Up North
  by Kerala Goodkin, '02

 
 

My grandfather carries on entire conversations while he salts his food. He salts indiscriminately: His corn, his pasta, his fish, even his fruit. He never samples his food before reaching for the shaker: He knows it has yet to be salted to his liking.

The one thing my grandfather doesn't salt is his beer. If there's one taste my grandfather likes more than salt, it's the wheaty, fizzy flavor of Labatt's Blue. It comes in cans at fifty cents a pop. There is a full-sized refrigerator rigged up in the basement of my grandparents' summer cottage to accommodate my grandfather's beer. He buys it in boxes of thirty. They never last long.

My grandmother will spring for the occasional beer, but her drink of choice is wine. She fills up her first glass at noon, and from then until bedtime, she sees to it that it never stays empty for long. During our week-long annual family reunion in Benzie county on the shores of Lake Michigan, she takes advantage of the extra company to share the responsibility.

"I could sure use some more wine," she says, her subtle Southern accent drawing out the "i." She says it without looking up, her eyes intent on the enormous half-finished rug-hooking draped across her lap. My uncle has learned to pick up the hint: it is often he who dutifully carries the glass to the kitchen for a refill. My grandmother watches him from her chair to make sure that he fills the glass to her liking. "Not so much ice," she will inevitably snap. "Lord, I don't need so much ice."

"You don't need so much wine," my uncle mutters under his breath.

My grandpa buys white wine for my grandma in jugs that cost $12.99 each. "At least it doesn't come in boxes," my other uncle, Barclay, likes to comment with his characteristically cynical sneer.

But my grandpa and grandma aren't the only ones who drink. Next door resides a variety of relatives, whose precise relations to me are sometimes unclear: they are always characterized by a "great" or a "second" or a "once removed." Once when I was thirteen, a family came to visit who were relatives of my relatives, a family that included a fine-looking young male specimen with a firm and nicely bronzed chest. Before deciding if it was acceptable to flirt with him, I had to sit down and draw out a family tree to figure out whether he was blood-related. He wasn't.

The drinking that transpires next door makes the habits of my grandparents look like child's play. They pass over the beer and wine and head straight for the hard stuff. My grandma's sister, my great-aunt, starts her day off with a scotch and soda. My cousins are mixing margaritas before they've finished digesting lunch. By the time "cocktail hour" rolls around, they're all hammered. Sunset only invites more madness. If my great-aunt's middle-aged sons aren't setting off $2000 worth of illegal fireworks down at the beach, they're either rigging raccoon traps or offering driving lessons in my great aunt's red Chrysler convertible to any number of prepubescent cousins.

The alcohol creates diversion but it also creates tensions. When my grandparents get tipsy, they start snapping and ordering people around. I can see the wine begin to take effect on my grandma: the corners of her mouth pull down into a sour pout. Sometimes she and my grandpa say things that aren't very nice. Last summer, grandpa told my younger sister she was looking "porky." "Better cut down on that butter," he said, as she was slathering it on her corn. He released a hearty laugh. My sister did not crack a smile.

After a couple of glasses of wine, my grandma seems to enjoy telling people to "shut up." Sometimes it gets to my mom and she starts throwing things.

My mother initiated the throwing ritual when I was ten, and still relatively oblivious when it came to familial tensions. I sat at the dinner table and grinned at the furious flecks of spit spewing from my mother's mouth. I gaped when my grandma told my mother to "go to hell." I gasped when my mother retaliated with a box of powdered sugar. It sailed through the air and nose-dived onto the carpet; powdered sugar rose and swelled like smoke.

My mother chooses larger objects to throw each year. When I was a sophomore in high school, she threw a fully-packed suitcase at my grandma from the second-floor balcony. A hard plastic suitcase with wheels. It dented the floor.

My uncle Barclay then got involved, blaming the whole spat on my grandparents' drinking problem. ("What drinking problem?" they wanted to know.) He decided to "fix" the problem by eliminating all the alcohol from the house, a task that proved to be hours worth of hard labor. My sister and I were his accomplices. We started off by pouring two full jugs of wine into the sink. The beer cans were the next to go: Barclay retrieved them from the downstairs refrigerator, my sister opened them, and I emptied the contents down the drain. It was a finely-tuned operation.

Then we got into the hard liquor. My grandparents had theoretically sworn off hard liquor years before, but their liquor cabinet didn't look like a cabinet that belonged to two folks sworn off hard liquor. It looked like a fully-stocked bar.

I was in high school then and had just begun to experiment with the thrills of alcohol overconsumption. I had to close my eyes as I emptied Absolut Mandarin into the sink followed by Jim Beam whiskey followed by Sapphire gin. It was too painful. By the end of the evening, I calculated that I had just shamelessly discarded approximately five hundred dollars worth of perfectly good alcohol. This, my further calculations informed me, was enough to get me drunk one hundred and twenty five times.

*       *      *

I am always awed by the mass quantities in which things exist at my grandparents' lakeside cottage. Not just alcohol. In Michigan, excess is the governing law of the land. There is too much sun, too much soda, and too much food. I drop into bed at the end of each day, sunburned, full-bellied, and sticky-mouthed, exhausted from doing too much nothing.

As a child, I basked in the excess guiltlessly. I guzzled Oreos and potato chips every chance I got. I drank 7-up with breakfast, lunch, and dinner and all my snacks in-between. When I was four, I took home an empty 7-up bottle at the end of the week as a kind of souvenir. I tied a string around its neck and named it Leonard and dragged it behind me everywhere I went. Leonard and I became great pals. Stroking his green glossy backside at night, I fell asleep dreaming of sticky-sweet bubbles fizzing in my throat.

My sister and I were never allowed soda at home. Not only was it unhealthy, it was indulgent. And my parents don't indulge.

Perhaps my parents' careful models of moderation and frugality stem from my father's Zen Buddhist practice, a practice that his long-haired, shabby-bearded, bellbottom-sporting, pot-smoking twenty-something year old self latched onto during the hippie era and never quite gave up. Now he has no hair (not quite by choice), he's clean-shaven, he wears khakis, and, as far as I know, he no longer smokes pot.

But my father still wakes up at 7:30 every morning, slips on his Buddhist robes, and sits "lotus-style" on the window seat in the living room. Amidst snaking pillars of incense, he closes his eyes and for twenty minutes he moves not a muscle. He then starts chanting - deep, throaty chants -- while kneeling on the floor and bowing repeatedly.

When I was younger, I thought this was just what dads did in the morning. Slowly I began to realize that my dad wasn't like other dads.

And neither was my mom like other moms. By my elementary school definition of the word, my parents weren't exactly "normal."

Other kids' parents gave them Lunchables to bring to school; my mom gave me organic peanut butter and honey sandwiches in recycled bread bags. Other kids' parents gave them single-serving strawberry Yoplaits; my mom gave me plain yogurt scooped from a tub into a rinsed-out mustard jar.

When I complained, my parents took the moral high ground first. "We don't want to be wasteful," they said. Then there was always: "Besides, it saves money."

Throughout my childhood, I wore secondhand, thirdhand, or fourthhand clothes passed down to me from my faster-growing friends. My sister and I shared everything with each other, save our toothbrushes. We always split dinners when we went out to eat. We counted out three hundred and fifty pennies from my father's change jar once a month so we could buy a pint of ice cream.

We ate bread heels, scraped the mold off old fruit, and whipped up cream cheese with milk so it would last longer.

"We don't want to be wasteful," my parents said. "Besides, it saves money."

Whether my mother's frugality was inherited by some bizarre twist of genetic fate or learned from my father, I have yet to ascertain. But frugality runs in my father's side of the family; in my mother's, it does not.

My mother's family is not extravagantly wealthy, by U.S. standards at least. My mother's parents were well-off enough to raise their three children in a sleepy tree-lined suburb of Detroit. Now that they don't have three children to support, they have some extra money to throw around. Enough to own two houses -- one in Ann Arbor and a vacation home "up north" on Lake Michigan, enough to drive two cars, enough to have a fledgling collection of needlessly expensive art. Money breeds excess, but I've seen worse cases than my grandparents'. (My roommate's family in my freshman year of college had a private plastic surgeon and a "pet" leopard which they harbored in a bullet-proof tank.)

No, my mother's parents do not selfishly waste their days away in a haze of alcohol and gluttony. They drink too much, to be sure, but they still find useful things to do with their time. My grandpa tutors children and my grandma volunteers as a tour guide at the arboretum. My grandpa reads the newspaper, front to back, every day and my grandma hooks rugs prodigiously. By U.S. standards, they are not grossly indulgent people.

By my parents' standards, gross indulgence is perhaps an overstatement, but my grandparents definitely indulge. "Daddy," my mother reprimands disapprovingly, when he goes on his daily grocery shopping run and returns home with a trunk full of paper bags. "Are you trying to feed the entire state of Michigan?"

Whether my mother's frugality was inherited by some bizarre twist of genetic fate or learned from my father, I have yet to ascertain. But frugality runs in my father's side of the family; in my mother's, it does not.

My mother's family is not extravagantly wealthy, by U.S. standards at least. My mother's parents were well-off enough to raise their three children in a sleepy tree-lined suburb of Detroit. Now that they don't have three children to support, they have some extra money to throw around. Enough to own two houses -- one in Ann Arbor and a vacation home "up north" on Lake Michigan, enough to drive two cars, enough to have a fledgling collection of needlessly expensive art. Money breeds excess, but I've seen worse cases than my grandparents'. (My roommate's family in my freshman year of college had a private plastic surgeon and a "pet" leopard which they harbored in a bullet-proof tank.)

No, my mother's parents do not selfishly waste their days away in a haze of alcohol and gluttony. They drink too much, to be sure, but they still find useful things to do with their time. My grandpa tutors children and my grandma volunteers as a tour guide at the arboretum. My grandpa reads the newspaper, front to back, every day and my grandma hooks rugs prodigiously. By U.S. standards, they are not grossly indulgent people.

By my parents' standards, gross indulgence is perhaps an overstatement, but my grandparents definitely indulge. "Daddy," my mother reprimands disapprovingly, when he goes on his daily grocery shopping run and returns home with a trunk full of paper bags. "Are you trying to feed the entire state of Michigan?"

But even my parents are a little more relaxed up north. After all, it is vacation. We all do our best to let preoccupations fall by the wayside.

Normally my parents warn me not to get too much sun. (Up north, I soak it up like a sponge.) Normally my parents encourage me to eat relatively healthily. (Up north, I eat dessert every hour on the hour.) Normally my parents promote "family bonding" through calorie burning activities, like hiking or backpacking or bike riding. (Up north, I turn over every now and then on my beach towel.)

Normally my parents like to have stimulating conversations. They urge me to talk politics, to challenge people with dissenting points of view, to engage in meaningful, critical, eye-opening dialogue.

Up north, we avoid politics like a cat sidestepping puddles. We try not to think about the fact that my grandfather voted for both George Bushes. We try to pretend that the American Family Federation monthly brochure that my second cousin likes to give us (July's featured article: Homosexuality -- A Threat to the Family and the Will of God) is just a harmless joke. We try not to wince when my great-aunt talks about "Negroes" and "Orientals."

There's already enough dissent in our cottage to fuel a month's worth of electricity for all of Benzie county. Simple matters like rice or pasta for dinner can escalate into furious shoutfests. There's no need to bring up George Bush.

My grandparents are obsessed with the fact that most of my boyfriends happen to be nonwhite. When I bring pictures to show them, they'll hold them up, scrutinize them, and say something to the effect of; "Oh. He's a Mexican."

Last year, when my sister was describing her prom date, she happened to mention that he was black. Later, when looking through photos of my sister's friends, my grandma came across a picture of a young black man. "Is this your prom date?" she asked.

"No," my sister said. My grandma's eyebrows leaned down into a point above her nose as she struggled to understand.

"Are you sure?" she asked, holding the picture closer. My sister nodded. "But...but, look!" she said, waving the picture around. "Look! He's a Negro!"

Grandma honey, I wanted to say from my seat across the room. There's more than one black person in this country. Oh yeah, and FYI, we don't use the term "Negro" anymore.

In my head, I was wondering what would happen if I were to whip out my wallet-sized photo of a girl I had been briefly involved with.

Look Grandma! Do you want to see a picture of my significant other? [Handing it to her]

Where is he? [Adjusting her glasses] I don't see him.

She's right there [Pointing]

[Furrowing brows] But...but...but, look! Look! She's a girl!

But I was in no mood to launch into a defense of bisexuality. My watch blared 11:00 AM. Time for dessert.

*      *       *

Thank goodness for dessert. Thank goodness for pistachio nuts and 7-up and raspberries and bacon and all the other delicacies that ease and dissolve frustration. The kitchen in our Lake Michigan cottage is never empty; the successful completion of our family reunion (with only minor injuries) hinges on food. Dinner time each day is a monumentous event. My grandmother busies herself over the stove burners almost all afternoon, her wine glass in hand.

She is under the impression that she is an exquisite cook. She's quite adept with pies, cakes, cobblers, anything sweet. She is often adept with needlessly elaborate salads and side dishes. She is sometimes adept with main courses.

And sometimes she isn't. One summer she decided to try her hand at making fresh pesto using the basil she was growing in her deck planter. She handpicked the leaves and blended them with parmesan cheese and olive oil.

It might have been tasty had she just picked basil leaves. But she had picked basil leaves along with a variety of other leaves growing in the planter that faintly bore a resemblance to basil and that may or may not have been legally edible. And she not only picked leaves, she also picked sticks as well. And some roots. And some dirt.

That dinner was a quiet one. Everyone was working intently on picking out something salvageable from my grandmother's leaf-stick-dirt-root-oil-parmesan creation. "Mmmm," my grandmother kept saying. "Mmmmm, mmmm. This is just delicious." I am guessing that her wine-satiated tongue was not as capable of distinguishing texture and flavor as the rest of ours.

It was only my younger cousin who spoke out. He had not yet learned the rules of tact. "Mommy!" he wailed. "There are sticks in my pasta!"

"Don't be silly," my aunt reprimanded sharply, glancing nervously at my grandmother. "It's yummy pasta. Eat up."

My grandmother hadn't even noticed. She was chewing, eyes closed, and murmuring to herself. "Mmmm! Mmmmm, mmmm!"

But the sheer quantity of platters at the dinner table leaves room for a flop or two. We may have to stomach a little bit of dirt every now and then for the sake of politeness, but we can always follow it up with fresh tomatoes, steaming corn-on-the-cob, and sizzling garlic bread. Or we can opt for barbecued chicken, roasted pork, or a hearty grilled steak.

I eat more meat in my one week up north than in all the other 51 weeks of the year. My father is a vegetarian so we generally stick to hippie foods like tofu and tahini and eggplant. ("Besides, they save money," my father says.) For the most part, my mother, my sister and I get along just fine without meat, but every now and then carnivorous cravings quietly swell within us and demand recognition.

My grandparents do their best to satisfy these cravings. "Hamburgers anyone?" they ask. "Take two or three."

"Okay," I say. "If you insist."

My grandma and grandpa have known my father for almost twenty-five years and they still push him to eat meat. They just don't get it.

Every night, it's the same conversation. "Try some steak," my grandpa will say.

"No thanks, I don't eat meat," my father responds.

"Are you sure?" my grandpa asks.

"Yes, thanks."

"Just try a little. It's so tasty."

"No, really. I don't eat meat."

"Oh, don't be silly."

"I'm a vegetarian."

My grandpa then raises his eyebrows as though this is news to him. He lets the steak platter linger in front of my father for a few seconds longer in a last futile effort to rescue him from the clutches of herbivorism. Then he withdraws it, looking defeated.

My grandparents exchange glances that seem to say: "Oh well. We tried."

*      *      *

My father may never be able to successfully explain to my grandparents the concept of vegetarianism. But so it goes. Most things in Michigan never change. Every year, the adults gain a few more wrinkles and the kids shed a little more baby fat. But every year, no matter how much older or more "mature" we are, we always end up doing and saying most of the same things.

Every year we play monopoly. My uncle Barclay falls asleep twenty minutes into the game, I start cleaning every one else out, and my younger cousin knocks the board off the table before I get to bankrupt him altogether. It's like clockwork.

Every year we go miniature golfing. My uncle Barclay hits a hole in one, my sister hits a hole in one, I hit a hole in one, and my cousin hits one of us with his golf club to vent his frustration. Barclay drags him kicking and screaming to the car for a "time-out" and we finish the game without him.

Every year we go to the rope swing. I get rope burn, my sister scratches her leg up on a submerged tree branch, and we both swear we will never come back.

And every year, my grandparents insist on taking us out to eat at a restaurant called Brookside. Brookside boasts ten rooms and about the same number of customers each night. Its owner is partial to two things: 1) air-conditioning, and 2) Christmas. In August, customers shiver in subzero temperatures while being subjected to various eyesores: Christmas lights, Christmas trees, oversized Christmas candy-canes. To top it off, there is always a Muzak version of Deck the Halls dribbling out through the speakers.

The owner, who is abnormally fat, is also partial to fried food. All of the food that his restaurant serves is submerged into spitting vats of oil before being dished up for the customers. It is three times the price that fried food should be (fish 'n chips cost fifteen dollars), and it's not particularly good.

But my grandparents never remember these things. They seem to have unconsciously developed a script that they repeat year after year, each line on cue. As we're entering the restaurant, my grandma will remark, "Whew! It's chilly in here!"

Then my grandpa will comment, "What? Christmas in August?"

Then my grandma, upon sighting the owner: "I forgot how fat he is."

Then my grandpa: "Do you hear what song they're playing?"

My grandma: "It's not very full tonight."

They both swear by the fried scrod, but every year the end of the meal finds them hitting upon the revelation that it's not very good.

"It wasn't very good this time," my grandpa will say.

"No," my grandma will respond. "Too rubbery. Not much flavor."

My grandparents have fairly sharp memories: from year to year, they always know how old I am and how many years left until graduation and what I'm studying in school. But some strange amnesia seems to befall them when it comes to remembering the mediocrity of Brookside's fried scrod.

The same amnesia has repeatedly befallen my bachelor uncle after the establishment of the drive-in movie tradition. He started it when I was fifteen, as a way to relieve various parents of their children for the evening. Between the two neighboring cottages, there are about eight children total, all prepubescent boys, save my sister and I. They like doing the same things that most prepubescent boys enjoy doing: namely, fidgeting, shouting, breaking rules, and being generally obnoxious.

My uncle's three favorite things are himself, his tan, and his forest green Ford Explorer. His art (photography and oil painting) is a close fourth, along with Vogue magazine and European electronic dance music. Prepubescent boys do not make it onto his list of favorites. Not even close.

The Cherry Bowl Drive-In lies a good 45 minutes south of the cottage. A 45 minute drive with six little boys is one thing. A 45 minute drive with six little boys in my bachelor uncle's car is another thing altogether.

Things are always relatively calm for the first five minutes. Then one of the boys will start playing around with buttons. Window buttons, seat buttons, radio buttons, whatever he can get his hands on. "Sweetpea don't do that," my uncle will say, gritting his teeth. Eventually, the other boys follow the lead and button-playing ritual begins to intensify.

"Don't do that," my uncle repeats. Then one of the boys starts playing with another boy's buttons, and that's when the fighting begins, complete with name-calling and elbow-poking.

"Stop it!" my uncle shouts.

Then: "Stop it!!"

Then: "STOP IT!!!"

It's usually about fifteen minutes from the theater that my uncle opens the sky roof, accelerates to 90, and starts blasting his European electronic dance music. SEX! I LIKE SEX! I LIKE SEX! I-I-I-I-I-I LIKE SEX! some woman's husky voice will thunder through the speakers against a heart-racing jungle of beats.

That always shuts the boys up in a hurry.

But even after completing the drive with minimal injuries, we still have to spend another two hours in the car. The first year that my uncle volunteered to chauffeur us, he bought armloads of candy and jumbo-sized sodas. "Now just eat your candy and watch the movie," he ordered sternly.

For about fifteen blissful minutes, there was silence: all eyes were riveted to the flashing images on the screen amidst the moist munching of Mars Bars.

Then someone slurped.

Then someone else giggled.

Then someone else burped.

More giggling. More slurping. More burping.

"Stop it!" my uncle snapped.

A tentative silence. A slurp. A burp. A giggle.

"Stop it!!"

Another slurp. Another burp. Another giggle.

"STOP IT!!!" My uncle collected all the sodas and put them on the dashboard. "No more soda!" he bellowed. Then the Crinkling of the Candy Wrappers began. After the candy was confiscated, one of the boys in the front seat rediscovered his soda cup. He grabbed it from the dashboard when my uncle wasn't looking and started scraping the straw against the soda cup lid. More giggling.

As the eldest child, I felt that perhaps I should intervene but decided against it. Watching my uncle's disciplinary attempts were far too amusing. As the straw-grating saga continued, he seized the cup from the boy and reached his hand through the open window to rest it on top of his car. All of a sudden, the ceiling seemed to be gushing orange soda, splashing on my uncle's head and dripping down into his lap.

He had never put down his sun roof.

My uncle returned to the cottage with sticky, orange-scented hair and a damp dark stain on his crotch. "Never again," he growled. "Never again!"

The annual drive-in movie with my uncle has been a tradition ever since.

*      *       *

Yes, most things in Michigan never change. Like the rest of my family, I do and say mostly the same things every year. I always tell inquiring relatives that "things are going great," I always cry when my uncle throws me in the water, I always eat too many pistachio nuts during cocktail hour, and I always get sunburned knees.

But I've also had a lot of firsts up north. It was there that I first learned to swim. It was where I first shaved my legs and where I first wore a bikini. It was also where I almost had my first kiss.

The near-incident occurred in the summer of '94 when I was thirteen years old. I've dubbed that summer "The Summer of David," David being the young, good-looking, firm-chested male from next door who, thank goodness, wasn't blood-related. After confirming this crucial fact, I prepared myself to engage in shameless flirtation, complete with coquettish giggles and provocative glances.

It didn't take me long to realize that while I was very adept at sitting next to David in utter silence and even better at avoiding him altogether, I was an awfully lousy seductress.

Lucky for me, David didn't need seducing. He was infatuated with me from day one. Whether it was my gangly legs, my pointy breasts, or my purple braces that spurred his furious attraction, I'm not quite sure.

Three days into his visit, he asked me if I would like to take a walk with him along the beach. I nodded stupidly.

For the first mile or so, we walked in silence. I pretended to be intently searching for stones. "So," David said finally. "You like rocks?"

"Yeah," I said. More silence. David cleared his throat.

"Isn't the sky pretty?" he asked. I looked at the sky. It looked like your average sky: big and blue, with some clouds streaked across like brushstrokes. "Yes," I said. "It's very pretty." Silence again.

"Gosh that sky is so pretty," David said after a few minutes. I looked again. It looked the same as before.

"Yes," I said. "It's still very pretty." Then David stopped abruptly and turned to face me.

"Hey can I kiss you?" he asked.

For months after, I reconstructed the scene in my mind: me eagerly leaning towards him, his arms drawing me in, the passionate locking of lips. Then, zooming out: us against the pretty sky. Music swirling around like white ribbons in the wind.

But it didn't happen like that. Instead, I hesitated. Not because I didn't want to kiss him -- every iota of my body was yearning to experience the singular sensation of having a cute boy's tongue in my mouth. No, I hesitated because I was wearing a hat. I wasn't sure how the whole kissing ritual worked, but I was pretty sure that the brim of my hat would get in the way. I was pretty sure that it would hit his forehead if I leaned in too far.

I concluded that in order to kiss David, I would have to remove my hat. In the end, I declined his offer. I didn't want to remove my hat. I didn't want to have my first kiss with hat hair.

*      *      *

I ended up having my first kiss in a basement after a few too many beers. Looking back, of course, it's easy to linger on the could've, would've, should'ves. It quickly became obvious to me that I should have endured the self-invented shame of a few limp hairs for the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson in intimacy against a backdrop of sand and water and sky. A slightly more scenic backdrop than, say, basement wall cinder blocks.

But even now, I am stubborn when it comes to hat hair. Everyone has their irrational preoccupations -- mine is in the form of the springy blonde curls that leap off my scalp and bounce down my back. ("I don't get it," a friend of mine remarked once, tugging at one of my curls. "Why doesn't gravity pull it down?")

I can't stand crushing my hair under a hat. I can't stand the thought of languid defeat after hours of sweat and suffocation. During previous years up north, I wouldn't take my hat off until I was in the privacy of the bathroom: even then, I would close my eyes and jump straight into the shower to avoid catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

Last year I solved my hat hair dilemma by purchasing a visor. My tactic worked splendidly, except for the fact that my part line had difficulty handling such extreme sun exposure. "Put sunscreen on it," my mother suggested.

"And get sunscreen in my hair?" I wailed frantically. The thought made me shudder. I stubbornly refused, and throughout the week, my part line continued to burn. When it couldn't turn any pinker, it started turning red. When it couldn't turn any redder, it started turning purple. My uncle Barclay, who is a doctor, scrutinized my scalp every chance he got. Then he examined the darkening freckles on my arms and shoulders. Then my sunburned knees.

"You're a walking case of melanoma," he concluded gravely. "You should stay out of the sun." Seconds later, my bachelor uncle John handed me a bottles of baby oil, SPF negative two, and instructed me to "go get some more cullah," (color.) "With a skin tone like yours," he said. "You have to burn before you tan."

Barclay "sunbathes" under a beach umbrella in a wetsuit, his nose and cheeks coated in thick white layers of zinc oxide. A few feet away from him, his brother lies splayed out in the sun, sporting a speedo and a glistening coat of baby oil. If I am irrationally preoccupied with my hair, John is irrationally preoccupied with his tan. He's been working at it for upwards of twenty five years. Everyone in my family, on both my mother's and my father's side, is freckled and fair-skinned, save my sister, whose exotic, olive, Mediterranean skin tone is still somewhat of an unsolved conundrum. My pre-med friends in college tell me that it must come from a long-repressed gene. Either that or the milkman, they say.

My uncle John is in stubborn denial of his Scotch-Irish heritage; years and years of deliberate sunburning has turned his skin a permanent reddish-brownish-purple. He likes to pretend that he shares the same repressed gene as my sister: "Us tan people," he says, winking at her when I complain about the red flaking circles on my knees. "Us tan people, we'll just never understand your pain."

*      *      *

John spends most of his day greased up on a beach towel, but he always makes sure to get back to the cottage before sunset. Everyone does. Whether we're at the golf course or the grocery store, whether we're hunting raccoons or mixing margaritas, sunset finds us gathered on the deck, drinks, of course, in hand.

I've enjoyed my share of sunsets. During my various summer travels, I've seen suns set in the Peruvian Andes, on the Australian outback, over Indonesian rice fields, under Serengeti skies, behind Costa Rican volcanoes. But nothing matches the splendor of a sunset over Lake Michigan. Nothing in the world. In the air, the clean smell of pine from quiet trees that cluster around our cottage; beyond the deck, the still steel water, the lip of sand. Pink tinted clouds gather around the sun as it drops almost imperceptibly, searing a hot red line from horizon to shore.

There is silence during sunset. My mother rests her head on my grandma's shoulder, my uncle puts his arm around my sister, I clutch my cousin's hand. We are all lost in the sky, in its bigness and our smallness, in the simultaneous senses of timelessness and of time slipping away. As the last sliver of sun ducks under the horizon, we count down together: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

And it's gone. And for a few more seconds, the silence lingers. Then my cousin notices my fingers intertwined around his. "AAAAAAAH!" he shouts, untangling his hand and wiping it across the front of his shirt. "AAAAAAH!! COOTIES!!!"

My uncle examines his arm against my sister's shoulder. "My tan is darker than yours," he gloats. My grandma pats my mother on the head. Dessert is almost ready, she tells her. But first, she says, frowning down at her glass, she could really use a touch more wine.