Evening by the Lake

Sitting on a bench, watching the ducks and the small birds and the Hendersons, the swan couple Mrs. Dalloway easily spotted swimming on the far side, a couple she knows from before, in the glimmering sun, listening to Kate Bush, looking like a true graffiti painter, only the cans of paint missing from her back pockets.

And if she was a graffiti artist, she would carry fuchsia pink and hot purple cans of spray paint and write words like Bananafish and Flashdance and Comic Book Tattoo on the walls of the old school building she passed on her way over, which is waiting to be demolished. Already a bunch of schoolboys considering themselves radicals had climbed on the roof, using an upturned bike stand to get there. When they saw her approaching, the kids weren’t fooled by her street getup for even a second, it was a grownup approaching, all her baseball cap and name-brand hoodie and large headphones camouflage couldn’t cover the fact that she is no school girl, but a grown woman. But, as Beyoncé reminds, a grown woman can do whatever she wants, and this is how Mrs. Dalloway is looking, schoolboys on top of abandoned school buildings be damned.

When she gets there, the beach is anything but abandoned; seems like all of her neighborhood has had the same idea to come see the sun before it disappears. Families with small children playing in the still chilly sand, young men and women sitting by themselves or in twos or threes, taking photos or checking their phones or, in a couple of instances, drinking endless beers from white plastic bags sporting the name of their local grocery store. A group of teen boys with music of some kind take their shirts off, not really weather-appropriate yet, but hey, kids will be kids, and start practicing their cartwheels and flips. 

The setting sun is exquisite. It is blinding, brilliant, warm. It knocks her socks off. She wishes with all her heart that one of the girls on the beach, whose backflips are flawless and advanced, isn’t saying anything discouraging to her less graceful friend, who cannot spin a cartwheel no matter how many times she tries it on the soft, riotous sand that is so plentiful it is almost like an overwhelming quagmire coming at them at all sides.

The drunkards aren’t drunk enough yet to comment, so Mrs. Dalloway can for a moment imagine herself living in a neighborhood where the teenage girls are quite welcome to do their gymnastics on the beach and grown men with a plastic bag full of beer will take no advantage whatsoever, verbal, or, god forbid, otherwise.

The vulnerable and innocent act of the two young women, who are a little apart from the other back-flipping kids, moves Mrs. Dalloway, she feels like she knows them, or knew them, maybe she went to school with them when she was a young woman. She was never able to make a clean cartwheel, either. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the cartwheels the blond girl performs with such ease it looks like she is merely breathing are meaningless or trite. They aren’t. The girl is gorgeous, taking her end-of-performance pose at the end of each maneuver. The dark-haired girl who can’t get it right reminds Mrs. Dalloway of the singer Lorde, with her shoulder length curly hair all over, and her nervous energy, and her constant cheerful chattering.

But it is early, and there are plenty of elderly people sitting on benches, too, admiring the coming summer like Mrs. Dalloway, and dogwalkers, so many of those in fact that at times the whole beach feels like one immense dog park. Now the kids with the music have put their sweaters back on. Good, it is warm but not that warm yet. There is a pause between songs in Mrs. Dalloway’s headphones, and she can make out a few sounds of the small waterfront. Kids laughing and running. Dogs barking. Gulls hollering while they fly over the water, looking for fish. A steady low hum of talking coming from where the beer drinkers are sitting.

The girls seem to have had enough, and retire on one of the benches, to talk about things that young ladies that age talk about. Mrs. Dalloway is glad. The other big kids, the same ones who were listening to music and practicing their own flips earlier, just lost the ball they were kicking around. It landed in the water, and now it is drifting further out, and none of them want to go get it from the icy, muddy, early spring lake. They are all just standing there, right by the water, smoking, as if willing the ball to float back to them by giving it enough evil eye and film noir -style cigarette handling. Clueless as to what to do, they obviously don’t want to seem stupid in front of the rest of the beach, and do the one stupid thing one can think of to do: run to the pole where the life ring hangs, take the ring, and throw it in the lake, in order to catch the ball inside the ring. Mrs. Dalloway fights an urgent impulse to yell at the kids that they are being a bunch of idiots right now.

The ring lands a few meters from the ball, and starts drifting away, mimicking the football’s movements. None of the kids move, unbelieving their plan backfired; they just keep staring at the two objects, smoking their endless cigarettes. Mrs. Dalloway looks around the beach, but no one else seems to be noticing that the moronic youth threw a life saving object in the lake to get their ball back, and now both objects are just floating there. She closes her eyes, trying to focus on her music and nothing else for a moment. When she re-opens them, one of the boys is waist-high in the water, fetching the ball and the ring. He gets back on the beach, his jeans and sneakers now soaking, and tosses the objects on the sand. His face betrays none of the discomfort he must be feeling right now, he just lights another cigarette. Mrs. Dalloway fights another impulse, which is to run to the kids and give the courageous young man a joyful hug and tell him what a good kid he is, that was a real nice thing to do.

Of course, she does none of that. Instead, she gets up from her place in the sun, and heads home. She always listens to Aerial this time of year. The yellow album cover, the lyrics, the musical style of the whole record makes her think of summer, as it is meant to.

(Whose shadow, long and low, is slipping out of wet clothes? And changes into the most iridescent blue? Who knows who wrote that song of Summer that blackbirds sing at dusk? This is a song of colour where sands sing in crimson, red, and rust, then climb into bed and turn to dust.)

Kate Bush, Aerial, 2005. Lyric excerpt from Sunset.