Screening Room by Alan Lightman Read Free Book Online

Lake, about two hundred miles northeast of Memphis, an area famous for the eerie morning mists hanging low over the lake. Ambers and lavenders and mossy green hues would refract in the air for an hour, then melt away like some rare species of plant in bloom only a day. For these weekends, we booked rooms at the Kenlake Hotel. It was a three-story rustic building, perched high over rolling grassy hills on one side and the lake on the other. A water tower afforded a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside. If we went out to the hotel balcony early in the morning, before breakfast, we could watch an old man with white hair and suspenders walking slowly around the grounds and turning on the sprinklers. Then, after a breakfast of fresh orange juice and French toast, we wandered down a little path to the water. The lake, with its dissolving mists and the soft landings of blue herons and egrets, spread out before us like a fairyland, far from the world of our schoolwork and carpools. This was the place of our dreams, and the place where my father and mother came closest to happiness.
    On the Friday before a weekend at Kentucky Lake, my father would come home early from the office to pack. Packing, and in fact any task that required organization or leadership, brought out the worst in my parents’ relationship. Dad seemed almostwillfully to stumble over himself. When he made the reservations for family trips, dates would be wrong, hotel bookings snarled up, once an entire city misplaced. In the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, we built an underground bomb shelter in the backyard, frightened by President Kennedy’s exhortations for all Americans to protect themselves. My father bumbled the job. He hired an incompetent construction company, and the whole thing filled up with water. For the next several years, we fished out cans of sardines, floating first-aid kits, and other items we had stockpiled for the impending nuclear war.
    Packing for a trip to Kentucky Lake, my father would stand incapacitated and confused in front of the closet where he stored life jackets and oars and other boating accessories in a tangled mess. “What are you
doing
, Dick?” my mother would say. “I should trade you in on a better model.” I would watch silently, never speaking up on my father’s behalf. Without responding, Dad would drag one item after another from the closet, looking for something he seldom found, while my mother began hyperventilating. “I’m going to faint, Dick. Where’s Blanche? I’m going to faint.”
    At the last minute before departure, my father would discover that he had no clean underwear and summon Blanche to do a quick wash and dry. Then my mother would start to sing.
    The drive to Kentucky Lake took three and a half hours, not an easy journey for my three brothers and me as we shoved and fought in the backseat. “Dick, do something,” Mother would demand from the passenger seat. “You’re supposed to be the man of the family.” At that, my father would take one arm off the steering wheel and swat at us in the backseat. The car would swerve on the road, Mother would scream, and my brothers and I would become silent. We felt guilty. But there was something else worse than guilt, something I can express only now. I vowed to myself that I would never be like my father. Never. Surely, hemust have felt that vast, hollow space, that abandonment. But I could not say for sure. Then, and for the next fifty years, I rarely knew what my father felt.
    I have good memories of our vacations. We drove up Interstate 51, through Covington, Ripley, Union City, and into Kentucky at South Fulton, passing farmhouses, fields of corn and tobacco, roadside cafés and barbershops, people sitting on benches doing nothing in particular. On the way, we usually stopped in some small town at a Krystal to eat square hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes. Dad would ask for sweet milk, and Mother always wanted raw onions on her