Screening Room by Alan Lightman Read Free Book Online Page A

hamburgers. The Krystal waitresses wore white uniforms, red-checkered aprons, and white hats. Sometimes, they flirted with one of my brothers or me, and we would puff up like bullfrogs.
    Stretching a hundred feet over the lake was a wooden dock owned by the hotel. As soon as we arrived, we would walk out on that dock. My mother always exclaimed over a certain magenta bougainvillea climbing out of a terra-cotta urn, and she would fuss with its winding branches as if seeing an old friend again. On the dock, we breathed in the lake air, and we looked out at the tiny figures of fishermen arcing their fly rods back and forth, back and forth, with the movement of ballet dancers. Later, the hotel brought us bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, and cold Coca-Colas.
    My father was a passionate sailor. Each day at Kentucky Lake, he rented a sailboat and cajoled as many of us as possible to come along as his crew. At sea, with his hand on the tiller, Dad displayed the power and command that he lacked on dry land, although he routinely led us into maritime disasters. On one outing, we went under a bridge that was too low and split our mast. On another, my father accidentally jibed while I was sitting (at his orders) on the boom as a human boom vang, and I was catapulted into the air and then into the lake. Lines becamemysteriously tangled around cleats on the dock just as we were sailing away, our boat straining to break free like a wild hog with a lasso around its foot. We ran aground. We crashed into other boats. “Please, Dick,” Mother would say. “Do we have to go sailing?”
    “Oh, come on, honey,” my father pleaded.
    Lennie sometimes joined us at Kentucky Lake, a “welcome escape,” as she put it, from one of her husbands. Lennie’s preferred activity at Kentucky Lake was to sit in the hotel bar at all hours in full makeup and survey the clientele who walked by, especially the male clientele, her pockets slowly becoming stuffed with names and room numbers written on napkins. As the Kenlake Hotel was moderately priced, Lennie plowed through broad strata of social territory, from lawyers to insurance salesmen, all of them
intéressant
.
    Lennie didn’t like to sail any more than my mother did, and she was far too much of a southern flower for outdoor exertions, but she loved the romance of the sea, and she ventured onto the boat so that she could later tell tales to her friends. However, she would develop a headache or some other ailment while we were miles offshore and insist that we turn around immediately and take her back to the landing. She spoiled many outings. Nevertheless, on the drive back to Memphis, Lennie always happily babbled about the marvelous trip she’d had.
    As the years went by, my father became more and more vexed with Lennie’s behavior. Quietly, he took countermeasures. When she asked to return to the dock, he sailed in the wrong direction. On the next outing, Lennie brought a navigational chart and kept pointing her finger like a weathervane in the direction of the landing. My father remarked that we would have to sail “into the wind” to get back and took endless tacks, zigzagging for hours. Whereupon Lennie purchased a sailingbook and learned the relation between wind direction and points of sail. My father then asked Lennie to pitch in and haul the jib sheets, which blistered her hands. She bought gloves. My father deliberately ran aground, stranding us all in the boat for a half day. Gradually, Lennie’s outings with us tapered off. But for a long time, she exhibited heroic photographs of herself on the boat wearing foul-weather gear and hiking straps.
    On the days that we didn’t eat lunch on the boat, we drove to a little family-run restaurant near Gilbertsville that made fried chicken. Looking out of the restaurant, which was really only three tables on a screened porch, you could see a dirt road and a tractor, meadows rolling off to the horizon, and a quiet pond. The family also kept