Read Online Study in Perfect by Sarah Gorham - Free Book Online Page B

She pulls me into the bathroom to show me, and at first I think she’s wearing a white bikini. Sadness and anxiety begin to creep in; we find ourselves less in the present, making arrangements for our departure, jealous of the next family that, like clockwork, will drive down the driveway on Thursday morning to displace us.
    Yes, there were summers we drummed our fingers, anxious for the arrival of Family B with their horns tooting, kayaks roped to the car roof. Two weeks of rain and a pair of miserable phlegmy toddlers were an endurance test; only six hundred miles and we could drop them off at their grandparents’! Another year, my husband made the decision to quit smoking where it was beautiful and stress-free…. And later, that night-owl couple we invited along in ’88. I’ve never been so exhausted. But these were exceptions; mostly we looked for ways to extend the pleasure.
    I had the idea that if I chose the right object, I could bring my vacation home. Oh, I know, fortunes have been made on souvenirs that in the French allow one “to recall” places and in the Latin “to come to mind.” But, I reasoned, the tchotchkes sold in gift shops all over Door Peninsula were impersonal and expensive—painted ducks, quilted hot pads, the shrink-wrapped dried cherries for four dollars an ounce. Nothing like our own tasteful, hand-worn, sponge-glazed mugs that had traveled through four generations of mothers, aunts, nieces, sons, their hot cocoa stains old enough to withstand the strongest bleach. Here was our history, Gray Logs itself, compact enough to slip into a pocket.
    I discovered a beautiful lace doily in a deep drawer under placemats and tablecloths, work that simply isn’t done anymore. My grandmother must have kept a dozen of these in her city house. No one will miss it, I thought. Sheepishly, I folded it into quarters and tucked it into my suitcase. But at home, the doily rested uneasily on dresser top, desk, dining room table, till finally I stuffed it back in my drawer for its safe return back to Wisconsin.
    Wittgenstein noticed that when the human eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. Elaine Scarry begins her ingenious study
On Beauty and Being Just
with this idea. She describes a “forward momentum,” how beauty incites the desire to bring new things into the world: babies, drawings, photographs, poems, and so on.
    With a similar noble intention, I inaugurated the obligatory-or-not Guest Book—record of bliss, something to touch and savor, which could be revisited again and again. It would double as a conversation between families, across time slots! August inEphraim, June in Ephraim. Family B and their enormous clan; Family A, who preferred to be alone; Family C, who politely tolerated Family A. The little green book would stitch all of us back together again.
    In practice though, the entries were awkward. Long lists of activities—identical activities from year to year, family to family—miniature golf at the Red Putter, rowing to Anderson’s dock, biking, ferries to Washington Island. Budding young writers contributed purple accounts of water and sailboats. There were tributes to the generosity of our matriarch and patriarch. Once in a while, something unusual happened. An exploding wasp nest, a muzzle full of porcupine quills—these stories scratched in ten-year-old scrawl. But five or six years went by and the entries fizzled out. It was a chore to chronicle a perfect swim under Eagle Bluff, when after all, the reader could just go there and swim herself.
    On the last evening of our vacation, a front moves through, bringing a Canadian chill and raucous wind. All night the curtains suck and swell. The big gray-planked doors with their wrought-iron hardware unhitch and slam. In a few hours, the temperature drops twenty degrees. Family B and their guests are the lucky ones now; they’ll get that “air-conditioned