Page 21 of The Deepest Lake
“I think you’re just dipping your toe in the shallows, to make sure it’s safe, first.”
Rose doesn’t know how to respond. But you don’t have to tell people very much, she is discovering. Most people, even the kind ones, are lost in their own stories.
When dinner is served, Eva sits at the table farthest from Rose’s. Stuffed on the first courses, Rose nonetheless manages to plunge her fork into a Guatemalan stewed chicken entrée with green sauce and pumpkin seeds, delivered in an individual, lidded ceramic dish, as well as rice and tortillas and a side salad, all produced in a flourish by the big bald chef named Hans and his half dozen assistants, most of them women in traditional huipil blouses and skirts.
More wine appears, not without a little finagling. Officially, the bar has closed, but new bottles are coaxed out of the kitchen by Isobel, badgering the staff, sliding them folded cash, making them giggle. Rose’s bits of Spanish help, but it’s Isobel’s fluent, native Spanish that really opens the doors.
With the additional booze come more speeches. An alumna rises to talk about her memoir, recently accepted for publication by HarperCollins and optioned for a television series. Cheers, whistles, hoots. You rock, sister! Hit it out of the park! Fucking awesome!
Less predictable is the next speech from a different alum who has attended many times but never managed to publish her manuscript. The woman, whose name is Sam, explains that she started coming here five years ago, when she was a mess. She thought writing a memoir would heal her. It didn’t. She thought her memoir would be published and praised. It wasn’t.
“I wanted my book to prove that I had emerged unscathed. I wanted Eva and every woman in my group to see me as a heroine. But Eva finally showed me. I was broken. I still am broken.”
Everyone stands stock-still on the lawn, clutching the stems of half-empty wineglasses.
“Eva loved me for who I am as soon as I got here,” Sam says, “even before she read my pages. ‘Sometimes it’s easier when you come to Casa Eva with no pages at all!’”
A few women share a knowing laugh, quieting as Sam continues. “For years I couldn’t write anything worth reading because I kept focusing on the perfect thing I wanted to be, or on the mess that I was, and I couldn’t find a way to describe that other thing . . .”
Here, she trails off, and Rose is confused. Dizzy, also. Definitely drunk. What other thing?
Sam clears her throat and manages to finish, “A still-broken, beautiful thing. Cracks and all.”
Eva wraps her arms around Sam, who seems more beloved even than the writer with a publishing contract, as if the fact of her failure—and her acceptance of that failure—makes her the biggest success of all. The two of them sway in a continuing embrace as Eva shouts, “Cracks and all!”
It seems to be an anthem, because the alumnae know to shout back, “Cracks and all!”
“One more time,” Eva says, raising a glass. “Broken but beautiful.”
Rose is confused. But . . . still broken? Complete healing is a lie, in a sense. That’s what her gut tells her, too. She will never fill the hole left by Jules. She doesn’t want to.
Maybe Eva means that you can heal and yet still be scarred, and you will fail at first but eventually succeed, or you will succeed because you have failed, or something that is just beyond Rose’s ability to absorb. Maybe all of them will become the broken, beautiful things they were always meant to be if they only listen and pay good attention and . . . that’s the problem. Rose is having a hard time paying attention. Her glass is empty. She wants more wine.
“I didn’t hear you,” Eva shouts.
All the women call back, “Cracks and all!”
Rose tears up, knowing that she would probably tear up no matter what they were saying. It’s not the words so much as the energy of the group itself: women, united in a quest of self-knowledge and self-actualization (if people still use that word), embracing their flaws and espousing confidence in some hopeful, forward-moving effort.
Rose doesn’t go to football games and she hasn’t attended church in over twenty years, but she knows why other people do. There’s something special about those places where defeats create cohesion as much as victories; where the bitter is accepted alongside the sweet.
She has felt superior, at times, for turning away from pop culture, religion and any kind of groupthink. But she stopped feeling superior as soon as Jules went missing. She recognized the emptiness of her superior attitude and the deep, unsolvable problem of her introverted nature. It’s one thing to survive in the normal day-to-day world; another to survive when tragedy strikes. That’s when you realize you have nothing. Your vague sense of intellectual superiority will not save you. Your refusal to believe in the tribe’s big stories—Who is God? Why are we here?—will only condemn you to emotional paralysis and existential purgatory.
Once the speeches finish, the servers distribute desserts, but everyone is so full and tipsy that many small plates are left untouched. Rose retains an image of chocolate cake crumbs scattered across the tables and her own silver fork dropping into the dark, thick grass. She intends to pick it up, but instead she only stares at the sharp tines glinting beneath the fairy lights, too dizzy to bend over.
Sometime later, she finds herself talking to a tall, slim woman named K, the only one of them who has dared to wear jeans, paired with a sleeveless mock turtleneck that shows off her fit arms, honed by early years spent boxing and wrestling. She’s the only Black person at the workshop, as she herself mentions, not surprised. “I knew there’d be a bunch of Liz Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed types here, but this is crazy. What is it about upper-middle-class blond women and memoirs?”
Rose doesn’t bother to point out that Isobel is Mexican-American and a young woman named Noelani is Hawaiian and her own hair is shoe-polish brown, not blond, because she gets it. There is, indeed, a type.
In addition to being the daughter of a famous Chicago coach, K is a well-known stand-up comic, evidently. They have withdrawn to one side of the lawn, with the silvery-black lake sparkling below them, when Scarlett walks past. She does a double-take. “Is that really K-Tap?”
Rose has never heard of K-Tap.
Scarlett says, “You’ve seriously never heard of her? The new Chris Rock? But female and queer?”
“I’m sorry,” Rose says. “I haven’t been to a comedy club in fifteen years.”
“Works for me,” K says. “I don’t need stalkers here.”