Lightning That Lingers Read Online Free PDF Page A

for their families. The names are amazing—they rival Lake Geneva with its Wrigleys, Chalmerses, and Sears. Many were hidden from the road by trees, including Lily Hill, belonging to the Brooks family, which the local history books claim was the showplace of the Midwest in its time. But I saw enough to have visions of ladies with frilly parasols crossing green shaded lawns while little boys in knickers and girls with huge hair ribbons rolled hoops on gravel pathways, their proud papas watching from the verandas. Did I tell you that their mail was, and still is, delivered by a boat? Just like
On Golden Pond
. Some of the mansions have remained in the family, though Annette said even the rich can’t live on quite the same scale anymore.
    After the lake tour we had quiche at Annette’s, of which she said (tartly of course) we didn’t have to worry about eating it, not being real men. Which leads neatly into the subject of men.
    You’d never guess where they took me afterward. To see male strippers. No kidding. And they take off
everything. Every stitch
. Can you believe this is legal in Wisconsin? Or that you’d find it in a small town like Emerald Lake? Actually most people in town don’t frequent the place. The clientele is affluent, mainly youngish, andfrom Milwaukee and Chicago and the resort areas around Lake Geneva, even though it’s quite a drive. Of course you want to know how your only begotten child bore up in the face of naked men. Not well. However, I did see the most handsome man in the world. Yes. It’s true—there
is
a most handsome man in the world and he lives in Emerald Lake. Do you remember the bust of Alexander the Great we saw in the Getty Museum last summer? This was him. So now I know what Alexander looked like from the neck down, too. You know how one sometimes reads a description of someone as having an aristocratic appearance, and you think (in a down-to-earth American way) tch-tch, what’s aristocratic? This man looked aristocratic, and here he was, taking off his clothes for money. And you just knew he was the kind of man who drives a Corvette, wears aviator shades—and has a huge poorly trained German shepherd who barks at company and tries to poke his nose in your crotch. Dreams die hard. Mind you, I could have kissed this guy but I was too embarrassed. You know me. However, no one thought the worse of me for being timid about it all. They thought I was joking.
    I love you,
Jennifer
    P.S. I’ve finally had a piña colada. Interesting stuff. I may have more.
    Five days after she’d dropped the letter to her mother into a friendly blue box marked U.S. MAIL,Jennifer stood at the library window, her elbows on the window ledge, her chin in her hands, her legs against the radiator’s warm teeth. The Wisconsin outside was a Christmas card. She could see Emerald Lake stretching flat and frozen to the stark trees on the distant white shore. Iceboats skimmed far out on the lake under colorful sails, and nearby, teenagers walked mitten in mitten along the lakepath, past young mothers pulling sledloads of small children bundled into shapes like teddy bears under their layers of winter clothing. The clear, crystal-free black ice of the nearby cove was beginning to fill with ice-skaters let out of school at three-thirty. Red and yellow pompoms shone bright on skate laces, polished blades swept in swirls and figure eights, shaving foamy ice-dust from a scarring surface. Her imagination could hear the laughter and shouts that the window glass silenced.
    This was life, a thing she watched happening from the other side of a clear pane while she hung back and hung back, guarding the brave dreamer inside. She took no risks, and that gave her quiet, safety … and restlessness.
    The sun was low above the hills behind the lake, a swollen wreath of fiery white, the emblem of one more fading day. The afternoon had been still and to her right an elderly gentleman had nodded asleep behind a newspaper. The