Sarah Wrote That | new jersey

13 Jan 2012 17:21

All the Summers Ahead - Part Five →

My Five Chapters story concludes today:

The lawn projected a small green semi-circle into a dark audience of trees. Fireflies, moths, and the kids — Anders and Emma — played along its edges. Overhead a pair of bats darted across and under each other. Ellen sat on the patio steps, out of the smoke that poured from the grill when Marcus unlidded it. […]

This, somewhere like it, was where Ellen would have said she saw herself at this age, if anyone had asked ten or fifteen years before. Not because she wanted it. Because it was the horizon; New Jersey seen from the West Side. You could forget it because you knew it was there.

[Parts One, Two, Three, and Four]

D&R Canal and Lake Carnegie
Princeton, NJ

I’d run on the towpath between the two many times before remarking on the parallels and contrasts in their histories. The lake was excavated in 1905 as a site for Princeton University’s rowing team:

In 1903, a group of Princeton alumni began purchasing farmland that occupied areas of the projected basin. They, in turn, sold this land to Carnegie. This was done in order to avoid arousing the suspicions of local residents, and to allow Carnegie to purchase the land for the lowest possible price. By 1905, the needed land was purchased and the work of clearing the area and constructing the bridges and dam began.

The canal was excavated

mostly by hand tools, mostly by Irish immigrants. Work began in 1830 and was completed in 1834, at an estimated cost of $2,830,000. When the canal first opened, teams of mules were used to tow canal boats through it (the steam engine was not yet applied to such uses). The canal’s greatest usage occurred during the 1860s and 1870s, when it was used primarily to transport coal from Pennsylvania to New York City…

(Source: twitter.com)

Barnegat Bay →

I have a story in The Good Men Project’s Weekend Fiction section. I’m really thrilled about this one - I think it’s the fullest exploration I’ve yet written of a marriage, an in particular of the husband. Also: New Jersey!

When my husband, Dilshad, was hired as a partner by a small firm in Princeton, New Jersey, we—or, rather, I—decided the train back and forth from the city was too much to ask of him for the sake of friends we now would rarely see, or the playground in Central Park. He was working, so I did most of our house-hunt. Plus, he said, I’d grown up outside Philadelphia, and knew the area.

“You should look her up,” he said. “That friend, Kim.”

“Kimberly,” I said. “How do you know she’s still here?”

I was surprised he’d asked. He knew the story: when Kimberly—my best friend in elementary school—and I were 12, her mother had let their Newfoundland mix and German shorthaired pointer outside for air. The dogs came into our garage, where my father had made a bed of newspapers for a tabby I had found in our side yard. I had named the tabby Charley. The Newfoundland carried Charley, what was left of him, or her, home to Kimberly’s mother.

Read On →

Drive Home

Scott was there, and a new girl, and Rebecca in the white sheath Jeff said he could see through.

Cannot, Rebecca said.

Aureoles, said Jeff.

Their glasses knocked, heavy, golden. His white shirt paunched under his jacket. Under the green pavilion, their places were set with floured rolls and pink champagne: Dan and Megan and Fitz and Dori, and Muff and Ayako, and Dawn and the three Nicks, and Brian with an ‘i’ and Bryan with a ‘y,’ and both spellings of Sarah, and Mike whom no one spoke to, who was telling Elizabeth to trust herself. Rebecca’s upper arms held forth freckled among the crowd—who would have thought we all would be here? Across the lawn Scott had a camera and pollen floated from upstream trees. The new girl had kicked her pumps off, double fist laughing, head back high.

Who was she, cartwheeling and brushing scratches from her knees, Rebecca asked, meaning: I want to be that girl.

Look at us, Jeff said. Swimming in beer.

Main courses were high on their plates, chicken peaks and salmon ridges and high plains beef. The next day Scott would be thirty; the others were twenty-eight and twenty-nine and halves. Scott introduced the new girl—Lucy.

Lulu, she said.

Rebecca nudged her potatoes toward Jeff.

I’ll never finish them, he said.

But he did. Dancing, he said he’d forgotten about dessert.

’Cause you’re drunk, Rebecca said. What do I have to look forward to when you’re thirty-five?

When I’m thirty-five and sixty and when I’m sixty-four I’m going to love you more than I did yesterday, he said.

He looked steady. When he stood on his chair to toast them off she saw him shake.

Friends, he said; may we stay that way.

The grass was long and wet with night. They leaned into each other.

Lucky I have you to keep me from being sober, he said.

By the last sky-lightness they could make out his convertible. He fell into the passenger seat, held up the keys. The others were flashing on headlights, leaning on horns, lowering windows to show what songs they were driving into the night to, some alone, a dozen or more in the same direction as they were, a caterpillar visible only by the lights linking its segments.

Let’s call around, Jeff said.

Rebecca said she was driving. The road narrowed into darkness between white trees. Moths shone, fireflies Morse-coded, darting abdomens and wings. Lulu sent pictures to Jeff’s phone: the afternoon, late dances, Jeff lifting Rebecca in a fast dance (Us! Rebecca said) and Scott watching the road, his face by flashlight lined more deeply than Rebecca remembered. Jeff said time sped up the faster you went.

Wait, Rebecca said.

Jeff said, for what?

photo: Prospect House, Princeton, NJ

Princeton takes its graded crossings seriously.

Carnegie Lake
Princeton, NJ

27 May 2011 23:06