Afloat by Jennifer McCartney Page A

next, afraid of being alone.
    In the pile, a thin paper rectangle is shiny with the politics of the summer. Though it never occurred to me at the time, I suppose giving out bumper stickers on the island had an air of the ridiculous about it. I try to peel away the waxy paper backing but my fingers won’t work and this governor died a long time ago anyway. Still, I think I’ll keep it.
    I’m reminded of the shows on television, where a professional cleaner will come into someone’s house to help them get rid of things. There will be protests, the mother saying,
But it was my grandmother’s chair
. And the professional cleaner will say,
Yes, but that chair is not your grandmother
.
    It’s easy to laugh then. It is easy to laugh, but it is much different when it’s your own hand, hovering above the trash, hesitating with memory.

Mackinac
    The sun from each day etches itself in progressing shades of brown on my skin and Bryce begins calling me his Little Indian Princess. Trainer says he’s sick of the white man appropriating minority culture this way, and Rummy points out that Trainer is white himself and the least politically correct person he knows, and Trainer calls him a lying Canuck. The resulting conversation ends with shots of Jaegermeister, and Trainer giving Rummy a piggyback ride down Main Street, both of them yelling,
The British are coming!
At four in the afternoon tourists stop to take pictures.
    These strange incidents are rarely worthy of conversation, each unlikely act obtaining a sort of normalcy and blending together with the last. The schedule hanging in the back of the Tippecanoe runs from Thursday to Thursday and often there are no corresponding dates, or even the month.
    Everything is green and the lilacs begin to bloom. Hundreds and hundreds of trees turn purple and white and pink. Bushes that were thin and broken and brown just days ago now reveal their purpose, exploding with breezy trumpets of flowers; the air is full of their scent. Some people come just for this, to take pictures and walk among them. They blossom quickly and stay for weeks. The shops sell sweatshirts and china plates with sprays of lilac on them.
    What
else
should we see on the island?
    When guests ask, I point to the large white house near the west bluff.
    â€˜You can’t go in,’ I tell them, ‘but sometimes she’s there. You can see her through the windows.’
    The governor of Michigan uses the summerhouse for both business and pleasure. Supposedly when the state flag is raised it means she is in residence, but though the flagpole is tall and visible from atop Fort Hill, the small blue flag is difficult to see. The
Detroit Free Press
is a better indication of the governor’s whereabouts. Bryce tells me the flag’s crest includes both a moose and an elk, supporting a shield on which a man is waving and holding a gun. ‘We don’t fuck around here in Michigan,’ Bryce told me proudly. Incongruously, the white ribbon at the bottom of the flag reads in Latin:
if you seek a pleasant peninsula, look around
.
    The governor’s mansion is described as stately, Victorian, picturesque, and also as a tax burden by some Republicans. The current governor is a Democrat, and she points out that when the Republicans were in office and made use of the home the cost of it didn’t bother them. It is a nice house for parties. I know this because the groundskeeper employed by the governor lives in the house and loves drinking Shiraz-Cabernet. After a bottle or two he becomes a gracious host, inviting random people he’s just met back to the mansion.
    We arrive there late one sweltering night after the pubs have closed. No one knows his name, but none of us care as he leads a group of us, stumbling, into the living room which is tasteful and white and open. Trainer keeps wondering aloud where his bellboy is, and Rummy throws up on the governor’s couch.
    â€˜You guys