Cool Front
Deborah Ann Percy
Jake continued the conversation in her head.
If you hadn't had to have that fancy fish, this wouldn't have happened, he said.
We had to take something.
You always worry about what you think has to be done.
It's just good manners to take a small gift. And to be there on time.
I parked in the shade so the car would stay cool. I thought you'd like that.
I looked. You weren't there.
I was there. Under the tree in the shade. You didn't look.
I did look.
Like you looked for the running shorts I wanted? Like you looked for my special chocolate at the wine store? Like you looked for your credit cards? How could you have lost your credit cards? And your checkbook!
You were not there.
You just jumped to conclusions and took off in a huff.
"There was no shade in the parking lot," she said aloud. "There were no trees at all."
But it was too late because he was gone. She couldn't remember any more, and she stopped and rested the sack on a fence-post. Jake was gone somewhere, and she wasn't going to argue with his ghost all the way to the Wilsons'. She picked up the sack and started off again along the narrow sidewalk, determined to silence the talking in her head. She had told the Wilsons they would be there by ten. She didn't wear a watch, disliked wearing one, but it had to be close to eleven, what with Jake's dawdling at the breakfast table and her wait at Jensen's. She hated to be late.
I asked if you'd cashed your check. How did I know you didn't have any money?
She made herself watch the houses across the street on the lake to keep out the talking. When she was a child, her father had owned one of these places; she would look for it as she walked. She had been allowed to spend two weeks with him in the summer. Her mother drove her to South Haven, helped carry in her suitcases, and left. The musty smell of old vacation homes like the Wilsons' still brought back memories of the safe sound of summer rain on the old cottage roof, of chocolate ice cream on the porch high above the lake, of falling asleep to the sound of her father's laughter mixed with the waves on the sand far below.
ISBN 1-59661-146-4
44 pages/$15
The smell of sunshine on sweet water permeates these stories, all set in Michigan's Lake Country. There's a heightened sense of life that comes with being located amidst such natural beauty, and in Cool Front, Deborah Ann Percy artfully plays that sense of location off the shadowy uncertainties of human relationships.
--Stuart Dybek,
MacArthur Fellow,
author of I Sailed with Magellan
With the lightest of touches, Deborah Ann Percy reaches into the darkest of places. Set against the unpredictability of Lake Michigan, the four short stories of Cool Front show us the unpredictability of men, women, children. Sand, water, sky are the elements here, edgy is the writing, perfect pitch the dialogue.
--Alicia Ostriker,
twice National Book Award finalist,
author of No Heaven
The waters of Lake Michigan flow through Deborah Ann Percy's veins and into every word she puts on the page in this compelling collection of stories. She writes with a dramatist's keen eye about the people you probably know if you've spent time on the shores of the Third Coast or any other lake in America.
--Robert Eversz,
Nero Award nominee,
author of Zero to the Bone
Deborah Ann Percy's elegant collection of stories is, among other things, a very adult meditation on cosmic, geological, and human-scale time. In these stories, the unique ethos of southwest Michigan, its plangent good-naturedness, is reflected, and refracted, in graceful prose that laps repeatedly into a pure lyricism as understated as the waves of Lake Michigan on a mild summer morning. This is fine writing by a storyteller at the top of her game.
--Richard Katrovas,
founding director of the Prague Summer Program,
author of The Years of Smashing Bricks and Prague Winter
Cool Front, by Deborah Ann Percy, shares the same compact dimensions as a Kindle book, but this collection of finely crafted stories has the heft of a much bigger work.
Despite the adage about a book and its cover, the graphic design of Cool Front creates an immediate impression of Lake Michigan's sprawling primacy. From the crowded shores of Chicago to the isolated reaches of the Upper Peninsula, the lake is home to many souls.
Some are permanent residents, while others find sanctuary only in summer. Deborah Ann Percy examines every extreme in a book that--I'm warning you--begs to be consumed in one sitting.
The first story, "A Day at the Lake," begins with a mundane breakfast conversation between a thirty-something married couple who decide that a "nice piece of smoked salmon" would make a good hostess gift for the friends they are to visit later in the day.
While coffee perks in a new Krups for the wife, the husband brews decaf in an old percolater.
Humdrum details reveal the gulf between the two. His routine is precise, right down to his bathroom habits; hers are loose and unpredictable. When he asks whether she has deposited her paycheck and paid the Master Card bill, she peevishly answers, "Of course." From there, the couple heads into town. Jake stays in the car while Becky goes to the grocery store. She buys "an especially large piece of salmon," using almost all her cash because she had not really cashed her check. When she comes out, her husband and the car are gone.
The story goes on from there with the reader in eager pursuit, wondering if the relationship will survive.
Another married couple, the Murphys, inhabit the next story in the book. Unlike Becky and Jake from "A Day at the Lake," this pair are parents of six year old Billy.
On a summer day filled with typically aimless vacation activity, the reader learns that "Billy wandered up the gully from the beach to look for toads and disappeared forever." That simple sentence is delivered right to the gut. The reader gasps at the word "forever."
From there, the rest of the story titled "Beach Glass" is recounted in direct, unsentimental language. There are search parties that form, fan out and regroup. Time somehow moves on with no word about Billy, no signs at all. Reporters show up, clamoring for information, but nothing turns up. "And there was no relief," the narrator explains. "Days ground into weeks." While the husband went back to work for lack of anything better to do, the wife, Joann, sat in the cottage. When Labor Day arrived, they returned to town so Joann could resume her teaching job.
The shortest story in the book, "Beach Glass" is a stunner. As Joann walks the beach following the scattering of beach glass along the shoreline, she discovers a young couple making love and furtively retreats to her cottage, not wanting to be discovered.
She climbs up on the roof and perches there so she can look out over the water, where it meets the sky and disappears. "Beach Glass" does not end there, however, but it would be a shame to spoil the ending so I will trail off right here. The rest of the stories in Cool Front are compelling, but "Beach Glass" is the one with the most staying power; its images revisit the reader long after the book is finished.
Cool Front has received ample praise from prestigious writers, including Stuart Dybeck and Alicia Ostriker. Author Deborah Ann Percy writes fiction as well as plays, and her work has won awards, publication and productions nationwide.
--Constance Alexander
Deborah Ann Percy earned the MFA in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University. Her plays, and those written in collaboration with her husband, Arnold Johnston, have won awards, publication, and production nationwide. Their edited collection The Art of the One Act appeared in 2007 from New Issues Press, and a collection of their own one-acts, Duets: Love Is Strange, appeared in 2008 from March Street Press. Their other books include the plays Rasputin in New York and Beyond Sex, and (with Dona Rosu) translations of Romanian playwright Hristache Popescu's Night of the Passions and Sons of Cain and the forthcoming Epilogue. After a distinguished administrative career in the Kalamazoo Public Schools, she is now a full-time writer, a member of the Dramatists Guild and a member of the American Literary Translators Association.