Excercise

The Promenade was new, part of a downtown renewal project. Concrete poured into a segmented ring around the lake. At night the whole complex was lit up by streetlight. Lilies in the water shone bright green. On every bench, or almost every bench, slept a homeless person. Often arched over or huddled fetus-like or sitting upright. Thanks to a divider rail in the middle of each one, designed especially to thwart his efforts. One man stops by, asks about birthdays. Says oh wow, that’s mine too. He shows you his license. He asks for money. You hand a little over. Was it a trick, with the license, you’ll never know.

The lakes in these parts aren’t really lakes. They’re sinkholes which have over time accumulated rainwater. Most are perfect circles. No more than a half mile across. Occasionally they have to be dredged, or another sinkhole opens up in the limestone below, and the water level sinks five or ten feet. That’s about the depth of the lake. You could walk the length of it with a pair of heavy boots and a tall snorkel. If it weren’t for all the gators, anyway. Each time a lake drains, the rich people complain. Well, not the rich people exactly. The ones with low-end Japanese luxury cars and unfeasible mortgages and who knows how many run up credit cards. They complain now, but it’s alright. They’ll be selling the place in a couple of years, putting another family in over their head. Next to a lake that barely rises over it.

All the lakes in these parts have alligators, but you’ve never seen any in this one. Only swans. You’ve spent a lot of time on the steps, at night, looking out at the water. Looking for nostril bumps, eye ridges. You wonder where, how the gators spend their evenings. Among the lilies? On a bank somewhere? Another lake, one with less concrete, fewer people? You see how the swans do it. Head tucked under a wing, huddled on the shore. Neck curled into an upside down uppercase U.

One time you and a friend are walking the lake at night. She has a list, see, of things she’s never done before. As you approach the busy stretch of the promenade, the part where four lanes of traffic tangents the circle of the lake, she lifts up her shirt for an oncoming car. You glance away for some reason, granting her a modesty she doesn’t seem to value at this moment. I’ve never flashed anyone before she says. Did you lift your bra up too? Oh yes she says. Oh yes.

You used to work not too far from the lake, in the downtown. The parking lot was right there, right by the promenade. Every day you parked at nine, left at six. There was a squirrel once. No, more than once. Fifty, sixty times? You found it dead one morning, wedged between blades of grass. That evening it was still dead, and the next morning, and the next evening, and the next day, and the next. You watched as the fur thinned, flaked off, disappeared. The eyes dripped out. The skin breeched, the internal organs exposed, then withered away. Weeks, months later there were only bones. White, polished, picked clean. Then dirtied, blackened, broken. Reclaimed by dirt.

This is where the Christmas parade passed through. Just under the covered walkway, left onto Main. Those floats pulled by locally owned pickups. Nearby high school marching bands. Santa at the end, on the biggest float, the flat bed of a tractor trailer. But what you remember most is the fireworks. Hands cupped over ears like the headgear you’d wear at the firing range. Head tilted up, heavenward, as the explosions bombard the skies above downtown.

Above the promenade, up a dozen concrete stairs or so, is a garden. A garden with butterflies, fountains, columns. A nice place for a wedding. This is where everyone in the city gets married if they don’t want to get married in a church. And it’s true most everyone here still wants to get married in a church, but it’s getting to be a pretty big city and the amount that doesn’t isn’t quite as small a number as it used to be. Late summer, early august, temperature and humidity both must be in the nineties. This is the lake, the garden, the promenade that serves as the backdrop in all those wedding photos. Black and white. Just a gray, broken oval.