Guest post written by The Lake Club author Lina Patton
Lina Patton is a writer, illustrator, and teacher. Originally from Maine, she moved to Minnesota at thirteen, trading the ocean for 10,000 lakes. She holds a BA from Elon University and an MFA from George Mason University. Her work has appeared in ELLE, The Cut, Narrative Magazine, and Driftwood Press, among others. After seven years living abroad, she and her husband currently reside in Washington, DC, with their two very good, very bad dogs. The Lake Club is her first novel.
About The Lake Club: Two women in a wealthy lakeside suburb clash over a cute male nanny, pulling the town’s darker secrets to the surface. The Lake Club is both an addictive, rollicking beach read, and a stylish, deft exploration of a lesser-known region of American wealth.
It’s a warm-ish day in April—the kind that makes Minnesotans suddenly regain their will to live after six months of icy snow and air so cold it makes you choke—when my mom looks up from her coffee, slides a newspaper across the table, and says, “It’s probably time to get a job.”
This isn’t some failure-to-launch situation. It’s 2006, I’ve just turned 16, and I’m not surprised by the comment—nor by the classifieds section now staring up at me, several listings circled in black Sharpie.
Still, my stomach drops.
I’m not excited to get a summer job. I’m not going to push back, either. Not because my parents are crazy strict or anything, but because they’re such good, hardworking people. I know this is simply what comes with turning sixteen. In our family, work ethic runs deep.
My mom is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant who escaped the rise of Communist powers via a scholarship to Cornell. At seventy-three, she still travels every week for work. My dad grew up incredibly poor and, though an actor at heart, became an engineer for job security. So it’s unsurprising that they raised a Type A, straight-A daughter.
And yet, I’m still a 16-year-old girl, so I groan, grab the newspaper, mutter, “fine,” and stomp off to my room.
There, among my Josh Hartnett posters and Sex and the City DVDs, I review the résumé I’ve already started. I figure I’m as good a job candidate as any other high schooler—maybe even better, given I’ve been stacking my extracurriculars for college applications: I’m on student council, multiple sports teams, yearbook, DECA, National Honor Society… blah blah blah.
Still, I have a sinking gut feeling about this whole job situation, and I know it’s for one main reason: I am terrified I’m going to be bad at it.
After all, even at sixteen, I understand there’s no way to prepare for your first job. It’s not a test you can cram for or a soccer drill you can run in your backyard. The double-edged sword of succeeding all the time is that you become even more afraid to fail.
The job is happening whether I like it or not, so the following Saturday, I put on the black slacks and blue button-down I’d bought for a marketing competition and spend the afternoon driving around, dropping off résumés at restaurants and coffee shops.
Lastly, I end up at the country club. While I’ve driven past the club plenty of times, as I step inside the foyer, I am overwhelmed by all the beautiful marble and golden light and the smell of money. You know the scent… Something like bergamot and air conditioning.
So as I hand over my résumé, I make a silent, sweet sixteen wish that they’ll be the ones to call me back.
And they do! Long story short: they invite me to interview to be a cater waiter, I overprepare, nail it, and before I know it, school’s out—all my friends are headed out on Lake Minnetonka—and I’m headed to my first day of training.
I am, of course, thrilled there’s training—and that my coworkers are wonderful.
There’s Charles, an older man who looks like a ballerina but can carry thirty stacked plates. Ann, who rolls up her sleeves to show me her giant mermaid tattoos. And Sam, a cute redhead boy from three towns over.
They teach me the choreography of the job.
But while everyone else seems to be able to juggle seven tasks at once, I can’t see the forest for the trees. I ping-pong through each event checklist in a completely nonsensical order, obsessing over tiny details while missing what actually matters. I spend half an hour folding perfect napkin flowers and forget to fill the water glasses. I set out the butter patties three hours early and prep the creamers when there’s no coffee service. And when the guests arrive, I become so shy, I skirt the edges of each room, trying to avoid as much interaction as possible.
So, as the week of training wraps up, I realize my fear has come true: Only practice makes perfect, and I’m far from it.
This is unfortunate, given my first solo event is fast approaching: the biggest wedding of the summer, 250 people descending on the ballroom that pitch-perfect Saturday.
I’m going to spare you the gory details.
Let’s just say that at one point, Ann, my section partner, has to grab me by the shoulders and yell, “You need to own the tables! Stop being afraid! We need to clear the salad plates!”
And later, while carrying a tray of wine glasses back to the kitchen, I drop the entire thing against the wall, glass and Cabernet exploding everywhere.
Then, toward midnight, as the guests leave and we’re back in the kitchen, my boss hands us each a slice of leftover wedding cake; pats my shoulder and says, “You’ll get the hang of it.” I try not to cry as I swallow the buttercream.
It turns out, she’s right.
I do get the hang of it.
But not just over that first summer—because I end up working there another five until I am the one training the terrified sixteen-year-olds.
Each summer, I thought I was just learning how to be a better cater waiter; what I didn’t realize was that I was actually learning how to quietly fail without quitting.
This lesson came back to me in full force when, years later, I finally broke from my very Type A plan and committed to my secret dream of writing a novel. Because writing—as many of us know—is all about learning to embrace failure. Draft after draft, rejection after rejection, you have to rely on your own dogged belief in yourself to keep going. You have to see every low point as just another tray of glasses hitting the wall: Clean it up, pick yourself up.
I spent ten years in this cycle, and finally, my debut novel, The Lake Club—which, fun fact, is directly inspired by my time working at the club—published this June.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go back to Minnesota for a book event at the country club. My old boss still works there, and she welcomed me back with open arms.
Honestly, I was nervous. I hadn’t been back to the town, let alone the club, in over a decade, and I worried I’d be overcome with nostalgia and transported back to my anxious teenage years.
Yet walking into the foyer, I was surprised by how I felt nostalgic—sure—but I also felt oddly calm; I held so much tenderness toward my younger self.
There’s actually a line in The Lake Club that says, “There’s no such thing as grown-ups, only the act of growing up,” and standing there, I finally understood what I had written.
I realized that life is really just one long conversation with our past, present, and future selves. We often spend so much time wishing we were in a different stage that we forget our younger or older selves would probably be proud of us exactly where we are—of how we made it through the hard times or soaked in the good.
As I left that evening, I looked down the long hallway toward the ballroom, and I imagined my 16-year-old self there in her bowtie, sweating and rushing back to a wedding.
I imagined her pausing to stare back at me and saying,
“Wait… you really wrote a book?”
