Heron Lake

                                Heron Lake

     The lake is east of the cottage. In the morning, with the sun on its face, it shines like silver foil, then darkens into afternoon; it is already late and the water is blue as ink. There are no figures in the painting I have been working on, but in the fading light in my mind's eye I see a woman on the path to the water's edge, no more than a shadow beneath the trees. A flat bottomed wooden row boat approaches from the south as she watches.

     There are two children in the boat, a boy with sunburned shoulders and a girl with pale hair. They share the middle seat; each holds an oar and they row in alternate strokes northward along the shore. With each stroke of the oar the boat pulls--a little to the left, then to the right. The boy sits on the left, and because he is stronger than the girl the boat has been veering gradually toward the shore.

     They are in high spirits and their voices carry over the lake. I hear them, but cannot make out what they say--though it appears that the woman understands. They see us and begin to shout and wave, beckoning us to come down to the pier. They slap the oars against the surface, splashing plumes of water into the air. From where I stand, their laughter sounds like bird calls.

     The boy pulls harder on his oar and the girl tries to match him, but can't keep up and the boat begins to turn in a wide circle. Then, seeing she is overmatched, she reverses herself and rows in the opposite direction--as the boy pulls back on his oar, she pushes forward on hers and the boat rotates slowly counter-clockwise round its center, like time wound backwards.

     They row harder and faster and the boat turns more rapidly. He begins to shout, "whirly pool, help!" and she joins in. Their voices echo from across the lake, "Help, help, the whirly pool has got us!"  Suddenly the girl stands up, leans toward the edge of the boat, and dives. She slides into the water and disappears beneath the surface, her own little vortex closing behind her, like an eye.

     Mary Fisher was two months older than me. She had just turned thirteen. They had gone out in the boat without me, she and Willie. I fingered the tiny, gold lotus I wore on a chain around my neck, as though it were a talisman: her gift of friendship. "I hope you drown," I whispered, flushed with jealousy.

*  *  *

     The Fisher summer house was next to ours, about a hundred yards away on the edge of the lake. We spent the whole school vacation together--inseparable. When Mary didn't sleep over with us, I would stay with her.

     "Not even night shall part us," Mary said, mugging for the camera. In the snapshot, her one hand still rests on my shoulder, the other points to heaven as witness, and her father's foxgloves bloom eternally at our backs, like the promises of childhood.

    I was an only child, and she was my fantasy of what it would be like to have a real sister; she would be myself, but other--like Miranda, my mother's favorite doll.

     Dressed in white organdy and yellowing satin, with black shoes of real leather, Miranda sat on top of my mother's upright, surrounded by gilt framed photographs of me, of my Grandma Rose, of Aunt Winnie and herself when they were infants. With blue eyes that opened and shut with a click in her china face, Miranda kept watch over my childhood. I felt my mother's presence in her cool gaze. A silent admonishment.

      I was not allowed to play with Miranda, only, now and then, to hold her--always with Mother there to supervise. "She is an antique," Mother said, "and very valuable."  The photographs, too, were "antiques", images valued for having grown old without change. Ancient children, infants whose eyes shown with animal fire, bereft of time, abandoned by the adults they had become.

     By preserving Miranda upon her inviolate throne, my mother clung to an idea of herself, and of me. When I held Miranda (always under Mother's eyes), I could feel her comparing us, judging me. Next to the doll, I was but an imperfect fragment of that idea. When I was sick, or when I came to her crying because I had been clumsy and tripped on the stairs, or taken a spill on my bike, she would comfort me‑‑but always with a hint of anger. Like Miranda, I was not meant to feel pain, but to be redeemed from fever and rash, from sore throats and skinned knees, from all bruises, and from bleeding of every kind.

     I see my mother playing with Miranda when she was a child, as though I could remember it. She presides there in that imagined memory--old, without having aged, her pretty face preserved from time, like Miranda's, like Mary's among the foxgloves. Memory grows strong at our expense, and if we weaken and give way before it, resistance grows continually more difficult, until it towers unassailably above us, to weigh our every act with antique eyes.

     Mary's mother had gotten sick a few days before. Her father drove in from Midland on a Wednesday night, though he usually only came on weekends. They had planed to drive back together, but she grew worse and Mr. Fisher took her to the hospital in town.

     The next morning, her father got a call from the hospital. He would not let Mary go in with him, no matter how she begged. She came over to our house after he left, but was too upset to talk. To pass the time, we went out in the boat to wait for his return.

     The air was perfectly still; not a breath moved to ripple the water. Brilliant white summer cumulus touched with shadows of mauve and violet were piling up into an ultramarine sky. So flawless was the reflected image of cloud and sky on the glassy surface that we felt as though earth and water had vanished and our little boat was drifting among the cloud banks like an illustration from a children's picture book. It made us feel dizzy to look into the water, as though we were peering down from a great height--we let the oars hang idly by the sides of the boat like broken wings, reluctant to either speak or move lest we wake and fall from the sky like lost angels.

     Whenever a cloud passed before the sun, it's shadow moved like a hand over the water, erasing the reflected image of the heavens and opening the depths of the lake below to our eyes. We passed from air to water and water to air, with only the trilled flute call of the red winged black bird to mark the silence.

     Without warning, one of the shadow clouds opened in a brief, gusty shower that transformed the mirrored heavens we sailed to stormy, miniature whitecaps, ending our heavenly flight in a sudden, kaleidoscopic turn. No sooner had the rain begun, than the sun emerged again. The broken waters gleamed. We each took an oar and rowed in silence back to Mary's dock. Without a word, we tied the boat, climbed up on the white pier, and holding hands, walked up the path to the Fisher cottage where Mary's father stood waiting for us at the door.

     That was the last time we were together. That afternoon her father pulled the boat out of the water, carried it into the woodshed and stored it away with the inner tubes and the wheelbarrow and Mary's fat tired bicycle. He covered the boat with a piece of gray, paint spattered canvas, as though he were preparing for winter, then closed the door to the shed, secured it with a padlock and shuttered the windows of the cottage.

     I was walking down the beach road to the big lake when they drove past on the way to Midland. I waved as she went by, but I'm not sure she even saw me.

     There was another woman in the car that day. I didn't know her then, but recognized her later as Mary's future step mother, Emily. Where she'd been staying at the lake, no one knew. It was a scandal that set tongues clicking at the harbor club in town, over cocktails on beach chairs at the edge of the lake.

     Harold Fisher remarried before the first snow. He and Emily came up for a few weekends the following summer, but stayed at the resort hotel in town, not the family cottage, and when they did come, Mary wasn't with them. Perhaps they knew how people talked.

    With Mary gone, my attentions turned to Willie, whose father owned the boat shop and grocery store where the lake road meets what's now, old U.S. 31. Under the trees, on the woods side of the store, boat hulls of various sizes, paint long since peeled down to weathered, rotting wood, lay here and there among rusted auto bodies. On the slope leading down to the docks on the lake side were bait tubs, sections of wooden piers, water filled steel barrels with old outboard motors clamped onto cross bars for testing. There was a red gas pump in front of the store--an antique even then--with yellowed glass at the top, like a bell jar that let you see the gasoline swirling through as you filled your car.

     Behind the store in tubs, or wire cages he had built himself, Willie kept rabbits, turtles--whatever animals he could find or trap. He would bring home the wounded and maimed from the roadside, chipmunks shot by boys with B.B. guns, baby birds that had fallen from their nests--then try to heal them. Never with any luck, that I remember.

     Once he had a fox, a red fox whose pungent, fetid odor would seep into our car when we parked in front of the store. I could smell it all the way home. The fox paced and paced in its tiny cage until it had rubbed most of its fur off against the wires. It died a few weeks after he caught it, but it took a long, Michigan winter to purge the land around the store of its smell.

            Willie was a skinny, towheaded, barefoot kid, half a head shorter than I. But the summer I turned thirteen, the summer of the boat ride, the summer Mary's mother died, Willie grew up. Just like that, it seemed, over the course of a single winter. He was as tall as my father, and his shoulders were round and hard, though he was still gangly and awkward. When he would come to the beach, Mary and I would lie on the sand and poke each other and stare at him. We couldn't take our eyes off him. If we thought he was looking, we buried our faces in our beach towels and held our breath to keep from giggling. He became the topic of our most private conversations.

     Three summers later, three summers since I last saw Mary, Willie and I were going steady. We walked to the beach together every afternoon. He worked at a farmer's cooperative, loading trucks in the day, so we didn't get to the lake until almost six when the late afternoon sun sank into the water below us in long, slanting green shafts. About a hundreds yards out, a sandbar paralleled the shore. Between the drop off and the sandbar, the water was deep, but above the bar it was only a little over our heads. We would swim above it side by side in easy strokes until our arms grew tired, then rest by letting ourselves sink down till our feet touched the sand, than thrust our bodies to the surface again for air, sinking down once more, sinking and rising.

     If we didn't get to the beach until late and the sun was near setting, the water would be dark below us, and we could only guess where the sandbar might be. Sometimes we would wander out too far, or veer toward shore, so when we stopped to rest, and let ourselves drop down, we would keep on sinking, down further, falling, the water black around us and nothing below our feet but black water, deeper yet, to the end of our breath we went down--until it was all we could do to kick and thrust and pull upwards with our arms toward the sheen of light above us, the surface, breaking through to silver and the golden flames of the sunset, and to air.

     We spread our towels on the slant of the sand dune facing the lake so the rays of the sun, now low in the sky, would better warm and dry us. I don't remember what we talked about, not at all. Nothing. Its a silent picture, as though I had been alone in that green water that held us, together and apart.

     We held hands, touched sandy fingers palm to palm. I had begun to draw by then, all the time. I took a sketch pad everywhere I went. I drew bits of twisted driftwood. Drew Willie's hands. Drew his face--over and over I drew his face until he began to notice that what I drew would startle--even disturb him a little. At first he'd glance, casually, at what I did. Would pay me compliments. "Oh that's nice!," he'd say, you're pretty good!"  Or, "You've got that tree just right!" But there was something about his praise that left me uneasy, did not satisfy my hunger. Once, while I was drawing him, I suddenly saw the fox--the one he had kept in the wire cage. The sunlight played like flashing swords off the water, and the fox paced up and down on the surface, his skin peeled away and the bones of his hips shone white as chalk over the foaming waves, and when Willy reached over and touched my arm, it felt like my own skin was going to slough off in blisters and I grabbed my sketch pad and ran down the sandy slop to the water's edge, and down the beach until a stitch in my side doubled me over and I knelt, gasping for breath, with the shallow water lapping at my body, warm and clear as human tears.

                                    *  *  *

     It was very late the night they arrived. No one had heard them pull in or seen a light go on, and Mr. Fisher had taken the car to town first thing in the morning so their cottage looked as deserted as ever; it was a complete surprise to see--as though no time had passed at all--Mary standing at the door. The same face I had seen peering out of the window of her father's black Buick peered back at me now through the screen, like an after image on TV, returned from some diaphanous exile. Her hair was a little darker now, but her skin was as white as the tow headed little girl's I had played with years before, and her eyes the same pale, milky blue. A sudden cloudburst sent a rushing noise through the trees, and in the hazy air, against the gray curtain of rain, Mary could as well have been a ghost or a flash of memory: I stood at the door staring out at her and for a moment, couldn't find my tongue to even say "hello!"  She smiled, looked embarrassed for me, and fingered a silver cross that hung on her neck from a fine, gold chain.

    "Well, you do remember me, don't you?" she said, breaking the tension, and I cried, "Of course I remember you!" and swept her into the house with a hug that almost lifted her off her feet, amazed as I did at how thin and light she was.

     "Your bones are made of air," I said!  "You're as tall as I am, but can't weigh half what I do!  You must be all of ninety pounds!"

     "Ninety-two, she said. "My father tells me to stay out of strong winds;" but there was no humor in her voice. After stopping in the kitchen to visit for a moment with Aunt Winnie, we went out on the screened porch at the side of the house and sat down on the glider. The porch faced the lake, which gleamed like polished steel through the trees. For a time we listened to the hush of rain in the woods, its drumming on the porch roof above us and the rhythmic squeaking of the old glider.

     Mary took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She was so pale in that dim, watery green light; I thought of the white Indian pipes that grow from the carpet of oak leaves along the path to the lake. My father used to tell us that these pipes and the almost translucent mushrooms that spring up after a rain were the spirits of a tribe of Indians who once lived by our lake. Every winter, he said, the whole tribe set off across the lake in canoes to set up their village in the greater shelter of the hills on the other side. They hunted deer in the forest and fished the waters of the lake, and when they fished, it was their custom to sing as they hauled in their lines. They believed this pleased the Fish King, who rewarded them by seeding the lake with new fish. But this tribe grew careless of the old ways, and the young men scoffed at the beliefs of the elders. They refused to sing when they went out on the lake, and the Fish King was offended. Now it was not because the fish loved their singing, as you might suppose, for the music of humans is not like the music of fish, and it is difficult for one kind to appreciate the art of the other. No, it was that the young men, when they stopped singing, grew sullen and course. And when the young men grew sullen and course, they mistreated their wives and their elders, and the women, miserable at the hands of their husbands, neglected and beat the children, and the elders became silent, for their wisdom was no longer sought.

     One autumn morning, the tribe set out across the lake as they had always done, but on this morning the children fought and cried, the women scolded, and the men scowled as they plunged their paddles angrily into the waves. From his shaman seat on the lake bottom, the Fish King saw them passing on the surface above like a storm cloud.

     "Joyless!" he cried!

     "They have forgotten how to return joy for abundance, joy for want, joy for pleasure, joy for pain!"

     "They have become like fish who cannot bear the water!  Their own element rises to drown them!"

     At that moment the waters opened in a giant whirlpool and sucked down every man, woman and child to its death--all but one, an infant who saved itself by clinging to a water lily.

     "And what happened to the baby," we would ask, only I spoke the question out loud as I thought it.

     "The baby? She said " ...the baby will pull the water lily down and she will drown with the rest of them."

     "How do you know the baby was a girl?" I asked, picking up the thread of a conversation from years before, when Mary and I, by turn, would make up endings for the stories my father told.

       I stopped making up stories," she said. "Or reading them."

     Mary read my silence as a question...

     "Because they are lies," she said.

     And when I asked her what she meant, she told me the story of The Church of True Man, where they believed imagination was a sin.

     I asked her about novels.

     "Lies," she said. They were against any book that wasn't just plain fact.

     "What do they read to their children?" I asked.

     "Only the Bible," she said," and books of useful information--things you have to learn to make an honest living."

     "What about Peter Rabbit, or The Little Engine that Could?"

     "Lies", she said. "All lies."

     A friend had invited her to services after her mother died. She was angry with her father over Emily, and when she saw how much her attendance upset him, she pledged her life to Christ, the True Man.

     Mary's father tried his best to stop her, but it only led to fights, and every time they fought she would defy him by taking on one more of the seemingly endless church activities: there was Wednesday bible study, services on Sunday, after-school club for young teens, church suppers on Sunday afternoons. Soon, Mary was all but a stranger to her father's house.

     "Do you really believe that?" I asked--"that God thinks telling stories is a sin?"

     "No," she said. "Not anymore. I don't believe in anything, now--especially God." 

     At first, she said, she clung to some dim hope that she might convince her father to convert.

     If she could manage that, surely they would make him divorce Emily--who wrote romantic novels under a half dozen pseudonyms--compounding the sin of storytelling with lies about her name! 

     When it became clear this would not work, she bent her will to God in prayer--in hopes she could wreck this marriage by divine intervention.

     She tried to convince herself that God must have his reasons for failing her--though she couldn't imagine what they might be: but then came the doubts, and the more she prayed to still them, the more she thought, and the more she thought, the angrier she got.

     To make matters worse, just at the stage when passion, following its normal course--would be expected to begin its inevitable decline, their arguments had the unfortunate effect of rekindling her father's heat for Emily. Mary would find herself at the diner table alone, listening to the tell tale sounds from the bedroom above as her father, in his frustration and anger at the Church of the True Man, sought consolation in the arms of his young bride.

    This was more than faith could bear--and Mary pronounced herself an atheist.

     "Besides," she said, " there was this boy. And they didn't believe in dating..."

     As enthusiastically as Mary had pursued the love of God, to hear her tell it--she now sought the fleshy love of boys. From purity to profligate, without so much as stopping to take a breath. Looking back on them now, the stories she told me that afternoon seem more ludicrous than lewd. Perhaps she was trying to shock me. Mary had always made a show of being the more mature--the "woman of experience" to my innocent naivete. I didn't know what to say, and after a while, she grew quiet, staring out at the lake as though she had seen something there that had disturbed the surface of her thoughts.

     The rain splattered water shone like a broken mirror. "If you look in a shattered glass," I said, "what you see will look broken too. Yourself. The world. No wonder people believe it's bad luck to break a mirror." 

     "That's how it feels to come back," she told me. "Like a drawing torn to pieces and the pieces thrown in the air, and as they fall, I try to make out the pattern, to see the picture in the fluttering scraps--a glimpse of a line here, a bit of color there." 

     "Come back from where?" I asked.

     "From the Church of the True Man to my father's house. From Midland to Heron Lake. From the whirlpool of the Fish King, from my mother's ghosts."

     "Does she have more than one?" I asked.

     "Oh, yes!" she said. "The whole world is filled with them!"

     We sat on the glider watching the rain. There was a little knot of fear inside me, sharp and heavy at the same time, and I wondered how many ghosts were hidden inside of Aunt Winnie, waiting to spring out. Mary sat beside me, a thousand miles away.

     I had known from the day she went out in the boat with Willie and vanished into the circling waves, that she would never return.

                                    *  *  *

     Aunt Winnie was hospitalized the summer after Mary's mother died. I came home from a fish fry at the Wenddel's and there was no one home. A note on the door gave a number at the hospital. My mother's voice was calm on the phone. "Don't worry," she said. "A little fluid on her chest. She'll be out in a few days."  And she was. They told us she had low blood pressure and a slow heart. Mother sounded relieved when she reported this. "It's low blood pressure," she would say, as though to reassure herself, and then; "My mother--your Grandma Rose, had high blood pressure, and she had first one stroke then another. There was nothing could be done."            

            When Elsie from across the road came over and said she had heard Aunt Winnie had suffered a heart attack, Mother protested; "No, no, not an attack. A slow heart. They can treat her with medications." 

     In her mind, and still in mine, a heart attack meant something violent, sudden, irreversible, like my father's golf partner, Matty Luewin, who dropped dead one day, right in our kitchen. He had just come over with a vase of lilacs from his garden when he complained of a sudden thirst. Mother gave him a glass of water and he had not quite got it to his mouth when he jumped stiff straight up, like someone who's suddenly remembered a missed appointment, or stumbled in an instant on a momentous insight; there he stood, eyes wide, poised as though about to announce this electrical discovery; his mouth open, his jaw slack, but not a word, not a sound, not even a breath--instead, clutching the glass so hard it broke in his hand, he went over flat on his back with a thud like a felled tree. There he lay, blood slowly trickling from between his fingers, and before anyone in the room had time to realize what had happened, his face had turned as blue as the lilacs that now lay scattered about him--funeral blooms in accidental disarray.    

     It was not like that, my mother meant to say. A mere complication from her diabetes. We would not be caught by surprise. We would all have time, time to think about what was to come--as though this were a mercy.

     It is hard to grasp that she was not yet sixty--a few years older than I am now. It didn't help that she had no patience with the restrictions her illness imposed on her, or that she refused to forego the pleasures her doctor would have denied her: the ice cream, the powdered sugar cookies she kept in that red cracker tin, the sweet tea laced with brandy.

     By the following year, the summer of Mary's return, she was an old woman, able to walk only with great effort and much pain, shuffling about when she did in a pair of slippers made of real lamb's skin, wooly side in. Her feet were swollen, dry and cracked, like the worn hide of the slippers. The first days of that summer, though weak and in considerable discomfort, she had been in good humor and bore her illness with defiant resolve, but she rapidly grew worse, and took on the pained and startled look I've seen in the eyes of struck animals left by the roadside.

     Her moods shifted radically. There were days when she would sit for hours without saying a word--followed by days spent in a state of constant agitation, testing everyone's patience with her complaints and irritability. At least when she was cross, there was a certain vigor, a liveliness about her that offered the illusion of hope; when she was depressed, it was as though she were not there, had already passed on and left this fleshy ghost behind to wring us dry.

     Mother tried to help, but her grimly insistent optimism got in the way. There came a point when she would refuse to see. I suppose it was her way of coping, of preserving herself, but it drove a wedge between us. I was willing enough to take on the chores of caring, maybe more than willing--I willfully took on what Mother couldn't, or wouldn't do.

     I bathed and dressed Aunt Winnie. I helped her on and off the toilet when she was too weak to manage--and when her feet were swollen and she couldn't walk, I took her the bedpan and helped her clean herself. I learned to take her blood pressure, how to apply salve to the open pressure sores on her buttocks. I practiced giving injections to grapefruits so I could give her insulin. The nurses had shown my mother how to do this--but I was the one who gave the shots. I was the one who pulled on the surgical gloves to give her suppositories, and to free her from impaction.

     Over the course of the summer, little by little, I watched my mother defer to me, give way--intimations of the future.

     What I resented was, that she gave me no credit for any of this. Not that she didn't appreciate what I did--but the reality was more than she could acknowledge--even to think about what I was doing was too much, and so she acted as though this unpleasantness didn't even exist.

     One evening, Mother, Aunt Winnie and I were eating dinner (it was a weekday, and father, who only drove up on weekends, was in Chicago); Aunt Winnie had a sudden stomach spasm and vomited at the dinner table. Mother looked up, as though she were checking the hanging lamp above the table for dust, pushed her chair back. "I think I'll walk down to the big lake to see the sunset and take in some air," she said, as though nothing had happened.

     I cleaned the table. Helped Aunt Winnie out of her soiled dress, mopped the floor. I put the dirty clothes in a basket and sprinkled them with baking soda to cut the smell. When Mother came home, Aunt Winnie was asleep and I was drying and putting away the dishes.

      I tried to ignore her, furiously rubbing the last plate with a dish towel while I stared out the window above the sink. Attracted to the light, mosquitoes, night flying insects, moths of all shapes and sizes flew in erratic patterns in the dark beyond the glass. Orb spiders with swollen bodies policed tattered webs, trying to harvest the bounty.

     It was only when I heard Mother singing in the living room that I lost control and burst into tears of anger--but I took deep breaths to choke back the sobs, blotted my face with the dish towel, and composed myself.

            When I walked into the room to confront her, she was sitting under the reading lamp, stitching a hem in Miranda's dress. A strand of errant hair trailed across her forehead. It moved with her breath, with the air in the room--I couldn't take my eyes off it. This slightly incongruous disarray--like catching her out of costume by surprise.

     Miranda lay across her lap, face down, the way you would hold a baby with gas.

     "You weren't an easy child," she said. "I used to sing this song to you--when you were colicky."

     Silence.

     "We each do what we can, dear." She said.

     As I walked down the path to the lake, feeling the wings of moths brush against my face, I could hear her voice, and even from the pier, fragments of song drifted down to me.     

            The stars brightly shining...

                                    Wild roses in bloom ...

*  *  *

   Seeing Mary again seemed to rally Aunt Winnie from her torpor. The next day, while I was waiting for Willie to take me to the beach, she insisted on serving me tea and cookies. She questioned me about Mary--"I always liked that girl," she said. "But she's in trouble, isn't she?"--and about Willie. I didn't think she knew about Willie, that she even noticed! 

    There was her world, dimly lit, tinted sepia and stained sienna, a sky of fading amber, rooms smelling of wax and black tea, naphtha and rose petals. The rooms of that world were hers alone, and when she died, they would fade and vanish with her. I hadn't dreamt that she could even see me in my world!  And how she talked!  The questions that she asked!

     She spoke with animation and intense interest, leaning across the table and pouring brandy into her tea, then with a look to the side to be sure my mother wasn't watching from the door, she would pour a little brandy into my glass of coke.

     "Everyone will tell you, `be careful, be careful, be good, be good!' she said. "And well they should. It's their duty. But let me tell you, the truth of the matter is not what they make it out to be. Just between the two of us--God forbid anyone should hear I've planted such ideas in a child's mind--but here it is. Pleasure is what it's about. Pleasure‑‑and if you have the presence of mind to be honest, you'll more likely have the sense not to spoil the pleasure."

     "Don't misunderstand!  There's more to pleasure than having a wild good time--but I'll just have to trust you on this. It's not a thing that can be taught."

     "There's a passage from a story," she said, about life's feast passing you by. Don't let it." 

     There was a certain sadness in her voice, but what I realized then--for the first time--was that this was the sadness of knowing life's feast is coming to an end--but after having enjoyed it to the full!  I had always thought of her, my spinster aunt, as someone life had passed by. She had never married, though I knew from photographs that she had been a beautiful young woman, and from family stories that she had many suitors.

     Arrangements had been made for a marriage to a man in the foreign service, but when he returned from his assignment the week they were to be married, he was accompanied by a wife of Asian heritage who dressed in strange flowing clothes and spoke no English. Nonetheless, she spoke of him often, with no sign of regret or sadness. They continued to correspond and she kept his letters in a carved wooden box with inlaid mother of pearl on the lid--the figure of a lotus surrounded by Chinese goldfish.

     Then I remembered how she would take the train to Washington on unknown business, or disappear on mysterious vacations. Her conversation after one of these trips (she lived only blocks away and was a frequent diner guest) would be full of the gossip and goings on of the international set--people who seemed as remote from our everyday life--and what we knew of hers, as movie stars or foreign royalty.

     Is this feast reserved for those who have the gift to find it?  Can it be that someone whose life has looked as spare and dry as Aunt Winnie's, has been all along the secret guest of honor at a table other's cannot even see?

     I looked into Aunt Winnie's cloudy eyes and sensed in my own body--in the pressure of my legs against the chair, the weighted curve of my belly, the bony heart at the base of my spine--a common identity. I felt my death in hers, her life in mine. The simple fact that we will die--reason teaches us this much, but to feel our death, like a seed, in the life of another, is a gift beyond reason's grasp. She understood about Willie because, beneath her pain, the same hunger churned and drove her on. The seed of life and the seed of death is the body itself, one seed.

                                   *   *   *

     Death", she said, and the boards of the porch floor groaned above us so that "death" was all I caught of what she said. That would be Emily Fisher's voice, but I had to recognize my mother by her footsteps, for only Emily spoke and I couldn't see them. "Death", as though it were a name, a summer visiter come to call. I pictured him in my mind, Mother and Emily showing him the door, now that he'd finished his business with Aunt Winnie. He stepped lightly over our young bodies, over the sandy ground where we lay beneath the house.

     He'd come uninvited, but not unexpected; if it was rude of us to be such unsolicitous hosts, I told myself, it was only rudeness paid in kind, so we tried to forgive one another, Willie and I, for our eager, curious hunger grown insatiable.

     We had been like that all summer, seizing every chance we had to be alone, but with Aunt Winnie sick, people coming and going, always guests to care for, our opportunities were far and few between. Now the event had come and gone, and in the swirl of funerary activities, left to ourselves at last, we sank beneath the sound of footsteps, clutched at one another like drowning swimmers, while the resigned voices of the mourners murmured above us like sea waves lapping.

     But it was no good. I couldn't silence them, my thoughts. My mind would float upward into their gathered voices, and more than once I swore I could hear Aunt Winnie speaking, laughing!  Suddenly it all seemed grotesque. Willie, with his groping hands, his school boy love--his was not the pleasure that I wanted. I pushed him aside, crawled out into the open night and ran down the path to the lake.

     After a week or so he stopped coming to the house, and then I would see him with Mary, walking to the beach, holding hands. For a while he thought it was because of Aunt Winnie that I avoided him, and in a way, he was right. I stood on the pier that night and watched the moon dart in and out of the breaking clouds. It floated low, just above the hills on the other side of the lake.

     I was shaking inside, though the air was warm. The woods at night still frightened me a little. The darkness would come alive. A distant whip-poor-will or a sudden rush of leaves and the hoarse cry of a great blue heron would leap out of some greater, animate presence, guided by an unfathomable will.

     Chilled though I was, I sat on the edge of the pier and took off my shoes, then my blouse. I slipped out of my clothes, carefully folded each piece, laying them on the bench at the end of the pier. I stepped into the water and began to walk in the direction of the moon.

     Overhead, the sky was filled with sequins. If I reached up, I could pull them down, wrap the mantle of night over my shoulders, a mantilla, a dancer spinning under a veil of stars. Not even the almost full moon could drown the milky way, which spilled its phosphorous stream across the center of the sky. The water lapped against the posts of the pier and sloshed gently on the sandy shore. Now and then a fish splashed out on the lake. A choir of frogs enveloped the world.

                                  *    *    *

            I can hear her voice, my Aunt Winnie, and Mary's, and Willie's--but I can't see them now, not clearly. There is the little boat heading north on an ink blue lake. Aunt Winnie has turned her back to the house. I try to make out her features, the way they were before she got sick, but when our paths cross, her face is a mask of shadow, and though I try to draw it in my mind, I can't make it come out right. I work and work at it, erasing, drawing again, until the place where her face should be is only a smudge, a hole worn through to a shimmering darkness beyond.

            This is where my pleasure lies. My invisible feast.

     I close my eyes, let in the cold, let the dark water flood over me, and the lake, whose little waves break around me like voices, holds me as in my father's arms. In front of me, the moon casts herself on the water in the form of a lily. I cling to it, for life.