Decide: this is the time in your life to catch a nine-spined stickleback and forget about Lawrence the Painting Instructor, who has just moved back in with his wife. Wake from your dreaming. You are almost thirty-five, a successful sculptor. Get out of the city. Tie your Uncle Uriah's old green canoe on the roof of your Toyota and drive up and pick up Ray, the man who was once your husband in a different life. That life you had before the miscarriage, but don't start thinking about that. Take that rutted dirt road out into the marsh and watch the dust covering your tracks.
Tell Ray your Uncle Uriah's story. It's one you think he will relate to. This is how it goes: Uriah and his golden retriever Max were fishing in Moosehead Lake, north of Harford's Point, when a storm came churning in low over the water. The waves were higher than the sides of the canoe and they drove the canoe against some rocks. It tilted, water poured in and Max went over the side, into the lake. Your Uncle reached for the dog's collar but could not catch it. He managed to get the canoe (this canoe!) righted somehow, but by then the storm was already blowing over. Far away, towards the middle of the lake, he could see his dog swimming south toward home. Make your voice dramatic and tell him that the dog was never seen again.
Listen as Ray tells you of his own experiences in lakes. You've heard the stories before; his tongue paddles around familiarly in names like Shoodic and Quakish and Pemadumcock, even one lake called Chemquasabamticook. He tells you how he used to canoe and fish and swim and how he worked through college summers as a lifeguard, as if you don't know. As if you are strangers meeting for the first time.
Neither of you knows how to do this.
"Don't you go worrying, Karen," he says in that easy speech of his. "Just take it slow. You know I'd always watch out for you all right. You know I'd keep you afloat." He tells you he's taken time off from teaching Biology; he's writing a book.
Then he tells you about his garden, that the arugula is coming up and that the woodchuck still gets to the zucchini despite the fence he put up. These are things you wanted to hear. Realize: you don't quite know how to feel. 'Guilty' is only a stepping stone, worn smooth by a year and a half of rough water.
At the launch, help Ray take the canoe off the roof and put it into the water. Put in the bug spray, the small styrofoam cooler and the net. Direct Ray into the front seat and hand him a paddle. Push off. Steer.
Watch the green-headed flies. They bump into reeds and cattails and the muddy sides of the bank, and occasionally one falls into the water and is eaten. Move the canoe deeper into the marsh.
"There." Ray points. "Mummichog. Genus Fundulus."
Ask, "The fly?" because there is one in the water, wriggling where you're looking. Its legs make tiny indentations in the surface of the water but do not break it. "No no," says Ray. "Did you forget everything in Boston? The fish, right beneath. See?" Ray leans far over the edge of the canoe and points again.
The canoe rocks. You watch ripples spread out into the water and think about Lawrence's wife, which is not really thinking of Lawrence, or so you tell yourself. Decide she probably has thin, pale fingers with rings, and catches cold easily. The kind of woman that wears hand-woven scarves around her shoulders indoors and drives a Mercedes down to the corner store for slim, European cigarettes in a blue box. You can see the way she'd suck in smoke, lips tight, a blush painted on her white cheeks like a doll's.
Open the cooler, pass Ray a sandwich and take one for yourself, salami on white bread with butter. Realize: Ray wants to know everything, about Boston, about your studio, about Lawrence the Painting Instructor, but isn't going to ask. He wants you to tell him about your clients, too--those alien men and women who smell like leather and strange, pungent flowers. Who talk about things like line and color value and the virtues of negative space. The ones who write checks while their chauffeurs wait smoking on the street, double-parked. This, you can tell him about. So you do. Then tell him what it feels like to carve stone.
Steam rises off the water. A dragonfly lands on the seat between you and Ray and moves its wings.
Remember your dream as you're speaking. But say nothing yet.
Paddle and think if you were to sculpt Ray from clay, that this is how you would do it. You would use simple, blunt strokes for the the shoulders and hands--those large workman's hands of his--but a sharp knife to cut the lines of his face. With the nail of your right index finger you would scoop out the hollow of his throat, and you would use something quartzlike to cover his eyes, circles thick like the sides of fishbowls, and bound with a slender copper wire. A pale, translucent glaze for his skin, probably. Something that glistens. Moss, you think, for his hair. Yes.
From his chest down, decide you would cover him in scales. You'd make him a creature of water with a smooth and silvery tail, one that billows out in his wake like a cloak.
If you were to sculpt Lawrence the Painting Instructor, you'd make him a sea creature too but different, you decide. Flashier colors on his top half like the sun on water, while the lower part of his body would be eel-like, coiled in on itself in a confused and shadowy jungle, shaped from some dark stone that always looks wet.
Decide this too: If Lawrence the Painting Instructor was the last person on the planet besides you, and you were the last living artist, then the tradition of American Figurative Art would quickly sicken and expire.
Watch Ondrata zibethica wriggle out from between some reeds and remember you're here to catch a fish. "Over there," Ray says. He digs in the water with his paddle. "Driver, follow that muskrat!"
You both push ahead, moving the canoe into a deeper pool, scraping over a shallow lip by setting the paddles against the bottom and pushing. Here the water is darker. Here, the sticklebacks are hiding.
"Hah!" says Ray. "Where's that net?"
You move closer. They swim in a group, just ahead of you, flickering green in the sunlight and each no more than an inch long. You can count the spines along their backs.
You see the one you want. Nine spines and a red belly this season, on display for the female. Men!
Dip in the net. "Slowly," says Ray. "Real slow."
But this fish is quick. He twists out of reach and dives deep and away. Remember--you just learned this lesson. Try again for another. Move the net through the water as if it were just a part of the water, as if it were a piece of grass or bark or an innocent stick that happened to be floating by. Ray leans closer, reaches for your hand and helps guide it. Remember how he took your hand in the hospital too, back when everything changed. He reached beneath the rough white hospital sheet but you didn't want to be held, then. You left your hand limp like something he might put in a jar for students to look at, while something that might have been your creation together was leaving you.
His hand closed around yours like it does now. Remember this. He points and now you see another stickleback. This one moves a little slower than the last. A little less majestic, perhaps. But it has a wide, unbitten tail and subtle, more matured colors. Nothing like the quick one, maybe. And yet.
You move the net with the water, Ray's hand on yours.
There. The fish swims into the net as if it had wanted to be there all along.
Now tell Ray your dream.
Say how you dreamt you were making love to a merman. His penis was covered with a fine down, and like a cattail it sprouted from a patch of coarse spartina grasses in a tiny, shell-shaped crevice of scales. You were both covered with algae, under a roof made of mud, and you were breathing water there while tiny fish were chewing on your fingers and toes. You could feel the merman swimming in and out of you slowly, like the gentle rise and fall of tides.
Then, together and holding hands, you and the merman were out in open water. Above the surface there, dragonflies were falling. One after another, they curled their wings in on themselves and fell out of the sky like tiny red and green meteorites.
When they hit the water, each one spit like a match.
They drifted down to you and hung turning in the water near you, curved like so many unborn babies--miniature embryos turning in the water above you there just out of your reach, and together you stretched out your fingers. Yours were so thin and white and covered with the dust of stones. His were blunt and green and wrapped together with a pale netting that seemed to shimmer. But you could not catch the dragonflies. The currents grabbed them, and moved them around. Try as hard as you might, they eluded you.
In the dream then, you were diving alone into water that was deep and cold, and full of sightless creatures that pressed against you for your warmth. Though the merman pursued, and though you somehow knew he had been swimming for all of his life, even he could not catch you.
Tell him you have been swimming a lot in your sleep lately. Say "The way you swim in dreams," as if everyone knew what you meant, as if everyone knew that feeling, that selfish and ungrateful love that water has without your having to explain.
If anyone understands, you think, it would be Ray.
Ray is not sure what to say though he wants to say something. You can see that in the corners of his mouth. He is a smart man and knows what is going on and there are hundreds of words in there that want to come out. But he doesn't know where to start.
Say nothing just yet. Put the fish back in the water and let it decide where to go. It swims off a short distance and seems to hover there in the current, letting it's tail keep it in place. Its watching you, you think. Its waiting to see what you will do next.
Sit for a while together, you and Ray, and experience here what you couldn't in the city. Feel the rough, chipped wood and the cracked caning of that worn seat beneath you. Smell that smell of damp that rises up out of the water and heads towards dry land; it leaves the faint taste of salt on your lips. See that the tide is coming in and all the insects are crawling up the reeds and grasses together to avoid drowning. Aedes solicitans, the mosquitoes, are pooling in the shadow of the canoe. Melampus, the salt marsh snail, works its slow way up a piece of cordgrass. As it nears the top, its own weight bends it down near to the surface of the water, again, and beneath it two sticklebacks are circling. The snail is just out of their reach.
One fish is the one you caught and let go. The other is the one you could not catch. The snail moves closer and then away from them. It bobs from one side to the other with the wind, and the fish move beneath it, rising with the currents, changing positions of left and right and displaying their colors, as ripples from the canoe and breeze wash over them.
You do not want the snail to fall in and be eaten. Think that if you were a snail at one time, in a similar situation, you might have stayed on that piece of grass, swinging in mid-air forever.
Now is the time of day too when the dragonflies hover near the surface of the water to eat. Their wings are nearly invisible. They move there, back and forth in the air, before you. Tell Ray just how beautiful they are. Ray is excited now in his own calm way, that way of his that, in the past, has made magic happen. Students' eyes have lit with an understanding of Latin when he's been excited. Arugula has sprouted from overwatered soil and woodchucks have eaten only weeds. He tells you to hold out your hand and you do. "Just keep it there," he says. "Don't move."
"Then what," you ask.
"Shh," he whispers.
Then, as Elmer Fudd: "We're hunting wabbits."
It seems like you wait for a long time. Shadows spring up around you like trees. Your arm grows tired and you rest it on Ray's shoulder, and you lean in against him for his warmth, too. This is Maine, remember. You think maybe you're getting a little too old for things like this.
But then a dragonfly lands. For a moment you can't believe it's actually there. It places its tiny legs in the center of your hand and rests there, like a tiny and well-made toy that lifts its minute wings up and down to the beat of some microscopic internal clock. It's looking at you, you think. Just like that fish was, but with forty-thousand-odd eyes. You think it's deciding whether or not you're good enough to hold it.
Study it back. Its colors are the brightest gold and emerald you have ever seen. So tiny--you couldn't sculpt it from anything but the most fragile of materials.
"Stay still," Ray mouths. "Watch."
A long minute passes and the dragonfly doesn't leave. In fact, another one circles you and lands. And then, another. You think they must communicate, like birds, and then you wonder if they have something like a collective, dragonfly sort of soul shared between them. Something with a thousand wings and a million eyes. Who knows?
More crowd into your hand as the sun goes down and more are coming. They're sailing out of the dusk. You hold out your other hand, reach it out above your head and they land there too. There must be fifty now! They sculpt the setting light with their own warm humming. They shape and refract it with their eyes for you. They crowd around you and jostle for position, brushing your face with their wings, landing on your shoulders and hair and the tops of your knees where your jeans are damp, and they sing to you the music of the dusk here, where everything is possible.
Then, they are silent. Resting. Their wings rise and fall now to the rhythm of your breathing. The sun exhales and dives behind hills, and for a moment, its last rays light your Uncle Uriah's canoes with strings of tiny, winged torches.
You and Ray exchange glances. Then, he claps his hands, and the dragonflies lift into the air as one, and are gone.
Wait now and huddle together.
It's time to watch for the late rising of the moon.