Free The Visible World by Mark Slouka Page B

over the other, this was less a dance than a battle of some kind, though what was being fought for, and by whom, I could hardly guess. Two days after it had begun—during which time my mother would often drag a chair out to the shore after breakfast, or retire to one of the hammocks my father had strung about the place, in which she would lie, straight-legged, smoking cigarette after cigarette, holding the book above her head—it would be over. I would find her lying in the hammock, staring up into the trees, the book tossed on the grass beside her.
     
    I liked it there. I liked the rainy days when the three of us sat around the card table and played board games for hours on end, raising our voices over the dulling sound on the roof, and I liked finding things like the pencil-thin milk snake that crawled out of a crack in the foundation stone of the communal barn one day, but most of all, I think, I liked sitting on the dock with my mother on hot summer afternoons in July or August when a storm was rising out of the west and we knew it wouldn’t miss us.
    Such stillness. The sky above our heads remained perfectly clear, a deep, serene blue, but already the light would be changed, troubled, and with every deep rumble that seemed to move the wood beneath our chairs, I’d feel a thrill of anticipation, and sometimes my mother, who liked these storms as much as I did, would reach out her hand and squeeze my shoulder as if to say, “That was a good one—here we go.”
    It was the inevitability of the thing that we liked, I realize now: the hundred swallows flicking down to their reflections in the water; the mountain growing over us toward the sun, then swallowing it in a slow gulp, which always brought on a small, sad wind that felt good in my hair; and then the crash and rumble, extending, extending, longer than one would have thought possible, then subsiding into poised quiet. There was nothing to be done, nothing we could change, and there was a quiet joy in this.
    Sometimes my father would come out on the sagging porch and tell us to come in, and we’d call back that we’d be right there and stay right where we were, transfixed, as the curtain rose higher and higher, and then what always looked and sounded like wind would turn the water on the other side of the lake mirror-green to pewter-gray, and in the next breath the squall line would be halfway across the water and my mother and I would be running for the cabin.
     
    It was in our second season on the lake that my father shot the dog with Mr. Colby’s gun and Mrs. Kessler fell in love with the man who lived in the cabin on the other side of the lake. He was much younger than she was, which was very important, and everyone talked about it those two weeks whenever they thought I couldn’t hear, changing the subject to food or interrupting themselves to ask me whether I had seen the heron by the dam as soon as I came closer. She had made a spectacle of herself, which made me think of glasses even though I knew what it meant, and really it was a bit much, this carrying on in plain view. Everyone seemed angry about it, and though my parents and the Mostovskýs and some of the others didn’t have much to say, I could always tell when people were talking about it by the way they would look slightly off to the side, shaking their heads, or the way their shoulders shrugged, as if they didn’t care, or the way some would lean forward while others, giving their opinion, would lean back luxuriously in their Adirondack chairs.
    I knew it was probably wrong and shameful for a married lady to fall in love with someone, and particularly someone younger, but the truth was that I liked Mrs. Kessler. She had come across me once while I was working on one of my many forts in the woods and kept my secret, and sometimes when Harold Mostovský and I spent the long, hot afternoons feeling around in the water with our toes, trying to walk the pasture walls that had disappeared when