Swimming, Snow

Swimming, Snow

For Miriam the winter of her father’s death would always be juxtaposed with a summer day.  It was Saturday, Labor Day weekend, and she had ridden her bike down to Lake Harriet, near their house in Minneapolis, to the north beach, just beyond the bandstand, where her husband Ted had his sailboat tipped up on shore to clean the hull.  Miriam had meant to help with the scrubbing; she had good intentions.  But as soon as she saw the water, she wanted to go swimming.

She hadn’t been swimming all summer.  She didn’t know why.  It was just that she was always so busy.  Doing what?  She tried to think.  Before her the lake sparkled in the sun.  She had just finished teaching a summer school course, and she was working part-time at a bookstore.  Then there was Ted, a high-maintenance husband, and lots of women friends, and of course there was writing.  It was like a demanding, beloved child.  She waded into the water. 

She struck out through the sailboats bouncing lightly on their buoys.  She passed two female mallards who were swimming there too.   Up above the sky was a resplendent blue.  Snow-white clouds, cumulus now, would be thunderheads by evening.  She floated for awhile on her back, the sun on her face.  Then she commenced swimming again.

 She had spoken to her parents in South Carolina just that morning.   Her father had sounded fine, though she noticed that he didn’t linger on the phone, as if he found it too much effort to call across the miles about the Southern heat, his tomatoes, Miriam’s trip that morning to the farmers’ market.  Oh! she remembered him saying, I wish I could have gone with you!  Well, Miriam wished too. 

After she hung up, she had felt disturbed, restless, and she had a strong feeling that she should get to South Carolina.  She had gone upstairs and looked hard at her calendar.  She marked off five days in October when she could go.  At that moment she remembered a dream:  both her parents had died suddenly, in a plane crash.  They had dropped out of the sky and were gone.  Then she was in their old house having to go through their things and dispose of what had been her parents’ material life.

Now, swimming, Miriam lost track of time and distance.  But suddenly something frightened her, a dark shadow passing over.  She jerked up, trying to touch bottom that wasn’t there.  How far away the shore was!  There was the tipped up hull of the sailboat, a large portion of which was now a bright blue, the rest a dull green, and Ted’s tiny figure bent over a bucket.  But the shadow?  Looking up, she saw that a plane had passed over.  With her head in the water and earplugs, she hadn’t heard it. 

When she returned to the beach, she was pleasantly tired.  She spread her towel on the sand and lay down.  The sun warmed her, smiling on her.  So this is what it is like, she thought happily, to relax.  Relaxation was not a big part of Miriam’s life.  She was always in a hurry, always busy, always striving, achieving, or at least trying.  It had to do, she thought, with being a woman, living in a city, in the last decade of the century.  Then she was asleep.

When she woke it was late afternoon.  She felt deeply refreshed, as if she had traveled to some distant restful place.  Her limbs felt loose and light.  Her mind empty and clear.   She couldn’t remember such a feeling of well-being.  She told herself she would come swimming again, soon.

When she came in from her lunch break at the bookstore the next day, she immediately encountered a difficult customer.  Most people who bought books were polite and good humored, but this woman was the exception.  She had ordered a book which was listed in Books-in-Print at $17.95 and now that it had arrived, the price was $19.95.  And she was insisting, in a querulous sort of way, as if Miriam were trying to cheat her, that she only pay $17.95.  The phone rang.  Dan, another clerk, was nearby, and Miriam, dodging, motioned him over to handle the woman while she took the phone. 

To her surprise, it was Ted.  His voice sounded thin. “I didn’t know whether I should call you right now or not… but…your mother just called.  Your dad fell in the bathroom and they’re taking him to the hospital.”

Miriam was very calm.  She was taking it in, trying to figure it out.  Her father had fallen in the bathroom?  Her father never fell.  But maybe he had slipped in the shower.  And was he hurt?  She felt some strange sensation of lightness, but also, she was holding herself very still.  It seemed important not to jump to conclusions.

“I just had a moment to talk to your mother,” Ted explained, “because the paramedics were there and they were just taking him out.”

Paramedics?  Taking him out?

“She must have called 911,” Ted said.

Out of the corner of her eye Miriam saw Dan dealing with the difficult customer.  The world around her was still there.  But all her attention was focused on Ted’s voice, trying to hear what had happened, what it meant.

Fallen in the bathroom.  Paramedics.  Hospital. 

“Miriam,” Ted said, “it looks as if he collapsed.  He might have had a heart attack.  It doesn’t look good.

“Maybe you should come home,” Ted said.

It wasn’t obvious to Miriam what she should do.

“We won’t know anything for awhile,” Ted said.

Miriam was very calm.  She hung up the phone.  She tried to think what to do.  Should she go home now or not?  Maybe he had just fallen in the bathroom.  Maybe he’d be home by that night.  He wasn’t the kind to get hurt.  She started downstairs.  She was considering not telling anyone at the bookstore about the phone call.  She would go right on selling books, as if nothing had happened.  Wouldn’t it then be, in some way, that nothing had happened?

Before she could get to the stairs, a customer grabbed her.  She wanted to find a book with a certain poem in it by Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Miriam led her to the poetry section and looked with her through a few anthologies.  She tried to find Edna St. Vincent Millay in the individual poets section but she couldn’t think whether her last name would be S, V, or M.  Miriam felt very confused about that.

Finally she found the Collected Poems.  She handed it over.

As soon as she got downstairs, the phone was ringing and ringing.  Out of habit she picked it up.  A customer wanted to know if a book he had ordered had come in.  Miriam went back upstairs to the special order shelf, but she couldn’t remember what book he had mentioned, or his name.  She was kneeling by the special order books, but she couldn’t remember what she was looking for.  Dan was looking at her.  She looked up at him. 

“I just got a phone call that my father has collapsed,” she said, “and they’re taking him to the hospital.”  Her hands started to shake.  They were shaking in front of her, trying to find the book the name of which she had forgotten.

It was saying those words — my father, collapse, hospital — that had done it.  Once they were loosed, she couldn’t get them back.  She couldn’t stop them.

Dan was full of concern.  Didn’t she want to go home? Miriam asked him to pick up line 2 and help the customer who was waiting.

Five, maybe ten minutes had passed.

Then she was in her car, driving home.  She was crying, but at the same time, her mind was working quietly, efficiently.  She was thinking what she needed to do if she was going to have to go to South Carolina.  When she pulled into the garage, Ted was there.  When he saw Miriam, he burst into tears.  Miriam was surprised.  She had never seen him cry that way.

Your uncle Perry will be the one to call, Ted told her in the house.  Miriam had gotten her calendar, she had asked Ted to call the airlines to find out about flights.  She made a list of names and phone numbers of appointments and commitments that would have to be canceled.  She would leave the list with a friend if she had to.

They were sitting at the dining room table when the phone rang.  Her uncle Perry cleared his throat, he gathered himself.  “Miriam,” he said into her ear, “he didn’t make it.” 

 “He didn’t,” Miriam repeated dully.  

Her uncle, a retired doctor, related how he had met the ambulance at the hospital, how they had worked on her father, how they weren’t able to save him.  He had never had any heart trouble, but it was that sudden thing.  The heart stops.  Stops.    He and Miriam’s mother had gone in and viewed the body, and now they were home.  Not an hour had passed. 

Miriam asked to speak to her mother.  “He was just fine,” her mother said in a perplexed voice.  “We had had lunch and were getting ready to take some letters that hadn’t been picked up Saturday to the post office.  He said ‘I have a little headache and I’m out of aspirin.’  I gave him a Tylenol to take.  He went into the bathroom to get ready and five minutes later, when I called to him, he didn’t answer.  I found him stretched out on the floor.  I tried to revive him with a wet washcloth.  I put a pillow under his head.  But I couldn’t find a pulse.  I called 9ll — I didn’t waste any time.” 

Miriam told her mother she wasn’t sure she could get a flight out that afternoon.  But two hours later, she and Ted were on a plane to Greenville.

 She was flying to Greenville because her father had died, just as she had always known he would, and never for a minute believed. She had first started fearing her father’s death when she was about fourteen.  She would get up at night and stand in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom to make sure he was still snoring.  He was forty-five when Miriam was born, and in school she had come to understand that he was an “old” father.  He didn’t seem old in any way, but still, she was afraid she’d lose him before she was ready.  She was forty-three now, and he would have been eighty-eight on September l7, fifteen days after he died.  And while it was true that she was still not ready to lose him, and never would have been, she was grateful that she had had as long as she did to grow up before he died.  It was only in the last year or two that Miriam had felt her own maturity somewhat in place. 

She felt composed in a numb sort of way, aware of everything around her and yet at a remove.  Her job now was to get to Greenville and all her energy was directed towards that goal.  It seemed important to get there as soon as possible, important that Miriam be there that first night to help her mother turn down the antique oak bed, the bed her husband would inhabit no more, after fifty-eight years of marriage.

Miriam and Ted were sleeping in an upstairs bedroom and when Miriam turned on the light in the bathroom that first night home, the radio came on.  It was an oldies station, rock ’n roll.  Miriam stood transfixed in the bathroom, feeling her father’s presence, and for the first time, his absence.  He was the one who had rigged up the radio to turn on with the light.  When he shaved in this bathroom, he wanted the radio on.  More than anything else, radios bespoke her father.  During her growing up, Miriam’s father had had a radio and t.v. store on North Main Street.  Their house had always been full of radios and t.v.s. 

 It was just like her father to have that radio on.  When her folks would visit them up North, it was always a joke between Miriam and Ted about how her father would want a radio or t.v. on the whole time.  Once they took her parents to some fancy townhouses on the North Shore which had no radios or t.v.s, and her father had withdrawal symptoms.  Was she making it up to say he went out to the car to listen to the radio?

At any rate, when the radio burst on in the bathroom, with so much volume, it was her father all the way, and it broke Miriam’s heart.  She went crying into Ted in the bedroom, and she was laughing too, for her father had been something of a character.  She knew she was in for a hard time then, because she needed to turn that radio off and she knew that when she did…. Well.  Her father would never be there to turn it on again.

Miriam cried and cried.  The radio played and played.  I can’t turn it off, she wept to Ted, I just can’t.  I can’t.  But she wanted to. 

You don’t have to, Ted soothed.  You can always turn it back on.

She knew.   She knew.  But she was beginning to know something else.  Her father was dead.  Each moment was another moment separating her from his living, breathing self.  He had been alive a few hours earlier.  Nine hours ago, he was alive!   And now.  Now his hand, which she knew so well, would never again be there to turn that radio on.  Not after Miriam turned it off.

She turned it off.

The next morning, the house was full of people.  The kitchen began to fill up with honey baked ham, sliced turkey, casseroles topped with potato chips or cheddar cheese, pound cake.  There was so much to do that Miriam barely had time to miss her father.  She had to write up an obituary, find a photograph for the newspaper, help her mother with all the decisions, and meet the mortician, a handsome man about her age who remembered buying stereos as a teenager from her father.  Her aunt Grace and uncle Perry and cousin Henry and his wife Clarice came over, and they all sat down to a big Southern lunch.  Only once or twice did Miriam look up to see where her father should be sitting at the head of the table, where he always sat.

At the mortuary that afternoon, Miriam, her mother and Ted looked over the caskets.  They were all in a showroom, as cars might be, and they had discreet cards in them with the important information, the cost.  There were Rolls-Royce caskets of shiny dark mahogany, there were Cadillac caskets of highly burnished metal, and there were a few Chevrolets and Mercuries, but nothing approaching a Toyota.  Miriam noticed some huge object that turned out to be a vault, and learned that not only did one need a casket, one needed something to put the casket in.  Ted pulled her aside at some point and asked if anybody had considered cremation.  Miriam was aware of that option herself, but she doubted that her mother would go for it.  It might seem too Northern a thing, and Miriam was sure her mother was going to bury her father according to some internal idea which didn’t need to be articulated.  Miriam didn’t know how to bury the dead, and if her mother did, that was fine with her.

Later that afternoon, Miriam and her mother returned to the mortuary to make sure that the body had been laid out properly.  Miriam was afraid to see her father.  But at the same time, she wanted to.  She hadn’t seen him since last March — six months!  Maybe it would have been different if she lived in the same town, if she had seen him every few days.  But now she needed to see her father’s face again.  She had always liked being with her father.  His presence, his abiding love and complete approval of her had made her feel welcomed in the world, buoyed up.  What more could a child ask for, and she was still her father’s child.  She still needed his love.

It didn’t look like him.  At first Miriam thought there had been a mistake, and of course the heart leaps, maybe it’s all a mistake!  Maybe he didn’t die.  But of course it was him, and gradually, after the initial shock, she saw that it was him, or some form of him.  His little glasses looked right, and his forehead and his white hair, which he was so proud of, but from the nose down, it might have been someone else.  The mortuary had done something strange to make him look — she didn’t know what.  For one thing, his mouth was shut.  That seemed odd, for him.  He had on his best dark suit and a tie Miriam had given him, and one hand was laid across his middle, rather formally.  It was his hand, Miriam could see that.  That she knew.  She knew those hands, and they were his, and nothing the mortuary did could change them.  They were her father’s hands, and they were dead.  They would never rise again in all that animation that was his, all that joy.  All that caring, all that tending, all that fixing, all that doing.  All that love. 

Miriam wanted more than anything else to go back to the mortuary alone and spend time with her father.  In that confused and hectic time, this need rose like a mountain out of the mist, vivid and undeniable.  A mountain of need.  There were so many people around, there was so much going on – but where was her father?   He was missing, and if she didn’t separate herself from everything else, if only for a little while, she would lose him in the commotion.  She told her mother of her need.  Arrangements had to be made.  It wasn’t easy.  Her mother needed her car to go to the beauty parlor to get her hair done before the funeral the next day.  Miriam’s sister and her husband were driving down from Virginia and Miriam’s mother thought Miriam should be there when they got in.  Her father’s old gold Plymouth station wagon was a dubious means of transportation.  Mostly it sat in the backyard like an old horse put out to pasture.  Ted and her mother were afraid for Miriam to drive it to the mortuary.  But Miriam had to go, that much was clear.

The station wagon drove like a boat, but it carried Miriam all the way across town.  She went into the room where her father lay, and she shut the door behind her.

II

When Miriam got back to Minnesota after the funeral, fall was in the air.  She had been gone two weeks and she couldn’t remember where she had left off exactly or what she had to do.  But it was all waiting for her.   Right away she had to start teaching as an adjunct at the university and working at the bookstore, where the best seller was a little book called “Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much.”  And of course there was the book she was writing, which lay beached on her desk, out of water, stranded, dying from lack of attention.

Miriam started right in on everything.  It was her life, after all; she had no choice but to live it.  When someone would ask her how she was doing, she wasn’t sure what to say.  People kept telling her what a big thing it was, how difficult to lose a parent, and she worried if it were big enough for her — how big was it supposed to be, and how did such a loss manifest itself?   She had expected to be demolished somehow, but she was coping very well.  In fact, she was doing so well she sometimes had to remind herself that her father had died.  Still, her brow felt contracted, as if in concentration. 

 It was several weeks before she found time to walk around Lake Harriet, bundled up against a sharp wind that splashed waves high up on the north shore. The water had taken on a steely color.  She could not imagine ever swimming in it.  She thought back to that last summer day when she had gone swimming, and a feeling of incomprehension came over her.  Overhead, Canadian geese were winging their way South in formation.  There was something in their cries that stopped her in her tracks.  She looked up.  She shook her head.  She couldn’t answer.

 It was just that she was so busy!  She was always rushing here and there, trying to do so much, like everyone else.  But then one day she wore her blouse wrong side out, and not long after that at the grocery store when the young man asked her plastic or paper, she said paper, and when he asked her carry out or drive up, she said drive up.  When she pulled into her garage at home, she saw the number they had given her there on the front seat.  She had forgotten the groceries.   But those were the kind of things she might have done before her father died, she told herself.  She always had a lot on her mind, only now she had more. 

Her mother had wanted Miriam and Ted to have something of Miriam’s father’s, so Miriam had taken his wrist watch, which had stopped working, and which she kept now in a change purse in her desk drawer.  She was not able to take it out.  Ted had gotten her father’s little pocketknife, which he had had for maybe fifty years.  It was always with him, either on his dresser top at night or in his pocket during the day.  Her father was handy and she had seen him use it to repair rabbit ears on the t.v., open a stuck sardine can, cut twine for mailing a package, or do any of the innumerable other things her father did to repair the world.  Ted was glad to have it.  It was a pretty little knife, ivory with streaks of gold, small, with a good feel in the hand. 

Ted had it down at the dock with him the day he took the sailboat out for the winter.  As he was trimming a tattered telltale, the pocketknife leaped from his hands and jumped into the water.  Miriam could only stare at him in amazement when he told her.  He felt so miserable about losing it, but Miriam couldn’t help saying something along the lines of how her father had had that knife for fifty years and Ted couldn’t hold on to it for ten minutes.  She regarded him across a great divide: his father hadn’t died. 

After that, she often thought about the knife.  She couldn’t get it out of her mind.  How she wished to have it back!  It was always leaping like a little silvery fish, leaping into the dark water, and what she couldn’t get around was that it was gone.  Gone!

Even though it was getting so cold, she circled Lake Harriet nearly every day, going round and round.  She stared at the lake in a new way.   Now it contained her father’s little knife.  How was it, she wondered, that her father’s pocketknife had traveled all the way from South Carolina to jump into Lake Harriet a few blocks from her house?  The lake, looking particularly gray and remote, offered no answers.

In November the lake began to freeze.  It started with crystals around the edges, then thin panes spread out over the surface, which children threw sticks and rocks onto while they could still break through.  But one day the temperature plunged sharply and Miriam hurried down to find the lake freezing solid.  It was happening and nothing could stop it.  As she walked around the lake, her face burning with cold, the freezing sheets of ice pitched high thin notes like a tuning fork.  She had read somewhere that tuning forks had a mysterious quality, wherein if you held several of them up in a room, and struck only one, the others would sound as well, absorbing vibrations through the air, answering in kind.  Miriam felt the sounds coming off the lake reverberating in her, and something in her answered back in that high keening tone: Gone!  Gone!  

 She had meant to get her bulbs into the ground well before it froze, but she was very late this year.  Thus she found herself on her knees one frigid day, the earth cold and hard, brown paper sacks of tulip and daffodil bulbs by her side, wearing her old green garden gloves, spading holes into which she sprinkled bone meal.  As she set the last bulb into the ground and covered it up, suddenly she began to weep.  Her father had loved gardening.  He was always growing something.  His old metal watering can came into her mind and the strips of white undershirt he had used to tie his heavy tomato vines to stakes.  He was wearing a white undershirt when he died; the paramedics had had to cut it open to get to his heart.  She wept into her garden gloves, smearing her face with dirt. Her father was gone!  She would never see him again!   How was this possible?  It was not possible.  How could she stand it?  She could not stand it.  She got creakily to her feet.  She went in the house and washed her face.

 It began to snow in December.  At first there were just a few light dustings, against which the earth battled back, but then it began in earnest, seriously, with great determination.   Standing at the window, watching the snow swirl and float out of the sky, vanishing the familiar world, Miriam felt despair.  It was as if she came from a country where it never snowed; how she longed to return to that green land!  Of course she knew snow, she had lived in Minnesota for a long time, she liked snow, she even liked winter, sort of, but now it weighed her down.  It made her long for sleep. 

One wintry afternoon she was driving home from her class at the university, listening to MPR.  It was snowing and Miriam was afraid to drive in snow, but she pushed on, just as everyone around her on the freeway was doing.  She tried to concentrate on Michael Friezen’s voice.  Though she had never met him, she was very fond of him; she often thought of him as her best friend, at least when she had the radio on.  She loved how he read poetry, how he was so appreciative of the seasons, and most of all, how he loved music.  Today’s selections, he began, were in honor of the snow, which was falling so gently, so softly, covering everything over, falling — and here he quoted Joyce — “upon all the living and the dead.”  He had chosen the “Four Last Songs” of Strauss to begin the afternoon’s program.  The songs, he explained, were concerned with serene confidence in eternity and immortality. “In them,”  he said deeply, “the voice is allowed to soar within an exceptionally wide compass, giving the impression of an instrument with vocal qualities.”

 Before Miriam was ready, the music began.  The first chords struck several slow funereal notes, against which broke a clear pure soprano, as if the human heart had been translated into sound.  This voice lifted higher and higher, seeking to escape the bounds of earth, taking with it all grief, all sorrow, and it tore Miriam from her moorings, lifting her, too.  She was weeping.  She was weeping so much, in fact, that she needed to pull off the freeway.  She maneuvered her way out of the speeding traffic — sliding forty miles per hour through the snow — and stopped.  She stopped.  Cars zoomed past her; she put her face in her hands and wept.  Her father was gone.  She would never see him again.   This simple truth rose up in her.  It opened up in her, it opened her up.   An inner life, which she was hardly aware of, but which nevertheless was going about its work, had chosen this moment to make itself known.  Most of the time she skimmed along on the surface, trying to keep head above water.  But now she sensed fathoms.  She sounded the depths.

 Miriam and Ted flew to South Carolina to be with her mother for the first Christmas.  It shocked Miriam to see how her mother had aged since her father’s death.  For many years he had been the old one; now her mother’s turn had arrived.  She would be seventy-nine in January.   There were all the questions of her mother’s old age: could she continue to live alone; and if not, where should she live?  And how to fix the glove compartment door of her old Buick, which kept falling open, which Miriam’s father would have fixed.  Walking across the uneven winter grass of the cemetery, holding onto her mother’s arm to keep her from falling, Miriam hardly thought of her father at all.  She was thinking instead of how old and shaky her mother had become, of whether they should get her a microwave and if she could master it, and of the approaching day when Miriam would fly away, again.

 When Miriam returned to Minnesota in January, she looked around her in surprise.  Having gotten through fall and the holidays, she had expected to be let off the hook.  But her father was still dead.  He was going to go right on being dead forever. 

  Now began the days of deepest winter: four degrees below zero; ten below.  The world was monochromatic, stark, shut down.  She thought back to that summer day; she had been innocent then, as green as a leaf.  It was harder to make herself go down to the lake now.  But still she went.  It lay so still and frozen.  Impossible to believe it could ever be the inviting blue of summer.  Everything was cold.  Miriam was cold.  She turned down invitations when she could.  The weather was as good an excuse as any; no one much liked to go out, especially in the dark cold night.  Now was winter: solitude, privacy, silence, snow. 

She quit her job at the bookstore.  She needed the money but she couldn’t afford to make it.  She spent her days making soup, black bean, vegetable beef.  She sat in a rocker for hours, listening to music: Beethoven’s symphonies, Brahms, Chopin.  Outside the snow glittered in the crystal-cold air.  When she taught, her students moved her: their beauty, their youth.  She took long baths, fragrant with oils, pungent with salts.   She was silent and still, watching the birds at the feeder. 

Deep one night she dreamed of her father.  He wasn’t old, as she had last known him in life, or even young but rather no age at all — just himself, outside of time.  They were in the garden, planting shrubs.  He had on his garden gloves, old soft ones of cotton ticking.  How happy she was to see him!  What comfort in being with him again.  Miriam knew that she was dreaming.  She knew that he wouldn’t be staying.    But for now they were in the garden, planting green things.  

Miriam awoke.  She went to stand at the window.  Below, the garden was covered with snow, a dark radiance in the night.   Under its glow, flowers and bulbs were sleeping through this long winter’s night.

 Miriam went in for a massage.   The masseuse was an ex-nun named Joan with arms like a fullback.  She had Miriam undress completely in the bathroom of her suburban ranch house and lie face-down on a massage table in an extra bedroom that had been converted into a quasi-New Age den.  Joan and Miriam made small talk at first but then they both fell silent.  It felt good to Miriam to have her back massaged with such power.  All her muscles, knotted from the long cold winter, were being smoothed out under the force of Joan’s strong hands.  Outside the windchill was minus forty-four degrees; but inside, Miriam, feeling naked and small, was warm.  She buried her face in the hole in the massage table.  Every now and then Joan would stop, and simply rest her hand for a moment on Miriam’s back, as if Miriam were a baby, and Joan was reassuring her.  Miriam began to cry.  The weeping rose from deep in her body, from a physical place she didn’t even know existed.  It was as if Joan had released these tears from Miriam’s tissues.  She didn’t so much think the words this time as feel them: He’s gone.  Never again.  Above her Joan rested her hand lightly on Miriam’s sobbing back.  

“‘Tis very warm winter when one’s in bed,’” Ted says to Miriam.  They’re in bed and it is very warm.

“Who said that,” Miriam asks.  He majored in English, and often surprises her with quotes.

“Jonathan Swift,” he says, taking her in his arms.

“Tis,” she says, kissing him softly.

  She’s neglected Ted over this long winter of her father’s death.  It’s as if she’s been away, though of course she’s been here all along.  Still, she hasn’t quite been able to notice him in some way, though she understands that he has been noticing her, watching and waiting for her all through this long cold time. 

She does notice him now, notices the pleasing smell of his neck, notices his large hands on her bare back, the way he tilts her chin to kiss her, the quickening taste of his tongue.  Let’s face it, lovemaking for Miriam sometimes seems just another “thing-to-do” on her apparently endless list.  But not today.  On this frosty Sunday afternoon when it’s too cold to go outside, she wants only to burrow — into the house, into the bedroom, into the bed, into Ted.  Though maybe he is burrowing into her.  It is sometimes hard to tell.

Then there comes the moment, as they progress, when her body tenses, becomes taut, like an instrument, a stringed instrument against which a bow is being drawn, now, releasing one high sweet note.  And once again, Miriam is weeping.  This time the weeping comes from such a deep place that Miriam can’t tell if what she feels is pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow.   

Ted folds her to him. 

 Miriam begins swimming in an indoor pool which is in a kind of glass dome.  It has a running track on the floor above which is encircled by walls of windows, a lot of light flooding down on the water.  She goes as often as she can.  She has the time.  She’s slowed way down; swimming helps her do that.  Maybe it’s the ritual of it, how it takes a solid hour to go there, undress, swim, shower, dry her hair, and all that time she isn’t even thinking.  She never hurries.   She remembers how her father, raised in the country, used to like to sit on the porch.  Just sit!  He might have the radio on or he might not.  He wouldn’t do a thing.  Just be.  Swimming gives Miriam some of that same feeling. 

Today she has the pool to herself, perhaps because of the forecast.  Twelve more inches of snow; no one wants to be out in a blizzard.  But it wasn’t snowing when Miriam left home, and she wanted so much to go swimming.  Now she enters the water, feeling the pleasure of her crawl.  Arm over arm, legs flutter kicking behind her, she moves smoothly and lightly through the blue water.  She does lap after lap, as if she could never tire.  Memories float through her: summer days at Table Rock Lake where she grew up swimming, her father’s leaping pocketknife, sailing with Ted on his J boat.  She’ll swim in Lake Harriet again this summer.  She’ll make a point of doing so, and not just once. 

She stands up.  She is all alone.  It is perfectly quiet.  Up above through the glass dome she sees that it is snowing.  The snow is coming down in big beautiful flakes.  Before her the water is calm and blue.  She begins to walk through it, slowly, trailing her hands.  She moves in slow motion, watching her fingers part the water in incandescent waves. 

And now she’s aware of a presence.  She is not afraid.   She understands that she is being watched over, guarded.  Or maybe it’s only the snow.  It has the feel of snow — beautiful, silvery, silent, filling the air.  This is what angels are like, she thinks.  And this is what snow is like.  How it falls and falls, how it blesses us. 

You’re gone.  I’ll never see you again. 

But this time she doesn’t cry.  She walks in the water, trailing her fingers, looking up at the snow.