Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund Page B

my mother answered.
    â€œOf unveiled Nature,” Aunt put in. “But sometimes we’re veiled in mists and fogs that last all day.”
    â€œYou have a splotch of mud on your cheek,” my mother said, and she reached out and, slipping her nail under the edge of the dried mud, flicked it off. “Like a teardrop.” With the ball of her thumb, she rubbed away the last crumbs of the blemish.
    â€œGo down the shore,” Aunt said, “you and Frannie, and wade.”
    When I conveyed the instruction to Frannie, she was delighted, for she was forbidden to put so much as a toe in the water without an accompanying adult. On the little beach, we slid out of our pantaloons and held up our skirts. Our toes giggled in the cold water, but we were bold and made them go deeper and root in the mushy sand while the water splashed around our ankles and then up our calves. The sheer cleanness of the waves! The cold freshness!
    â€œOcean water makes you want to drink it,” Frannie said.
    â€œIt does! It does!” I bent and cupped up the foam.
    â€œBut you mustn’t. It will make you sick.”
    That first day set the pattern for our relationships. Frannie and I shared what we knew—I not to go too deep; Frannie not to drink the salt sea—and followed each other’s desires, and played and chatted, comfortable always, yet always with careful respect. Young as she was, Frannie often pointed to the ships far out to sea and told me their names.
    The last sensation each night, in my bed across the little room from Frannie in her bed, and the first awareness when I awoke was dread that soon my mother would leave. But each day of her presence was licked by light, glowed like mellow gold.
    The last evening, my mother and I sat on the pier alone and watched the western sun slide toward the sea. My mother remarked that in Kentucky we never had so clear a view of the sunset, and then she asked me if I liked it, on the Island.
    â€œCould you not stay?” I asked stiffly, because the question was too important not to articulate, and yet I knew the answer.
    â€œLet your aunt represent me.”
    â€œBut she’s not you.”
    â€œI think it is a mistake, Una, to insist on having only one particular person near you. And we will be close together whenever we think ofone another. And we will write.” She leaned toward me. “And your father and I will come to visit.”
    I squirmed in my chair. “Shouldn’t we be helping Aunt in the kitchen?”
    â€œShe shooed me out. Because you and I will not be able to sit together again for many afternoons.”
    So we sat quietly in our chairs and did not help with supper, or sing Uncle aloft, but watched the smooth red slide of the sun toward the restless water. Even before the sun slipped into the slot of the horizon, the beam from the Lighthouse shone out in the dusk, and the cool, westerly breezes caped our shoulders. When the last red arc disappeared, my mother stood and said, “And so we eat again.”
    Our dinner was beautiful fillets of cod, simmered in goat butter, and sprinkled over with toasted bread crumbs. Afterward, Uncle set up a chessboard and invited my mother to play, while Aunt set up a second board and said she would show Frannie and me the moves.
    â€œO, I love the horses,” Frannie exclaimed. She picked up a brown one and a white one and mated their green-felt bases.
    To sweeten the time with the boards, Aunt served us dried-apple cobbler, with brown sugar, like sand, on top.
    None of us seemed to like the bishops. Aunt showed Frannie and me the diagonal cut across their faces, and said that was a sign as to how they moved—always on the slant. But even more than the bishops, I disliked the pawns with their stupid, hobbled conformity each to each. My mother asked what the pieces were made of, and Uncle said the white were ivory, carved from whalebone, and the dark were walnut, which was a very