All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen Page A

thought it better to stop.
    Just beside the dock, a phrase from As You Like It was scored into the Canadian Shield, displacing the mossy covering that once grew there. Colin read it aloud, and as he began, he knew that all visitors to the cottage did the same thing:
    And this our life, exempt from public haunt
    Finds—

    Samantha and Myra/Myrna chimed in,
    Tongues in trees, Books in the running brooks,
    Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
    â€œIt’s a bit indulgent, I know,” said Myra/Myrna, laughing, “but we freshen up the carving every couple of years. We have a sharp chisel for the purpose. It reminds us to be grateful. Even during bug season. Benedictions in blackflies, wisdom in weeds, magic in mosquitoes….”
    Samantha took up the refrain:
    â€œLechery in lichen, frolics in ferns, bathos in blueberries, pathos in...”
    While she chanted, she tied her hair up. Colin looked away. It was impossible to witness the movement of her shoulder blades and not to wish to make a personal measurement of the space between the lopsided bikini bow and the slight shadow it cast on the middle of her back.
    Pathos in professors. He had the worst possible case of it. The cherry tree is all that it does, Sam is all that she does, did, might do. Colin attempted to focus on the stepmother instead. Myra/Myrna’s skin was apricot, and her hair a darker shade. She was hearty as an apple, just as Sam was reedy as a stem.
    â€œShe’s my stepmother,” Sam had said on the way down to the dock, “after Dad died she brought me up, and I love her for that.”
    Colin summoned his most interested voice. “So, Myrna, what is your particular field of expertise within economics?”
    â€œMyra, Colin.” Sam’s stepmother chided him gently, nudging his ankle with her bare foot, “and I’m in real estate.”

    Myra had well-tended nails, a jangle of bracelets, cropped pants. She wore a spiral toe ring in the shape of a serpent with a glistening red eye. Her look seemed to say, Sam is twenty-four, you can go ahead and ask her. But he could not. There are some things that you just cannot have, and if you try, you will make a fool of yourself.
    â€œIs there a...? May I?” He waved his hand back up at the house.
    â€œOf course, make yourself at home Professor P. The bathroom’s just down the corridor from the kitchen.” Myra stood up to let him past. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
    There was a splash and the dock swayed up and down. Sam was in, her narrow form gliding under the water.
    It had been a long time since Professor Pilchard had taught Shakespeare. As You Like It , he seemed to recall, was set in an enchanted forest where members of court fed each other strawberries and disported themselves in idleness. Sam’s dock was indeed a setting for such pleasures, but something about the act of inscription bothered him. He felt that the words ought to float up like smoke from a thin-stemmed clay pipe, hang in the air, and then be off. The sermon in the stone is that everything wears away. The book in the brook is that water runs on. The engraving seemed rather, and he hated to apply the word to Sam or to her family: vulgar. Make yourself at home Professor P.
    Relieved, Colin returned to the living room where he sat a moment in a chair covered in golden velvet with a pattern of black lozenges. His glance ranged over the objects in the room.
There he found a mixture of furniture from across the decades, unconnected by any overarching aesthetic vision except for the passage of the sun, principally a purple fun fur beanbag chair, and an enormous radiogram now functioning as a sideboard. Colin set the champagne glass down on the arm of the chair. He contemplated the bubbles that had attached themselves to the blueberries at the bottom. Perhaps the thing itself was not a cherry tree, but a bubble. Sooner rather than later, a bubble pops.
    The professor