Salt Water by Charles Simmons Page A

slipped food to the dogs, and Blackheart spit up. Father, Zina, and I were on one blanket; Ari and Melissa on another; Mrs. Mertz, squatting, poked the fire with a stick and sipped a martini. And, sure enough, there was Max Pondoro chatting Mother up. She was laughing. Well, why not?
    By firelight Zina took on a new kind of beauty. Her dark, tanned face had red in it, and her brown eyes were shiny black. She told a ghost story about a witch who was deserted by her lover for another woman. The witch turned herself into a pig and mingled with the man’s other pigs. She was the most succulent pig of all, and when Christmas came the man chose her for Christmas dinner. But just before the slaughter she ate the leaves of a deadly henbane bush growing at the edge of the wood, and when the couple ate her flesh they died a fearful death.
    “Is the moral,” Father said, “not to eat pig or not to lie down with witches?”
    “I think,” Mother said, “it’s watch out for any woman who makes a pig of herself.”
    “I think the moral of the story,” Melissa said, “is that love is worth dying for.”
    “It’s your story,” Father said to Zina. “What’s the moral?”
    “Melissa has the right answer.”
    The fire turned to embers. Father suggested we walk along the beach. Mother had fallen asleep. Max Pondoro and Mrs. Mertz said they would stay and guard her. The water was black except for the phosphorescent lights in the hollows of the waves. Backlit clouds passed in front of the moon. Melissa, walking behind us with Ari, recited Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”
    The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits…
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…
    The poem was beautiful, but it was wrong about the world. The world at the moment was Zina and Father and I walkingon this perfect beach on this perfect night. Mother content. Mrs. Mertz probably staring into the embers. Melissa and Ari discovering each other.
    Father felt it. “How dear we are to one another!” he said.
    Zina felt it too. “Without one another we might as well die. Isn’t that what the poem means, Melissa?”
    “Yes.”
    When we got back to the fire only Mr. Pondoro was there. Mrs. Mertz had gone to bed. It seems that when Mother woke she wanted to know where everyone was. Mr. Pondoro tried to tell her, but she didn’t believe him. She said she was going to the guesthouse to look for herself, and that was the last he saw of her.
    That pretty much ended the party. But the night wasn’t over. I woke, at what time I don’t know. The moon was gone, the room was dark. Blackheart had his paws on my chest and was whining. Someone else was in bed beside me. At first it seemed to be Mother, who for some reason thought I was still a baby. Then it was Zina, who now understood how much I loved her. But it was Melissa. “Is it all right to be here?” she whispered. She put her arm around me, and we kissed. The trouble was, when I had awakened I was having a sex dream. I could no more have turned away from Melissa than I could have stopped the dream. She smelled so sweet.We didn’t do anything besides kiss, but it happened to me. I held her, and we kissed some more. Then I fell asleep. When I woke in the morning she was gone.
    After lunch Father and I sailed Melissa, Ari, and Mr. Pondoro across the bay to town. On the dock Melissa squeezed my hand and whispered, “Write me your thoughts.” Ari embraced me and whispered, “Thanks.” What did he think he was thanking me for?
    When we got back to the Point I wanted to go right away to the guesthouse, but I held off till later in the afternoon.
    Zina was alone on the deck.
    “Misha, I want to tell you something about yourself. You are actually older right now than you will be in a few