one must solve to think like a fish—all the while conscious of nothing but the sheer luck of being on the water. “Why these fish hiding?” he asks his daughter. “What they do?”
This is how she’ll remember him, wading in his heaven. Fishing, he has solved life. Fishing, he passes the final exam, the next arhat, joining the ones in the mysterious scroll at the bottom of his closet that Mimi has continued to visit in secret, over the years. She’s old enough now to know that the men in the scroll are not her ancestors. But seeing her father like this, on the river, complete and at peace, she cannot help but think: He’s their descendant.
Charlotte sits in a camping chair by the side of the river. Her only job is to unsnag the lines of the two fishermen, untying Byzantine, microscopic knots, hour after hour. Winston watches the sun set over the river, the reeds going from gold to dun. “Look the color!” And again, a few minutes later, a whisper to himself under the sky’s collapsing cobalt: Look the color! There are colors in his spectrum that no one else can see.
They picnic on the shores of a small lake not far off the road toward Tower Junction. Mimi and Carmen look for stones to make into jewelry. Charlotte and Amelia begin their seventeenth consecutive game of Chinese checkers. Winston sits in a foldable camping chair, updating his notebooks. There’s a funny motion near the table. Amelia shouts, “Bear!”
Charlotte leaps up, sending the game board flying. She lifts her youngest daughter into the air and dashes into the lake. The bear ambles toward the jewelry gatherers. Mimi checks for high shoulders or a sloping face. She must do one thing for grizzlies, the opposite for black bears. One climbs trees, the other doesn’t. She can’t remember which. “Climb,” she shouts to Carmen, and they each scramble up their own lodgepole.
The bear, which could reach either of them in two easy scooches, loses interest. It stands on the lakeshore, wondering if today might be a good day for a swim. It regards the chest-deep woman in the water holding her tiny daughter on high like she’s about to baptize the girl. It waits to see what the always insane species will do next. It wanders over to Winston, who has been sitting stock-still at the camping table, taking pictures with the Nikon. The camera—the only Japanese item the man allows himself to own—goes click, snick, whir.
Winston rises to his feet as the animal approaches. Then he starts to chatter to the bear. In Chinese. A primitive toilet stands near the site, door open. Winston talks to the bear, cajoling it while edging toward the door. This baffles the bear, who reconsiders his whole approach to the situation. Sadness percolates up in him. He sits and claws at the air.
Winston keeps talking. It astounds Mimi, this alien language coming from her father’s mouth. Winston draws a handful of pistachios from his pocket and tosses them into the latrine. The bear ambles after them, grateful for the diversion. “Get in car,” Winston shout-whispers. “Fast!” They do, and the bear doesn’t even lift its head. But Winston stops to retrieve the camping table and stools. He’s paid good money for them, and he’s not about to leave them behind.
That night, at the campsite near Norris, Mimi asks him, awed. Her father has changed before her eyes. “Weren’t you afraid?”
He laughs, embarrassed. “Not my time yet. Not my story.”
The words chill her. How can he know his story, ahead of time? But she doesn’t ask him that. Instead, she says, “What did you say to it?”
His brow crumples. He shrugs. What else is there to say, to a bear? “Apologize! I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.”
AT HOLYOKE, Mimi is a LUG: lesbian until graduation. It’s the same at half of the other Seven Sisters colleges, rounded up. Scissors and paste, they call it. Fun, sinning, healthy, shameful, sweet—great practice for something. Life, say. Whatever happens after school.
She reads nineteenth-century American poetry and drinks afternoon tea in South Hadley for three semesters. It beats Wheaton. But one April day she’s reading Abbott’s Flatland for a sophomore survey called Transcendence, when she reaches the part where the narrator, A. Square, gets lifted out of his