I didn’t know how—to an island on the north half of the lake while Luther recited verses from “Hiawatha.” The water was so bright in the June sunshine that I could barely keep my eyes open.
When I think back to that first summer on the lake, that’s what I see—a dazzling brightness that encroaches on the bare outline of the pointed tops of fir and pine, the rock hump of the island rising from the water like a turtle’s back, the wood frame of the lone cabin on the island. They were all like stage props in this fantasy-scape Luther had invented for us. Luther himself was a cutout figure in a shadow puppet show—the dashing iconoclast, the transcendentalist woodsman, the Romantic poet reciting love poetry and telling stories, only now the stories weren’t about vanished girls, they were about us. We were soul mates in our refusal to conform to the world. We couldn’t be constrained by binary categories like teacher/student, adult/minor, husband/wife, father/mother. We would create our stories and poems and novels just as we created the flesh growing inside of me. I was so dazzled that I half thought Luther was carrying the baby with me and would do his share in birthing it.
Here is what Luther’s stories didn’t tell me, and I didn’t think to ask: what we’d do when it got cold and the lake froze. How we’d get to the store for food or to the hospital when my time came. What we’d do for money when the credit at the store ran out. If I had asked, I imagine Luther would have told me we’d walk across the ice; we’d deliver the baby in the cabin; we’d sell our books at the end of the year and be rich enough to live on the island forever.
And that summer was dazzling. My morning sickness was soon over and the hormones from my pregnancy seemed to tranquilize me into a complacent stupor. We swam, sunned, and feasted on fresh fish and blueberries as if we were the only two people on earth. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the fall.
Only as summer drew to an end and the bright dazzle of the lake faded to a mist-drenched autumn landscape did I begin to notice some flaws in the picture Luther had painted. The first was that Luther wasn’t writing. While I was filling up the composition books he’d brought with stories and poems, he barely touched his. He spent most of the day swimming and sunning on the dock or, as the weather grew cooler, chopping wood with maniacal intensity. Maybe, I figured, he would turn to writing when winter came and we were stuck inside.
The thought of being stuck inside brought up another concern: we didn’t have enough wood. Our island was mostly rock. Even if we cut down all the trees we wouldn’t have enough wood to make it through the winter. When I mentioned this to Luther one day in early October we had our first fight.
“How do you know how much wood it takes to make it through the winter?” he demanded. “From your Girl Scout troop on Long Giland?” Long Giland was the way the Haywood kids from Westchester and New England said it to make fun of me. Luther, who had grown up in the suburbs of Boston and gone to Choate before Princeton, apparently shared many of the same prejudices.
“We had a fireplace,” I told him. “My mom liked making fires. My dad used to make me s’mores.”
He laughed. “Did you think that’s what this was? A camping trip with Mummy and Daddy with wieners and s’mores?”
“N-no,” I replied, “but I remember we’d go through six or seven logs just in one night and it wasn’t like we were trying to heat the whole house.”
“If you wanted central heating maybe you should have gone home to Long Giland . . . oh, wait, Daddy S’mores sold the ancestral manse and debunked to Boca. Maybe you thought we’d be joining them for the winter in an adjoining condo? Maybe it’s not too late for you to go.”
I didn’t understand why he was being so mean, but then the next thing he said gave me a clue.
“Or maybe we can burn the notebooks you’re going through so fast. Unless you think there’s something worthwhile in them.”
“Are you jealous that I’m writing and you’re not?” The question popped out before I knew I even thought such an absurd