“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness….”

 

Keats, A Thing of Beauty is Joy Forever

 

The hint of a laugh climbs up the parched oak tree. A translucent smile flickers between sunrays. The breath behind a phrase, “Life must not be wasted,” carries with the October breeze.

 

There are ghosts seated on the dock outside my bedroom window, and I watch as they become visible, their feet flopping back-n-forth, back-n-forth: synchronized. I sit upon my bunk bed, toes hanging off above the ground, mimicking their rhythm. It’s the only pulse I can find.

 

There are no splashes when their feet kick the water, which feels right, because locked up here in my room I also can’t splash. Though, on occasion, I think I see a ripple in the water as there bare toes dip and stir. It makes her smile when the water ripples with her movement. When she smiles, he lights up so fully that I’d swear he was alive. They make me remember what it was like to be the center of someone’s world.

 

There was a time when my mother was obsessed with posture. She had a look containing head tilt and eye lift which meant, “Masha, sit up straight!” She advised that in life you must always keep your lips curved in a smile and your shoulders high. “If you’re to be a model you’ve got to present yourself as one.”

I had done photo shoots, four commercials, in and out of the city a few times a week to pose in front of a board game, or next to the newest kind of bathroom-going-doll. I was once cast to stand in a crowd of jiggling children, dancing along with Bill Cosby, this was my high point.

 

I was the red head; the Asian boy was usually to my left and one or two petite black girls to my right. Mom said my hair made me stand out and that’s why the directors liked me, which was to say it didn’t have to do with my good looks.

 

I didn’t mind this. I was happy enough to be her focus. Adjusting lip stick, pushing hair in front of the ear or behind: my mother’s eyes on me like hers are on him right now as their ghost feet keep up the kicking.

 

He calls her Jewls, and she is always changing, though she does have her constants: a thick round waist, wild ringlets of hair extending down her back, soft green eyes small when she smiles with those wire lips, teeth that jet out unafraid. But her height has its way of shifting, up a bit and then down curving shoulders and back. Wrinkles are sometimes deep sitting shadows, like now, and other times invisible on an olive pallet.            

 

Her voice moves down and up the pitches like a slow chromatic chime of smoking unfiltereds and calling out to lonely soldiers. She is seventeen; she is sixty-two; she is both; she is every age in between like a flip-book sketch of time. She changes like a wave dark blue to light green, though starting and ending with the very same water. I always recognize her. 

 

His image is quite different. He has a stiff body, hard and smooth like television men. Hair dried-up leaf brown in a neat crew cut, skin gently tanned, hands wide and callused, eyes a flower blue, soft, demanding, passionate, kind. He is twenty-four in mid-summer. That’s how she wants to remember him. She calls him Ashen. I wonder if this is a real name, or just a word she has made up out of their love. 

 

On my faded wooden dock, slightly tilted to the left, decorated with one dim light covered in ivy and a pair of chipping wooden chairs, they meet. I must watch for them closely because there’s no telling when they’ll come. Weeks, sometimes month, pass between their visits. On lucky days, like today, they arrive early, and I can spend the whole day watching. 

 

 “A dock built for two,” Jewls says her voice turning old and then young again all amidst the phrase. She picks up a small stuffed rabbit I left out there for her and hugs it close to her body, head melting down.

 

“A dock built for us,” Ashen says, his arm to her back, his side to her side, her head to his shoulder.

 

“How are you these days?” she inquires.

 

“Nostalgic,” he replies. “Remember when…”

 

“Shhhhh…”

 

It’s painful to remember alone but together it may be tragic. She’s afraid they wouldn’t recover. I know because she says so: “If we think back like that we might not recover.”

 

I want to go outside and see them, touch them, prove that they are real. I’d like to introduce myself formally, Masha Pikes. I would like them to know that I see them, that I believe in them. I grab for my sweater, gather my courage, but I am distracted by a voice from the living room. A voice that immobilizes me, and makes everything seem impossible. 

 

 “You cruel motherfucker.” 

 

I shut my bedroom door hard. I hate that voice, shrill and scared; I’m ashamed that she’s my mother with that voice, but more ashamed of what he’s done, again.

 

I had a doll I named Lillian Jenkins, some might say twelve is a bit too old for such things. I painted her lips red and her eyes blue, contemplated loving her for a moment and then drowned her, rocks in the pockets of her dress like Virginia Wolf. I could hear her name being spoken in my mother’s nasty voice, “Lillian Jenkins.” She worked with my dad in his old office. It’s been months since I drowned her; it’s been months since he’s seen her, and it’s been months since Jewls and Ashen have been present.

 

“Couldn’t you have stayed away?” my mother screeches. I don’t know if she means from her or from Lillian. Maybe both.

 

I should cry for my mother. I should run down the stairs and let my father know how terrible I can be. But all I think is that I might be missing something of Jewls and Ashen, and it has been so long since I’ve seen them. I stuff a blanket under the crack in the door. I stick my head outside the window.

 

Ashen puts his hand on hers. Jewls sings out a verse to a song, “Let’s build a stairway to the stars, and climb that stairway to the stars, with love beside us to fill the night with song.*” Her voice is thick and dry like potatoes without butter, and pushes me back from my window with its force. After a few lines she can tell she’s hurting him. She stops and looks towards him for a long time.

 

“Laugh with me,” she says.

 

Together they laugh.

 

My mother leaves in the afternoon. She’s wearing a ripped black t-shirt covered with red fat lips; it’s a band logo from a concert which she says “shows her age.”

Her jeans squeeze her tight as she has more matter on her now then she knows how to handle. She was once neat with V-necked shirts and slim fit jeans. We would shop at Macy’s together and she’d gather a slew of short sleeved dresses for me to try while she perused through solidly colored blouses. We always had different opinions of which looked the best.

 

I prefer her that way over this. Her eyes, which once were so intriguing beneath their thick layer of lashes, are now like man-o-wars puffed upon the surface of an ocean and ready to strike. I want to pop them as I sit on the steps and watch her load miscellaneous objects into the car: a hair dryer, a tennis racquet, a blanket. I am curious as to where she will go but I’d rather remain curious. When she asks me if I’ll go with her I stand up from the step and beg that my eyes fill fast enough with tears to let her know I love her.

 

They do fill and my mother throws her arms around me and tells, “Oh, no, it’s okay. I understand you don’t want to leave your house and your friends. I know, I know.” I feel her course brown curls brush upon my shoulder and I think that I might miss her.

 

But I don’t.

 

Jewls and Ashen sit back to back, infused with words: a cherry tomato garden, a green flowered notebook, meatballs, the answer to a riddle, swing dancing, a dictator, hop scotch, building a house, bombs. They nap huddled tight behind a shrub in the afternoon. I have never seen them together so frequently; they act like children. Running. Climbing. Swimming. Chatting. Giggling. There’s always something new.

 

She loves him in the way he moves, the way he breathes. He loves her in the way she smiles, the way she touches. When he moved with her touch and she smiles with his breath, all at once, I can see them as paintings – two vivid figures against the background of the browning grass, the glowing trees, the still water. A man in a thick fresh navy suit and a woman caressed by a flowing flowered dress and a tilted tan hat, held tight to each other like a secret to the one who holds it.

 

I don’t leave my room except to eat. I watch and wonder how they died and what they lived. I picture a house, a child, but this feels typical. I envision a city, a circus lion upon an apartment’s wood floor, a studio of naked clay sculptures, but this feels fantastic. I wish that I had been their child. I wish that I could have lived my life near such a love. 

 

My father says to me after five days of silence, “sometimes you forget how you love someone ...”

 

I’m eating corn flakes with sugar at the kitchen table with my feet up on the chair next to me. My dads eyebrows are lifted towards the ceiling and his lips are pursed. His cheeks tilt in so strangely that I want to reach over and smooth them. I imagine how his oily unshaven skin would feel against my palms. We rarely touch. 

 

I shrug my shoulders. “She’ll come back.” 

 

He lifts his chin like he’s about to be brave, “Will you?” he asks.

 

He rocks slowly back and forth and waits for my answer. I have none. I don’t know. The house feels empty, so empty it could erase me in some kind of immaculate explosion the exact opposite of the one which brought me into existence in the first place. I reach out and grab my father’s hand; it feels cool and familiar and while I touch him I don’t think of him as my own father. He’s anyone’s father. He’s anyone’s husband. From this distance I can almost sympathize.

 

“I’ll tell you when I know,” I say.

 

He smiles slowly.

 

When I return the mood has changed. It has been such a playful week and now Jewls and Ashen dance morosely across the dock and onto the water. Rain begins from them and spreads outward across the yard as if they created it. The sound of the small drops hitting the lake creates the soft steady rhythm to which they dance.

 

They don’t speak, at least nothing I can hear. Their dancing seems so desperate and I can’t quite understand. They have it, that which everyone wants. They have perfect love and the ability to keep it for all of eternity. I watch them spin across the water like demigods and I want to run out and tell them how hard it is to get; I want to scream it.

 

“Must we,” Ashen says to the night, his voice so clear that I jump from my sleep to hear.

 

Jewls nods slowly. He places his hand on her side and with his touch her body grimaces; I’ve never seen her so scared.

 

“It’s a thing of beauty and there’s not enough left,” she says. “Look around. So few are willing to give it back. It was never ours to keep. It must begin again, don’t you see? Think if there had been more in our days. Think what it would have stopped. Think of what you saw…the way they returned you to me.”

 

He brushes his hands across her hair, cups her face in his palms, transforms for an instant into a tattered man bound to a wheel chair, legs turned to air, and a face which can not move correctly. Then he is back: handsome and young. 

 

“But for a few minutes, surely once in a while, just for a few minutes…”

 

She smiles at him because he has forgotten that it was given to them once. She smiles because he would have wilted if their love had ever waned, even for a moment.

 

I hold on to the windowsill tightly for support.

 

“One memory,” Jewls says.

 

They begin a slow dance again. They close their eyes. It seems natural for them to dance with their eyes closed. Everything is easy.

 

It was a cool rain. It was summer vacation from college. His hand grasped hers and she was afraid that she was holding wrong, pointer and middle finger clumped together, thumb folded in. Were hands supposed to fold evenly? They ran away from all of the people and the bar and the stench of cigarette smoke and the sound of records playing the same old words. They wanted words for themselves. Their clothes were wet from their sweat and the rain and he gave her his green cap to cover her hair from the moisture. She wore it sideways and spun in circles with it on her head, letting the rain drops fall into her mouth and the grass and mud gather below her feet.

 

“Do you want to go back in?” he asked when she stopped turning.

 

“No, not yet.”

 

They went down to the lake in the middle of town and snuck across a small yard to a dock made of fresh cedar. They sat down upon its cold wet boards with their feet dipped into the warm water. He pointed to a duck gliding across. When she turned her head to look at it, he leaned over to her and whispered in her cheek, “I love you.”

 

I see the duck. I see the dock, new and thick and free of algae. I see a yard full of tree’s, a young woman and man so ripe and unsure.

 

“I always will,” he says now.

 

She scowls; this is a foolish thing to say.

 

They stand together, holding each other and she resumes her song, “we’ll hear the sound of violins, out of yonder where the blue begins...”

 

“Sing with me,” she says.

 

And together they sing, “The moon will guide us as we go drifting along.”

 

In the morning my mother’s SUV pulls into our driveway. My mother has a new hair cut, shorter. It makes her whole face look bouncy. My father comes into my room and approaches me like a foreign land, wide eyed and curious. His skin looks warm and lifted. He stands dangerously close to me, like he wants to hug me but doesn’t know how. 

 

“It’s back now,” my dad says. “She’s back now and I won’t lose her again Masha.” He speaks like a promise. I grant him a head nod, a half smile. Perhaps I could forgive him if I didn’t know what was lost.

 

“It was given to us once, remember?” Jewls whispers.

 

I can hear her voice lingering amidst the fallen leaves. But soon it will be winter and the leaves will all disappear. Another season leading us on, further away from where we began.