Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

to people shying away completely from what he did, or else making jokes about it.
    “And then you inject the fluid, which is a solution of formaldehyde and phenol and alcohol, and often some dye added to it for the hands and the face. Everybody thinks of the face being important and there’s a lot to be done there with the eye caps and wiring the gums. As well as massage and fussing with the eyelashes and special makeup. But people are just as apt to care about the hands and to want them soft and natural and not wrinkled at the fingertips….”
    “You did all that work.”
    “That’s all right. It wasn’t what you wanted. It’s just cosmetic things we do, mostly. That’s what we’re concerned with today more than any long-term preservation. Even old Lenin, you know, they had to keep going in and re-injecting him so he wouldn’t dessicate or discolor—I don’t know if they do anymore.”
    Some expansion, or ease, combined with the seriousness in his voice, made her think of Lewis. She was reminded of Lewis the night before last, speaking to her weakly but with satisfaction about the single-celled creatures—no nucleus, no paired chromosomes, no what else?—that had been the only form of life on earth for nearly two-thirds of life-on-earth’s history.
    “Now with the ancient Egyptians,” Ed said, “they had the idea that your soul went on a journey, and it took three thousand years to complete, and then it came back to your body and your body ought to be in reasonably good shape. So the main concern they had was preservation, which we have not got today to anything like the same extent.”
    No chloroplasts and no—mitochondria.
    “Three thousand years,” she said. “Then it comes back.”
    “Well, according to them,” he said. He put down his empty cup and remarked that he had better be getting home.
    “Thank you,” said Nina. Then, hurriedly, “Do you believe in such a thing as souls?“
    He stood with his hands pressed down on her kitchen table. He sighed and shook his head and said, “Yes.”

    Soon after he had gone she took the ashes out and set them on the passenger seat of the car. Then she went back into the house to get her keys and a coat. She drove about a mile out of town, to a crossroads, parked and got out and walked up a side road, carrying the box. The night was quite cold and still, the moon already high in the sky.
    This road at first ran through boggy ground in which cattails grew—they were now dried out, tall and wintry-looking. There were also milkweeds, with their pods empty, shining like shells. Everything was distinct under the moon. She could smell horses. Yes—there were two of them close by, solid black shapes beyond the cattails and the farmer’s fence. They stood brushing their big bodies against each other, watching her.
    She got the box open and put her hand into the cooling ashes and tossed or dropped them—with other tiny recalcitrant bits of the body—among those roadside plants. Doing this was like wading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icyswim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion—calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body.

Nettles

    In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Sunny’s house near Uxbridge, Ontario, and saw a man standing at the counter, making himself a ketchup sandwich.
    I have driven around in the hills northeast of Toronto, with my husband—my second husband, not the one I had left behind that summer—and I have looked for the house, in an idly persistent way, I have tried to locate the road it was on, but I have never succeeded. It has probably been torn down. Sunny and her husband sold it a few years after I visited them. It was too far from Ottawa, where they lived, to serve as a convenient summer place. Their children, as they became teenagers, balked at going there. And there was too much upkeep work for Johnston—Sunny’s husband—who liked to spend his weekends golfing.
    I have found the golf course—I think it the right one, though the ragged verges have been cleaned up and there is a fancier clubhouse.

    In the countryside where I lived as a child, wells would go dry in the summer. This happened once in about every five or six years, when there was not enough rain. These wells were holes dug in the ground. Our well was a