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Happy Isles

“A little unreal,” he said. There were grass stains on Truman’s suit, and Mother noted them with worry as she repacked a picnic basket. “They won’t come out,” she said. He drank champagne, which seemed to make the unreality acceptable, normal, even necessary; he sat in a haze like the lengthening afternoon’s, pacific and happy. Mother tied up the basket, and then saw a plate staring up at her from the grass; when the job had been all redone, Smoky with a sense of dejà vu pointed out a fork she hadn’t seen. Daily Alice linked her arm with his. They had been all over the island several times, seeing friends and relatives, being made much of. “Thank you,” several of them said when she presented Smoky, and when they gave her gifts. Smoky, after his third glass of champagne, wondered if this saying of things backwards (Cloud was always doing it) needn’t be looked at case by case, so to speak, but was in the way of a general, well, a general… She leaned her head on his padded shoulder, and the two of them supported each other, hello’d out. “Nice,” he said to no one. “What do they say when something’s outdoors?”

“Al fresco?”

“Is that it?”

“I think so.”

“Are you happy?”

“I think so.”

“I am.”

When Franz Mouse had been married, he and his bride (what was her name?) had gone together to a storefront photo studio. There, as well as the formal nuptial exposure, the photographer had thrown in a few goof pictures taken with props of his own: a papier-mâché ball-and-chain for Franz’s leg, a rolling pin he encouraged the bride to brandish over him. Smoky reflected that he knew just about that much of married life, and laughed aloud.

“What,” Alice inquired.

“Do you have a rolling pin?”

“You mean to roll out dough? I guess Mother does.”

“That’s all right, then.” He had the giggles now, the stream of laughter arising from a point in his diaphragm as the bubbles rose from an invisible point in his glass. She caught it from him. Mother, standing above them arms akimbo, shook her head at them. The harmonium or whatever it was began again, stilling them as though it had been a cool hand laid on them or a voice suddenly beginning to speak of some long-past sadness; he had never heard music like it, and it seemed to catch him, or rather he it, as though he were a rough thing drawn across the silk of it. It was a Recessional, he thought, not remembering how he knew the word; but it was a Recessional meant seemingly not for him and his bride, but for the others. Mother sighed a great sigh, having fallen momentarily silent as the whole island had; she picked up her picnic basket, motioned Smoky to sit still who had half-risen with deep reluctance to help her. She kissed them both and turned away smiling. Around the island others were going down to the water; there was laughter, and a far-off shout. At the water’s edge he saw pretty Sarah Pink helped into the swan boat, and others waiting to embark, depart, some holding glasses and one with a guitar over his shoulder; Ruby Flood flourished a green bottle. The music and the late afternoon charged their glad departure with melancholy, as though they left the Happy Isles for somewhere less happy, unable till they left to realize their loss,

Smoky stood his near-empty glass at a drunken angle in the grass, and feeling made of music head to foot, turned to lay his head in Daily Alice’s lap. In doing so, he happened to catch sight of Great-aunt Cloud at the lake’s margin speaking with two people he seemed to know but for a moment couldn’t identify, though he felt great surprise to see them there. Then the man made a fish’s mouth to puff on his pipe, and helped his wife into a rowboat.

Marge and Jeff Juniper.

He looked up into Daily Alice’s placid and certain face, wondering why every deepening of these daily mysteries left him less inclined to probe them. “The things that make us happy,” he said, “make us wise.”

And she smiled, and nodded, as who should say: yes, those old truths are really true.

A Sheltered Life

Sophie parted from her parents as they went arm in arm through the hushing wood, talking quietly to each other of what has been, as parents do whose eldest child has just been married. She took a path of her own, which went away uncertainly, eventually leading back the way they had come. Evening began to fall as she walked, though what it seemed to do was not fall but well up from the ground, beginning with the dense ferns’ velvet undersides turning black. Sophie could see day go from her hands; they became indistinct by degrees, and life then light went from the bunch of flowers she still for some reason carried. But she felt her head to be still above the rising dark, until the path before her grew obscure and she breathed an evening coolness, and was submerged. Evening next reached the birds where they sat, stilling bird by bird their furious battle-of-the-hands and leaving whispering silence in the middle air. Still the sky was as blue as noon, or nearly, though the path was so dark she stumbled, and the first firefly reported for work. She took off her shoes (bending her knee in mid-step and reaching behind her to pull off one by the heel, hopping a step, and taking off the other) and left them on a stone, hoping without giving it much thought that the dew would not spoil their satin.

She wanted not to hurry, though her heart against her will hurried anyway. Brambles implored her lacy dress to stay, and she thought of taking it off too, but did not. The wood, looked through lengthwise the way she went, was a tunnel of soft darkness, a perspective of fireflies; but when she looked out its less dense sides she could see a lapidary blue-gone-green horizon flawed by a pale brush of cloud. She could also see, unexpectedly (it was always unexpected) the top or tops of the house, far off and moving farther off—so it seemed as the air between grew hazier. She went on more slowly into the tunnel into evening, feeling a kind of laughter constrict her throat.