Ancient Ritual

Mike was mean as a snake, except when she decided she wasn’t.  Then she was sweet as pie.  She could be an in-between kind of nice too, but that was mostly for waitresses and old ladies and neither of us ever found that very interesting.  Mike was beautiful, stunning actually, and understood the leverage this gave her with both sexes, though it was the advantage she pressed least.  A girl raised not just with brothers but as a brother, she’d studied both teams’ playbooks, knew the rules inside out, especially those unwritten, and had been conditioned to play hard and without mercy. Mike had little patience for anyone who couldn’t read instinctively snake from sweetheart and adjust.  Guess right and you got shotgun on the best ride ever; see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya if you didn’t.  Improbably, I guessed right more than wrong, coming to intuit when to nod and go along, act brave occasionally and say she was full of shit, or to hold her like a little, precious thing.

I stand beside the lake that always seemed to know what we needed.  Sparks dancing on playful waves teased us from beach chairs on long weekends here.  The serenity of silver ice made holiday lights cheerier for a week in December.  The rippled v’s of a couple blithe mallards the only disturbance on the blue glass water the day I knew I was losing her.  Today, the lake is agitated, north wind and fat raindrops mixed with winter’s last stubborn snowflakes making a gray roil.  Lousy night for a fire, I think, as thawing mud weeps through the seams in my dress shoes.  There are people up in the cottage who love us both and know what happened and that I’m alone.  I should explain my slipping away from them to stand on the narrow dirt strip we called a beach and stare at the empty lake in the early evening cold.  Thinking about what to say, memories come in random snatches, the narrative jagged, the story nearly complete:

Memorial Day Weekend, 1990

“Mike never brings guys to the cottage,” her oldest brother announced to me, an accusation in the tone.  I sat nervously in what was then her family’s weekend place on this freshwater lake upstate on a glorious warm Saturday before Memorial Day.  We’d met a couple weeks earlier as college grad stockbrokers in training with a big investment firm’s new hire program.  She fit right in at work and acted like she owned the place while I was awkward and felt lucky to be there, suspecting her holiday weekend invitation was a prank she’d laugh about later with the manicured, moisturizing Armani guys from good schools.

“Mike has a different guy every week,” the middle brother said squinting at me.  “But never brought one here.  You something special?”

“Or just a masochist?” the youngest laughed.  “Seriously bud, you know how she is, right?”

“I’d get out now if I was you,” the oldest said.  “There’s a bus station in town...”

I remember looking from face to face, finding their genetic features as consistent as their suspicious stares, trying to avoid saying anything wrong.  These were the big, confident crap-talking guys I wasn’t, who would eventually make room in their secret fort for me.  When my time with their sister ends, they can’t find words so they say nothing, their wives stepping up for them admirably.

Couple months ago, our bed

Part of loving Mike was being afraid of losing her.  The sick churn in my stomach started early when I found myself plucked from obscurity, a pretender with poorly concealed deficiencies struggling to understand her picking me over better options.  That panic became an old friend over the years whenever it seemed my luck had finally run out.  In some ancient cultures, the one chosen to service the high priestess was ritually burned alive right after, and the dichotomy of Mike suggested a sensational and painful end whenever it came.  Time brings comfort and with that certain implied assurances, but I never shook the specter of borrowed time with her.  Happy to wake in the morning to the familiar sight of her sleeping back, I stroked the sheet over her hip but knew the moment was temporary.  The night before I’d seen a terrifying vacancy in her eyes that told me she’d finally reconciled saying goodbye.  She’d come to bed with me quietly, reluctantly, seeming disappointed in herself.  I kissed her cheek and laid my head with hers, smelling soap on her scalp, missing the jasmine scent I always liked in her hair.  “You are the love of my life,” she said softly.  “Doesn’t say much for my standards, does it?”

Late July 1990, the lake

“Know why I might love you?” Mike teased me on my second visit to the cottage.  Her family had all gone into town, leaving us alone.  She rose impulsively from our spot on the weedy grass behind the swath of dirt separating us from the lake’s lapping waves and stretched tall against the late-afternoon sun.  She stripped in front of me, smiling enigmatically and holding my gaze the whole time, the purposeful stare broken only briefly by quick gyrations to pull the tee shirt across her face.  Mike strolled slowly to the water nude, watching me the whole time, twisting herself playfully at the shore’s edge, brash reminder of the reward for playing this moment right.  I thought of Grecian urns and other perfect things I’d never touched.  “You know why I might love you?” she called again.  “Because I think you can handle me.”  Mike flexed her knees, then in a fluid motion arched her bare back and thrust herself in.  I wondered if she knew I looked like a competent man but really had no idea whether to strip and rush in, feign indifference and stay put, or let her twist naked out there a while.  I was smart enough to recognize the decision as the most important I would ever make and somehow guessed right.

2004 or so, in the Ulta parking lot

It wasn’t Mike’s fault men did stupid things around her, heads whipping about like hungry dogs sniffing meat.  Geezers and teenagers alike would snap pole-stiff on catching a glimpse, sucking in guts reflexively, faces going happy and hopeful, their brains jelly.  I waited to pick her up from shopping one day.  She exited the store laden with bags, smiling at spotting my car.  I watched a big-eyed guy on the sidewalk decide in an instant that devouring her form with x-ray vision was more necessary and urgent than finding the drop of the curb right in front of him.  Her mom probably taught her it’s best to pretend she hadn’t noticed a boy’s stupidity, and for the most part she did but wasn’t always charitable.  She made no fuss over his fall, her expression in fact showing boredom with the inevitable as she stepped over the guy moaning on the asphalt.  “Watch yourself, bud,” she said.  Mike dismissed superfluous men as “bud,” a term used almost exclusively between males, a habit picked up from her brothers that sounded phony coming from most women, and something she only called me once.

Toast

I had known a female Johnny, this girl Tommy, also a cute and delicate Jack, all quick to explain their fathers’ preference for a boy.  “Nah, I always wanted a pretty little frilly girl to spoil rotten,” her dad told me.  We drank bourbon to celebrate his daughter’s engagement to me, her father regarding me as his sons had, a mix of grudging admiration and bewilderment.  “I got a pretty girl, but I also got...” he considered words carefully, “a handful.”  Her birth certificate said Michaela but few knew it, the incongruity adding another variable to the litmus test: to hell with you if your head couldn’t wrap around a pretty girl named Mike.

Still Bush not quite Obama, our cottage

One spring we purchased her family cottage, buying out her brothers’ shares.  We spent most of our weekends during the year and a long week every August at the lake where we fell in love; I saw us slowing into a comfortable groove, enjoying all our free time here until the cottage someday hosted our retirement.  By Wednesday of one August week, Mike was bored.  “I found cheap airfare to Vegas,” she announced.  “I got us a flight tonight and we can still catch a late show.  We’ll stay drunk for three days and sleep on the plane home Sunday.”

“Thanks for consulting me,” I said, knowing it was my job to say yes and hers to cajole me into thinking us equals.

Mike turned her head, examining me from a skewed angle.  “Your idea of a great vacation is hot dogs and beer in this old dump my father built,” she sniffed, pronouncing “dump” with the decided iciness of some black-and-white Hollywood Golden Era starlet mid-monologue.

“I thought you loved this cottage, this lake...”

“I do. In the same way an adult loves their old binky or teddy bear.  But big girls like fun.  We need to leave now to make that flight.”

 “No.” The word tasted metallic, felt big and awkward in my mouth.

She strolled to a mirror hanging by the fireplace, primping and brushing imaginary imperfections from her cheeks, tossing long hair around, puckering lips at herself and watching me in the reflection watch her as she had years before on the lakeshore.  “I’ll go alone then,” she said.  “Cruise the bus station first for some good-looking drifter with a big cock who’ll carry my bags and use your ticket.”

It became our worst fight, Mike calling me “provincial,” an insult only she could pull off, me calling her selfish.  “See ya, bud,” she seethed finally, pushing past me into the bedroom to pack.

I would feel the cold nausea of actually losing her again, would know the liquified gut and shaking legs of sitting in that cottage alone, but it was new then.  Mike stayed in the bedroom an hour, and I dimly came to realize she wouldn’t make any flight.  I found her sitting on the floor, arms folded.  It seemed she’d been that way since storming off.  She said nothing when I sat beside her.  Her eyes were wet and red, and I felt a novel and powerful responsibility.  “Vegas is better in the fall,” I said.  “And nobody carries your bags but me.”

Her expression didn’t change but she stirred, placing herself wordlessly on my lap, kissing with just enough pressure to remind me that her lips were at once close and soft.  “We got any beer in this dump?” she asked.

November 2023, this same lakeshore

I rubbed her shoulders, unsure what else to do.  The lake knew to be quiet.  The cancer doc had said “Stage 4” that morning, and I remembered there was no Stage 5.  “I want a Viking Funeral,” Mike said, almost sounding happy.  “On this lake.  Soak some sheets in kerosene and wrap me up.  Put me in the rowboat and light it, then push the thing into the water.  I want a pyre seen for miles, flames shimmering off the water!  It must be magnificent and nothing else will do.”

“We’ll fight,” I fumbled.  “You’re the strongest person I know...”

“But I want a regular funeral too,” she said, ignoring me.  “An overwrought monstrosity!  With towers of fragrant flowers and a choir singing Renaissance dirges.  Crying and wailing and gnashing of teeth.  The whole maudlin bit.  I want every stuck-up bitch in town forced to make a show of mourning me.  You bastards will feel really terrible and I’ll be loving it!  Then after that, bring me here for my final show!”

A Viking Funeral, I would learn from Wikipedia, was an ancient Norse ritual where the remains of warriors were set ablaze on their warships, the ash symbiotically nourishing the sea, the departing spirit soaring to Valhalla on the flames.  It was sacred and spectacular, but an honor reserved for men – fitting, but a detail I doubt my wife considered.  Also, it’s illegal in all fifty states.

Yesterday morning, thirty yards from where I’m standing

“No way,” Stosch said flatly.  He was a local plumber and captained the volunteer fire department protecting the little lake town where our cottage sits.  Stosch lives next door and I found him raking the few putrid leaves that had decayed under snow all winter.  “You’re talking a Class III violation,” Stosch frowned.  “But forget the fire code, I’d be more worried about the EPA or DNR with this crazy idea.”

“It’s what Mike wants,” I answered, struck by how many times I’d said this before.  Awake for three days, his refusal stirred a childlike anger in me.

He stared, eyes hard, mouth drawn.  “As a sworn township official, I’d have to cite you,” he grumbled, spitting on the ground.  We stood in silence.  Stosch finally said, “Rita and I loved her too.”  His expression softened to that of a big brother releasing his scrawny sib from a headlock.  It made me remember her brothers’ stories of Mike being unafraid to fight them growing up, expecting no mercy, pitting everything in her slender body against theirs and throwing petite fists full-fury, fingers tucked to save the manicure and avoid accusations of dirty fighting, knowing a kick to the balls ends it, but never doing it.  “Get me drunk,” Stosch said.  “I might not notice.”

1996, Cineplex lobby

We’d just seen a movie about a guy aspiring to be a singer, who started getting traction after meeting a beautiful woman, a talented musician herself.  They were a duo for a while but the man got famous when she gave up her singing dreams and became his songwriter, the arc of ambition and sacrifice the basis of the movie’s tension.  On the way out we lingered in front of the movie poster in the lobby.  It depicted a scene I didn’t recall:  the man, guitar slung over his back, with hands under the woman’s arms, twirling her high into the air, practically making her levitate, ponytail floating, legs kicking at jaunty angles beneath a billowed peasant skirt, feet off the ground, one shoe coming loose, both faces joyful.

 “Would you do what she did?” I asked.  It was a silly question, thrown out for an easy laugh.  I expected something about double standards and gender roles, the postfeminist tyranny of zero-sum choices, or maybe some crack about periods or childbirth.

Mike moved closer, intertwining her arm with mine and lacing our fingers together.  She put her head in the hollow between my neck and shoulder and I smelled jasmine from her long hair, feeling the fullness of her body in my side, her breast on my ribs.  “Are you strong enough to twirl me like that?” she asked.

Two weeks ago, lakefront

The walk to the water was difficult, slow and painful for both of us, yet somehow felt urgent.  She had been sleeping a lot, but seemed excited about our walk, bundling up against the northern winter, layered sweaters and both her coat and mine making her shrunken frame look almost like it once had.  This wasn’t the time to confess to being a man who couldn’t give a woman like Mike everything she wanted, one not into drama and who wouldn’t commit crimes.  I searched for ways to say there would be no spectacular pyre, the ancient ritual just not realistic.  We stood on dead brown grass, watching the waves ooze under ice clotting the shoreline, and I imagined saying no to Mike.

“You were right,” she said softly. “I am selfish.”

“Don’t...”

“I always acted like whatever I wanted was somehow my gift to you.  And you let me get away with it.  You took my best but I’ve got nothing left.”

That night I set her in the tub, hot water and soap bubbles on her bare skin once a thrill, now an unsmiling duty.  I had to hold her weightless arms above her head because she couldn’t, teasing the tee shirt from her body and finding her eyes locked on mine as the fabric crossed her face.  It made me remember the day she said she might love me.  Mike didn’t have energy to talk, but I hoped she was thinking of that too.  I moved the washcloth over wan skin, touching lightly the bones that jutted like stubborn tent poles under collapsed canvas, tracing the welted red-purple tracks laced around empty pockets on her chest.  Out the window snow was flying, summer at the lake long gone and seeming never to come again.  It was almost more than I could handle.

Same lake, right now

I stand on the little crust of beach, feeling snowflakes in my hair.  If our lake once knew to be quiet for us, it seems angry at finding me alone.  For the millionth time in my life, I say Mike was right; she was selfish, and I always accepted her gifts.  Some have more to give, I suppose, and others only do their best work with a little push.  The arrangement works if both parties can handle it.

 A hand on the rowboat, I keep my gaze on the small mound bundled in kerosene-soaked sheets laid across its bottom, wondering why she might have loved me.  I hear the low din of mourners gathered in the cottage and know that in a moment I’ll play it right and call them out here.  I’ll thumb the tiny flint wheel of the Bic then shove the burdened craft into the cold blue.  But before that I’ll make them listen to a few stories.