The Woman in the Water

Abstract

PENELOPE IS THINKING: The night I am remembering marks the exact moment in my life when longing split off from desire. What is the difference be tween longing and desire? she thinks, and then she decides that longing is un connected with anything familiar or concrete, free-floating, she thinks, and smiles, but not, it would seem, with any pleasure. In her head, though twenty years have passed, more than half her life, it is as clear as it was back then: the black expanse of sky, brightly studded with stars, the blacker lake spreading out beyond them, lapping, lapping softly at the dusty shore, the dark thrust of pines behind them, and high above?the trestle, blackest of all, crossing the arm of the lake, stern and ab solute against the unspeakable tenderness ofthat warm late summer night. Penelope is wandering as she often does in early evening through the neighborhoods that spread out around the tiny alley where she lives in half a tiny house, a duplex she has shared for the past several weeks with a pock marked Indian boy, a prospective missionary who smells of marijuana, and before that, before the Navajo, an old woman who gardened, raised irises and roses, and who kept Penelope's tables, when the flowers were in bloom, richly adorned with her labor. Nearby in the neighborhoods the large frame houses seem mid western to Penelope, who has never been to the midwest and imagines it as wholesome and empty, endless acres of corn where red-cheeked children lose themselves and grow, somehow, into pa triotic adulthood. Penelope herself prefers the desert these days, mean land where life itself seems rare and therefore elegant. That night on the lake, the eve of Penelope's sixteenth birthday, it was beautiful, she was surrounded by friends who adored her, she was about to discover her sex, even that dry air, still rank with the dust raised by her boyfriend's parents' car, smelled of mystery and promise. Penelope cuts across an empty lot that she knows in several weeks will be overgrown with someone else's irises, for they are on the edge of yet an other spring, a season akin to desire she thinks, for you can name it, you know how it will be: sweet nights and all those flowers, the profusion of growing things, warmth. This was something that amazed her when she first came to Salt Lake City, all the flowers, and she marvels once again at how the people of this place, long ago in their history, turned the desert to