M.E. Breen

My cat burned off his whiskers yesterday. Some are completely gone, some are still long, but most got curly and short with the heat, so he has a frizz of white question marks where his eyebrows and whiskers and chin hairs used to be. He looks like a cartoon cat, after the cartoon mouse tricked him into sticking his paw into an electrical socket. This cat is a 10 year-old marmalade tabby, a big cat, the kind who would have made a ferocious Tom, only his head never grew to proper bullish size and, when he was tiny and his sister was somewhat less tiny and I wasn’t thinking about the long term psychological effects, I named him Didi.

Didi’s accident involved an attempt to Cross the Stove.  On the other side of the stove is a window, and outside the window is a vine, and in the vine nests a fruit rat. Nested, actually. For two days. A year ago. But it might come back. My other cat has no problem jumping to the edge of the sink and reaching the window that way, but Didi has this great down-hanging stomach that throws him off balance. I have seen the stomach swing to one side and drag him from the top of the fridge or the bookcase to the floor, like a man in cement shoes dropping to the bottom of a lake.

And that’s what this is meant to be about. Not a stove, but a lake. Over the weekend, I made my own wild attempt. There was something I wanted, something that would make my life better, but getting the thing I wanted involved terror and risk.

C. invited me to spend labor day with her in her family’s cabin on a lake. You can only reach the cabin by boat or by foot. I packed my swimsuit. I packed my long undies and my headlamp. I packed five different kinds of face cream. I was ready. And then I got sick. Really sick, like the swine flu, except not the swine flu, but still: really sick.

C. went on hikes and cooked beautiful dinners and made me a thousand cups of tea and slept under the stars and wrote in her journal while the sun rose over the water. I marinated in germs inside my sleeping bag. C. and I have known each other since we were eight. We are like a pair of feet in old shoes together. But still, being sick is embarrassing. Self-pity is embarrassing, and having your nose peel and crack and your left eye leak fluid for three days straight is embarrassing, too.

On the second day we decided I might actually turn to liquid if I stayed in that sleeping bag any longer. So, wobbling, with C. behind ready to catch me, we went on a hike. By hike, I mean walk, and by walk, I mean three steps, sit on a rock, three steps, sit on a rock. But we got up to this sunny ridge and lay on the flat-topped boulders and tanned our shins and laughed and my eye leaked. On the way down, I took off my sweatshirt, and then the sweatshirt I was wearing under the sweatshirt. I was hot. Sweating, even. And there was that lake.

This lake is something you want to drink and be swallowed by at the same time. The water is clear, clearer than water in a glass or a bath or a pool. On the shore are broad sloping rocks that slope you right into the water, as deep as you want to go. And there are high round-shouldered rocks over dark pools for when you want to jump, and battered wooden docks for when you want to jump, but not so high. On this particular weekend, the wind was up. There were whitecaps on the water. And the water was cold, cold enough that when you put your hand in to test it you were ready to take it out again right away. I said, I’m going swimming. C. said, I think you should.

I jumped off the dock. I gasped and flopped like a fish in fast-forward evolution onto the shore where C. was waiting with my towel. I was proud. I wheezed. But then, standing there, a dripping, prickly-skinned, bright pink mammal, I wanted to do it again. So I did, and this time I really swam, all the way out to a rock island and back through the chop, and C.’s neighbors cheered and gave me a thumbs up and offered me a beer, and said, Aren’t you sick? And the next day I did it again, and I was still sick, but I was better.