Enchanted Islands Read Free

anywhere. Wouldn’t we all?
    *
    I used to be so busy, not a moment to stop and rest. And now it is moments of activity that punctuate my sedentariness. I have swimming for physical therapy two times a week. It is odd to think that I have a sensual life again after so many years of emptiness. It may seem strange, too, for a woman my age to experience physical pleasure, but I am not dead, yet. Patricia comes to my room and lays me out on my bed. I’m embarrassed when she removes my clothes, and think it’s ridiculous when she puts me in a black swimsuit. My breasts have never been much to look at, but between my crooked back and gravity, they seem to be heading to the grave faster than the rest of me.
    Then Patricia wheels me to the pool. I love the heat and the smell of chlorine. It’s usually quiet in there; only the sound of therapists whispering instruction and limbs moving through water. She straps me into the harness and then winches me down. I feel the water rise to meet me. It’s cool and silky. She unstraps me and holds me under my arms like I’m a child, but even with that point of contact I can feel the water loosen my limbs. My legs begin to kick with muscle memory. They’re free in the water. For a minute, I can pretend that I’m back in the islands, that it’s ocean tide lapping at me, not the splashes created by other residents.
    Sometimes Rosalie and I attend the morning lecture in the atrium. Today there is a woman from the San Francisco Opera, talking to us about
Don Giovanni
. I enjoy these lectures, most of the time. I like to see the slide shows of African safaris, take a virtual tour of the Hermitage, watch a second-rate magic show. It passes the time. Rosalie and I sit together, giggling and making trouble like schoolgirls. Once, the attendant shushed us, which set me into a laughing fit so strong they had to wheel me back to my room to calm me down.
    This woman is a singer, part of the opera’s Merola program. She is young and thin. How can anyone sing opera so young, so thin? How does she know about real love? How can that small rib cage fill an auditorium?
    She speaks about breath control. I remember seeing this opera, with Ainslie, in Golden Gate Park one summer night. He took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders, and though he finished the entire flask of gin he’d brought to the picnic, eating little as usual, he seemed sober, listening to the music attentively and humming it on the way home.
    I listen now not to the music but to the silence before the young woman presses the button on the record player. The quiet, when the music ends, is dirty with the rustling of old people’s wheezing, the clicking of the phonograph needle bobbing against the label, the distant kitchen clanging. It sounds like the islands then, so silent, more silent than you can even imagine, and yet so noisy.
    *
    They don’t send a limo; they send a young person to pick us up in her enormous car, which is covered in bits of food and children’s books.
    “Sorry,” she says. “I drive the carpool and the kids are slobs. I’m Susie.” I shake her hand; my bones rub together painfully. “Are you Rosalie Fischer?”
    “No, I’m the friend,” I say. Susie’s hair is tremendously long, down past her waist, where it grows straggly like a passionflower vine. She is dressed in a wood sprite’s flouncy skirt and a ruffled blouse with no sleeves.
    She looks disappointed. “You look so much like my aunt,” she says. “You are Mrs….?”
    “Just call me Frances, please.”
    “Okay, how are we going to do this?” She opens the front passenger door, at which I am surprised. I assumed I’d be riding in the back of the beast, which is elongated like a hearse. I decide to get in quickly before Rosalie arrives. Rosalie can take her turn on the way home. I want to see the world for once, instead of the back of Rosalie’s head.
    I heave myself onto my feet, but I’ve done it too quickly and my legs wobble.