The Visible World by Mark Slouka

the lake was made, we would look up and see her sitting on the shore watching us, her arms around her legs, and when she saw we had seen her, she would give a hesitant little wave, raising her hand a bit, then a bit more, as though unsure of how high she should bring it, and we would go back to what we were doing. It never bothered us having her there, and then at some point we’d look up and she’d be gone.
    Though I never saw it myself, I was told Mrs. Kessler lost her head so completely that at night she would walk down to the lake right after it got dark and get into the rowboat and row across to the other man’s cabin while Mr. Kessler sat reading by the green lamp in their cabin. (I wonder what Kessler’s reading, I heard Mr. Černý say. Must be good.) That she would sometimes stay for hours and hours, not caring what anyone thought, and that Mrs. Eugenia Bartlett had sworn she’d heard the creak of her oarlocks as she rowed back through the mist one morning just before dawn.
    My mother, I remember, seemed almost lighthearted that second week in June, waking early, surprising me with special meals like apricot dumplings and
kašička
with drops of jam, asking my father about things in the newspaper. She threw out the stacks of magazines and junk that had collected under the sink and swept out the cobwebs and the bottle caps and the mouse droppings that looked like fat caraway seeds and the bits of mattress stuffing and lint from the previous winter’s nests. One fresh morning after a night of rain she came home with the trunk of the DeSoto crammed with planting trays and seeds and bags of soil and fertilizer and sixteen hanging flowerpots and a paper bag with sixteen hooks to hang them on. In the back seat of the car were four carton bottoms filled with flowers. Except for the marigolds, I didn’t know their names. Some were purple and white, like pinwheels, others a dark velvety red, still others the color of the sky just before it gets dark. They seemed to soak in the spotted light that came through the windows, trembling with life. She was going to garden, my mother said.
    I saw my father looking at my mother as she first pointed out to us all the things she had bought, then started to drag one of the cartons out of the car. Here, let me get that, he said.
    We carried the cartons down to the bit of shady, tangled grass by the water that served as our yard, placing them side by side so they made a long, lovely rectangle, then returned for the bags of soil and the tools. It was mid-morning. The air was warming quickly. A number of people had gathered out on the float in the middle of the lake, and we could hear them laughing. My father carried out the card table my mother said she wanted to work on, and for the next few hours, while my father drilled holes into the south wall of the cabin and screwed the hooks into them, my mother and I transplanted the flowers into the hanging pots, filled the seedflats with soil, and sprinkled the tiny seeds from the packets into furrows we made in the dirt with the eraser end of a pencil. When my father was finished he asked if there was anything else my mother wanted him to do, but she said no, that he had done a wonderful job with the hooks and that we could do the rest on our own, couldn’t we, and I agreed.
    My mother talked more that morning than I could remember her talking in a long time. She asked me about school and told me how happy she was that we had a cabin on a lake and how she hadn’t liked it at first because it reminded her too much of home but that she had come to see things differently and now loved it as much, no, in some ways even more than the countryside she had known as a little girl. And she told me a little bit about the war and what the occupation had been like, and about a square called Karlovo náměstí in Prague with benches and flower beds and giant twisted oaks that had a house along it that had belonged to a man named Faust, who had