The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy Read Free Book Online Page B

“Rowing in Eden—/Ah—the sea”) isn’t reserved for the lithe and young, the dating or the hooked-up or the just lavishly married, or even for couples in the middle-aged mixed-doubles semifinals, thank God. No personal confession or revelation impends here, but these feelings in old folks are widely treated like a raunchy secret. The invisibility factor—you’ve had your turn—is back at it again. But I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize upon it avidly, stunned and altered again.
    Nothing is easy at this age, and first meetings for old lovers can be a high-risk venture. Reticence and awkwardness slip into the room. Also happiness. A wealthy old widower I knew married a nurse he met while in the hospital, but had trouble remembering her name afterward. He called her “kid.” An eighty-plus, twice-widowed lady I’d once known found still another love, a frail but vibrant Midwest professor, now close to ninety, and the pair got in two or three happy years together before he died as well. When she called his children and arranged to pick up her things at his house, she found every possession of hers lined up outside the front door.
    But to hell with them and with all that, O.K.? Here’s to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of you. Hook, line, and sinker; never mind the why or wherefore; somewhere in the night; love me forever, or at least until next week. For us and for anyone this unsettles, anyone who’s younger and still squirms at the vision of an old couple embracing, I’d offer John Updike’s “Sex or death: you take your pick”—a line that appears (in a slightly different form) in a late story of his, “Playing with Dynamite.”
    This is a great question, an excellent insurance plan choice, I mean. I think it’s in the Affordable Care Act somewhere. Take it from us, who know about the emptiness of loss and are still cruising along here feeling lucky and not yet entirely alone.

KENDRA ATLEEWORK
Charade
    FROM
Hayden’s Ferry Review
    Â 
    W HEN IT RAINED in Swall Meadows, Elizabeth and I took to the street. The best rains fell at night in the autumn, out of clouds resting on the side of Wheeler Crest, fat and freezing. They rolled down the mountain, swallowing my house and the surrounding blue spruce, the skeletons of silver poplars, peaks bristled by evergreens. By November snow had reached the ridge, and the air was tangible, flavored with frost and the slow death of plants and birds. In the evenings came the smell of smoke, the metallic ping of my father’s ax against knotty wood.
    The street that leads from my house to Elizabeth’s, gravelly and tilting to the south, is lined with dusty pines and mailboxes. Swall Meadows is high desert. The few deciduous trees that survive the dry summers lose their leaves and spend winter growing naked, branches freezing and snapping off, one by one.
    Water comes to our region three times a year. First are hot summer thunderstorms that draw steam from the mesas in the valley below. Next is autumn rain, gentle, resigned to an approaching freeze, hardened almost to ice but falling softly, melting into skin or the knit of a sweatshirt. Finally there is winter, when a flat plane of snow, sharpened by nights of wind, crusts over the mountainside and around the dead willow groves that encircle Swall Meadows.
    Autumn I remember best, when Elizabeth and I were sixteen. It was then that we walked. Each night when the rain fell we crept out Elizabeth’s ragged screen door. Swall Meadows has no streetlights, and we could see no more than twenty feet ahead. When the clouds settled they blocked out my house, higher up the