Alone for the first time on New Year’s Day, the tea house woman watches the DVD delivery boy on his bicycle bump away down her cobblestone street until she can no longer see the outline of his shoulders, warm with tenderness for all shoulders and shoulder muscles, her favorite part of the body to watch in motion—that simple action of reaching, according to Aristotle, beginning as an act of the imagination. So let us imagine Iris waiting for her inside with a pot of Lady Grey. See clearly the gully around Iris’s clavicles, her strong shoulders, the long line of her neck and spine visible through the blue Adidas tee she wears around the house, vintage like everything she owns, the white logo large on her back, the rest of the shirt verging toward transparent, indecent, and wish for me to be able to see her in it now, feel her holding onto me holding onto her, the assurance of her strength rising up and settling around us both as I turn to face my empty home, quiet and dark now but for the embers of my fading fire. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession: I knew my father was dying, but on Saturday night I had Christmas Eve dinner with my Portuguese lover instead. Sunday, the tea house hosted its annual Christmas bal masqué, where Catherine the Great was seduced by Eros, who, Monday morning, transformed into Adonis, transforming me into Aphrodite and my Portuguese lover into Ares and my father into my husband—dead. I found him Tuesday morning. It was raining and the waves were roaring. I had the windows cracked. Hard drops splattered loud on the porch boards. They took him away and I picked up his ashes Friday, after the memorial and before I met Iris, who stayed the night, and on Saturday, yesterday, volunteered to help me scatter the ashes. We spent New Year’s Eve in the Jacuzzi, and afterward the three of us lay on top of the covers as if it weren’t really a night of sleep and time. . . .

We tried to fuck
but he remained limp, although happy. I came
again and again, each time accumulating lucidity,

until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down
on the two souls clasped there on the bed
with their mortal boundaries

visible around them like lines on a map.
I saw the lines harden.
He left in the morning.

Today, Sunday morning, lying together on a shaggy rug on the floor in front of the fire, in thick wool socks and our robes, Iris and I pretended we were young again and watched Fantasia. I made us blueberry oatmeal waffles, distracted myself with watching the blueberries pop in the heat of cooking, nearly caramelizing, and I sliced strawberries for topping over clotted cream. As we ate, I listened to the crisp crunch of the oatmeal in each chewy mouthful, comforted by the smoothness of the clotted cream and the perfect tart and cold of those fresh-washed strawberries at the finish, mango mimosas in our mismatched juice glasses, black coffee for Iris and with cream for me in tiny gold-rimmed tea cups, the French press and a cow-shaped creamer and our dirty plates on a tray on the hearth at our feet, the darkness of that early morning and Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours playing softly on TV. After Iris ate, she slept, her head in my lap, my fingers in her hair. I wrapped us in blankets and watched that DVD straight through to the end, thinking about the tea house and how it belonged to me. I thought about it some nights till it almost hurt. I saw it lived in by the women. I saw myself as preceded by them, in the same bedrooms, the same twilights. There’d been nine generations of women before me within those walls; dozens of people gathered around the fires—children, farm workers, cow girls. All over the house there were surfaces rubbed smooth where grown-ups, children, and dogs had gone in and out of the doors. When Iris left, her white silk robe hanging from my bathroom door as a keepsake, my own blue flannel tucked into her duffel in exchange, I removed myself from the tea house and went for a long walk on the beach, after which I eventually made my way to our only video store here in Fenwick and asked the owner if I could buy that copy of Fantasia I had at home: My case is not unique: I am afraid of dying and distressed at being in this world. He took my money and said he’d send the delivery boy to pick up the rental in exchange for a new, unopened one. That night, and the nights following, I developed the habit of watching it to help me sleep, all the way from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to Schubert’s Ave Maria, the music and the colors flickering on the walls some small company for me as I lay in my parents’ bed, arms wrapped around my legs and thighs tight to my chest, tears sliding from my eyes and dripping from my left cheekbone to the pillow in the dark.