The Lake of Dead Languages

  “Good work, Jane,” Lucy said.

  “Yeah, Jane, you’re braver than I thought,” Deirdre said.

  We sat on the rock for a few minutes looking out over the still, moonlit lake. I didn’t feel cold anymore. The climb and the swim had warmed me up. What surprised me was that I didn’t feel afraid either. The third rock was past the Point, and so we could have been seen from the windows of the mansion, but I imagined that if someone, say Helen Chambers who had an apartment on the top floor of the mansion, had looked out her window and seen us, three naked girls on a rock in the middle of the lake, she would have thought it was a vision. I imagined that we looked like the three graces in the painting by Botticelli Miss Beade had shown us.

  As if responding to a prearranged signal, we all stood up. Lucy slid her arm over my shoulder and Deirdre, on my other side, slipped her arm over Lucy’s. I pulled my arms up to clasp theirs, but instead I kept lifting them—they felt weightless, as if pulled by the moon—until my hands were suspended over their heads. We hadn’t talked about what form our “prayer” to the Lake Goddess would take. “We’ll let the spirit of the moment move us,” Lucy had said. I had imagined it would be Lucy or Deirdre who would think of what to say. They were both better at that sort of thing. But now, with Lucy and Deirdre at my side, I felt stronger than I ever had before. My mother was wrong. Three was a magic number.

  “Spirit of the Lake,” I said. “We come here in the spirit of friendship. We don’t ask for special protection.”

  I saw Lucy nod. It was what Domina Chambers always told us. The ancients believed they must first humble themselves before the gods. The greatest sin was hubris.

  I knew then what form the prayer should take. “All we ask,” I said in a high, ringing voice that seemed to echo off the stone face of the Point, which towered above us, “is that whatever happens to one of us, let happen to all of us.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  WE NEED A STAG-KING.” DEIRDRE HELD THE HAIRPIN figurine we had recently dubbed a corniculum in her fingers and wriggled it in the light from the window. A minute before she had been dancing around the room to the Allman Brothers singing “Ramblin’ Man” on the radio, but then “Seasons in the Sun” came on and she switched it off.

  Lucy looked up from Graves’s The White Goddess and nodded. “Like Cernunnos,” she said. “The horned one, the antlered king.”

  “Like Actaeon,” Deirdre said.

  “Actaeon was slaughtered by his own hounds,” I said. It was junior year. Deirdre had read an article in Ms. magazine about matriarchal cultures and goddess worship. She spent most of Latin class pestering Domina Chambers about “the patriarchal canon” she adhered to. “At the very least,” she told our teacher, “we should be doing Ovid’s Art of Love instead of boring old Metamorphoses.”

  I picked up my translation for the next day’s class and read aloud: “ ‘Now they are all around him, tearing deep their master’s flesh.’ His dogs ate him alive.”

  Deirdre shrugged. “Domina Chambers said he got what he deserved for spying on Diana in her bath.”

  “But it was an accident,” I told her. “Look, even Ovid says so, ‘The fault was fortune’s and no guilt that day, for what guilt can it be to lose one’s way.’ ”

  Lucy sighed. “Don’t be so literal, Jane. We’re not going to hunt some poor boy down and eat him.” Deirdre giggled and Lucy gave her a look that silenced her.

  “It’s a symbolic rite of renewal. The goddess joins with the stag-king and the community is granted fertility and good fortune.”

  “Yeah, the goddess and the stag-king get it on.”

  “Well, are we going to take that part literally?”

  “I certainly hope so,” Deirdre said.

  “Then who gets to be the goddess?” I asked.

  Deirdre jingled the hairpins so that they sparkled in the sun and she wiggled her hips like one of the Balinese dancers on the tapestries that decorated her room. “Who do you think? Who around here looks like a fertility goddess?”

  “The goddess is the lake,” Lucy said reprovingly. “The stag-king will swim in the lake, like a baptism, and that will appease the Lake Goddess.”

  “Oh.” Deirdre looked disappointed. She tapped the hairpin that dangled from the “mouth” of the top hairpin so that it swung in a wide arc. “Is our stag-king also going to be symbolic or do we at least get a real boy?”

  I saw Lucy considering. We both knew which boy Deirdre had in mind. Although Lucy and Deirdre had been friends, more or less, since that night sophomore year when we all swam in the lake, Lucy still hadn’t let Deirdre spend any time with Matt. She had met him the couple of times. Matt had come to Friday tea and the Founder’s Day picnic, but Lucy had always been careful to keep Deirdre from spending too much time with her brother.

  “He’s adorable,” Deirdre had confided to me. “I see why you like him. Have you ever… you know… done anything with him?”

  “He’s just a friend,” I said, “and my best friend’s brother. I don’t think of him that way.”

  Deirdre eyed me skeptically. Just as she had a way of finding sexual meaning in the most innocuous Latin phrase, so she could inject sexual context into the most innocent friendship. Over the year we had been at Heart Lake she had posited illicit liaisons between the groundskeeper and Miss Buehl, Miss Buehl and Miss Pike, Miss Macintosh and Miss Pike, Miss Beade and three of the senior girls, and the class president and the captain of the swim team. She had taken it for granted from the beginning that I had a thing for Matt.

  I suppose she was right. Pressed between the pages of my Tales from the Ballet I kept the red maple leaf he had given me on that first walk home. It wasn’t a rose, but he had pretended it was when he gave it to me, so wasn’t it almost as if it were a rose? I’d saved other things, too. The pebbles he gave me when he was teaching me to skip stones on the lake, notes he’d written me in Latin class when we were still at Corinth High, and a skate key he’d dropped in the icehouse and thought was lost. I kept them with my journals under a loose board beneath my desk. Not even Lucy knew about my hiding place or the things I wrote in my journal about Matt.

  “I think Lucy misses him,” I wrote in my journal. I’d used up the first notebook he’d given me and bought a new one that was just the same. I had sat a long time with the fountain pen poised over the lined paper before adding, “I miss him, too.”

  Since we’d been at Heart Lake we’d seen less of him. I knew Lucy missed him terribly. For the whole first year she had slept in one of his old hockey jerseys, and sometimes at night, after she thought I was asleep, I heard her crying. If she hadn’t been afraid of Deirdre going after him I think she would have thought of some way of seeing him more. After all, he lived less than half a mile from the school—only a quarter mile from the far end of the lake—and he knew every inch of the woods surrounding Heart Lake.

  “I bet Matt would be interested in the Cernunnos legend,” I said.

  Both girls looked at me as if they had never heard of a boy named Matt. I half expected Deirdre to say, “Matt who?”

  Lucy sighed. “Actually, Mattie’s more interested in chemistry and physics these days.”

  After Lucy and I had gotten the Iris Scholarship, Helen Chambers had given up on her experiment with public education, and Corinth High School had, in turn, given up on its Latin program. Matt seemed forlorn without Latin until he discovered physics.

  “All he talks about these days is the temperature/density relationship in water and the molecular structure of ice. He’s keen on seeing the lake freeze.”

  “Well,” Deirdre said, “he can watch for the lake to freeze and we can reenact the rite of the horned god. Hey, do you think that’s how we got the expression horny?”

  “We can’t make Matt swim in the lake,” Lucy said. “It’s already too cold.”

  “They do it in Russia,” Deirdre said. “But yeah, it’s even getting too cold to hang out outside. If only we had some kind of shelter. The c
hanging room at the swimming beach would be perfect, but they lock it up over the winter.”

  “There’s the icehouse,” I said. “We could meet there.”

  Lucy’s head jerked up. Belatedly I remembered that Matt and Lucy had made me promise not to tell anyone that they used the icehouse.

  “What icehouse?” Deirdre asked. “It doesn’t sound too appealing.”

  “It’s not,” Lucy said flatly. “It’s just a little hut on the other end of the lake where the Crevecoeurs used to store ice harvested from the lake. It’s a good twenty-minute walk away.”

  “Is there anything in it?”

  I shook my head no, but Lucy was nodding. “The county extension agent keeps her rowboat there, but she only comes once a week, on Tuesdays, to take water samples.”

  I looked at Lucy in surprise. I hadn’t been to the icehouse since we had all gone skating last winter. Apparently she and Matt had been there without me.

  “A boat?” Deirdre said. “Cool. We could have our stag-king rite on the water. When can your brother meet us there?”

  I DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH LUCY TOLD MATT ABOUT THE horned god, but he was excited about what he called the first ice club. We met at the icehouse the last weekend in November.

  Matt brought a Thermos of hot chocolate. Deirdre brought a joint. Lucy brought blankets. We sat in the hull of the extension agent’s rowboat using her life jackets for pillows. We’d decided it was too dangerous to take the boat out; someone might see us. Matt insisted that we keep the doors at the end of the hut open so we could look at the lake, even though it made the hut unbearably cold. It was beautiful though. Lying in the hull of the boat, looking out the doors, it seemed as if we were on the water. Across the lake we could see the stone wall of the Point jutting into the lake like the prow of a gigantic ocean liner bearing down on us. After a few hits, I felt as if we were gliding toward it.

  “The lake has already begun the process of freezing,” Matt told us. “This first stage is called overturn. As water gets colder it gets denser, so it sinks and the warm water rises to the top.” Matt made circles in the air with his hands. “But—and this is the part that’s really amazing—if water continued getting denser as it froze the lake would freeze from the bottom up.”

  “It doesn’t?” Deirdre asked.

  Lucy gave her a scornful look, but Matt continued his explanation patiently.

  “If it did that all the fish and other creatures would die. But what happens is that at four degrees Celsius water becomes less dense. That means that ice is actually less dense than water.”

  “I may be too dense to get this,” Deirdre said, passing Matt the joint. “Science was never my thing.”

  I was surprised at Deirdre putting herself down like this in front of Matt. I thought she would want to impress him. It was weird, too, because Deirdre wasn’t dense about stuff like this. She was actually pretty good at science. If she hadn’t spent most of her time getting stoned and thinking about boys, she would have gotten all A’s. As it was, she did almost no work and still got B’s.

  Matt took a hit off the joint and passed it to Lucy, then he reached across me and took Deirdre’s hands in both of his.

  “It’s like this.” He turned her right hand so that its back lay against the palm of her left. I saw Deirdre wince, but she didn’t complain and I don’t think Matt noticed he was hurting her.

  “This is what a water molecule is like above four degrees Celsius. The two hydrogen atoms fit together like two spoons lying in the same direction. When people lie like that they call it spooning.”

  I imagined lying next to Matt like that. I imagined what it would feel like to lie against his back, against his broad swimmer’s shoulders, and bend my knees to fit into the space where his knees bent. I wondered if Deirdre was imagining the same thing. Why hadn’t he used my hands for his demonstration? Why hadn’t I said I was dense?

  “The oxygen atom lies alongside the two hydrogen atoms,” he added, balling his hand like a fist against the palm of Deirdre’s right hand. “But at four degrees Celsius the hydrogen atoms flip around.” Matt turned Deirdre’s right hand over so that her palms were facing each other as if in prayer. “See that space between your hands,” he tickled the inside of her palms and she giggled. “There’s a little pocket between the atoms now. That’s why ice is lighter than water.”

  “I still don’t get it,” I said.

  Matt dropped Deirdre’s hands. I was hoping he would take mine, but instead he made two peace signs with his fingers and held them up.

  “Tricky Dick,” Deirdre said. She had a cartoon tacked to her wall of Nixon holding his fingers up in two V’s.

  He lowered his fingers so they were pointing out, into the center of the circle we made inside the boat. “You can also think of it like this. Each water molecule is made up of three atoms—two hydrogen, one oxygen—so it’s like a triangle. When water is liquid, the molecules just lie on top of each other like this.” He lay one peace sign over another. “But at four degrees Celsius, the hydrogen molecules flip around because they want to touch.”

  “Oooh,” Deirdre cooed. “Lezzie molecules.”

  “Jesus, Deir,” Lucy said, “only you could make hydrogen bonding sexy.”

  “Well, it is kind of sexy,” Matt admitted. “I mean it has to do with attraction. In a water molecule, the positively charged nuclei of these three atoms are stuck together by negatively charged electrons. But the oxygen atom is so greedy for the attention of electrons that it strips the two hydrogen atoms of their negative charge. That makes the hydrogen atoms attracted to other electrons, like the oxygen atom in another water molecule. That’s why water is liquid. When water freezes, the hydrogen bonds hold each molecule apart.”

  Matt reached out both his arms and took my hand and Lucy’s. “You guys hold hands, too,” he said.

  I saw Lucy reluctantly take Deirdre’s hand and Deirdre took my hand.

  “Now hold your arms out straight.”

  We had to shuffle around in the boat a little to make space so we could all hold our arms out straight. The boat rocked on the wooden floor of the icehouse. It was a good thing, I thought, that we weren’t doing this on the water.

  “See how we take up more space now,” Matt said. “We’re ice.”

  “My ass is ice,” Deirdre said. She released Lucy’s and my hands and stood up. The boat lurched toward her and then, when she stepped out of it, careened away from her. Lucy and I both fell against Matt. I felt Matt’s arm around me, steadying me.

  “Hey, you broke the molecular bond,” Matt said.

  “I always was a great ice breaker,” Deirdre said, shimmying her shoulders and hips. Even under a sweater and down jacket you could see her breasts swaying. I realized she hadn’t worn a bra. I looked at Matt and it seemed his gaze also rested on Deirdre at about chest level.

  “I think that concludes the science portion of the evening,” Deirdre said. “And now for the sacred rite of the horned god. Got your antlers ready, Matt?”

  Matt held up his fingers in V’s again, but this time he held them over Lucy’s head. “I always thought Lucy would make a good deer,” he said. “She’s about as brave as one.”

  Lucy shook his hands away and got up out of the boat. She stood at the doorway of the hut and stretched her arms over her head. She was wearing a pale blue ski parka that glimmered against the cold black water. She was like a deer, I thought, leggy and lithe. I thought of a line from Book Four of the Aeneid. It’s when Dido realizes that Aeneas doesn’t love her anymore and he’s going to leave her. “Qualis coniecta cerva sagitta,” I recited, impressed at myself for remembering the Latin.

  With her back to us, Lucy took up the passage, reciting it to the lake. As she spoke Deirdre moved next to her and held her arms up, too. I stayed in the boat with Matt. He had put his arm back around my shoulder.

  “Quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit pastor agens telis liquitque volatile ferrum nescius: illa fuga silvas saltu
sque peragrat Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo,” Lucy recited.

  “Wow,” I said. “How’d you remember all that?”

  Lucy shrugged. “It’s my favorite part.”

  “Might an ordinary mortal ask for a translation?” Matt asked.

  “Just as when a deer pierced by an arrow from some shepherd, who unknowing leaves in her the flying iron, wanders the woods and mountain glades with the deadly shaft still clinging to her flesh,” I told him. I had left out a bunch of words, but that was the gist of it. “It’s like, even though she runs away the thing that’s going to kill her stays with her. She can’t escape her fate.” I was surprised to hear my own voice quiver. It had always gotten to me, the way Dido was doomed to kill herself from the moment she set eyes on Aeneas.

  Matt squeezed my shoulder and I felt his lips brush the side of my face. “You’re a sweet kid, Jane,” he whispered in my ear, “but I think these two might rip me to shreds, so I better hightail it.”

  He was gone before I knew it; only the sway of the empty boat and a damp spot on my cheek where his lips had brushed told me he’d been there a minute ago. Deirdre and Lucy ran after him. I could hear them, laughing and shrieking through the woods. I could have caught up with them, but instead I lay back in the boat and watched the moon move from behind a cloud. The rocky prow of the Point, as if awakened by the cascade of white light, seemed to glide toward me, silent as an iceberg in a still, black sea.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ON THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS BREAK I CAME BACK to our room from dinner and found a corniculum tacked to the door. I was surprised because it was so cold, but Lucy said we couldn’t miss the solstice because it would be a propitious night for the first ice to form. It was a windless night and the full moon seemed unusually close and bright.

  “It’s going down below zero tonight,” Deirdre said. “We could get frostbite. And besides, I feel awful.” Deirdre sneezed and blew her nose. She had gone to the infirmary that day and the nurse had excused her from her last final and said she should stay in bed until it was time to catch her train home.