Opening weekend. For ten years, Sharon had come out for opening weekend, the official start to the family’s cabin season. It was still cold in northern Minnesota, the leaves not yet trusting. Cynthia had called Sharon three days earlier, her voice flat but achingly familiar, “It’s opening weekend.” They could spread the ashes, she said. Go out and catch a walleye for Matt.
But on this day, the first opening weekend, Sharon drove out to the cabin alone, rain cleaved the air in sideways sheets, windshield wipers beating frantically. The former sisters-in-law would not go out in the boat. Sharon wasn’t sure what they would do. She could not let herself imagine.
Ten years earlier, Sharon met Matt at the Fellini double-feature.
The audience came early to the vintage theater, settling into the threadbare seats beneath the sky-painted ceiling, angels circling the perimeter. The Hammond B3 belted jaunty tunes. A reverent hush fell, and red velvet drapes swished back behind Grecian columns. The theater dimmed to dusk, then midnight. On the screen, Jesus flew beside the crumbling Roman viaduct, his arms wide.
More than two hours later, even the closing credits held the audience’s rapt attention.
The lights came up, the organist resumed his post, and a man several rows in front of Sharon stood and put on a black overcoat and hat—a black hat, like a Stetson. Sharon knew that hat. Everyone in the audience knew that hat, and if they didn’t, they were about to when Marcello Mastroianni appeared on screen after intermission. The man a few rows in front of Sharon turned and gazed up at the projector, then made his way up the aisle, humming.
From her place in the concessions line, she watched him cross the old tile floor, dress shoes clicking. His square jaw was clean-shaven; smile lines framed his mouth and eyes. He caught Sharon watching him and did not look away. He joined her in line.
“I like your hat,” she said.
“Only the men who worked at a haberdashery knew what I was talking about.”
“Is it an American Western hat?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“It suits you,” she said. “Not everyone could pull that off.” She wasn’t sure why she told him it suited him, when she didn’t even know him, but she knew it was accurate.
He escorted her back into the theater. “May I sit with you?” he asked.
When she said yes, he did the most courteous thing she could imagine; he sat just one seat over. The empty seat between them beckoned like an unopened invitation. He set his hat on it and winked at her.
Sharon wasn’t sure what she expected falling in love to feel like: high drama, possibly—passion! But it was nothing like the great waves of desire she imagined happened to other people. It was a calmness, a deep river whose current flowed steadily, with purpose, inviting everything near it to come along. She didn’t have to create the love, didn’t have to fight it; she only had to let go and float along with it.
Sharon was forty-one, a virgin until the spring fever day about a month after she met Matt when he took her to his bedroom. They undressed themselves. It was odd, to feel another person’s naked skin against her own. He had a new box of condoms waiting in the bedside drawer, and it occurred to her that he had prepared for this. Why hadn’t the thought crossed her mind? Because sex never crossed her mind. She wasn’t asexual, exactly. In high school and college, she assumed she would meet a man and get married, but it never happened, and time went on. It was never a big priority for her to begin with. And then she was forty-one, and here was a man who found her very interesting, and who she found very interesting. And sex? It too was nothing like she thought it would be, nothing like media everywhere promoted. The pressure of Matt inside her was amusing, and warm. People screamed during this? It was natural that they would do this together, natural to fall asleep after, natural for him to bring her coffee in the morning.
Was this what love and sex meant?
Well, OK, then. Seemed pretty good to her.
Matt invited Sharon to his family’s cabin for opening weekend. His mother had died the previous summer, and Matt and his sister Cynthia would continue the tradition of hauling in walleye.
Sharon knew this meant something, to be invited to such a private, important event as opening weekend at the family cabin.
Cynthia scanned Sharon up and down, then held her eye from her perch six inches taller. She pumped her hand three times like the handle of a well. It was a bit unnerving how much Matt and Cynthia resembled each other. Born eighteen months apart, they looked like two versions of the same person. Tall, with the same pinwheel wrinkles about their same gray eyes, same brusque slate hair framing wide-brimmed canvas hats. But where Matt was reserved and soft spoken, Cynthia’s cadence was like too many staccato quarter notes, forte.
“There are always three of us in this boat,” Cynthia announced, after Matt tied the skiff to a fallen maple tree. “It was Mom, until last summer. Now it looks like you.”
They commenced baiting hooks while Sharon sat mute between them. She had never been fishing before. Cynthia handed her the first pole, a minnow dangling from a hook through its eye. How odd and reassuring that Matt’s sister realized she needed help when Matt did not. Cynthia instructed, “Depress the button with your thumb, flip it back a little, and fling it out there. Watch for those branches.” Sharon tried to follow directions, but the minnow fell down beside the boat with a plop. Cynthia grinned. “Or you can just do that.”
When everyone had two lines in the water, Sharon asked, “So this is opening weekend?”
“Officially, it was last weekend,” Matt explained, “but our mother felt it was a crime that fishing opener was Mother’s Day weekend. ‘How is that about mothers?’ she would say.”
“If the priest didn’t dedicate his whole homily to mothers, she was pissed about that, too,” Cynthia said.
“Didn’t he have a mother?” Matt said. “Didn’t Jesus have Mary?”
“In our family,” Cynthia told Sharon, “fishing opener is the weekend after Mother’s Day.”
Matt asked, “Remember when she caught me fishing on Wednesday and took my poles away?”
“You were yelling, ‘It’s legal! It’s legal!’”
“She said, ‘Not in this family.’”
Sharon enjoyed hearing Matt and Cynthia banter back and forth, the natural way of close siblings. An hour passed, nothing biting, though the banter between Matt and Cynthia delighted Sharon. Cynthia brought out Matt’s dry sense of humor, and Sharon suddenly realized how funny he was. She almost missed it when her line tugged. She yanked up the pole, as she’d seen Matt do, and reeled it up to find an empty hook.
“Took your bait,” Matt said.
“Don’t snag it,” Cynthia told her, spooning a new minnow from the bucket. “Tease it out.”
By noon, Sharon caught two of the ten good-sized walleye they brought in.
Back at the cabin, Matt and Cynthia taught her the coming-home tradition. They climbed onto the dock, kicked their boots onto the grass, rolled up their pant legs, and waded in. Off went their identical hats. They bent at the waist to dip the tops of their heads in the lake. Sharon marveled at the same bald spot formed atop their crowns.
Inside, Sharon watched Matt through the window above the kitchen sink, how he carefully retied the boat and put away the motor. The division of labor in this family meant women gutted the fish—at the kitchen sink, no less—while men tended boat matters.
The walleye lay piled, sharp fins down their spines like freshwater sharks, jellied eyes staring up. Cynthia showed Sharon how to oil an obelisk-shaped stone and whisk the ivory-handled knife across it. She flipped the knife around, aiming the handle toward Sharon. “You caught a fish, now you clean ’em.”
Sharon took the knife. Cynthia put a seven-inch walleye, silver-blue, on the cutting board.
Sharon confessed, “My students dissect frogs every year. It always makes me squeamish.”
“Here,” Cynthia stepped closer, putting her left arm around Sharon, her left hand over hers. A flush flowed through Sharon’s whole body. Instinctively, she jerked rigid against it. “Relax,” Cynthia instructed, flapping Sharon’s left hand, moving her torso loosey-goosey against Sharon’s back.
“Hold the head down here,” Cynthia said. “It’s going to try to flip. Put your thumb in its mouth and get a good grip.” Sharon tried to slow her breathing as Cynthia molded her left hand into a hitchhiker’s grip, then slid her thumb into the fish’s mouth. She could feel its teeth, the smooth wet membrane of its interior. The fish’s gills flapped slowly, the one eye staring up at her. Out the window, the yard and lake were quiet.
“Now with your other hand—” Cynthia put her right hand over Sharon’s, holding the knife within it—“pierce it just under the gills and slice it along the belly.” Cynthia guided her hand down the length of the fish to the tail, dividing the flesh. Sharon tried to concentrate. She would have dropped the knife if not for her sister-in-law’s hand over hers, squeezing it.
Incision complete, Cynthia let go Sharon’s hand and flipped up the skin to reveal the ribs, the organs, and a mass of red balls. “Look,” she said, “eggs.”
Matt fried up the walleye in a batter of cornmeal and egg and his special secret seasoning. “Garlic, saffron, and thyme,” Cynthia whispered in her ear. They ate at the Formica table. Cynthia brought out the cribbage board and asked Sharon if she knew how to play three-handed, then claimed her for her team.
After the women skunked him a second time, Matt reached into the pocket of his flannel shirt and brought out a box. He set it in front of Sharon. “Maybe it’s strange to do this now,” he said, “but I really wanted my family to be a part of this.”
That night, Sharon lay in the damp bed beside Matt.
Had she just said yes to him? To his sister? To both?
In the strange room of late-night thinking, she wondered if Matt had brought her as a gift for his sister.
She reached her arm across his chest, slung her leg over, crawled on top. He roused. “What’s this?” he asked. She pressed her hips into his, kissed his mouth. In the liminal space of half-sleep, they wriggled out of their pants, and Sharon straddled him, pulling him inside her, controlling the tempo—not too fast, careful not to knock the headboard into the wall, with Cynthia on the other side.
Cynthia’s children Theresa and John arrived the next day. Sharon mucked around with them in the mud, collecting crawdads in a bucket, searching the reeds for shy garter snakes. She brought out her magnifying glasses, and showed her ten-year-old soon-to-be-nephew how to focus sunlight into a pinpoint and burn holes in thin birch bark, the cinder scent lasting long after the momentary fire.
In September, they were married.
Being married was not something he’d ever hoped for, Matt confessed one night as they lay side by side in bed, holding hands. He was forty-five, a lifelong bachelor, but now that it had happened, he couldn’t believe how lucky he was. Sharon asked why he didn’t kiss her when he came home from work. He looked baffled. “It never occurred to me,” he said, “but I will.”
True to his word, every night at 5:20, right on the lips.
When they were eighty years old, Sharon knew, he’d still be kissing her at 5:20.
Fall set in. They turned off the water and closed up the cabin.
The first weekend they were home, the house phone rang. It was Cynthia. “I miss you two,” she told Sharon. “It’s always sad when cabin season ends.” And then, like best friends, they talked for an hour about everything and nothing.
A decade passed.
The three spent family holidays together and summers at the cabin. They watched Cynthia’s children grow up, graduate from high school, go to college. At least once a week Cynthia called the house. Cynthia was always the one to call. If Matt answered, he’d talk briefly with his sister, then pass the phone off to his wife. He was never one for chit-chat, anyway.
Sharon clung to the growing mound of small glowing coals as evidence that something existed between her and Cynthia.
At the cabin: Cynthia grasped Sharon’s hand—“Moose!”—and held it for as long as the buck sauntered through the brush before them.
Christmas: Perfume, diamond earrings, a tennis bracelet with emeralds from Cynthia. Robe and slippers, National Geographic subscription, an Instant Pot from Matt.
Cynthia’s son’s middle school violin concert, where she leaned close to Sharon and breathed, If they play Hamilton, let’s go get donuts.
And so many summer evenings where they’d sit at the cabin, mosquitos assaulting the screens, loons calling on the lake. Three of them, content.
But what exactly was it between them? Sharon could never examine that question, could not even pose it. Not to herself, and never to Cynthia. Peering too closely would expose what was really there. Or not there. Either outcome brought something painful with it, an end to something, with no guarantee of a beginning. Sharon wasn’t willing to risk it, so she said nothing.
Cynthia called with news that her ex-husband was getting remarried: a destination wedding in Mexico. “Why am I so upset?” she asked Sharon. “We’ve been divorced twenty years. I’ll take my own damn trip somewhere. You and Matt come with me. I’m buying.”
Cynthia insisted on a big trip, an extravagant trip, somewhere they’d always wanted to go: Rome.
They rented a second-floor apartment overlooking a crowded brick street. A piano bar beneath them, the notes of Thelonious Monk wove their way upstairs at all hours. Below that, a large dining room hosted private events in the basement. The guests ate puttanesca and marveled at the display literally beneath their feet: excavated ruins of Roman plates, pitchers, forks, and knives, lit by soft amber lights, covered by Plexiglass.
The trio walked the streets. They ate gelato in parks and snapped photos in front of fountains. Sharon held Matt’s arm as they strolled. At night in the living room adjoining the two bedrooms, they sat on couches drinking wine.
One evening they finished a bottle early. “I’ll head down to that corner place and get another,” Matt said.
“Get two,” said his sister.
The women went to the window and called out to Matt below, like starlets waving to Marcello Mastroianni. Matt blew them extravagant kisses that he would never send in the States and rounded the corner.
They remained before the open window, observing the flow of people and activity in the narrow Roman street: zippy mopeds, dogs—stray and leashed, lovers arm in arm.
Then Cynthia took Sharon’s hand and led her back to the rug. She kissed her on the lips. Sweetly, then open, the soft rounded tip of her tongue licking Sharon’s lips, her taste of Chianti and pepper. Cynthia’s hands beneath her breasts, then under her blouse, scooping into the cups of her bra. Sharon let go and felt herself fall, down into the excavated ruins beneath all of Rome, into another world, a world that once was, a world that was always happening, somewhere, in another time.
Far away, Sharon heard a door close, blending with the sounds from the street below. Then the crash of glass, close. Cynthia released her and backed away. Sharon regained her footing. They both looked to the archway leading from the apartment’s foyer. Matt knelt, one bottle of wine cradled to his chest, one broken in front of him, red wine crawling on the tile. His glasses were gone.
Cynthia went to him. “What happened?”
“I fell,” he said. “I tripped, something.”
“At least you saved one,” his sister said, pointing to the intact bottle. She laughed.
They ransacked the kitchenette for paper towels, silently cleaning up the wine and the glass shards. Sharon found Matt’s eyeglasses beside the couch, twisted at the bridge. No one said anything about what Matt had seen or didn’t see. They opened the remaining bottle. Cynthia talked staccato about her daughter’s new job, her son going to Australia. Sharon kept jumping up, arranging the souvenirs she’d bought, shuffling pamphlets on the table. Matt sat silently sipping wine. But he was often quiet with the women, listening to them talk. They agreed to call it for the night.
In bed, Matt reached for his wife, pulling her toward him and kissing her with the kind of intensity Sharon knew led somewhere. But what little erection leapt up quickly wilted. “Sorry,” Matt said sleepily. “Three glasses.” He rolled over and started snoring, leaving Sharon to press her fist to the hollow between her legs.
The next morning, they visited the optometrist. No one in the shop spoke English. But the problem was obvious. The optometrist conveyed that the glasses could not be fixed, but he could make new lenses based on the old ones. Sharon and Cynthia found frames that looked just like the glasses of Marcello Mastroianni.
As they left the shop with new glasses, Matt proudly put on his hat.
“All you need is the whip,” his sister told him.
They returned to the States, returned to the status quo. But time and events have a way of forcing our hands, even when we’re committed to the present course. A month later, during a March blizzard, two solemn-looking police showed up on Sharon’s doorstep.
She called Cynthia to repeat that Matt suffered a heart attack at a rest stop halfway home from St. Paul. Their father had died from a heart attack when he was fifty. Matt outlived him by five years.
Together, the sisters-in-law went to the funeral home to make arrangements. Cynthia stayed in their guest room that night, and for the next five nights, as friends and family and colleagues filled the house. Then everyone left, even Cynthia. She did not call the next week, or the week after, or the week after that, leaving Sharon to sink into her grief without her best friend and confidant.
The funeral home director gave Sharon two boxes. One held Matt’s ashes. In their bedroom one night, she opened the second box to find his wedding ring and his glasses. She turned the glasses over, examining them for the first time. One arm was nicked above the ear. His skin’s oil lined the bottoms of the frames where they rested on his cheeks. She brought them to her nose, inhaled, and licked the bridge; it tasted of his sweat.
And then, a few days before the fishing opener, Cynthia called. Two months since Matt died, and she finally called. Let’s spread his ashes and catch a fish for him, she said.
The springtime light opened its arms wide, calling the leaves to risk unfurling in the still-cold air.
Sharon packed a backpack and bought a bag of groceries, like she did every year for opening weekend. Then she got into the driver’s seat, which she never did before.
It began to rain. She tried to focus through the relentless wipers, searching for the gravel road she had always relied on Matt’s intuition to find. Past the row of mailboxes, past the thimbleberry patch, turn right at the big maple. But her mind kept pushing her into the future. Not the cabin, which would be happening in an hour, then thirty minutes, then ten minutes, then almost to the driveway—and what would happen when she opened the door? It was too much to anticipate. So Sharon went to the future beyond, decades into a lifetime where they would be old women together. Which one would be sweet, which one would be mean? Which one would knit? Which one would work puzzles? Would she still thrill every time Cynthia’s veiny, wrinkled hand pressed her own? Would she still swoon every time her toothless-mouth kissed her? Yes! Yes yes and yes!
Cynthia sat in the front room before a fire with fresh logs piled atop smoldering coals.
Sharon felt like an intruder, standing with her backpack, a bag of groceries, the box with ashes.
Cynthia rose and went to the kitchen to make tea. Sharon followed. They watched rain fall from bruise-colored clouds, the lake’s surface bouncing up to embrace the thousand tiny drops.
In another lifetime, Sharon stood here with Cynthia and felt her warmth at her back, her arms around her. She closed her eyes and imagined falling through the excavated ruins of what might have been, what had been, what could still be.
She opened her eyes and turned to her sister-in-law, standing a few feet away, her back against the stove. Cynthia was watching her.
Sharon asked, “Now what?”
Cynthia’s forehead furrowed the way Matt’s would when he was hurting. “I can’t just take up with my brother’s widow.”
Arguments leapt to Sharon’s mind: We can wait—it doesn’t have to be right now. We don’t have to tell anyone. We don’t have to do anything. We can just keep going the way it’s always been.
But that wasn’t the truth. Cynthia had just spoken the truth, clearer than anything she’d ever said to her sister-in-law. That truth pierced the self Sharon had conjured to keep living the lie: the dutiful wife and the secretly pursued. She thrived on the tension humming between the roles, between the three of them. Now, her body burned under the scrutiny of this new lens, forcing her to reveal her own heart.
“I can’t lose both of you.”
The admission was humiliating, and freeing. A momentary lightness buoyed her.
Cynthia stared back, the lines around her mouth unmoving. The kettle whistled, rain beat the window. And Sharon understood that losing Cynthia was exactly what was about to happen.
Felicia Schneiderhan’s fiction and personal essays have appeared in literary journals including the Great Lakes Review, Literary Mama, Sport Literate, Annalemma, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and Slow Trains. Her magazine work appears in Real Simple, Parents, and Lake Superior Magazine. She is the author of the 2015 memoir Newlyweds Afloat (Breakaway Books), detailing the three years she and her husband Mark lived aboard a boat in downtown Chicago. She currently lives on the northern shore of Lake Superior, where she writes in whatever closet she thinks her three tsunamis won’t find her. www.feliciaschneiderhan.com.