Coe Review

on to and feel you were holding on to something. Or at least, she seemed
that way to me. My wives, when I first touched them, were slight and thin,
their faces like something whittled in miniature. Dora's face was almost
masculine, hardened by the sun and cold.
Lloyd and Dora stood side by side, he with his arm tightly gripping
Dora's waist. They looked like pioneers. I don't know why I say that, why I
thought that, but they did. They were careful and skilled. They were capable
pioneers. I felt embarrassed, as a man, to know so little about what it meant
to be a pioneer.
Lloyd asked us about the fishing in Gut Bay and shook our hands when
we took our leave. He smiled, his face crumpling up like wax paper, and he
wished us good luck. I remember one of the small girls wrapping her arms
around his thigh as he stood out on the porch. We started walking back
through the fireweed toward the boat, and when I turned around, they were
all standing there waving, just like a photograph, the children small, sober
versions of their father, and Dora in the back, behind Lloyd. She wiped
raspberry syrup from her hands with an old towel.
That is the way I think of them sometimes. Maybe I am being romantic
—my first wife always said that of me—but I do not think so.
It became a tradition after that. No one talked about it beforehand,
but each year, every fishing trip, we stopped for a meal with Lloyd and
Dora. It didn't matter that Mr. Voss didn't particularly care for the "country
experience," as he called it, or if the water was still and the fishing good. Joe
and I would walk over to the deckhand and tell him we wanted to dock at
Baranof Island, and then we would. Sometimes the children would see our
boat coming long before it got to shore, and they would run along, drawing
deep lines into the sand with rocks and wood, making arrows pointing
toward the cabin.
Maybe none of this seems important, but that is how traditions are.
They just start, with a momentum of their own. I try to explain the concept
of tradition to my new wife, but she laughs and wraps popcorn garland
around her body instead of around the Christmas tree. "I'm serious," I tell
her. "There are things you have to take seriously, like tradition," I say over
her squeaks of amusement.
There is something comforting about these things while they last, until
you start to realize that they change, whether you want them to or not, in
small subtle ways. And before you know it, they resemble nothing you've
seen before.
I'm not sure which trip it was that we brought along Dr. Renard. He
only came once—spent the whole time bent over, vomiting—and he never
caught a single fish. It was Mr. Voss' idea. They were golfing buddies, or
Elizabeth Eslami 103