A neighbor had died. She was the widow of a security guard, and she lived in a trailer a quarter mile distant. We often exchanged vegetables and game with her, and she took care of my little brother and sister when their mother had to go into town. At the funeral I expected to see her body, and I did, but the morticians had gone to work on her. They had taken her glasses, and, in place of the blue print smock, they had given her some kind of skirt suit; then, they had tightened her chin somehow, and powdered her hair, so she looked like George Washington, and they put her in a lead coffin. I knew it was her, but she did not look like anyone I knew, and I kept staring at the body.

Finally they mounted the box above a hole, with the steel pipes and the straps, for the lowering. The preacher was a young man, a recent graduate with neck like a stalk, but he meant well; he praised her as 'a fan of good conversation'. The silk flowers smiled, in mauve and off-color pinks, and beneath the canvas that held the dirt, poison ivy was growing. Somehow, the clay and the ivy failed to fit the occasion. The clay was not rich black dirt, like you see in a painting; instead, it was red and cracked, the kind of mud you scatter when you plant a cable. The poison ivy looked like a trinket, something slick and endless, like...the plastic leaves in the boxes at the red army temple. Poison ivy always looks like plastic; that was the connection.

Perhaps Mai Lin had it right. Some months before she told me her plan. She would live as long as she enjoyed life, as long as 'I am walking and doing!' Finally she would take a boat from Qingdao, the Chinese harbor 'where the sea meets the sky'. Mai Lin would row until she exhausted herself with rowing; then she would lay down with her hands across her breast.