My friend Robin wrote:
I met my best friend Heidi at Bennington college. Upon first visiting her dorm room, I was surprised to find a black velvet dress hanging on her wall. It was not the black velvet that surprised me, although it actually was, for I had never before seen such a dress, but the fact of her hanging a dress on her wall at all.
When I asked her about it, she asked back, but isn’t it beautiful? And it was. It had tiny opalescent buttons down the back, the whole length of it, to the calf, and in front, three buttons centered midway between the neck and waist, on each side of which was ruching which relaxed into loose velvet folds where one imagined breasts would neatly fit, breasts just the size of hers. The waist was tapered and then the dress almost flared. It’s not even fair to say it flared for it didn’t commit, but I say so because on her it seemed to, so that when she turned in it, almost imperceptibly it did, the way shoulder length hair, bobbed and cut on the bias in an A-line, flares with the turn of a head.
The first time she took the dress down I asked, with alarm, what are you doing? Why are you taking it down?
I can’t wear it if it’s on the wall, she said, raising one eyebrow, which was her specialty. The occasion was a picnic for which she’d packed an actual picnic basket, something else I’d never seen.
We trekked far beyond the edge of campus past the ledge that’s called the end of the world, she in the black velvet dress and I, in a black rayon crepe we found at the local thrift store that she said looked so noir. Barefoot, we tiptoed over rocks and sunk our feet into the soft pile of spring grass.
She found the tree under which we spread her favorite scarf, the same one we’d someday bury her bird in, under the same tree, a different spring. From the basket, she took out jars of jam, tins with olives, wedges of cheese, clusters of cherry tomatoes on the vine, and a bundle of green grapes. Out of the basket, came a long bread and a bottle of wine with two tiny pewter goblets, borrowed, she said, from her Omi, the same Omi who would one day frighten me with a cautionary tale about blood poisoning when a red thread dangled from my socks as we danced in the grass outside her house.
With her hair, a gold bundle that a smitten professor would come to refer to as a Van Gogh haystack, tousled, and her dress flared as she turned, she recited Marvell’s “The Garden,” not all of it, just her favorite verse, the one that I would one day recite over pieces smaller than the parts of a hayrick, in a vessel of her bigger than her Omi’s goblets.
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Into my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
She recited this often, and whenever she said curious peach, she would raise her eyebrows, her speciality. At the end, she would fall on grass, also a specialty, though often not on purpose.
When, in another spring, her bird died, we returned to the spot, dressed formally, she in black velvet and I in crepe, and buried it under the same tree. I had a feeling, so distinct I can remember everything about it but what it was. I did not love the bird we buried, but I loved the burial we gave it. The feeling is as present in me now as if I were standing there still, reciting Marvell in unison with her, over the lifeless bird wrapped in silk, and that memory is conflated with the one in which I stand at her gravestone with a bird carved on it, reciting Marvell in unison with no one.