Aberration of Starlight

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Surely she doesn’t look like the mother of a ten-year-old boy. Perhaps the woman thinks this as she examines herself in the mirror in her small room. Her figure, in a flowered bathing suit, is trim and well-shaped, is what may be termed desirable. She does not think this word and has not thought of herself as such for years, six, seven?

The bathing suit is of one piece, rather too generously cut, and skirted: one cannot know whether out of modesty or a desire to conceal what she fears is a slight thickening of her thighs. She grasps the skirt at its hem and pulls it to either side in a flare, as if she is about to curtsy, looking at herself in the glass. Her face seems to disapprove. The bathing suit is, for a woman of her age, somewhat prim, much like the kind her mother wore the last time she wore a bathing suit. She has had this garment for four years, it is as it is, although she has done her best to ignore it or deny it to herself, because of her wish to preclude what would have been her mother’s mocking laughter had she bought a suit that showed her figure to advantage. Her father, too, would have laughed, desperate as usual to ingratiate himself with his wife. He would have contributed the words “chippy,” and “jane,” the phrase “like Astor’s pet horse,” and her mother would have repeated it.

Do you want to go around looking like Astor’s pet horse?

Sure. She wants to go around dolled up like Astor’s pet horse. The mother of a six-year-old boy!

She suddenly pulls at the skirt and wraps it closely around her thighs, which are, despite her fears, still firm and smooth. They are not the thighs of an old woman, not even those of a mother of a ten-year-old boy, they might be the thighs of a, what do they call them? career woman? A mature woman who just never married. She knows, with absolute clarity, and in misery, that it is the bathing suit that has filled her with doubts about her attractiveness. She is not her mother! Damn it to hell, she is not. And her breasts are still firm. Surely she might be childless, she might be in her late twenties.

She hears Mr. Thebus and her son on the lawn below, although she cannot see them, her one window facing across the road to the old white church. They are laughing together, having a catch with a beach ball, while they wait for her to appear. Appear in this bathing suit, that she now pulls at — the waist, the skirt, the bodice, the shoulder straps — in frustration and embarrassment. She will soon be at Budd Lake with her son and Mr. Thebus. The latter will be in his navy-blue woolen trunks with the immaculate white web belt and its gleaming brass buckle, and his white athletic top. She will be in her flowered rag. Eleanor Stellkamp and her fiancé, Dave Warren, will be there, with the Copan girls, Helen and Peggy. Eleanor will wear her white, shiny, bathing-beauty suit; her flat breasts and oddly protruding belly will be displayed to all, but she will be in her white, shiny, bathing-beauty suit. Helen and Peggy will be the young, slim girls that they are, oh, how they are! The blankets will be laid on the sand next to each other, and she will sit, the heavy folds of this disgusting garment encasing her in ugliness.

She is not her father’s wife, she has a right to something, doesn’t she? She hears her son call: They’re all ready and waiting for her, and she pulls on her rubber bathing shoes and a flannel beach robe. She tightens its sash, rolls two towels together and takes her change purse, tightens the sash again. She will go downstairs now, the skirt of the bathing suit clinging to her thighs as if made of iron, out onto the lawn and into the sunlight and the appraising glance of Mr. Thebus. The beach ball will be under his arm, and he will smile, as he did that early afternoon five days ago when they got out of Louis’ car, fresh from the station at Netcong, to find him waiting on the porch, to see him rising from the glider in his white ducks, puffing aromatic wisps of smoke from his pipe, his finger in the pages of Gone With the Wind. Her navy dress with the white polka dots seemed to her wondrously fashionable, incredibly flattering, held, as it was, in his bright glance.