Last Summer

Two: Rhoda

Sandy’s mother gave a huge cocktail party on the last Sunday in July.

The alleged purpose of the party was to bid farewell to those islanders who had rented for only half the summer, but Sandy’s mother was a person who seized upon any excuse for a party, and probably would have thrown one anyway, if just to herald the coming of the regatta the following Wednesday.

David and I were at the party, which started at three P.M., only because Sandy’s mother had come to the island without help, and Sandy had offered our services free of charge for the afternoon. Her mother didn’t relish the idea at first, primarily because she had read about Greenwich, Connecticut, kids getting drunk at adult parties and causing automobile accidents and scandals, but we assured her we would participate only as waiters, refilling empty glasses, serving hors d’ouevres, and generally helping to ease the flow of traffic in and around the house. Since she had invited sixty-four people (certain disaster if it rained), and since her staff, before our generous offer, was to consist only of Mr. Caudell (the Pine Street lawyer) and her daughter, she eventually came around to seeing things our way, provided we “didn’t get underfoot.”

The day was sunny and clear.

Mr. Caudell had arrived on Friday night to spend the weekend. Sandy’s mother, with commendable propriety, always put up a cot for him in the living room, though it was Sandy’s observation that the bedclothes never seemed rumpled in the morning and many a floorboard squeaked at night in the passageway between the living room and her mother’s bedroom. He greeted David and me on the rear deck, where he had set up his bar. He was wearing a sports shirt with a loud Hawaiian print, over which he had put on a red bar apron decorated with the legend “Don’t Kiss Me, I’m Cooking.” Neither David nor I understood the apron’s connection with Mr. Caudell’s bartending duties, but we made no comment.

“It’s a gorgeous day, isn’t it?” Mr. Caudell said.

“Wonderful,” David said. “Is there anything we can do before the guests arrive?”

“Just relax, plenty to do later on,” Mr. Caudell said. “I’m certainly glad I’m not on the beach today. I turn lobster red in the sun.”

Sandy came out of the house just then and said, “Oh, hi, I didn’t hear you.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” David said.

She was wearing big golden hoop earrings and a blue shift. Even barefoot, she was taller than Mr. Caudell, who came up to about her left ear. David and I were wearing clean chinos, sneakers, and our blue Mr. Porter shirts. The three of us looked very good.

“Whatever happened to that bird you were training?” Mr. Caudell asked.

“His head hit a rock and he was killed,” Sandy answered immediately, and then glanced at us. The glance was significant.

Last Monday night, after we’d discovered the dead gull in the forest, David and I had first gone home to wash and change our clothes. (David’s mother, of course, asked him where he had got all that blood on him. After the incident with the beer, she was convinced that her son was a psychopathic criminal, and I’m sure she assumed he had murdered some innocent old man on the dock. He told her we’d been fishing and had cleaned our catch afterward, hence the blood and gore. She bought it.) We had then gone over to Sandy’s house and asked her to take a walk with us on the beach. Huddled over a small wood fire David built in the sand, we told her it was our understanding that there were to be no secrets between us. (Yes, she said, that’s right, that’s certainly true.) Well, we said, not only had she kept a secret, but she had actually lied to us. (No, Sandy said, how can you even think such a thing?) We can think such a thing, we said, because she had told us the bird had slipped his leash and flown away, when it was plainly apparent to both of us that she had led him into the forest and bashed in his skull.

The wood fire crackled and sputtered into the long silence. The waves pounded in against the shore.

“Why did you kill him?” David asked.

“I don’t know,” Sandy said.

“You must know,” I insisted.

“He was a stupid bird,” she said, and suddenly burst into tears. I watched her twisted face in the light of the fire, remembering our own anger, our own bitter tears after we had pounded the gull beyond recognition.

“I’ll never lie to you again,” Sandy said, and that, after all, was the most important thing about the entire incident, this strengthening of the bond between us.

Her glance now was secretive and assuring. She was answering Mr. Caudell’s question honestly, lying to him of course, but once again affirming our unity.

“That’s a shame,” Mr. Caudell said. “Point of fact, he was a most intelligent bird.”

I was spared answering him by the timely arrival of The Dynamiters, an island rock-and-roll group hired for the party by Sandy’s mother. The leader of the group was a kid named Dexter, whom everyone called Deuce, and who resembled a large sheepdog with glasses. He played lead guitar and sang. The rhythm guitarist was a kid who tried to hide his acne by keeping his head ducked at all times. His name was Phil, and he was a very bad musician who sang backup in a high whiny nasal voice. A kid named Arthur, whose father was a doctor, played bass guitar, and the drummer (the only good musician in the bunch) was a year-round islander whose family owned the plumbing supply store over near Mr. Porter’s. His name was Danny. The Dynamiters were all about thirteen, short and somewhat scrawny-looking, and they arrived with four thousand dollars worth of electronic equipment, including amplifiers and microphones enough to broadcast a signal to Tokyo. Deuce, the leader of the group, shy in the presence of anyone, but especially girls, approached Sandy deferentially and said, “Excuse me, Miss, but where did you want us to set up?”

“I’ll ask my mother,” Sandy said, and went inside.

“Well, so you fellows are the band, huh?” Mr. Caudell observed brilliantly,

“Yessir,” Deuce answered.

“What do you call yourselves?”

“The Dynamiters.”

“I hope you don’t have short fuses,” Mr. Caudell said, and winked at David and me, and then burst out laughing.

“Nossir,” Deuce answered, not getting the joke.

“What instrument do you play, son?” Mr. Caudell asked.

“Lead guitar, sir,” Deuce said.

“Would you care for a soda or something?”

“Not right now, sir, thank you,” Deuce said, and then smiled at me timidly and said, “Hi, Peter.”

“Hi, Deuce.”

“Hi, David.”

“Deuce.”

“Great day, huh?” Deuce said.

“Yeah,” David said.

“Think we’ll be setting up out here on the deck?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “She’ll probably put you down there on the lawn.”

“Gee, I hope our extension cords reach,” Deuce said.

Sandy came out of the house again and said, “Mother wants you down on the lawn.”

“Gee, I hope our extension cords reach,” Deuce said again, and went down to tell the other boys in the group. They held a brief consultation at the bottom of the porch steps. One of the boys — it was difficult to tell which one because they were in a huddle — said in a high squeaky voice, “Well, why the hell can’t we play on the deck there?” and Deuce answered, “Because she wants us here on the lawn,” and another boy said, “I mean, man, they won’t even be able to hear us down here.”

“You fellows want a soda or something?” Mr. Caudell asked us.

“No, thank you,” David said.

“Hey, you look handsome,” Sandy said to me.

“Thanks.”

“You, too,” she told David.

“Here come the first guests,” he answered, and pulled a face.

The first guests were Violet, in a green muu muu, and Frankie and Stuart, the two fags who ran The Captain’s, down near the old ferry slip. The Captain’s was a shack overlooking the bay, and it had got its name because Frankie had decorated it with nets and anchors and lobster pots and buoys and all things nautical in an attempt to disguise the undisguisable fact that it was a shack. Neither Frankie nor Stuart were obnoxious fruits, meaning they didn’t go mincing around or making sexy little jokes about Oh, you’re such a cute one, I’d love to give you such a pinch, the way some faggots do, especially the ones in the city along Greenwich Avenue. Frankie had been living with Stuart for half his life, almost as though they were married. Stuart had a black handlebar mustache, and he never said very much. Frankie was blond, and he made up for Stuart’s reticence, talking almost nonstop in a high grating voice. They were both wearing Bermuda shorts and Italian sports shirts. Stuart also wore a wedding band.

“Hello, boys,” Violet said to us, “what a surprise! Hello, David,” she said, beaming, and David smiled and nodded, and then went inside to see if Sandy’s mother needed any help in the kitchen. I introduced Mr. Caudell to Violet and the others, and then drifted down to the lawn while he mixed drinks for them. Sandy’s mother heard voices and came out of the house. I was talking to Deuce when Sandy tiptoed up behind me and said, “Hi, handsome.”

“Hi, gorgeous.”

“You supervising the band?”

“Yep, getting everything organized down here, yep,” I said, and nodded. “You know ‘Paint It Black,’ Deuce?”

“Sure,” he said. “But that’s like from the days of the chariot races, man.”

“You know your fly is open?” Sandy whispered to me.

“No, but if you hum a few bars, I’ll fake it,” I said, and we both burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Phil asked, his head ducked to hide his acne.

“Private joke,” Sandy told him.

“Give me an E,” Arthur said to Deuce. Behind them, the drummer began a series of rolls designed to cause sections of the beach to break off and slide into the ocean.

“Not so loud,” Sandy’s mother called from the deck. “Peter, tell them not to play so loud.”

“You heard her,” I said.

“Loud? We’re not even plugged in yet,” Deuce complained.

“Sandy,” her mother called, “may I see you a moment, please?”

Sandy went into the house and came out a few minutes later with a tray of canapés. I helped the Dynamiters lay out their extension cords across the lawn and into the house, where I found an outlet behind Mr. Caudell’s unslept-in cot. Then I retraced the whole process because the cord was trailing across the entrance door and I was afraid somebody would break his neck going in or out. What I finally did was unhook the living-room screen at the bottom, and pull the cords in through the window. One of Mr. Caudell’s old cigar butts was on the windowsill. David came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of glasses while I was plugging in the cords.

“The Dynamiters all set?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“Looks like we’re in for a musical treat,” he said.

“Oh yes indeed,” I said.

“How’d you like old Short Fuse?”

“Uncommonly hilarious,” I said.

“I never thought he was humorous until today,” David said. “Shows how wrong you can be about a fellow.”

“Oh yes indeed,” I said.

“Where’s Sandy?”

“Out serving.”

“I’d better bring these glasses out.”

We went out together. The deck was fairly crowded now, and more people were coming up the boardwalk toward the house. I kept circulating among the guests, asking them if I might refill their glasses, and then asking them what they were drinking, and then carrying the empty glasses over to Mr. Caudell, who tended bar almost as excellently as he told humorous stories, point of fact. There wasn’t much to do in the beginning, but by four o’clock, when almost everyone had arrived, Sandy and David and I got fairly busy. Mr. Matthews, the island councilman, was there of course, an honored guest whom no one dared call Tom except his wife. (She, in fact, called him Tommy.) Everyone else called him Mr. Matthews, and they endowed the term of address with all the respect due the president of the United States. “Excuse me, Mr. Matthews, but we were wondering what your thoughts were on the proposed bridge to the island,” or, “Excuse me, Mr. Matthews, but I’d like you to meet my sister-in-law, who’s visiting for the weekend,” or, “Excuse me, Mr. Matthews, but did you personally arrange this wonderful sunshine?” Mr. Matthews, meanwhile, could not take his eyes off Sandy, and along about 4:15 he maneuvered her into a corner of the deck and began telling her about his deep-sea fishing exploits the day before (apparently he was a big fisherman, too) while simultaneously trying to cop a feel under the protective cover of the canapé tray. I went over at that point and asked him if he would care for another drink, and then I told Sandy that Mr. and Mrs. Friedman over on the other side of the deck were saying they would like some more shrimp, so she escaped him and blew a kiss at me as she went by, and I brought his glass to Mr. Caudell and said, “Bourbon and water, very heavy on the bourbon,” figuring the sooner we got the old bastard drunk and incapacitated, the sooner Sandy could relax.

David’s parents weren’t at the party because they had left the island the day before to attend a wedding in New Jersey. My parents, however, had arrived at about a quarter to four, and they kept calling me over to introduce me to this or that person, always seeming to take great pride whenever anyone said, “My, how big he is! Did you say he’s only sixteen?” (to which my father invariably replied, “Sixteen going on twenty-four”). Actually, I was not, and am not, a tall person for my age, and I was surprised each time my parents were taken in by such flattery, nor could I figure out why they seemed so thrilled to hear I was big. I performed as expected, though, smiling shyly, and sirring everyone to death, and then offering to serve up some more hors d’oeuvres or carry off a glass that needed replenishing. My father’s glass needed replenishing more than most people’s, but that’s because he’s a connoisseur of good scotch, as he is terribly fond of saying. One night, after having connoisseured a great deal of good scotch, my father came into the bedroom where I was fast asleep. I was ten years old at the time. He woke me up, and then sat by the side of the bed and began crying.

“Oh, Peter,” he kept saying, over and over again. “Oh, Peter.”

I felt very strange that night. As if I was the father and he was the child. Very strange. Just “Oh, Peter,” over and over again.

Every time my father asked for another scotch that afternoon of the cocktail party, my mother threw him a little warning dagger, green eyes snapping off the knife with a quick flick, whap!, right between the shoulder blades. But my father always smiled back at her in a gracious and loving and absolutely sober-seeming way, his gray eyes crinkling and assuring her he would know when he’d had too much, which he rarely knew until he was falling-down drank and telling people once again that he was a connoisseur of good scotch. Everyone agreed that my father was just the most darling sweetest man in the whole world when he got drunk — except my mother. She called him a drunken pissing fool one night three summers ago while I was lying in my bed, without benefit of cuddly toy this time, being all of fourteen. That was the first inkling I had that perhaps my father drank a trifle too much at parties. The second inkling was in the city, when he drove the maid home after a party and nearly killed himself and her by ramming his Porsche into a lamppost. Everyone in the building knew that he had been drunk. I told the kids at school they were all crazy. That was when I was fifteen.

Last summer I was sixteen and serving drinks to guests at Sandy’s mother’s cocktail party, and trying very hard to keep my father from having one too many, which usually meant forty-four too many. I asked David to help keep the sauce away from him, but of course my father was a grown man capable of finding the bar all by himself, which he did with increasing regularity as the afternoon wore on. The Dynamiters, over constant threats of castration by Sandy’s mother, turned up their amplifiers full-blast and nearly blew everyone off the deck, for nothing had they been named so colorfully. Violet began dancing a fat lady’s version of the Frug, and most of the guests joined in, though hardly any of them knew what they were doing. The new dances are all on the upbeat, you see, and most people who learned to dance when my parents did are used to the downbeat, which is the one-and-three beat dominant in the Lindy and all of the other fast dances going all the way back to the Big Apple and the Shag and the Black Bottom, I guess. The Frug and the Monkey and the Watusi and all the other new ones, though, have the stress on the two-and-four beats, and it’s very difficult to explain that to people who were raised with the beat of another generation in their heads. So whereas some of them were very good dancers (Frankie, for example, had an excellent sense of rhythm and style as he danced with Violet, snapping his fingers and tossing his blond locks), they simply weren’t with the new beat; something looked wrong, distorted, off. I kept waiting for someone to say, “Let the kids do it; come on, kids, show us how to do it,” but they had the good grace not to. Besides, the three of us were very busy by that time, plying our way to and from the bar, coming out of the kitchen with hot little cheese patties, and chestnuts wrapped in bacon, and frankfurters with sharp delicatessen mustard, and beautiful tiny shrimp, and toasted little tortillas fresh from the oven, feeding the horde of hungry guests, most of whom seemed to have arrived expecting dinner, even though the invitations (which David and I had helped Sandy and her mother address and mail) had clearly stated Cocktails 3:00–7:00.

Mr. Caudell used a very heavy hand on the booze bottle, and a lot of the guests were beginning to get that six o’clock glassy-eyed look, including Sandy’s mother, who laughed too loud habitually, even when she wasn’t high, and whose laugh, I now realized, Sandy had imitated on the ferry ride home that night the townies tried to rape her. (We really didn’t know whether rape had been their intention, but we constantly referred to that night among ourselves as The Big Rape Scene.) It was Sandy who kept the flow of food coming from the kitchen, and a good thing too, because otherwise all those swilling islanders would have floated out to England on a sea of alcohol. When the sun finally went down, everyone turned to face the ocean, as though paying obeisance to a familiar deity. There were the usual “oooohs” and “ahhhhs” accompanying the sunset, the unvaried reaction that came every night of the summer, as though each successive sunset were a new and exciting experience instead of an identical replay of the one that had taken place the night before. The Dynamiters played right through the scintillating display out there on the horizon, blasting the deck and the house and the island itself with their own rendition of “Gloria,” Deuce wailing the words and Phil feebly bolstering him. The drummer was a good musician but a loud one, and the other members of the group kept turning up their amplifiers louder and louder in an attempt to drown him out, all in vain. As the music got louder and louder, as Mr. Caudell’s drinks got stronger and stronger, as the sky and the ocean and the beach and the deck got darker and darker, the guests got noisier and noisier, so that there was a cacophony of sound hanging on the night air, canopied by the distant silent stars and a full moon that brought, for an instant only, renewed sighs of “ahhhhh” and “oooooh.” The conversation was deafening, it bounced from the deck, it reverberated against the rear wall of the house, it threatened to obliterate even The Dynamiters’ detonations. “Sandra, you’re a nice little girl,” Mr. Matthews said, and put his arm around her and squeezed her. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Matthews,” Sandy said, “but I must see if anything’s burning in the kitchen.” Frankie said, “Yes, but the terrible truth of Pinter’s plays is exactly what makes them so excruciatingly human,” to which Mrs. Collins said, “But I think his people are horrible,” to which Stuart in one of his rare contributions said, “All people are horrible, darling.”

“I adore these two boys,” Violet said, putting her fat arms around Frankie and Stuart. “I just adore them. We have no secrets from each other, do we, boys?” and Frankie said, “Not a secret in the world,” and Stuart merely nodded, looking pleased and embarrassed. Mr. Ogilvy, who was an editor at a publishing house said, “Yes, but try to understand the Negro’s viewpoint. If he is forced to become an expatriate in order to become a man, why should he cling to any fond memories of this country?” Agnes Bergman, who was a close friend of Sandy’s mother, said, “I’m sick of everybody always talking about the Negro. How about the white man, huh, how about him?” to which Mr. Ogilvy said, “You’d better get used to people talking about the Negro,” to which Agnes Bergman said, “Screw the Negro. I don’t have to get used to anything I don’t want to get used to,” and David asked her if she would like another drink.

Mr. Patterson, who was a television executive, said, “Yes, but why do you think kids today are experimenting with all this crap?” and Mrs. Anhelm, who ran a notions shop in Queens, asked, “Why?” Mr. Patterson, grateful for the cue, nodded and said, “I’ll tell you why,” and Mr. Mannheim, who taught speech and dramatics at Columbia University, said, “I deal with youngsters every day of the week.” Mr. Patterson said, “It’s rebellion,” and Mrs. Anhelm said, “It’s their sex drive, that’s what it is,” and a woman wearing high-heeled shoes and a black bikini over which she had thrown a lacy robe that looked like a peignoir, said, “I’m from St. Louis.” Mr. Patterson said, “They simply refuse to accept adult responsibilities.” Mr. Mannheim said, “You’d be surprised how many of them are smoking pot,” and Mrs. Anhelm said, “I once smoked Mary Jane at a party,” and the woman in the black bikini said, “It’s the Gateway to the West,” and Mr. Mannheim said, “Did it turn you on?” and Mrs. Anhelm said, “I only smoked half a joint,” and Mr. Patterson said, “They refuse to emulate,” and Mr. Mannheim said, “It isn’t hep to call it Mary Jane any more,” and the woman in the black bikini said, “Hip.”

“It isn’t quite your proper bag,” Deuce sang into the microphone, “the scene ain’t yours, it’s ours.”

“Yes, but if we possess the power to blast them to hell and gone,” Mr. Porter said, “then why don’t we use it? Why are we holding back?”

“It’s girl and boy,” Deuce sang.

“Let’s demolish them,” Mr. Porter said, “annihilate them!”

“And flower joy,” Deuce sang.

The man with Mr. Porter, his bald head peeling, his face as lobster red as Mr. Caudell claimed his got in the sun, said, “I agree of course,” and Mr. Porter said, “Do you agree?” and the bald man said, “Of course, but what about retaliation?” Mr. Porter considered this for a moment, and then said, “Let them retaliate! It’s a question of lasting power, that’s all. We’ll still be going strong after they’re all dead and gone, let the bastards retaliate. Do you agree with me?” The bald man said, “Of course, I agree with you,” and Mr. Porter said, “You agree with me, don’t you?” and the bald man said, “Of course.”

“It isn’t quite your proper bag,” Deuce sang, “the scene ain’t yours, it’s ours.”

I took their empty glasses and carried them to the bar.

“Hello there, Sammy,” Mr. Caudell said.

“It’s Peter,” I told him.

“Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,” he said, and laughed. “What’ll it be, Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater?”

“Two scotches and soda,” I said.

“Coming up. You want a little snort yourself, Peter, Peter pumpkin eater?”

“Thank you, I don’t drink.”

“Ho-ho, zat ees rich,” Mr. Caudell said.

“It’s true, though.”

“What do you do, Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater?”

“I don’t get you.”

“With Sandy,” he said, and winked.

“Why won’t you let us set it right?” Deuce sang.

“I still don’t get you,” I said.

“Love all day and love all night...”

“Forget it, pal,” Mr. Caudell said, and winked again, and mixed the drinks.

“Lulu had a baby,” someone sang over Deuce’s voice, “his name was Sonny Jim...”

“She put him in a pisspot...”

“Shhh, shhh, die Kinder,” someone said.

“It isn’t quite your proper bag...”

“Two scotches and soda,” Mr. Caudell said.

“The scene ain’t yours, it’s ours.”

I picked up the glasses and carried them to where Mr. Porter and the bald-headed man were still talking.

“Because Goldwater himself advocated defoliation,” Mr. Porter said, “don’t you remember that?” the bald man said, “Of course I remember it,” and Mr. Porter said, “You remember it, don’t you?” and the bald man said, “Of course.” Behind me, I heard my father telling someone, “I’m a connoisseur of good scotch,” and then he grabbed me as I handed Mr. Porter his drink, and swung me around, and put his arm around my shoulders and said, “C’mere, Peter, tell these good people, am I a connoisseur of good scotch, or am I a connoisseur of good scotch?” I looked him in the eye, and I said, “You are a connoisseur of good scotch, Dad,” and he said, “You bet your sweet ass I am.” I excused myself just as someone said, “Is that your son? How old is he?” Behind me, I could hear my father saying, “Sixteen going on twenty-four,” and then a woman laughed, and said, “He’s so big for his age.” Sandy was leaning over the deck railing, looking back over her shoulder as I approached.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi. Where’s David?”

“Down with the band. He’s making a request.”

“What’s he requesting? ‘Far Far Away’?”

“Yok yok,” Sandy said.

The amplifiers exploded into sound again with “Chelsea Bird,” a hit expertly recorded by an English group and excruciatingly imitated now by Deuce and The Dynamiters. “Chelsea Bird, so cool, so nice, so cool like ice, so nice, so nice...”

“... because in this day and age, there are only hypocrites and Puritans and nothing in between. I ask you, does...”

“... Johnson really know what the fuck he’s doing...”

“All the world dig her, all the world love her, Bristol, Taunton, Leeds, and London!”

“... or is he only concerned about his precious image?”

“Blackburn, Bangor...”

“... into a drugstore and says he wants to buy a deodorant, and the clerk says, ‘Yes, sir, did you wish the roll-on ball type?’...”

“Die Kinder...”

“... all the world dig her, all the world love her, Bangor, Blackburn, Leeds, and London!”

“... ‘No, thank you, just the regular underarm kind...’”

“... of fools do they take the American public for?”

“Chelsea bird, so cool, so nice, so cool like ice, so nice, so nice...”

“... I love them both, they’re my precious sweethearts, these two darling boys.”

“All the world dig her, all the world dig her, all the world dig her, mmm.”

The voice suddenly cut through the cooperative din of the Dynamiters and the party guests, amplified and blaring from the group’s expensive loudspeaker setup, overwhelming all other noise by sheer volume and ineptitude. Sandy and I both turned to look over the deck at the same moment, trying to pinpoint this new source of sound, this intrusive and cacophanous groan from below. An amber rectangle cast from the living-room window above illuminated three quarters of The Dynamiters plus a short, chunky, dark-haired girl who had commandeered Deuce’s microphone and was holding it just below the head, as though producing, by her strangling grip on its neck, the horrible sound that permeated the night. We might not have recognized the girl as our friend from the beach had she not smiled in that moment, revealing her beautiful metal bands in what was doubtless intended to be a sexy grin accompanying the “Portsmouth, Dartmouth, Falmouth” line of the song. She continued slaughtering the lyrics as Deuce winced behind her, his head going deeper into his shoulders with each offkey bleat. Behind him, Phil’s fear of acne exposure fled before an overwhelming curiosity as he lifted his face to see who was being sick on the lawn. David came rushing up the steps to the deck, laughing helplessly, running over to where Sandy and I stood with our mouths open, listening. The dark-haired girl would not relent. The lyrics resisted her, the amplifier feedback squeaked, the drummer tried to drown her out by playing even louder (a feat I would have thought impossible), and Deuce and the embarrassed Phil tried to recover their cool by singing stronger than she, but only succeeded in sounding out of tune against her flat and penetrating whine, “All the world dig her, all the world love her, Chelsea bird, mmm, Chelsea bird, mmm, Chelsea bird, mmm, dig her, dig,” and the song ended.

The guests stood in drunken stupor and neurasthenic shock on the silent deck.

“Thank you very much,” the dark-haired girl said into the microphone. “My name is Rhoda.”

We took a walk along the beach after the party broke up.

There were a lot of parties on Greensward that night, and snatches of music drifted over the dunes, overlapping, and then getting lost in the steady murmur of the ocean. The moon had risen high and silvery over the water, dripping molten filigree from horizon to shore, illuminating the beach with a flat white light. The evening was soft, the distant stars blinked against a deep black void. We walked barefoot on the cold wet sand. We had already laughed ourselves silly over Rhoda and The Dynamiters, and now we were curiously silent, ambling up the beach without any clear destination in mind, stopping once to watch an airliner blink its red and green wing lights as it soared overhead, stopping again to listen to the clanging of a buoy far out on the water, and then picking up our steady gait again, the ocean on our left, the dunes dark with beach grass that rattled and whispered with each gentle gust of wind that came in off the water.

And then we sat on the edge of the shore; Sandy with her knees folded against her breasts, arms wrapped around them, skirts tucked in; David and I leaned back on locked elbows, legs stretched to where the water just touched our toes.

The night was so still.

The party sounds dissipated and then vanished completely, save for an occasional distant voice raised in farewell. There was a lingering sadness on the air, the knowledge that August was almost here, summer would soon be over. And then, as though giving voice to the permeating sense of grief, there was a sobbing sound behind us. Startled, we turned to look toward the dune, and saw nothing but the tall beach grass shifting in the ocean wind, illuminated by the brilliant moon. Puzzled, we looked at each other, and then Sandy got to her feet and walked swiftly to the dune. Climbing it, she signaled to us.

Rhoda was sitting with her face buried in her hands, sobbing bitterly.

“Who is it?” David said.

“It’s Rhoda,” I said.

“Go away,” Rhoda said. She would not take her hands from her face. Her shoulders were heaving. She had stopped sobbing only long enough to utter her command and take in a fresh gulp of air.

“Come on, leave her alone,” David said.

“No, wait a minute,” Sandy said.

“Go away,” Rhoda said again.

“She doesn’t want us here, for Christ’s sake, let’s...”

“Can’t you see she’s crying?” Sandy said.

“Well, what’s that got to do with anything?”

“He’s right,” I said. “Come on, Sandy.”

“No,” Sandy said.

“I can’t stand crybabies,” David said.

“Neither can I.”

“Well then, go,” Sandy said. “If you want to go, go.” She sat beside Rhoda in the sand and put her arm around her. “What’s the matter?” she said.

“Go away.”

Rhoda was gasping for breath now, still sobbing and trembling. She turned away from Sandy and flung herself full length onto the sand, her face hidden in the crook of her elbow. Sandy touched her hair and said, “Rhoda?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Come on, the hell with her,” David said.

“Oh, shut up,” Sandy said. “Can’t you see she needs help?”

“I don’t need help,” Rhoda said, gasping.

“Now you just stop that crying,” Sandy said. “Do you want to choke to death?”

“Nobody ever choked from crying,” I said.

“If she wants to cry, let her cry,” David said. “It’s better than her singing, anyway,” and Rhoda burst into fresh tears.

“Oh, Jesus Christ, listen to that,” I said.

“Don’t curse,” Rhoda said, sobbing.

“Come on, get up,” Sandy said.

“No.”

“Get up, or I’ll pick you up,” Sandy said.

“Leave me alone.”

“Leave her alone,” David said, “she’s a creep.”

“You’re a creep,” Rhoda said, gasping and choking and rolling further away from Sandy, who seized her left hand, and yanked on it, getting her at last to a sitting position, and then putting one arm around her waist, and pulling her to her feet. Rhoda staggered about blindly, her eyes closed, shaking her head and hiding her face, trying to pull away from Sandy, who finally slapped her sharply, twice. The sobbing stopped at once. Gasping for breath, Rhoda stared fixedly at Sandy, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“You hit me,” she said.

“You’re damn right I did,” Sandy answered.

“Now she’ll go screaming to her mother,” David said.

“My mother is dead,” Rhoda said.

“Her mother is dead, you jackass,” Sandy said.

Rhoda was making short brave snuffling sounds now, as though wanting to break into tears again, but afraid Sandy would hit her if she did. “Do you have a handkerchief?” she asked.

“David?”

“My handkerchief?” David said, outraged.

“Oh, come on,” Sandy said.

“No,” David said. “Absolutely not.”

“She can have mine,” I said, and reached into my back pocket. “I haven’t got one,” I said.

“All right, damn it,” David said, “here’s mine.” He handed it to Rhoda and said, “Try not to gook it all up, will you?”

“Thank you,” Rhoda said, and noisily blew her nose.

“How do you feel?” Sandy said.

“Terrible.”

“Why?”

“They all laughed at me.”

“That’s because you’re a lousy singer,” David said. Rhoda stopped in the middle of blowing her nose, and gave him an injured look. I thought surely she would begin crying again.

“You are a lousy singer,” Sandy said.

“I’m better than Deuce.”

“He’s the worst singer in the world.”

“I’m also better than Phil.”

“You’re probably also better than Senator Dirksen,” I said, and David burst out laughing.

“Don’t laugh at me!” Rhoda said, and turned her head into Sandy’s shoulder.

“I wasn’t laughing at you.” David said. “My friend said something funny. If I want to laugh at something funny my friend says...”

“Oh, shut up, David,” Sandy said.

“Well, I can laugh if I want to.”

“But not at her.”

“The hell with her,” David said, “I wasn’t laughing at her.”

“I like to sing,” Rhoda said defensively, blowing her nose.

“Fine, honey,” Sandy said, “but do it in the shower from now on.”

“Do it on a boat sixty miles offshore,” I said.

Surprisingly, Rhoda began giggling.

“There,” Sandy said.

“Sixty miles offshore,” Rhoda repeated, and giggled again.

“She’s a manic-depressive,” David said.

“Isn’t anybody hungry?” I asked.

“I’m famished,” Sandy said.

“Then let’s all go over to The Captain’s for some hamburgers.”

Which is what we did.

It rained again on Monday morning, the last day of July.

David’s parents were still in New Jersey, so we all went over to his house to listen to records. Eudice had just finished vacuuming the living room. She was well aware that we would make a mess of the place all over again, but she didn’t say a word to us, because she was still feeling guilty about her role in having brought David to justice.

David asked us if we would like to hear a talk for which he had got an A in a theory course, and we said absolutely not, and he said Go to hell and gave the talk, anyway. Actually, it wasn’t too bad at all. What he did was trace the development from blues and jazz to country western to swing to bop to rock and roll to the new experimental electronic stuff, sounding very much like a college professor, but nonetheless adding new dimensions to something which, until then, we had enjoyed only because the sound appealed to us.

The most important factor in modern pop, he explained, was the development and widespread use of amplification. Volume was essential to the new sound, sheer loudness that assaulted not only the ears but the entire human sensory system. It was, in fact, possible to feel (as he turned up the volume control and caused Eudice to moan in the kitchen) the buffeting of sound waves against our bodies, causing an actual vibration that was something different from the simple audio experience. For that matter, even my eyes seemed to be straining forward in their sockets as the sound got louder and louder, as though they wanted to see what my ears and my skin told me I was experiencing.

This assault, David explained, was mostly harmonic, in contrast to earlier music where the melody line was clearly heard and usually carried by one or another of the instruments. Today, he said, the melody was overpowered by background chords. These chord progressions (I had difficulty following him here) were usually similar and sometimes identical, with the result that each song had a familiar and comfortable feel to it. In other words, the effect was one of having heard any given song many many times before, a repetition that was hypnotic, demanding from the listener a minimum amount of concentration or involvement.

The dances were elementary, too, a simple response to the pulsing harmonic background, requiring little or no concentration, little or no involvement with one’s partner. They were, in fact, onanistic, David said, which means expressive of nothing but an involvement with oneself. The new experimental electronic music was carrying this sense of uninvolvement a step further because it threw away even the usual chord progressions, substituting instead an erratic series of sounds. It would become impossible to dance to the music of the future, he said. It would also become impossible to listen to it, except in the way one might overhear a random and accidental arrangement of noises.

He explained all this while illustrating his premise with some really good 45s and LPs. It was fascinating, most of it, anyway. Even Rhoda seemed pretty impressed by his instruction, although she was a bit ill at ease that first day with us. There was a tight enclosed feeling to the afternoon, the round wood-paneled living room and the fire David had set in the fireplace, the teeming rain outside, the records spinning while he patiently and expertly explained the evolution. Sandy was stretched on the floor before the fireplace like a long tawny cat, wearing tan chinos and a bulky beige turtle-neck sweater, barefoot, her blond hair streaming, her jaw propped on one hand. Rhoda sat rather primly at first in the blue wingback chair to the left of the fireplace, only later relaxing enough to tuck her feet up under her.

The rain was relentless. It never varied in its rhythm or its intensity, seemed in fact to add natural conviction to everything David was saying about the sameness of pop music. Rhoda, as it turned out, was a quite bright person who asked intelligent questions, and who smiled in delight each time David satisfactorily answered them. Her smile was a radiant thing, despite the unflattering bands on her teeth. It transformed her entire face, imparting a warmth to it that was totally lacking when she wore her serious, older-party look. She was not an attractive girl, but there was an appealing softness to her, in perfect contrast to Sandy’s glittering fine-boned beauty. As the afternoon waned, I found myself liking her more and more, and when David ended his demonstration, I was delighted that Sandy turned the conversation to Rhoda, asking her to tell us all about herself. I thought of that rainy Monday when we had drunk the truth serum, and I wondered now what Rhoda would say. She was under no obligation to tell us anything, of course, except that she was there, and the fire was blazing, and the room was warm and cozy, and there was an atmosphere of relaxed permissiveness, the rain outside creating an island within an island, drilling its narrow gray prison bars against each melting window.

“There’s nothing to tell,” Rhoda said, and blushed. The blush seemed entirely contradictory; I could not imagine it on the face of the girl who had boldly requisitioned Deuce’s microphone and drowned the night in horrid sound.

“There’s always something to tell,” Sandy said. She was eating prunes by the fireplace, lazily dipping her hand into the green Sunsweet box, chewing off the black meat, sucking the pits dry. She had told us the day before that she had been irregular for more than a week now, ever since The Big Rape Scene, when she’d been more terrified than she was willing to admit.

“Well, my mother is dead,” Rhoda said, and stopped.

“How did she die?” David asked.

“She drowned,” Rhoda said.

“Wow.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“On Martha’s Vineyard, five summers ago.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten.”

“God, that must have been awful,” Sandy said.

“Yes. Yes, it was.”

“Didn’t she know how to swim?”

“Oh yes, she was an expert swimmer.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well...” Rhoda said, and stopped. “I don’t like to talk about it, really.”

“Okay,” Sandy said, and popped another prune into her mouth. There was something chilling about the way she said that single word, as though she were suddenly excluding Rhoda from our closed society, in effect sending her outdoors into the driving rain. I sensed it, and I know that David did, too. I was surprised, however, to see visible recognition of it crossing Rhoda’s face and settling into her serious brown eyes. She hesitated only an instant before speaking again. Sandy had cowed her with a word, and I almost smiled at the ease of her accomplishment. I restrained myself only because Rhoda, after all, was going to tell us about something very serious and important, the drowning of her mother five years ago on Martha’s Vineyard.

“It was a bet,” Rhoda said. “My mother made a bet with this man.”

“What was the bet?”

“That she could swim out to the sandbar and back without stopping to rest.” Rhoda paused. A spark crackled out of the fireplace and onto the living-room rug. Sandy lifted the prune box and then brought it down on the spark, killing it. “There had been a party that night...”

“Oh, was it at nighttime?”

“Yes,” Rhoda said, “and I think everyone had a little too much to drink. I don’t remember very much about it because I was only ten at the time. There was a writer there who had written a bestseller about a man who takes another man’s identity, and there was a lyricist who kept using the word ‘fantastic’ all night long, ‘Oh, that’s a fantastic roast beef,’ or ‘Oh, where did you find this fantastic old lamp?’ I remember him very distinctly. I don’t know how the thing started, I think they were all a little bored. I was in my nightgown already, starting up for bed, going around the room and kissing everyone goodnight. The lyricist was very drunk, when he kissed me goodnight he cupped my behind in both hands and kissed me right on the mouth, smelling terribly of whiskey.” She blushed again. Outside, the rain swept in against the windows, driven by a sudden ferocious gust of wind. The eaves of the house creaked. By the fire, Sandy made tiny sucking sounds around her prune pit.

“They were saying that Mother was a great swimmer, and someone remarked that women had more stamina than men, and someone else said women had an extra layer of fat around their bodies, which was what made it possible for them to stay in the water for long periods of time without getting chilled. The writer, I think it was, explained that this was why so many of the long-distance swimmers had been women, like Gertrude whatever-her-name-was who swam the English Channel...”

“Ederle.”

“Yes, I think that was it. I don’t know if what he said was true or not, but I remember the women taking offense at the idea of having an extra layer of fat, and my mother saying — she was very slim and athletic-looking, you see — saying she had a lot of endurance and certainly did not have an extra layer of fat. All the women in the room said, ‘Bravo, Irene,’ and that was when the lyricist said Mother’s endurance was only a matter for speculation until it was proved. Daddy said that Mother had swum to the sandbar and back without stopping, the sandbar being a half mile offshore, and the lyricist said this was impossible, and Mother said she could do it again anytime, and he said How about right now?

“So that was how it started, I guess. I think they were all sort of restless, there had been a party on Friday night, and another one on Saturday night, and this was Sunday in the middle of August, and it can get kind of dull, I guess, I suppose it had got kind of dull for them. So Mother took me upstairs to tuck me in, and I could hear her changing into her bathing suit in the bedroom next door, and then she came in wearing the suit, a red one, and a short terry-cloth robe over it, and kissed me goodnight. She looked very pretty and very excited. When she kissed me, I smelled the same alcohol on her breath that had been on the lyricist’s, but of course she wasn’t drunk — she never drank to excess, just to feel happy, she always said. She turned out the light and left the room, closing the door behind her. That was the last time I saw her alive.”

Rhoda stopped again and turned her eyes toward the fire, as though trying to find in its turbid flames the words to explain what had happened next on that night five years ago. We were all silent. Sandy sucked on her prune pit once, seemed to sense the sibilant sound was an intrusion, and then simply waited attentively with her head bent, the firelight behind her, the prune pit in her hand.

“The house was empty for a long time,” Rhoda said. “They had all gone down to the beach with flashlights to watch Mother as she attempted the swim. I forget how much they had bet, I think it was ten dollars.”

“How did she drown?” Sandy said.

“A cramp. At least, that’s what they thought. They couldn’t know for sure. They said it must have hit her coming back, halfway between the sandbar and the shore. It was Daddy who broke the news to me. ‘Your mother is dead,’ he said, and I said, ‘No, she isn’t,’ and he said, ‘Rhoda, honey, your mother is dead.’” She nodded, and then stared into the fire again.

“That’s a rough break,” David said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I still miss her,” Rhoda said quietly.

“They’re pains in the asses,” I said, “but I guess you can miss them when they’re gone.”

“I thought my father was dead for the longest time,” Sandy said. “They got divorced when I was a baby, and I grew up thinking he was dead. Then one day this man arrived at the front door of the house and I said, ‘Yes, sir, may I help you?’ and he said, ‘Sandy, I’m your father.’ My mother came out of the kitchen and said, ‘Get the hell away from her, you bum.’ That was the first time and the last time I ever saw him.”

“That’s worse than if he were dead,” Rhoda said.

“He was handsome,” Sandy said.

“I often wonder what she was trying to prove,” Rhoda said. She looked across the room at Sandy. “What could she have been trying to prove?”

“Hey, put on some more music,” Sandy said suddenly. “Come on, David, how about it?”

“Okay,” David said, and got to his feet.

“You still haven’t told us anything about yourself, though,” Sandy said. “Tell us something about yourself.”

“Like what?”

“Something terrible.”

“I don’t know anything terrible.”

“Everybody does. Tell her something terrible, Peter.”

“I once made Ritz cracker sandwiches out of cream cheese and snot,” I said easily, “and gave them to my cousin to eat.”

“That’s disgusting,” Rhoda said, but she giggled.

“What have you done?” Sandy asked.

“Nothing.”

“Okay,” Sandy said, the same single word again, and again she reached into the prune box in dismissal. A look of panic crossed Rhoda’s face. She studied Sandy, who had turned her head away and was disdainfully nibbling on the prune. Then she looked at me, hopefully.

I didn’t say a word.

David had put on a Beatles LP, and we listened now as “Taxman” flooded the circular living room in the center of the circular house. Outside, the rain drummed its steady accompaniment.

“Well...” Rhoda said, but Sandy did not turn to look at her.

“This is the only really talented group around,” David said, gesturing toward the hi-fi setup.

“I like the Stones better,” Sandy said.

“The Stones are derivative.”

“But dynamic.”

“But derivative.”

“What I did once...”

“I also like the Yardbirds.”

“Second-rate.”

“I think they’re super.”

“What I did...”

“Yes, what the hell did you do?” Sandy said, turning toward her sharply and abruptly.

“You won’t tell anyone?”

“Of course not.”

“I...”

“Listen to this one,” David said as “Eleanor Rigby” started. “This one’ll become a classic.”

“I spit on my mother’s grave,” Rhoda said.

“When?” Sandy asked.

“At the cemetery. When everyone else had left. I stayed behind and spit on her grave because she had no right to die that way, no right to leave me all alone.” She suddenly covered her face with her hands. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said.

“Don’t be,” Sandy said cheerfully, and then rose and went into the bedroom, where she had left her yellow rainslicker and a brown paper bag. The bag contained two coloring books and a box of crayons she had bought at Mr. Porter’s. We spent the rest of the afternoon coloring pictures before the fire.

It was a very good day.

We decided to teach Rhoda to swim.

She assured us there was nothing psychosomatic about her inability to do even the dog paddle, no fear stemming from her mother’s drowning, no lingering effects of what might have been considered a traumatic experience. She wasn’t afraid of water, she said, nor of the idea of swimming, and in fact never gave very much thought to drowning — although she did often think of her mother’s death, but only in terms of an accident and rarely in terms of an accident that took place in water. The only problem about learning to swim, she told us, was her lack of coordination. She couldn’t seem to synchronize her arm and leg movements, and as a result she sank to the bottom each and every time she tried. We convinced her this was nonsense, and she agreed to have another go at it, even though she was pessimistic about the outcome.

We went around to The Blue Grotto, where, of course, Violet came out to greet us. She was wearing a white suit with bell-bottomed slacks. Sandy complimented her on the outfit, which I thought made her look like a brewer’s horse, and Violet told her she had bought them at a little place on the mainland called Kinship Korner. Sandy promised to look in on the shop, and then she and Violet exchanged some polite chatter about Sunday’s party, which I headed off when it started to get to the part about “the horrid little girl who,” noticing that Rhoda, ears pricked, was sensitively ready to take offense and possibly burst into tears again.

“Violet, how’s chances of renewing our old arrangement?” I said.

“Well, I don’t know,” Violet said. “You boys hardly spoke to me on Sunday.”

“We were very busy,” David said. “How about it, sweetheart?”

The “sweetheart” melted her completely. She looped her arm through David’s, flabby breast pressed against him, and led him around to the kitchen. He came back some five minutes later, the beer wrapped as usual in his poncho.

“What’s in the poncho?” Rhoda asked.

“Shhh,” David said.

She looked at him in puzzlement, and then gave a little-girlish shrug and followed us down to my father’s boat. Violet came onto the dock with us, helping us to cast off, and waving as we started the engine and moved out. Mr. Matthews’ Chris Craft was moored alongside a yacht from Floral Gables. He was aboard her in swimming trunks and blue cap, cleaning his fishing rods.

“Hi, Sandy!” he shouted as we chugged past, and Sandy lazily lifted her arm to wave at him.

We hoisted sail as soon as we cleared the breakwater. There was a good wind that first day of August, driving bloated white clouds across an azure sky, billowing into the sail, sending us skimming across the water at close to twenty knots. Sandy was at the tiller, wearing a new black bikini her mother had bought for her in the city. Her hair was held at the back of her neck by a tortoiseshell barrette, and she was wearing huge sunglasses and a gold heart locket that a boy from Mount St. Michael’s had given her the year before. I was wearing my sawed-off dungarees, which I sometimes swam in, and David had on a pair of white boxer shorts with a blue anchor near the change pocket. He looked positively great. He was handsome to begin with, of course, but now he had a marvelous tan, and his hair was much lighter, and his body was good and tight from all the swimming we did. He also had this very cool look about him, as though he were a recording star or something, vacationing incognito on Greensward and just dazzling anybody who happened to come into his orbit. It was a good confident look, and I tried to imitate it sometimes, but it never worked with me because of my sprouting acne and my dumb nose.

Rhoda wasn’t as white as she’d been that first day on the beach, but neither was she as tanned as the rest of us. She was, in fact, an angry red color that combined with her dark hair and eyes to give her a distinctly Indian look. She seemed, too, to be more dressed than the rest of us, wearing her usual one-piece bathing suit, a blue one this time, the kind of suit you’d expect a grandmother or a visiting aunt from Kansas to wear. She seemed thoroughly ill at ease aboard a boat, ducking in panic each time the boom swung across the deck, even though it came nowhere close to her. She finally relaxed enough to sit on deck alongside the cockpit. David tuned in his transistor to ABC, and then broke out the beer.

“I don’t drink,” Rhoda said.

“Beer isn’t drinking,” I said, and extended an open bottle to her.

“No, thank you. Really.”

“We’re not boozers, if that’s what you’re thinking,” David said.

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Well, suit yourself,” I said, and carried the bottle back to Sandy in the stern. I handed David another bottle and then opened one for myself. The beer was icy cold and sharp. It sent tingling little needles up into my nose.

“What does it taste like?” Rhoda asked.

“Like truth serum,” David said, and laughed.

“What do you mean?”

“Private joke.”

“Could I taste some?”

“Sure,” I said, and handed her my bottle, wiping off the lip for her.

She tilted it to her mouth, took a sip, pulled a face, and spit a mouthful of beer into the wind. “It’s awful,” she said.

“Hey, who’s spitting?” Sandy yelled from the stern.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Rhoda said, turning toward her. “I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t think...”

“That’s all right,” Sandy shouted. “David, why don’t you get her a beer?”

“She doesn’t want one!” David shouted.

“What?”

“I don’t want one!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like the taste of it!” Rhoda yelled.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” David said. He brought his bottle to his lips, took a long swallow, said, “Ahhhhhh,” and then belched. “Beg your pardon,” he said, and grinned, and drank some more.

“It looks good, but it tastes awful,” Rhoda said.

“It tastes wonderful,” David said, and drained his bottle. “Ahhhh,” he said again, and then threw the empty over the side.

“Doesn’t that mess up the ocean?”

“It’s a mighty big ocean.”

“I wish I had a nickel for every beer bottle on the bottom.”

“Who wants the tiller?”

“I’ll take it,” David said, and went back.

Sandy stood up and stretched. “Mmmm,” she said, “what a day. Where’d you put my bag, David?”

“In the cockpit,” he said, and she went below, out of sight.

“How far is the island?” Rhoda asked.

“Oh, five or six miles, that’s all,” I said.

“Is the water calm there?”

“Very calm. Nice little cove, no waves.”

“Shallow?”

“Yes. Don’t worry.”

“I was thinking maybe we should have gone over to the bay.”

“Too many little kids there.”

“You want to learn to swim with a lot of little kids around?” David yelled from the stern.

“No, but...”

“You’ll like the island, don’t worry,” I said.

“It won’t work, anyway,” Rhoda said. “You’ll see. I’ll sink straight to the bottom. You’ll have to rescue me,” she said, and giggled.

“It’s unnatural not to stay afloat,” I said. “Isn’t that right, David?”

“Absolutely,” he yelled. “If you just relax, you can’t possibly sink.”

Sandy came out of the cockpit, carrying her beach bag. She took a towel from it, spread it on the deck, sat, and opened a tube of suntan lotion. She greased her face and her arms and her chest and the front of her legs, and then she handed the tube to me, rolled over on the towel and said, “Would you do my back, please, Peter?”

“You’re so tan,” Rhoda said. “Do you still need that?”

“Keeps the skin from drying out,” Sandy said. “Wait a minute, Peter.” She reached behind her and undid the bikini top, lying flat on the towel, dropping the ties on either side of her body. “Okay,” she said.

I squeezed some of the lotion out onto the palm of my hand and began spreading it on her back.

“Do you all know each other from the city?” Rhoda asked.

“No, we met out here,” Sandy said.

“You seem like such close friends.”

“We are.”

“Actually,” I said, “David and I have known each other a long time.”

“Where do you go to school?” Rhoda asked.

“Me?”

She nodded.

“The Mercer School. That’s on Sixty-first.”

“Yes, I know where it is. I live in Manhattan.”

“Really? Where?”

“Peter, please pay attention to what you’re doing,” Sandy said.

“Sorry.”

“On Eightieth and West End,” Rhoda said.

“Would you do the backs of my legs too, please?” Sandy said.

“May I use some of that?”

“Sure,” I said, and squeezed some onto Rhoda’s palm.

“Thank you. Where do you go to school, Sandy?”

“Hunter College High.”

“She’s a genius,” I said.

“Oh, sure.”

“You are.” I paused. “She has an IQ of 157,” I said to Rhoda.

“Hey, I wonder whatever happened to that thing,” Sandy said, raising herself on one elbow, clutching the loose bikini top to her breasts.

“What thing?”

“The questionnaire.”

“Did you mail it in?”

“What questionnaire?” Rhoda said.

“Sure, I did. We should have heard by now, don’t you think?”

“Sure.”

“What are you talking about up there?” David shouted.

“The questionnaire!” Sandy shouted back.

“Cost us three dollars and thirty-five cents each,” I said to Rhoda.

“For what?” Rhoda asked.

“A dating service.”

“They’re going to supply me with a man,” Sandy said, and rolled her eyes.

“I still don’t understand,” Rhoda said.

“It’s one of those computer things,” I said.

“Oh. They’re silly,” Rhoda said.

“If you’re finished, Peter, please put the cap back on,” Sandy said, and then stretched out flat on the towel again, turning her head away from us.

“You want some more of this?” I asked Rhoda.

“Just a little,” she said, and held out her hand. I squeezed a blob of it onto her palm, and she spread it on her face, leaving a wide orange streak near her cheekbone. I reached out and smoothed it flat with my fingers.

“Thank you,” she said, and blushed.

“Where do you go to school?”

“What are you talking about now?” David yelled from the stern.

“Rhoda’s school.”

“Yeah, man, she’s cool,” David said, and grinned and snapped his fingers.

Sandy chuckled softly into the towel, her eyes closed.

“I go to Bailey,” Rhoda said.

“I know a girl from there. Adele Pierce, do you know her?”

“Is she a junior?”

“I think so.”

“She doesn’t sound familiar. Is she on the newspaper or anything?”

“Are you?”

“Yes, I write a weekly column.”

“What about?”

“Oh, mostly think pieces.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I just try to express my thoughts on various things, that’s all.”

“What’s it called?”

“‘Feelings,’” Rhoda said.

“Sounds sexy,” Sandy said.

“Oh, no.”

“No?”

“No, it isn’t, really,” Rhoda said.

“Well, I don’t think Adele Pierce is on the newspaper,” I said.

“Is she on the student council?”

“No, I don’t think so. Are you?”

“Yes, I’m my class representative.”

“You’re both putting me to sleep,” Sandy said, and yawned.

“What’s going on up there?” David shouted.

“They’re swapping biographies,” Sandy shouted.

“Did you tell her you’re on the swimming team?” David shouted.

I shrugged and said, “I’m on the swimming team.”

“Really?”

“Mmm.”

“You look like a swimmer.”

“How does a swimmer look?” I said, and grinned.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“We were undefeated last year,” I said.

“He was the only soph on the varsity team, too,” Sandy said.

“You must be very good.”

“Well, I’m okay, I guess.”

“He’s the best swimmer I know,” Sandy said.

“Will you be teaching me?” Rhoda asked.

“We’ll all teach you,” Sandy said, and sat up. Turning her back to Rhoda, she said, “Would you fasten me, please, Rhoda?” and then said, over her shoulder, “Why do you wear such creepy bathing suits?”

“Me?” Rhoda said, tying the bra top.

“Mmm.”

“I don’t know.” She raised her eyebrows, pulled a small grimace, and then looked down at her suit. “Is it creepy?”

“Well, sure it is.”

“Really?”

“Let’s say it’s not exactly what they’re showing in Seventeen.”

“I’m not sure I’m interested in what they’re showing in Seventeen,” Rhoda said. She looked down at the suit again. “Is it creepy, Peter?”

“It’s pretty creepy,” I said.

“In what way?”

“It’s too mature for you.”

“It covers too much,” Sandy said.

“Well, I have a fair complexion.”

“Like Snow White,” Sandy said.

“Snow...?”

“The famous Pine Street lawyer.”

“What?”

“Skip it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You should get a bikini,” Sandy said.

“All the kids are wearing them,” I said.

“Well...” Rhoda said, and blushed.

“Yes?” Sandy said.

“Well...”

“Say it.”

“Nothing.”

“You’d look marvelous in one,” Sandy said.

“I’d be embarrassed.”

“That’s ridiculous. Wouldn’t she look marvelous, Peter?”

“Sure. All the kids are wearing them, Rhoda.”

“Well, I don’t think my father would like me wearing a bikini.”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“I just don’t think he’d like it. He’s sort of stuffy about things like that.”

“He looks at girls in bikinis, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, but...”

“So?”

“I’m his daughter.”

“Everybody’s somebody’s daughter.”

“Except me,” I said.

“Yok yok.”

“What was that?” David yelled. “Somebody come take this damn tiller.”

“Do you want the tiller, Peter?”

“Come on,” I said to Rhoda, “I’ll teach you how to steer.”

“You go do it alone,” Sandy said. “Rhoda and I have to discuss her bikini.”

I went back to the stern and said, “They’re discussing Rhoda’s bikini.”

“That sounds like an interesting discussion,” David said. “Do you want another beer?”

“I would very much like to have another beer,” I said. “What’s our course, quartermaster?”

“Three-four-zero,” David said, “sighting on the fishing boat out there.”

“Isn’t she underway?”

“Not for the past ten minutes.”

“Roger.”

“Wilco.”

“Over.”

“Under.”

“Out,” David said, and went to get me a bottle of beer.

I felt very good. David uncapped the bottle for me and brought it back to the tiller, and I sat with the polished wood under my right arm, my legs stretched out, the bottle to my lips. From the bow, I heard David laugh and saw Sandy drawing a set of curves in the air with her hands. Rhoda laughed, too, her lips pulling back over her teeth, the metal bands glinting in the sunshine. I studied her carefully and decided she would look pretty good in a bikini, Sandy was right. After a while, the fishing boat began moving slowly east, so I sighted on the Coast Guard light marking the shoal, keeping it just off the starboard bow, until Violet’s island came into view.

“There she is,” I yelled.

“Where?” Rhoda said.

“Dead ahead.”

“See her?” David said.

“Yes, now I do.”

“Should be there in twenty minutes or so,” I said. “Sandy, why don’t you get one of those life preservers from under the berths?”

“What for?”

“So we can get Rhoda into the shallow water.”

“Good idea,” Sandy said, and went below.

There was another boat in the cove when we reached Violet’s island.

“We’ve got company,” Sandy said.

“Nuts,” I said.

“Do you see anybody?”

“No.”

“Where do you suppose they are?”

“Who knows?” David said. “The hell with them. Let’s go ashore, anyway?”

“Is it deep here?” Rhoda asked, peering fearfully over the side.

“We can’t go in any closer,” David said.

“I’m just afraid it’ll be too deep.”

“Put this on,” I said, handing her the life jacket. “You can’t possibly sink with this on.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. And we’ll guide you into the shallow water. No, tie it across the front there, that’s right.”

“I still don’t see anybody,” Sandy said. “Where are the binoculars?”

“I’ll get them,” David said, and went aft.

“Do I tie all of them?”

“Here you go,” David said, handing the binoculars to Sandy, who put them immediately to her eyes. “See anything?”

“No.”

“They’re probably walking the island.”

“Do you think we should go ashore?” Sandy asked.

“Why not?”

“I was thinking of our narrow escape on the mainland.”

“What narrow escape?” Rhoda asked, looking up.

“Privileged information,” David said. He took the binoculars from Sandy and scanned the beach. “There’s a woman’s beach bag on the blanket there,” he said. “I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”

“So let’s go,” I said.

“Do I have to jump in?” Rhoda asked.

“It’s really not deep at all,” I said. “Just put your left hand on top of the jacket here, to hold it down...”

“Why?”

“So it won’t hit you under the chin when you jump in.”

“Oh. All right. Like this?”

“That’s right. And then hold your nose with your right hand. Cross it over your other arm. That’s the way.”

“Shall I go now?” Rhoda asked, holding her nose between her thumb and forefinger.

“I’ll go in first,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, still holding her nose.

“You can let go of your nose until you’re ready to jump.”

“Okay,” she said.

I went to the side and dove in. The water was clear and cold. I swam underwater some ten feet from the boat, my eyes open, pulling with my arms, keeping my legs tightly together and not kicking, just seeing how much speed I could get up using my arms alone. I surfaced then and pushed the hair out of my eyes and waved to Rhoda where she stood poised on the starboard side amidships.

“Okay,” I said, “come on in.”

“You’re too far away,” she shouted.

“Okay, just a second,” I said, and breast stroked to about four feet away from the boat. “Okay.”

“Will you stay with me when I’m in?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay, so come on.”

She hesitated a moment longer and then grasped the top of the jacket with one hand, crossed her other arm over it, held her nose, and jumped in. She sank below the surface for only an instant, until the jacket popped her out of the water. I was at her side immediately.

“Here I am,” I said.

“Don’t leave me,” she said. Her eyes were closed.

“You can let go of your nose now.”

“Don’t leave me,” she said again, and released her nose, and opened her eyes.

“Don’t worry.”

David and Sandy came in with masks and fins and swam to where we were drifting near the boat.

“Everything okay?” David asked.

“Fine.”

“Let’s swim in.”

“Just roll over on your back,” I said to Rhoda, “and I’ll tow you into the shallow water.”

“All right,” she said, and obediently rolled over. I crooked my elbow under her chin, keeping her head up and out of the water, and began pulling for shore. David and Sandy dove under together, and surfaced about fifteen feet from where I was still towing Ropda.

“Same old garbage down here,” Sandy said.

“We ought to try the other side of the island,” David said.

“Peter, will you need us?”

“No, I think I can manage,” I said. I put my feet down, but I still couldn’t touch bottom.

“What’s the matter?” Rhoda said, alarmed.

“Nothing, just have to go in a little further, that’s all.”

“We’re going to try the other side,” David said.

“Okay, go ahead.”

“See you later,” Sandy shouted.

“Be careful,” Rhoda called, which I found curiously touching.

I towed her into the shallow water and then spent the next five minutes coaxing her to stand, assuring her the water would only come to her waist, demonstrating (“See? it only reaches to here on me”), cajoling, and finally losing my temper and shouting, “I thought you weren’t afraid of the water!”

“I’m not!” she shouted back. She was suspended in the jacket, refusing to lower her feet.

“Well, for Christ’s sake, it’s only three feet deep here, a midget could touch bottom!”

“Don’t yell, and don’t swear,” Rhoda said.

“Put your feet down.”

“I will.”

“So do it.”

“I will, don’t worry.”

“Now, goddammit!”

“Why do you swear all the time?”

“I don’t swear all the time, put your goddamn feet down!”

“All right!” she shouted, and lowered her feet.

“Are you touching?”

“Yes.”

“So stand up.”

“I will.”

“Rhoda...”

“I can feel the bottom with my toes,” she said.

“That’s right, now stand up.”

“Are there crabs?”

“Of course there are crabs, this is the ocean.”

“Do they bite?”

“No.”

“What else is there?”

“Barracuda, and moray eels, and giant squids. Stand up!”

“You’re so masterful,” she said, grinning, and stood up. It was the first time I’d ever heard her make a joke. It wasn’t such a good joke, mind you, but it caused me to smile nonetheless.

“Okay?” I said.

“Yes,” she said softly.

“Can you walk in?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so let’s walk in.”

“All right.” She hesitated. “Give me your hand, Peter,” she said. “Please.”

“Sure.” I took her hand in mine. “Don’t be frightened,” I said. “There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

“I know that.”

We waded in toward the shore. She treated the water as though it were an enemy, some strange mysterious foe that would reach out to swallow her if she did not carefully watch each ominous swell, each deadly surface ripple. When we were some two or three feet from the beach, she ran to the shore and immediately plunked herself down, as if delighted to find dry land beneath her once again.

“Whoo,” she said, “that was really exciting.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry I’m such a baby,” she said.

“Well,” I said.

“But I’ll try, Peter.” She nodded and then smiled weakly. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Well, first take off the jacket,” I said. “You can’t learn to swim with a life jacket on.”

“Some people do.”

“Yes, but that’s not the proper way.”

“Do I have to?”

“If you want to learn,” I said. “If you don’t want to learn, then leave it on.”

“I want to learn.”

“Then you’ve got to take it off, it’s as simple as that.”

“Okay,” she said, and nodded, and began loosening the ties. “We won’t go in the deep water, though, will we?”

“No, well stay where you can touch bottom.”

“Not deeper than my waist,” she said.

“Not in the beginning.”

“Not until later in the week.”

“That’s right.”

“Or maybe next week.”

“We’ll see how you do today,” I said.

“All right, I’m ready,” she said, and dropped the jacket to the sand.

“Now don’t go in with the idea of being afraid, okay?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“No, not much,” I said.

“Well, not much,” she said, and grinned.

She was terrified.

We spent perhaps twenty minutes in the shallow water, trying to teach her to kick. I would hold her hands and she would stretch out cautiously on the surface and then begin kicking, only to have her feet and then her legs sink slowly beneath the gentle waves. It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen in my life, it defied all the laws of physics. We eventually wound up with her arms around my waist, her cheek pressed against my ribs, and she kicking wildly while holding on for dear life, only to have her feet disappear, and then her legs again, it was absolutely supernatural. Finally, she released me, and stood up, and said, “It’s impossible.”

“Well,” I said, beginning to agree with her, “let’s rest for a while.”

“Take my hand, Peter,” she said, and we waded in to shore together.

The island was silent, the cove sat still and smooth, opening into the vaster ocean and the distant horizon and the huge canopy of blue sky and drifting pristine clouds. I lay back with my hands behind my head, and tried to understand why Rhoda couldn’t stay afloat.

I was beginning to think she was pretty stupid.

She lay beside me on her side, saying nothing. I glanced at her once and saw that her brow was furrowed, her lips thoughtfully pursed. Then she sighed, and rolled over onto her back, and stared up at the sky, and we were silent for a long time, looking up at the slowly moving clouds.

When she began speaking at last, it was without preamble, as though she assumed I’d been inside her head and would know immediately what she was talking about. She did not look at me, she continued staring at the sky without following any of the moving clouds, allowing them to pass across her field of vision the way her thoughts seemed to be drifting across the screen of her mind. Her voice was soft, the amorphous clouds above were hypnotic, I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. Drowsily, I listened to her, and in a little while I think I dozed and only dreamt her voice beside me going on in its same monotonous tone.

She began by apologizing again for the way she’d behaved, and by admitting she’d lied about her fear of water, but saying again it had nothing to do with her mother’s death. The truth of the matter, she said, was that she was afraid of so many things, probably because she felt so out of it most of the time. She couldn’t understand this feeling because, after all, half the entire world was composed of people who were twenty-five or younger, which she most certainly was, so why shouldn’t she feel right at home? And yet, she always had the feeling instead that a party was going on, and she hadn’t been invited. (She’d tried to explore this feeling in her column called “Feelings,” and had got letters from a lot of girls at school who thought she was merely a square, which she supposed she was.)

But there was no question in her mind that a party was in progress, and that she was out on the lawn only listening to the music and laughter inside. The music at this party was insistent, just as David had described it yesterday, hardly ever melodic, the driving chords and rhythms creating a hypnotic sound to which everybody danced, again as David had described them, in a sort of self-involved trance. No one touched or tried to touch, all the writhing and wriggling was directed at nobody in particular, it all seemed to be part of a show — Come see, come admire, like an exhibition of some kind. (She had written all of this in her column called “Feelings,” Rhoda said, and I thought No wonder you got letters.)

Everyone at this party is in costume, Rhoda said, but it isn’t a costume ball, they’re wearing regular street clothes that only seem to be disguises. The girls’ skirts are very short, with oh such marvelous colors, bright reds and oranges, greens and blues, pinks and purples, yellows and whites in stripes and polka dots, but they’re all combined in such a mad swirl that they seem like no color at all. And there are false eyelashes and wigs, flowing falls and sequins, metal skirts and plastic dresses, boots that reach to the calf or the thigh, See me, see me, everybody yells, Look at me, See me! And yet the funny thing, Peter, is that although everybody’s so exposed and naked at this party to which I haven’t been invited, there’s really no exposure at all, do you know what I mean, well, let me explain. (No, I thought, don’t bother, you’re putting me to sleep.)

Where’s the nucleus, Rhoda said, that’s what I mean. Where’s the person in all this action and noise, where’s the self in all this laughter? In fact, why’s there so much laughter to begin with, and why is it so loud?

The girls never just stand, Peter, they move, they’re in constant motion before the paintings on the walls, and the sculptures in the corners, lovely girls in motion in a riot of color against the riot of color behind them and around them, laughing and talking to boys whose hair is just as long as theirs, whose slacks are just as tight, moving and laughing with the stuff on the walls and in the corners but not at it, laughing instead at all the squares who aren’t in on this big joke whatever it is. I guess they’re even laughing when they take the old pill and go into the next room for some casual intercourse with a stranger or two (She must have blushed here, I don’t know, my eyes were closed), and then shake hands afterward and say So long, or How do you do, I don’t believe we’ve met, and then have another good laugh at the newspaper articles that tell where the action is, because this is where the action is.

The sun was hot, her voice was becoming more insistent (a bit hysterical, in fact), she seemed to find in my silent presence a sounding board for future columns called “Feelings,” she put her hand on my arm, her fingers were cold despite the sun, I think they’re afraid, she said. I think that’s why they threw this party in the first place, and I think that’s why it’s lasting through the night. But that’s exactly why I want to be invited, Peter! I’m as scared as they are, I want to be drowned in sound and color, I want to laugh with them, and dance with them and move with them! I want to feel them all around me, I want to see them, yes, see their naked legs and breasts and know that that’s the way I look, too, we’re all the same, all of us. Peter, I long to go to that party, but I’m terrified of going to it. I’m such a square, I know, I know. But I have the feeling that once I get there, I’ll really become like all the rest, that in our nuclear generation I’ll forget that I’m the nucleus and just lose myself in all the others laughing. I’m such a square, Peter.

I opened my eyes. The sky was still bright with buoyant clouds, the water still murmured softly in the cove, but Rhoda’s voice beside me suddenly chilled me, and gooseflesh broke out on my arms and across my chest.

The summer my mother died should have been the last summer for me, she said, I should have grown up fast and all at once, I should have come face to face with all the loss anyone ever has to experience. But each year, I seem to lose a little more, more and more each summer, until I want to shout ‘Leave me something, at least please leave me something,’ until I want to grab a microphone the way I did at Sandy’s house, and sing out louder than the noise, and thank everyone for listening, and then smile and tell them who I am, me, ‘My name is Rhoda.’ But I know, I know inside it isn’t any use, I’ll have to lose everything sooner or later, and I’ll join the others, yes, I’ll huddle with them in fear, and the party’ll end the minute I get there. That’ll be the last summer, Peter. Mine and maybe everybody’s. And I’m so afraid of winter coming.

“Mmm,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“I’ve got to be truthful with you,” I said. “That’s one of the things we don’t like about you.”

“What is?”

“That sometimes you sound like an old lady.”

“Well, sometimes I feel like an old lady.”

“Then try to hide your feelings, will you?”

“I can’t.”

“Because it isn’t much fun to hear somebody making dire predictions.”

“You didn’t seem to mind when David went on and on about pop music and amplification and...”

“That’s different, he also played records.”

“Well, if Catholics are eating meat,” Rhoda said illogically, “and Jews are decorating Christmas trees, where’s the meaning?”

“Of what?”

“Of anything.”

“The meaning is freedom.”

“Oh, baloney,” Rhoda said.

“Yes,” I said, “freedom, Rhoda. This is the nuclear generation, you’re right, but it’s not the awful thing you seem to think it is. We’ve finally freed ourselves from the force of gravity, Rhoda, we’re on the way to the moon, we’re free! And in the same way, we’re freeing ourselves from suspicion and doubt and ignorance and taboo. Rhoda, you don’t have to take my word for this...”

“Peter, don’t you see...?”

“... ask Sandy, ask David. Rhoda, believe me when I say there’s a new and exciting world everywhere around us, and you’re simply rejecting it. In fact, Rhoda, you’re the one who refuses to feel.”

“Me? But that’s exactly what I’ve been...”

“No, no, I beg your pardon. You said we were all having too much fun and acting as if every day was the Fourth of July.”

“I never said that.”

“Not in those words, maybe, but what’s wrong with a little fun, Rhoda? Why don’t you join the party?”

“It would be like kissing myself in the mirror,” she said.

“Well, what’s wrong with that, as a matter of fact? You’re a pretty girl, Rhoda. If you...”

“Am I?” she said.

“Of course you are. Rhoda, this is a new era, people simply can’t be bothered with petty restrictions and...”

“Am I really pretty?”

“... yes, and foolish prohibitions. Do you suppose it would make a damn bit of difference if you were to strip down naked right here on this beach?”

“Peter, I could never...”

“Do you for a minute imagine I’d be shocked?”

“Well, I don’t...”

“Rhoda, I wouldn’t be shocked at all, believe me. I’d look at you, yes,” I said, and grinned. “But I certainly...”

“Well, I wouldn’t do it,” Rhoda said, and got immediately to her feet.

“Well, don’t get excited,” I said, “I wasn’t suggesting that you actually do it.”

“I’m not at all excited.”

“Then calm down.”

“I’m perfectly calm,” she said.

She walked to the edge of the beach, her back to me, her hands on her hips, and stood there looking out over the water. I got up and went down to where she was standing.

“Would you like to try swimming again?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“What would you like to do?”

“Go home.”

“To Greensward?”

“Yes.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because David and Sandy aren’t back yet.”

“Then let’s go find them.”

“They went around to the other side of the island. You can’t swim, so how can we...?”

“We can walk,” she said.

“Okay, let’s walk.”

“Fine.”

“I’m sorry I upset you,” I said. “I didn’t realize I was saying anything so terrible.”

“It’s only that you didn’t understand anything I said.”

“I understood every word of it.”

“You were laughing at me all along.”

“I was not.”

“Inwardly.”

“Rhoda, I don’t see how you can know that I was laughing inwardly.”

From the high ground behind the beach, we could see most of the island where it fell away clear to the pine forest on the opposite end. There was a surf to the north, rolling in against the shore in cresting white breakers. On the eastern end, we could see Sandy and David bobbing on the surface, their faces in the water, swimming back toward the cove where we were anchored.

“They’re on their way back,” I said. “No sense going after them.”

“I’m sorry we argued,” Rhoda said.

“That’s all right.”

“I’ll try swimming again, if you want me to.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Peter...”

“Yes?”

“I just get very frightened sometimes. Forgive me.”

“That’s all right. We all get frightened sometimes.”

“But not by the same things.”

“No.”

“Let’s never argue again, Peter,” she said, “I’m too fond of you,” and suddenly kissed me on the cheek. Blushing, she took my hand, and we started down toward the beach again.

A man and a woman were lying on the blanket, on their stomachs, the man wearing blue trunks, the woman wearing brief red pants. Her back was naked, she had undoubtedly loosened her bra straps. The man had dark curly hair, and the woman had straight blond hair clipped short. The man’s hand was on the woman’s back. Their heads were very close together. We saw them as we came over the crest of the dune, and we both stopped dead in our tracks, not wanting to intrude, yet at the same time wanting to get back to the beach and the water. The man kissed the woman on the cheek and then playfully slipped his hand inside the back of her pants and moved closer to her on the blanket.

“Oh, this is awful,” Rhoda said.

“Shhh,” I cautioned.

“Let’s walk a little more.”

“No, wait,” I said.

The woman rolled over and sat up, facing the dune. Rhoda’s hand tightened so spasmodically on mine, I thought she would crush my fingers in her sudden grip.

“Oh, Peter,” she moaned, and I nodded wordlessly because the blond woman was not a woman at all, the blond woman was a slender, narrow-hipped, well-built young man who moved into his partner’s arms now, gently stroked his face, brought his lips to the other man’s cheek, trailed them over to his mouth, and then kissed him.

“Oh my God, let’s go,” Rhoda said.

“No, wait,” I said again.

She dropped my hand suddenly, quickly walked away from me over the dune, and sat apart with her back to the ocean. I continued watching the men on the blanket below. They caressed and fondled each other the way a man and a woman would, oblivious to their surroundings, very much concerned with the apparent effect of their mutual caresses. I suddenly thought of what Rhoda had said, It would be like kissing myself in the mirror, and then, oddly, all I could think of was the broken gull on the floor of the forest.

I watched them for a long while.

They broke apart only when they heard Sandy and David splashing around the point into the cove. The blond man brought his hand to his hair and patted it into place, turning his back to me. From the rear, he looked exactly like a woman again, his back slender and tanned, his hair coiffed in windblown carelessness. He was wearing a large ring with a green stone.

“Rhoda?” I whispered.

“What is it?” she said.

“Come on. Sandy and David are back.”

“Are... they still there?”

“The faggots?”

“Yes.”

“It’s all right now, come on.”

She took my hand, and I helped her to her feet.

“Why did you watch?” she asked. Her eyes were puzzled, her face was squinched up tight, the way it had been that day on the beach when she’d protested against our treatment of the gull.

“Because I wanted to see,” I said, and we walked down toward the beach to join Sandy and David.

“If you’ve seen one regatta, you’ve seen them all,” Sandy said that Wednesday, and promptly trotted Rhoda off to the mainland.

The regatta, as it turned out, was not a very exciting one at all. David and I watched it from the point, together with three dozen other islanders, all of whom began cheering when a boat with a striped blue sail took the lead. But that was the high point of the race. None of the other boats even came close to being in contention, and the outcome was foregone from the starting gun.

Sandy and Rhoda caught the three o’clock boat back to the island and joined us at the point. The race, such as it was, was still in progress, but the number of spectators had dwindled to perhaps a dozen or so, including David and myself.

“Who’s winning?” Sandy said.

“Guess,” David said, and pointed out to the horizon where the blue-sailed boat was a good hundred yards ahead of the trailing pack.

“How dull,” Sandy said. “Wait’ll you see what we’ve got. Come on, Rhoda,” and they disappeared over the dune.

David began humming. He always hummed very intricately, doing all the parts of whichever symphony happened to be in his head, getting thoroughly involved, and sometimes forgetting there was anyone with him. I kept watching the race and listening to him, trying to place the melody. And then suddenly, he stopped humming in the middle of a passage, surprising me, and said, “You think we should try to lay her, Poo?”

“What?” I said.

“Lay her,” he repeated.

“Who?”

“Her,” he said, and gestured toward the dune.

“Gee, I don’t know,” I said. This was the first time we’d talked alone together since almost the beginning of the summer, and I felt a little strange. David began humming again. Out on the water, one of the boats heeled way over and seemed in danger of capsizing. The small crowd on the beach let out a yell. I got to my feet and watched as the crew righted her.

“Close one,” I said.

“What do you think, Poo?” David asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I think she’d let us,” he said.

“Who?”

“Sandy.”

“Oh. I thought you meant Rhoda.”

“No. I don’t think Rhoda would. Do you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“But I think Sandy would.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, we can give it a try, anyway,” David said.

“Suppose she says no?”

“Well, let’s give it a try.”

“I’m a little scared to,” I said.

“I am, too. But let’s give it a try.”

“She’s liable to get sore,” I said. “We’ve got a pretty good relationship with her. I’d hate to see anything...”

“She lied about the bird, didn’t she?”

“Because she was embarrassed, that’s all.”

“Still, she lied about killing it.”

“What’s that got to do with this?”

“Only that she’s kept things from us,” he said, and shrugged.

“This is different.”

“How?”

“It’s like plotting against her.”

“Okay, why’d she let us feel her up in the movie?”

“I don’t know. I think it was the picture.”

“No, I think she’d have let us, anyway.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s try it.” David paused. “Wouldn’t you like to?”

“Yeah, sure, I’d like to.”

“She drives me crazy sometimes,” he said.

“Yeah. But I like her a lot, Dave, and I wouldn’t want to do anything that got her upset, you know.”

“We won’t, don’t worry,” David said.

“Also, we’ll have to be careful.”

“Oh sure, we’ll need protection.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

“I don’t know, just careful.”

“Yes, but we will need protection.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Very definitely,” David said.

“Maybe we ought to just forget the whole...”

“No, we can get what we need over on the mainland.”

“Who?”

“Well, we could go in together.”

“You look older than I do,” I said.

“Maybe we could draw straws or something.”

“I’d be embarrassed going in a drugstore.”

“So would I.”

“You look older,” I said again.

“You sound more mature, though.”

“You sound very mature, too.”

“Well, let’s figure it out,” David said.

“Look at that goddamn blue boat. Still in the lead.”

“Yeah. Does your father use them?”

“Gee, I don’t know.”

“I think my mother’s on the pill,” David said. “Why don’t you scout around?”

“What do you mean?”

“In his dresser, take a look through the drawers.”

“Gee, I’d hate to do that, Dave.”

“Would you rather go into some drugstore?”

“Well, no, but...”

“Take a look, then. Maybe he’s got some.”

“Suppose he counts them or something?”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they count them.” I shrugged. “Look at that damn blue boat.”

“Yeah,” David said. “Will you scout around?”

“I think maybe we ought to forget the whole thing,” I said.

“No, I want to do it.”

“So do I, but suppose we go to all this trouble, and Sandy says no?”

“Why would she say no? She loves us. She keeps saying she loves us, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t mean she loves us.”

“Sure she does.”

“Do you love her?”

“Sure I do,” David said.

“I mean, love her.”

“Well, not love her. But I do love her.”

“That’s what I mean. I don’t think she loves us, either. I mean, Dave, we’ve got a really fine relationship here, I’d sure hate to screw it up.”

“How can we screw it up? All she can do is say no.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like the idea of that, do you?”

“She’s a nice girl, she’d do it in a nice way.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Let’s give it a try,” David said.

“Well, okay,” I said, and sighed.

“You’ll look?”

“I’ll look.”

“And if he hasn’t got any, we’ll just have to go over to the mainland, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” I said.

The girls came back about twenty minutes later.

Sandy climbed over the dune first in a bikini we had never seen on her before, a wild sort of Gauguin print, skimpy in the top, very brief in the pants. It was Rhoda who thoroughly surprised us, though, Rhoda who stepped through the beach grass shyly and stood above us like a slave girl on the block, waiting to be inspected, dreading rejection, terrified that we’d laugh at her. She looked naked. She was wearing a dark-green bikini certainly no more revealing than Sandy’s, and yet I was shocked, and then embarrassed, and then puzzled by my own shock and embarrassment.

“Well, how does she look?” Sandy said, grinning proudly.

“Beautiful,” I said.

I thought we did a very good job with Rhoda, if I must say so myself.

To begin with, the new swimsuit brought about a remarkable change, liberating her body (I was alternately afraid and hopeful that she would fall completely out of it), and creating what seemed to be a more natural bond between flesh and water, allowing her to feel the element through which we were asking her to move. But at the same time, it seemed to free her mind as well, as though by changing her appearance, by forcing her into an alien costume, we had also forced her to awaken a dormant skill. We sailed out to Violet’s island on the day after Rhoda bought the bikini, and the change was apparent at once. The moment we entered the channel, she put on the life jacket without urging or instruction and then grabbed her nose and jumped over the side even before I was in the water. She waited for me to come in, obediently rolled over onto her back so I could tow her into shallow water, ran onto the beach, removed the jacket and dropped it to the sand, and then splashed into the water again, coming in up to her waist and waiting for us to begin the kicking exercises.

We spent all day teaching her, each of us taking turns. It was dreary work. For all her enthusiasm, Rhoda couldn’t seem to understand that we didn’t want her to bend her legs at the knees, that we were attempting to teach her the straight-legged kick she would need for a powerful Australian crawl, so she kept flapping her feet around in the water as though her legs were broken.

“She’ll catch on,” Sandy kept saying.

I wasn’t so sure.

To my surprise, though, she kept trying, seeming to gain a little more knowledge with each attempt, and at last realizing that we were trying to sidestep anything as elementary as the dog paddle in an attempt to move her directly into a strong crawl. Once she understood this, she straightened her legs ramrod stiff, and kicked with speed and determination, churning up a furious froth behind her, beating the water tirelessly.

“I think she’s got it,” David said.

“By George, she’s got it,” I said.

Whereupon Rhoda wearily dropped her legs to the bottom and then, puffing, trudged through the shallow water to the beach, where she collapsed as though dead.

“You’ll be a good swimmer,” Sandy said. “You’ll see.”

The very next day, our good swimmer practically had to be pushed over the side of the boat. She balked at putting on the life jacket, complained that we had anchored the boat too far from shore, told Sandy to keep her hands off her when she tried to help with the ties, and then resisted all our efforts to lure her into the cove, where I was patiently treading water. When Sandy threatened to knock her unconscious and throw her in, she grasped her nose with one hand, clung to the top of the jacket with the other, closed her eyes and leaped in with her legs apart, as though she’ were jumping from a burning building. Once in the water, she refused to roll over onto her back, pummeling me with both fists as I came close to her, her eyes closed, damn near drowning me, and forcing me to remember all the training I’d ever had in lifesaving courses.

“Slug her,” Sandy said.

“Don’t you dare!” Rhoda shouted, and opened her eyes.

“Roll over!” I shouted.

We were all in the water now, circling Rhoda like a school of sharks, trying to get close enough to help her.

“Damn it,” I said, “roll over!”

“Keep away from me!”

“You stupid idiot,” Sandy shouted, “he’s trying to get you to shore.”

“Don’t come near me!” Rhoda yelled, and struck out with her fist again, catching me on the cheek.

“Listen,” I said, “you’d better cut that out!”

“Slug her,” Sandy said again.

“You louses!” Rhoda yelled.

“Okay, leave her to drown,” Sandy said.

“Don’t you dare!” Rhoda said.

“Then roll over.”

“I’m not a trained animal act,” Rhoda said, and we all laughed. The smile broke on her face, metal bands catching sunlight, warmth spreading into her brown and frightened eyes. “Oh, all right,” she said, and rolled over.

I towed her toward shore, but the moment we reached shallow water, she stood up and ran for the beach and didn’t stop running until she had reached the dune. Standing on the high ground, she looked down at us like the lady of a besieged castle, and shouted, “Don’t come up here! You just go swimming around, and leave me alone.”

“The girl’s crazy,” David said.

“Absolutely paranoid,” Sandy said.

“The hell with her,” I said, and we went back into the water.

In a little while, Rhoda edged her way onto the beach, and then down to the shore. Demurely, she removed the life jacket. She was tanned everywhere, except where her body was newly exposed by the bikini. The white flesh of her belly and the sloping tops of her breasts looked peculiarly vulnerable. Daintily, she stepped into the water.

“I’m ready to try again,” she called sweetly.

“Try being a human being, why don’t you?” I shouted, and Rhoda giggled. “Oh, okay,” I said, and swam in to where she was waiting.

“I’m sorry, Peter,” she said, and looked down at her feet.

By the end of the week, we had her swimming around the cove.

Those were golden days.

We took the boat out every weekday morning, blessed with sunshine and fair breezes, feeling healthy and lazy and contented. Rhoda seemed to fit in more easily now, laughing at our jokes, offering nonsense of her own, rarely wincing at our occasional profanities. The boom no longer threatened her; she would laze confidently beside the cockpit, her eyes closed, a curious half-smile on her face, her head thrown back to the sun. She even wore her bikini with casual authority now, her body uniformly tanned, her look of flabby respectability all but gone; she had lost seven pounds in the past week, and she told us she had never felt better in her life.

I was beginning to like her very much.

I don’t know what it was.

I found myself staring at her whenever her eyes were closed, finding new and interesting things in her face each time I studied it; the way her brows soared up over her eyes, like quick sure charcoal strokes, her long black lashes, her really marvelous nose with its prominently sculpted bridge tapering gently to a delicate winged tip, her mouth with its full lower lip and deep bow, the freckles that showed on her cheeks even through the tan, it was really a remarkable face. I didn’t even mind the bands too much, though I kept wondering what she looked like without them. Once, I stared so hard at her mouth that she opened her eyes as though sensing my penetrating gaze, embarrassing me, and then she smiled and the warmth came over her face again and into her eyes, and she winked at me.

I felt so completely happy last August.

I think I had felt that way only once before in my life, and that was when I was very small, maybe five or six years old. My Aunt Bess owned a little summer cottage in Spotswood, New Jersey, and my parents used to take me out there every weekend. It probably was a dumpy little place, I can’t even remember what the inside looked like. It was set in a little clearing surrounded by trees, and it was made of wood, and painted yellow, with small brown-shuttered windows. There was a water pump in the clearing, just outside the kitchen screen door. A big aluminum pot used to sit on a milk crate under the pump’s spout. The whole family went out to Spotswood every weekend, dozens of us, aunts and uncles, cousins, even my grandmother before she died. I still can’t figure out where we all slept, there must have been a hundred beds inside that tiny house. What I remember most is the activity in the yard. The pump was the nucleus of that house, you see, everything centered and swarmed about it. There was constant traffic through the clearing, screen doors opening and closing, the pump squeaking, water splashing.

I can remember a striped canvas beach chair, and me lying back in short pants, my legs crossed, and bright sunlight pouring into the clearing, and the trees around the yard swaying, looking so very tall. I can remember the hum of the family all around me, buzzing back and forth to the pump, calling to each other, laughing, all in brilliant sunshine, and I can remember feeling warm, and safe, and extremely well-loved.

I felt the same way last summer.

One day, while David and Sandy were exploring the bottom on the western end of Violet’s island, I took Rhoda up over the dune and showed her the golden patches of marsh, and then walked her slowly in the sunlight toward the sloping shelf of sand and the luxuriant pine forest. Unlike the one on Greensward, there was a sure sense of life in this forest, the tall healthy trees moving in the wind, the birds navigating flawlessly in and around the branches, the chittering of insects in the undergrowth, the restless motion of small wildlife rattling unseen everywhere. The forest on Greensward was dead. The fire had consumed it, had scorched the ground so thoroughly that even the tentative second growth was stunted and grotesque, as though the earth could nurture only mutants.

“I love it here,” I said, remembering my sense of awe that day with Sandy and David, remembering too their curious indifference to what I had found so moving.

“Yes,” Rhoda said simply, and squeezed my hand, and then turned to smile at me.

“When you smile...” I said, and then shrugged.

“What, Peter?”

“When you smile,” I said, “you’re beautiful.” I felt foolish saying it. I shrugged again.

“Thank you,” she said, and then caught her breath as though mustering the courage for what she would say next. Her words surprised me, I knew for certain she was blushing furiously beneath her tan. I heard the slight intake of breath, and then she said, “You’re beautiful even when you’re not smiling, Peter,” and then, immediately, “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” I said.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I don’t know why I said that. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not embarrassed,” I said, even though I was.

“Peter, listen,” she said, “listen to everything.”

We listened. We stood holding hands, listening. A blue jay fluttered into sudden flight, cawing into the treetops. Along the length of a fallen branch, a squirrel skittered and stopped, nervously scurried away again, head jerking, and disappeared. A grasshopper leaped into the air at our feet, tumbling like a circus acrobat, and somewhere in the bushes on our right a katydid? a cricket? a cicada? made repetitive scratchy music. Rhoda stood with her head tilted, the dark hair curling in wispy tendrils on the back of her neck, her eyes wide, a lance of sunlight touching her left shoulder. Her hand in mine tightened. I turned her gently toward me, and lifted her face, and kissed her.

She didn’t say anything.

She kept her lips together I couldn’t feel the bands at all.

We walked deeper into the forest and found a tree with an enormous trunk and sat with our backs against it, still holding hands. I began talking. Rhoda put her head on my shoulder and stared up at me, and I just kept talking and talking. I told her about Spotswood, New Jersey, and about the time we lost my Aunt Mary’s dog and had to go searching for him through the underbrush, and how we finally found him whimpering in a tangle of Virginia Creeper, as effectively trapped as if a net had been thrown over him. I told her about my own dog, whose name was Kettle, and which I used to own when we were still living on Seventy-second Street, that must have been about seven or eight years ago. We got rid of Kettle because one night my father came in drunk (I didn’t tell that to Rhoda) and tripped over the dog where she was sleeping in the dining room, and she bit him on the leg, and he began kicking her, and I came running from my bedroom crying and yelling for him to stop because I was afraid he’d kill her. That was before I learned my father was a drinking man. I couldn’t understand why he’d been so furious with poor Kettle that night, I simply couldn’t understand it. (I didn’t tell Rhoda any of this, I just told her he’d had a hard day, and was naturally angry when the dog bit him.) My mother called the A.S.P.C.A., and they came for the dog the next afternoon. I was supposed to be at school when they called for the dog, but they arrived at 3:30 on the dot, just when I was getting home, two big men in uniform, come to take Kettle. I began crying. My mother assured me they would take good care of the dog, and one of the men said, “Sure, Sonny, if somebody doesn’t claim her in a couple of days, they’ll put her to sleep just as gentle,” the bastard, though I’m sure he didn’t realize what he was saying.

Rhoda listened.

I told her my ambition was to become a lawyer, that once my father had served as a trial juror and when the trial was over — he was not allowed to tell us anything about it while it was in progress — he had come home and described all of the courtroom action (he really told stories beautifully when he was sober — I did not mention that to Rhoda), and then and there I decided what I wanted to do with my life, which was become a famous trial lawyer. I told her that sometimes I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and pointed my finger at myself and began asking myself tricky questions. She didn’t laugh until I did, and then she laughed only tentatively until she was certain she was supposed to. She kept looking at my face.

I told her, oh Jesus, I told her everything I could think of. I told her about a collection of matchbooks I had once started, and how I saved three thousand and twenty-four of them until I got bored and set fire to them once in the gutter outside our building, just a huge pile of three thousand and twenty-four match-books going up in smoke, poof, and again she waited until I laughed before she did. I told her about the gull we had rescued and how it had been the start of a very special relationship between Sandy and David and me, and about how we had trained him, but I did not tell her what finally happened to the gull, and when she asked what became of him, I lied. He flew away, I said. I did not feel strange lying about the gull. What had happened with the gull was something between Sandy and David and me, and I could not have told Rhoda about it without betraying their confidence. I told her that Sandy was one of the greatest girls I’d ever met in my life, and that David was the closest friend I had, even though I never saw him in the city. It was odd, I said, how our friendship survived each winter, how we were able to pick it up again every summer, almost as though we’d never been apart. I told her I suspected the same thing would apply to Sandy, and when she suddenly looked hurt, I said that of course it would apply to her as well, now that she was one of us. I told her how much I loved swimming, and how pleased I was that she was learning so rapidly, how proud it made me feel whenever I saw her actually swimming around the cove. And this was only the beginning, I said (I couldn’t seem to stop talking), we were going to teach her how to swim underwater, how to use the snorkel and mask, and she’d be surprised at what was under the sea, an entirely new world that she probably never knew existed. (Are there crabs? she asked. I’m afraid of crabs.)

“Rhoda,” I said, “you’re afraid of too many things,” and I kissed her again, and when we drew apart she looked up at me, and touched my face with her open hand, and then swiftly lowered her eyes.

We left the forest at about three o’clock.

Sandy and David were on the beach, listening to the radio.

When they saw us coming, Sandy sat up and grinned, and said, “You’re bleeding, Peter,” meaning I had lipstick on my face, which I knew wasn’t true because Rhoda wasn’t wearing any.

“Gee,” I said, “thanks, Sandy,” and I jumped on her where she was lying on the blanket and gave her a noisy wet kiss on her mouth. Then David and I carried her down to the water, screaming and giggling and kicking, and I held her arms while he held her legs and we swung her out and dumped her. She came up struggling to keep on her bikini top, and then she chased us all over the beach until we were exhausted.

Rhoda sat on the blanket, watching us.

Sandy’s caller opened the telephone conversation in Spanish.

“Buenos dias,” he said.

“Buenos dias,” Sandy replied.

“Está Sandra, por favor?” he said.

“La soy,” Sandy said in hesitant Spanish.

“Ah, bueno!” the caller said. “Aqui el Señor Aníbal Gomez. Su número de teléfono...”

“No hablo español bien,” Sandy said.

“Sí, verdad,” Gomez said. “Usted no habla más que el inglés, el chino, y el griego,” he said, and laughed.

“Por favor, puede usted hablar inglés?” Sandy said.

“Sí, sí,” Gomez said, “I am sorry to speak Spanish, when it informs me here that you speak fluent Chinese and Greek.”

“What?” Sandy said.

“I have received your number,” he said, “and so I am calling.”

“What?” she said.

“It says that we have been chosen,” Gomez said. “By the machine.”

“Oh!” Sandy said. “Yes, yes, of course.”

“Ah, now you understand?” Gomez said.

“Yes, yes, certainly,” she said, and covered the mouthpiece with one hand and said, “It’s my date.”

“What?” David said.

“Shhh,” she warned, and then said, “Yes, Mr. Gomez, how are you?”

“I am fine, and you?” he said.

“Fine, thank you.”

“Bueno,” he said. “Sandra, es usted una morena?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your hair is black?”

“Oh, yes, yes, it is,” Sandy said.

“Bueno. You also have blue eyes?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Bueno. The machine says you wish to meet a Puerto Rican gentleman, which I am.”

“That’s right.”

“Who is very bright like you, which I am.”

“Good,” Sandy said.

“Also, I am five feet seven and one inches tall, with black hair and brown eyes, is that true?”

“That’s certainly true,” Sandy said, and stifled a giggle.

“How tall are you?”

“Five-four,” Sandy said.

“I wish to see you,” he said.

“Fine,” she answered. “When?”

“I had hoped this Saturday night, if that would be nice for you.”

“That would be very nice,” she said, and again covered her mouth to suppress a giggle.

“Where is this number?” he asked.

“Well, I’m on Greensward,” she said, “but there’s not too much to do here. Perhaps I can meet you on the mainland.”

“Please speak more slowly,” he said.

“The mainland. Do you have a car?” she asked.

“Sí, tengo un carro. Yes, I have.”

“Well, fine,” Sandy said, “get a pencil, and I’ll tell you how to get here.”

“More slowly, por favor,” he said, and she repeated what she had just said, and went on to give him a detailed auto route from Manhattan. They then spent another five minutes settling on a time and place to meet over on the mainland, deciding on 6:30 at the ferry slip, and then Gomez said, “I look forward to it, Sandra,” and Sandy said, “Me, too, Aníbal,” and he said, “Good,” and hung up.

“Well, I guess I have a date for Saturday night,” Sandy said. She was lying full length on her bed, and she rolled over now to replace the telephone receiver, and then began giggling. Rhoda, who was reading in the floppy armchair opposite the bed, looked up from her paperback and said, “What?”

“I said I have a date for Saturday night.”

“Who with?” Rhoda said, and I realized she hadn’t heard a word of the telephone conversation. David and I, who had been playing chess on the floor, had of course heard only Sandy’s half of the conversation, so she promptly filled us in, using a Spanish accent that was hilarious.

“You’re not going, are you?” Rhoda asked, appalled.

“Of course I am!”

“I don’t think you should,” Rhoda said.

“Why not?”

“It isn’t right.”

“Here comes Mother Hubbard again,” Sandy said, and rolled her eyes.

“Well, it isn’t right,” Rhoda insisted. “That poor man is probably lonely and...”

“Rhoda, let’s not make him into one of the hundred neediest, okay?”

“I don’t think you should go, either,” David said.

“What!”

“For different reasons, though,” he said, smiling. “To begin with, he’s expecting someone who’s twenty years old. You’re only...”

“I can pass for eighteen,” she said. “I’ll wear my mother’s wig.”

“Your mother’s wig is red. You described yourself as...”

“That’s right, but I’ll wear a kerchief over it. He’ll never know the difference.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” David said, and again he smiled.

“What’s that?”

“Send Rhoda in your place.”

“Who?” Rhoda said.

“Hey, that’s...”

“Absolutely not!”

“But Rhoda, it’s perfect!” Sandy said, leaping off the bed and rushing to where she sat. “You’re the right size, you’re the right coloring, you’re the right everything! David, that’s a marvelous idea!” she said, and threw her arms around him.

“That’s a lousy idea,” Rhoda said. She closed the paperback book with a small flourish, put it back into the bookcase with great care, and then said, “Anyway, my eyes are brown.”

“We’ll tell him the machine made a mistake.”

“And I don’t speak Chinese or Greek.”

“Neither do I.”

“Neither does he, for that matter,” David said.

“I don’t know any Spanish, either.”

“He speaks perfect English.”

“Oh yes, he sounds as if he speaks perfect English.”

“I was exaggerating his accent. He speaks fine. In fact, he sounded very nice.”

“Then why do you want to make a fool of him?”

“I don’t. I’m after the machine.”

“Why? What’d the machine do to you?”

“I don’t want to be computerized,” Sandy said.

“Then why’d you send in the questionnaire?”

“To screw up the machine,” Sandy said.

“But now you’re going along with the machine.”

“How do you figure that?”

“By keeping the date.”

“No, I’m screwing up the machine,” Sandy said.

“I don’t like that kind of language, Sandy,” her mother called from the other room.

“Sorrrrry!” Sandy sang back. “I’m screwing up the goddamn machine,” she whispered to Rhoda.

“You’re screwing up a human being,” Rhoda said. “You’re screwing up Mr. Aníbal Gomez, who doesn’t speak English too well, and who thinks you’re a lonely person like himself who wants to meet...”

“I said I don’t want to hear that language!” Sandy’s mother called again, a definite note of warning in her voice this time.

“I am a lonely person,” Sandy whispered.

“Oh, Sandy, please.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” David said.

“I haven’t got any,” Rhoda replied. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t want to get involved in this... double cross.”

“It’s nothing of the sort,” Sandy said. “The machine thinks I’m one person but I’m really another, so I’m sending along a totally different person to further confuse the machine.”

“People aren’t machines!” Rhoda said. “Aníbal Gomez is a person.”

“How do we know he didn’t lie to the machine, too? He may turn out to be an old man of sixty with his teeth falling out!”

“Fantastic!” David said. “A triple cross!”

“I don’t want any part of it,” Rhoda said. “Period.”

“Okay,” Sandy said, and walked out of the bedroom.

We went down to the boat at around one o’clock.

Sandy wasn’t speaking to Rhoda, and Rhoda was visibly hurt, and I didn’t know quite what to do about it I was very fond of Rhoda, but I did feel an allegiance to Sandy as well, and frankly I couldn’t see why Rhoda was making such a fuss over a simple practical joke. In fact, David’s idea seemed like a very good one to me. Besides, I had helped Sandy fill out the questionnaire and I did have a sizable investment in the outcome; three dollars and thirty-five cents does not grow on bushes where I come from. So Rhoda’s attitude seemed indefensible, and I could understand Sandy’s anger, though I did think she was carrying it a bit far by not speaking to Rhoda and causing a very strained atmosphere aboard the boat.

David came up with a new idea as we got underway, a suggestion I was sure Rhoda would welcome enthusiastically. He thought we should all keep the date with Gomez, which would provide Rhoda with the protection and camaraderie she might need, as well as enabling us to observe Gomez’s reactions at close range. Rhoda, sulking by the cockpit, squinting into the wind, said, “If anything, that’s a worse idea than the original one,” and David shrugged and looked at me, and I looked back at him, and then glanced at Sandy who was handling the tiller with all the warmth of a U-boat commander. I shrugged back at David, and we hoisted sail and headed for Violet’s island.

Rhoda kept looking at me as though anticipating support of some kind, but I still didn’t know quite what to do. So we had a jolly trip out to the island, Rhoda sulking, and Sandy fuming, and David and I trying to make jokes at which only the two of us laughed, oh, it was a very pleasant voyage indeed. When we got to the cove, it became apparent that Sandy’s freeze was only going to increase in intensity as the afternoon wore on. To begin with, she refused to come into the water. Then, when I asked Rhoda whether she was ready for her next swimming lesson, Sandy remarked, “She’ll never learn. She’s uncoordinated,” and Rhoda burst into tears.

“Now, listen,” I said, “this has gone far enough.”

“I can’t help it if I don’t want to hurt that poor man,” Rhoda blubbered.

“Who’s trying to hurt him?” Sandy shouted.

“You are!”

“I am not! Peter, tell her I don’t intend hurting him!”

“She doesn’t intend hurting him, Rhoda. Now stop crying.”

“Then why does she want me to go out with him and pretend I’m her and make fun of him?”

“I don’t want you to make fun of him! It’s only a joke, haven’t you got a sense of humor?”

“I have a very fine sense of humor,” Rhoda said, sobbing.

“Here’s a handkerchief,” David said, “don’t gook it all up.”

“I write jokes in my column,” Rhoda said, blowing her nose.

“I’ll bet they’re side-splitting,” Sandy said.

“Peter, tell her to stop.”

“Stop it, Sandy, can’t you see she’s upset?”

“She’s upset? How about me?”

“You’re both upset,” I said.

“You’d think I suggested something heinous!” Sandy shouted, pronouncing it “high-nous.”

“Hay-nous,” David corrected.

“Don’t you start!” Sandy shouted.

“Everybody shut up!” I shouted.

“I’ve never been out with a boy in my life!” Rhoda shouted.

“All right, everybody, shut up!” David shouted.

“We said we’d go with you, didn’t we?” Sandy said.

“Yes, but...”

“You think we’d let you go alone?” David said.

“No, but...”

“So what are you afraid of?”

“Don’t be so afraid of life, Rhoda.”

“This is only a joke, Rhoda.”

“We’ll tell Gomez all about it when the night’s over.”

“We’ll all have a good laugh together.”

“Including Gomez.”

“We’ll tell him what a good joke it was.”

“He sounded very nice on the phone.”

“He’s driving all the way out here, Rhoda, he must be very nice.”

“Am I really uncoordinated?” she asked, sniffling.

“No, you’re swimming beautifully. Isn’t she swimming beautifully, Peter?”

“Beautifully,” I said.

“Will you go, Rhoda?” Sandy asked.

“Will you come with me?”

“Absolutely.”

“And you’ll stay with me? You won’t leave me alone with him?”

“Not for a minute.”

“And you promise we won’t try to make a fool of him?”

“Why would we want to make a fool of him?”

“I don’t know, but...”

“Say yes, Rhoda.”

“I...”

“Say yes.”

“All right,” Rhoda said, “but...”

“You’re a darling,” Sandy said, and hugged her. “Come on, let’s get in the water. I want to show you something.”

She spent the entire afternoon with Rhoda in the shallow water, painstakingly instructing her in the use of the mask and snorkel, showing her first how to wash the inside of the face plate with spit so that it wouldn’t cloud underwater, and then showing her how to fit the mask to her face, and how to quickly lift it to release any water that might seep in, showing her how to pop her ears in case she ever went into deeper water and the pressure started to build, showing her how to blow water out of the snorkel, working patiently and calmly and gently, allowing Rhoda to progress at her own speed, without any insistence, until she was swimming freely around the cove, face in the water, and at last taking a few tentative dives with Sandy, who held her hand while they explored the bottom together.

On the boat, David said, “Did you look?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you check out your father’s stuff?”

I hesitated. The thought of going through my father’s belongings had scared hell out of me. I had tried to bring myself to do it, telling myself there was nothing to fear. But each time I started into the bedroom, I had the feeling I might discover something that would shock me, and I didn’t want that to happen. So I hadn’t done it. And here was David, asking about it.

“Did you?” he said again.

“Yes,” I said. This was the first time I’d ever lied to him in all the time I’d known him. I felt as if he could see clear into my skull, as if he knew instantly that I wasn’t telling the truth.

“And?” he said.

“I guess he doesn’t use them,” I said.

“Mmm,” David said, and shaded his eyes to watch the girls as they surfaced. “I want to get moving on this,” he said.

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

“We’ll be on the mainland Saturday night,” David said, “when we go to meet Gomez. We’ll have to get them then.”

“Okay,” I said.

“It ought to be a riot,” David said.

“Well, I don’t think we ought to make fun of him,” I said.

“No, no, of course not,” David said.

“I mean, we promised Rhoda.”

“Sure.” Looking out over the water, he said, “She’s really coming along nicely.”

“Mmm.”

“You still feel the same way?”

“What do you mean?”

“About her.”

“What do you mean?”

“That there’s no chance.”

“Oh. I don’t know.”

“She’s got great tits,” David said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Is something the matter?”

“No.”

“You sound funny.”

“No. I’m okay.”

“If you’re worried about Saturday night...”

“No, no.”

“... I’ll do the asking.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you come in with me, I’ll do the actual asking.”

“Oh. Okay. Sure.”

“Then maybe we can try it sometime next week.”

“Okay.”

“Right here. This’d be a good place, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

That was on Wednesday.

By Friday, we had Rhoda diving from the boat in the deeper water just outside the cove and spending half the afternoon below the surface. The water was exceptionally clear, and very warm now that it was August, but otherwise as disappointing as the cove itself had been, with little or no marine life to observe.

Our routine was unvaried.

We floated on the surface, masks in the water, until one or another of us spotted something that looked interesting. A finger pointed, a head nodded, the original discoverer jack-knifed into a surface dive and headed for the bottom, the rest of us following in formation. A glistening explosion of tiny bubbles trailed behind the kicking fins, I could see Sandy’s long blond hair flowing free in the water like a live golden plant, David’s powerful arms thrusting, Rhoda beside me. And then the discovery, whatever it was, a gleaming bottle top, a fishing lure and broken line tangled into a smooth piece of driftwood, a lumbering horseshoe crab, a school of tiny shiners, a pink bathing cap. Each new discovery delighted Rhoda; she would nod her head vigorously and then break into a wide grin around the snorkel mouthpiece, scaring me to death each time because I kept thinking she’d take in a mouthful, and choke, and panic, and forget everything we’d taught her.

Our underwater world was silent and exclusive.

We moved through it like conspirators.

Aníbal Gomez looked like an accountant.

He was wearing a simply tailored brown tropical suit, a pale-beige shirt, and a dark-brown tie. His socks were brown, as were his shoes, and he wore brown-rimmed spectacles. We identified him on the dock at once, the only individual there that Saturday night who looked even remotely civilized, standing apart from the ferry company personnel, who wore dungarees and chambray shirts, and the islanders coming and going in varied colorful and sloppy attire, and the sports fishermen in white shorts, windbreakers, and yachting caps.

The four of us had dressed for the occasion, too, though certainly not as elegantly as Gomez. Sandy had put on her mother’s red wig, not in any attempt to further baffle her Selecta-Date suitor, but only as defense against possible recognition by any of the townies who had chased us in July. She and Rhoda were both wearing thonged sandals and crisp cotton shifts, hers yellow, Rhoda’s blue; they both looked very pretty. David and I were wearing pressed khakis, sports shirts and jackets. The jackets had been put on under duress. Sandy had suggested that we wear ties, too, but we’d absolutely refused and threatened to blow the whole evening if she insisted, which she did not. As we came off the ferry and onto the dock, David whispered, “There he is.”

“Is everybody ready?” Sandy asked.

“I’m terrified,” Rhoda said.

“Let me handle it,” Sandy said.

“I feel like a hitchhiker with three friends hiding in the bushes.”

At the far end of the dock, Gomez stood watching the passengers as they unloaded, waiting for his date.

“Here goes,” Sandy said, and walked to him with her hand outstretched. Clearly expecting a brunette (On the phone, he had specifically asked about the color of her hair), Gomez was startled to see a redhead approaching him and offering her hand. He was a short person, coming eye to eye with Sandy, who, in the wig, looked easily as old as he did. His face was smooth and very white, his eyes brown. A gold tooth showed at the side of his mouth when he opened it in surprise. Tentatively, he took her hand.

“I’m Sandy,” she said, shaking his hand vigorously, and then dropping it. His eyes widened behind their glasses when he saw Rhoda and David and me walking over, and he seemed utterly baffled for an instant, seemed in fact as if he were about to run clear off the dock and all the way back to Manhattan. “Let me explain,” Sandy said quickly. “This is my friend Rhoda, she’s your date for tonight, she’s the girl who filled out the questionnaire.”

“But...” Gomez said.

“She’s very shy,” Sandy said, “which is why she used my name.”

“Ah, sí, lo entiendo,” Gomez said. He turned to Rhoda. “How do you do?” he said. “I am Aníbal Gomez.”

“How do you do?” Rhoda said shyly.

“But your eyes are not blue,” he said.

“She used my eyes,” Sandy said quickly.

“Oh.”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Rhoda said.

“That is all right,” Gomez said. He looked her over carefully. He still seemed on the edge of panic. Every thought flashing through his mind appeared instantly on his face, as though he were incapable of the slightest subterfuge. His eyes behind their magnifying lenses, his sensitive mouth, even his nostrils expressed doubt, and then suspicion, and then further confusion, and finally resignation. He had come all the way from Manhattan, his look clearly stated (he would have made a terrible spy), and for better or worse he would see this thing through, not with Sandy, it seemed, but with Rhoda instead, who claimed to have filled out the questionnaire, and who certainly appeared to be somewhere between nineteen and twenty with dark black hair, as she had claimed, but not with blue eyes, well, he would have to forego the blue eyes (all of this appearing in sequence on his face, he was about as inscrutable as a sparrow), and certainly of ample build, as she had promised, with very large tetas like Puerto Rican girls, and truly about five feet four inches tall, though she did not appear at all Oriental, but perhaps the Jewish part of her ancestry had dominated the Eastern influence, well, he would have to make the best of it. And then his transparent system of telegraphy flashed fresh puzzlement into his eyes and onto his mouth and caused his nostrils to twitch again, and we could clearly read his new concern: Who Are These Two Boys With Her?

“These are friends of yours?” he asked.

“Yes. They’re with Sandy,” Rhoda said.

“They’re with me,” Sandy said.

“Ahh,” Gomez said. They seem very young for her, his face telegraphed, but perhaps there is a shortage of available men on the island. “Well,” he said, “are we to be together?”

“I thought it might be nice,” Rhoda said.

“Ahhh,” he said, and his mouth turned slightly downward, and his eyes grew sad behind their spectacles, and he sniffed. “Ahh, well, if you wish,” he said.

The first thing David and I did was go to the drugstore. It was painless. David asked for a tube of hair cream and a dozen prophylactics (which I thought excessively ambitious), and then we went outside to where Gomez was waiting with the girls, and David made a joke about greasy kid stuff, which Gomez didn’t get. I was finding it more and more difficult to keep from putting him on, even though we’d promised Rhoda. He had no sense of humor, not the tiniest shred. His initial surprise and confusion had given way to an amiable submissiveness; he was willing to let us call the shots, and meekly followed us through the town, waiting outside the drugstore at our suggestion, accepting the idea of window-shopping before dinner, approving our choice of a restaurant and even, once we were seated, supplying coins for the juke box selections we made.

The restaurant, one of the least objectionable in town, was on a side street across the way from Wool-worth’s, its decor consisting largely of red leatherette booths and checked tablecloths. But it was clean and American, meaning it served a bland cuisine designed to offend no one. Gomez suggested we have a cocktail before dinner, but since we were all underage and didn’t need the embarrassment of being asked for identification, we all came up with various excuses which he accepted without question. Rhoda said she didn’t drink, which was the truth. Sandy said she didn’t feel like one right now, perhaps a brandy after the meal. David and I said we had each had two doubles before leaving the island, and didn’t want to chance another. But we all urged Gomez to have one if he wished, and he ordered a scotch and water, and then lifted the drink when it came and said, “Salud, Rosa.”

“It’s Rhoda,” she said.

“Rhoda? Ahhh, Rhoda. Ahhh, ahhh,” Gomez said and drank.

There was something terribly old-world about Gomez, something that spoke gently of haciendas and guitars, mantillas and black lace fans, soft Mediterranean breezes. The truth of the matter, however, (as he revealed it in an autobiographical monologue directed chiefly at Rhoda, catching us only tangentially as it were, but almost putting us to sleep nonetheless) was that he was born and raised in a Puerto Rican village named Las Croabas, thirty-six miles from San Juan, where his father was a poor-but-honest (ho-hum) fisherman except during the cane season when he took to the fields. Aníbal (it was a difficult name to pronounce, so we immediately bastardized it to Anna-belle) had lived in a wooden shack near the beach, and his only American contact had been with adventurous tourists who drove up from San Juan and rented his father’s boat for snorkeling expeditions. He had usually accompanied his father on these trips, taking the divers out to Cayo Lobos some three and a half miles offshore, and then watching the tall, elegant, rich people frolic in the water while the boat drifted and he ate his noonday meal of cheese and bread. Seven years ago, he had come from Puerto Rico to live with an aunt in Spanish Harlem. His father had by that time taken a job as a beachboy at the Caribe, and was earning more money than he’d ever earned from his combined fishing and cane cutting activities.

“Anything by The Stones there?” Sandy asked David.

“I don’t see anything,” David said. “Here’s a new Blues Project, though.”

“Oh, good, play it,” she said. “Do you mind, Annabelle?”

“No, not at all,” he answered, “but it is Aníbal. The accent is on the second syllable, Ah-nee-bal, do you see? not Annabelle. Annabelle is a girl’s name, no?”

Well, he went on to say, he was still living in Spanish Harlem, where he had managed to avoid the evil of narcotics addiction (those were his exact words) and where he worked during the day at a liquor store that had been at the same location for twenty-three years, while meantime studying accounting (we knew it!) at Columbia University three nights a week.

“You want to be an accountant, is that it?” Sandy said.

“Yes, of course,” Aníbal said, and smiled.

“Why don’t you have another drink, Annabelle?” David said.

“If no one minds.”

“No, go right ahead.”

“But it is Aníbal,” he said, and again smiled.

“Ah-nee-bal,” Sandy said, misplacing the accent.

“No, no,” Aníbal said, laughing, “you make it sound like ‘animal.’ No, no, it is Ah-nee-bal.”

“Well,” Sandy said, and shrugged, and smiled.

“It is difficult, I know,” Aníbal said, and then ordered another scotch and water.

He then asked Rhoda about the masters degree Sandy had concocted for the questionnaire. Rhoda was supposed to be twenty years old, of course, which made a masters virtually impossible unless she had graduated from college at the age of eighteen or thereabouts, which age she wasn’t about to reach for another three years. Trapped in Sandy’s original lie, Rhoda blushed and said, “Oh, yes, that,” and glanced at Sandy, who immediately said, “She’s very shy. Her masters is in sociology.”

“Ahh, yes?” Aníbal said, and it was my guess he didn’t know what sociology meant. His fresh drink arrived. He raised the glass, again said “Salud” to Rhoda, including us in a retrospective nod, and drank. It was then, I think, that we decided to get him drunk.

I don’t know whose idea it actually was. I only know that the notion was suddenly there, flashing between Sandy and David and me with the same electrical intimacy we had generated that night of the firehouse dance. Our eyes met. There was no need to nod, or smile, or offer acknowledgment of the idea in any way. It was simply there, we felt it taking shape and gaining power, it surged around and over the table, it was as if we had our arms around each other and could feel each other’s pulse beats: we would get Aníbal Gomez drunk.

We did not, however, reckon with Rhoda, who seemed to sense our scheme the moment it was hatched. When Aníbal finished his second scotch, Rhoda immediately suggested that we order, but David said, “Perhaps Annabelle would like another drink.”

“I’m starved,” Rhoda said, and shot a pointed glance at me.

“Well, we have loads of time,” Sandy said, “there’s really not much to do here in town.”

“Except eat the big dinner,” I said, referring of course to the Hemingway story and pleased when David got the allusion and nodded.

“Sure,” Sandy said, “have another one.”

“Only if you join me,” Aníbal said.

“We’re ahead of you already,” David said.

“If Rhoda is hungry...”

“I’m starved,” Rhoda said again, and again glanced meaningfully at me.

“Then...”

“Miss,” David said, calling the waitress, “another scotch and water here, please.”

“No, truly...”

“Make it a double,” Sandy said, and then smiled at Aníbal and whispered, “Save us the trouble of ordering another one later.”

“Sure, live it up a little,” David said. “What the hell, you came all the way out from the city.”

“But if Rhoda feels...”

“How was the traffic coming out?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Pués, ni malo, ni bueno,” Aníbal said. “So-so.”

“Where’d you leave the car?”

“In the lot. Near the ferry.”

“Here’s your drink,” Sandy said. “Salud.”

“Salud,” Aníbal answered, and drank. He shrugged at Rhoda, who now had a pained expression on her face.

“I’d like to see a menu,” she said. “Peter, would you ask the waitress for a menu?”

“Well, there’s no hurry,” I said. “Annabelle’s still drinking.”

“Peter...”

“Rhoda, there’s no hurry,” I said, and looked her straight in the eye.

“You promised,” Rhoda said, meeting my gaze.

“Eh?” Aníbal said, and smiled.

“Don’t blow it, Rhoda,” David warned.

“Eh?” Aníbal said again.

“Rhoda’s on a diet,” Sandy explained hastily.

“Why do you need a diet?” Aníbal asked gallantly. “You are very slim and nice.”

“Thank you,” Rhoda said.

“You are all very nice,” Aníbal said, and drank again. “Are you sure you will not join me?”

“No, but go ahead,” David said.

“Miss, another double,” Sandy said.

“No, please...”

“Drink up, drink up,” David said.

Aníbal drained the glass. Rhoda, fully aware of what was happening now, raised her eyes plaintively to mine, and I read in them for only an instant a sure accusation of betrayal, which I chose to ignore. If Aníbal felt like drinking, how were we doing anything so terribly wrong? I looked at Rhoda one last time, and turned away. On the seat of the red leatherette booth, Sandy took my hand in hers.

There were some swift currents swirling around that booth for the next ten minutes, and I began to get a little dizzy trying to cope with them all. Aníbal had completely entered into the spirit of the bacchanal now, recalling whatever annual feast it was the natives celebrated in the streets of Las Croabas on Holy Saturday, voluntarily ordering another double scotch, and swilling the stuff like water. His eyes were bright behind their spectacles, and I had seen that same brightness often enough in my father’s eyes to know that complete stupor was only a hairsbreadth away. I began to feel guilty about my role in getting him drunk. That was one of the currents, and it had nothing to do with anything Rhoda had said, nor anything to do with the signals her eyes had flashed. It had only to do with my father. It had only to do with this Puerto Rican connoisseur of good scotch who, like my father, might come to me in a predawn nightmare, and awaken me, and sit by my bed, and moan in inebriated cadence, “Oh, Peter, oh, Peter.” I suddenly remembered that day in the forest when Rhoda and I had listened to the sounds everywhere around us, and where I had lifted her lips to mine and kissed her without feeling even a suggestion of the metal bands. I thought of Spotswood, New Jersey, and of a clearing in bright sunshine, and a small boy in a striped beach chair, bare legs crossed, had my father been a drunk even then? it did not seem possible. Sandy’s hand over mine was warm and restless. I knew she was also holding David’s hand, and I remembered that night in the movie theater, and I thought of what she had admitted on the walk to the ferry, and of the townies wanting to get at her, and of David’s plans for her, and I suddenly got very excited and squeezed her hand tightly, and looked into Rhoda’s eyes, and for some reason had the strangest feeling I was watching Rhoda on film, as if the reality of Rhoda was rapidly fading, the reality was only Sandy’s hand and the promise beneath the cotton shift, the reality was here on this side of the table while the film, the illusion, was there across from us, Aníbal putting his hand over Rhoda’s on the tabletop and whispering, “Rosa, you a pretty muchacha, you know what that means? It means a pretty girl, Rosa.”

“Rosa ees a pretty gorl, sí,” Sandy mimicked.

“A muchas pretty gorl,” David said.

“No,” Aníbal said, “no ‘muchas’ what we say is ‘muy,’ we say ‘muy linda,’ that means ‘very beautiful.’”

“Thank you,” Rhoda said.

“De nada,” Aníbal said.

“Muy linda, that ees you, Rosa,” Sandy said.

“There is a rose in Spanish Harlem...” David sang.

“Ahhh, sí, you know that song?” Aníbal said.

“Ahh, sí, I knew it muy bien,” David said.

“Muy bien, very good,” Aníbal said, and his elbow slipped off the table and he almost hit his chin on the tabletop. He burst out laughing, and I was suddenly frightened.

“Let’s eat,” I said, “I think we should eat now.”

“No, Annabelle wants another drink,” Sandy said.

“Annabelle enjoys el boozo mucho bien,” David said.

“No more whiskey,” Aníbal said, “I may get drunk.”

“He may get drunk!” Sandy said, exploding into laughter.

“Tell us more about Spanish Harlem,” David said. “Tell us about the roses there.”

“Tell us about the rats there,” Sandy said.

“How about the rats here?” Rhoda said, suddenly and sharply.

“Oh-ho!” Sandy said.

“Olé!” David said.

“Ai toro!” Aníbal said, and picked up his napkin and waved it flirtatiously at Rhoda.

“Let’s order,” I said. “I think we ought to order.”

“Another drink, Annabelle?” David said.

“One more, but that is all,” Aníbal said, and smiled at Rhoda, and put the napkin back on his lap.

“Another scotch and water, miss,” David said to the waitress.

Aníbal was ossified by the time we got around to ordering. He told us all about a cousin of his who was a prostitute, and about another cousin who had been war counselor of a gang on 112th Street before he’d been busted by the cops, and who was now serving five years at Sing Sing, and he told us how he himself had once been picked up for carrying a knife, and of how he had got off with a suspended sentence even though he was eighteen at the time and could no longer be considered a juvenile offender. He told us he had seen West Side Story and rooted for the Puerto Ricans, but that his wish was to become a real American (like you, Rosa), which is why he had, when filling out the questionnaire, specifically asked for an American girl, and was somewhat surprised when they had supplied a girl who was of Chinese and Jewish ancestry, though of course Jewish is American, who is the Chinese, he asked, your mother or your father?

“Her grandfather was Chinese,” Sandy said.

My grandfather was a Spaniard, Aníbal said proudly, who owned seventy acres of land and a farm in the Meseta, as well as a town house in Salamanca, a very wealthy man. He had gone to Puerto Rico to visit his brother in April of 1936, only to receive word from home some three months later that the country was fast approaching civil war, and he had best hurry home to protect his interests. Aníbal seemed somewhat vague as to whether or not his grandfather had hurried home (he was, in fact, rather vague about everything along about then), but in any event it seemed the land was seized by the government, along with the town house (which sounded very fishy to me; I didn’t think Franco had behaved that way), and grandfather had emigrated to Puerto Rico with his family, a broken man who was now poor but still honest. (It occurred to me, while Aníbal was telling his story, that I had never met a poor person who did not claim his ancestors had been wealthy and powerful.) Old grandfather apparently did not fare too well in Puerto Rico, and died still poor but honest (not to mention proud) in the shack on the edge of the sea, his legacy to his only son, Luis, who was Aníbal’s father. So now, here in this wonderful land of opportunity, Aníbal was ready to restore honor and wealth to the family name by becoming an accountant and eventually buying his own home in, as he put it, “a nice residential section of the Bronx.”

“That’s very nice up there in the Bronx,” Sandy said.

“Almost like country,” David said, and winked at me.

“Sí, sí, I know,” Aníbal said.

We had begun eating by then, and some of the alcohol effect was beginning to wear off, but he was still slurring his words, and swaying gently in his seat, and smiling beatifically at Rhoda, who was furious at us for what we’d done, and even more furious at Aníbal for having allowed it to happen. When Aníbal ordered a brandy after the meal (Sandra, you will join me now? he asked, and Sandy shook her head demurely and answered, Oh, thank you, Annabelle, I don’t think so) Rhoda became nearly apoplectic. Aníbal finally staggered out into the street with us at about a quarter past ten, having paid the lion’s share of the check, which was only fair since he’d drunk so much.

The town was its usual Saturday-night self, riotously asleep even here in the business district. We crossed the street to avail ourselves of the big weekend entertainment — Woolworth’s lighted window — and then headed down for the bay front and the parking lot where Aníbal had left his car. The lampposts threw spaced circles of light into the blackness. Aníbal reeled along beside us, throwing his arms wide and bursting into song whenever he stepped into one of the circles, like a performer in successive spotlights. We were perhaps three or four-blocks from the parking lot — were, in fact, crossing the street to get on the same side as the lot — when we saw them.

I’m not sure they would have recognized us if our reaction hadn’t been so immediate and so obvious. But the three of us froze at once, stopping stock-still in the middle of the street as Rhoda and Aníbal moved forward to the sidewalk and then turned to see what was delaying us. The three boys were dressed just as they’d been dressed on the night of The Big Rape Scene, almost as though having once been typecast they refused to accept any other roles, levis, tee shirts, wide belts, loafers. They swaggered up the sidewalk, pushing each other and laughing, and then saw us, stopping the moment we did, freezing in an attitude of uncertainty. Then one of them let out a yell that chilled me to the marrow, “It’s Long Legs!” he shouted, his voice rising, the simple exclamation loaded with something more than merely joy of recognition, shrill with discovery, thoroughly malevolent in its promise of revenge for the merry chase we’d led them and the razzing we’d administered from the deck of the ferry.

I was terrified this time.

This time the danger was unmistakable, there was no wondering about illusion this time, there was only panic being pounded into the heart like a splintery wooden stake. What happened next happened in split-second sequence, and yet it all seemed to overlap, the only concession reality made to distortion. I grabbed Sandy’s hand and started to run, and then I head David’s voice shouting, “Run!” and then I remembered Rhoda, and dropped Sandy’s hand, and whirled, and stopped, and Sandy shouted, “Come on, for Christ’s sake!” and I ran to the curb as the three boys raced down the sidewalk, and saw the angry face of one of them, and seized Rhoda’s hand, and heard David yell “Let’s get out of here!” and Rhoda said “What?” and idiotically I thought of the three astronauts who had been trapped inside the Apollo rocket when the flash fire erupted, and the way one of them in his last few seconds alive had shrieked in what the Times described as a shrill voice, “Get us out of here!” I caught another fast glimpse of the boy’s face as he approached, and then saw that Aníbal had his mouth open, and I lunged forward and pulled Rhoda off the sidewalk, and heard Sandy shout, “Stop them, Anna-belle! They’re after Rhoda!”

Aníbal reacted at once. He planted his feet wide, clenched his fists and calmly and deliberately and drunkenly waited for the rush of the first boy, who was almost upon him now. This was something he understood, Sandy had chosen precisely the words to hurl at him, “They’re after Rhoda!” This was pride and this was honor and this was manhood, and this was only the code that had contributed to the flow of mucho sangre along 111th Street and environs, “They’re after our girl, they’re after our turf, they’re after our balls, get them, get them, get them!” I suddenly wondered if he’d told us even one tenth of the truth about his life in Spanish Harlem, and as we ran across the street again, I turned for a last look at Aníbal Gomez. Hunched forward in the light of the lamppost, wearing his neat brown suit, swaying somewhat with the liquor that still fumed inside him, he stood with his slender accountant’s hands clenched, and bravely prepared to defend the honor of the wrong girl the computer had provided.

“Goddamn you, come on!” Sandy shouted, and the hero Aníbal Gomez burned himself in my mind in brown silhouette, and I thought again of the heroes in the space capsule and the way they had been reduced to merely terrified human beings at the end, and wondered if Aníbal Gomez would also scream to the unseen power that was NASA Control or whoever when three townie hoods tried to stomp out his brains — but it was Rhoda who screamed instead and tried to go back to him.

I grabbed her hand, I swung her around, I pulled her up the street. She was still screaming. Sandy ran over to where we were struggling. Behind us, I could hear grunting sounds, the muffled thud of fists, gentle mayhem, while here apart from the danger Rhoda screamed to the night and Sandy approached with terror-filled blue eyes, blond hair streaming from beneath the red wig, and quickly brought her hand to Rhoda’s mouth to smother the cries. I grabbed Rhoda’s arms and held them pinned to her sides while she squirmed and struggled to get loose, trying to calm her, knowing her screams would do no good, we did not want police on the scene, we did not want to have to explain fuzz to our parents. She was wearing lipstick Sandy had expertly helped her to apply, her mouth was slippery, she twisted her head sharply to the left leaving a wide blood-red smear on the right side of her face, escaping Sandy’s hand and screaming again, screaming hysterically while behind us the grunting went on, the pulpy sound of fists, the soft noise of people sweating hard to kill each other. “Hold her!” Sandy shouted, grasping for her mouth again — and Rhoda bit her.

She yanked back her hand. A look of startled rage crossed her face. “You fucking idiot!” she shrieked, and reached for her again, lips skinned back, teeth bared as if to return the bite. Something slid into her eyes. Intelligence or guile, cunning or concern, it jarred her to an immediate stop. Trembling, she forced a smile onto her mouth and gently said, “Rhoda, we can’t stay here. Come on, Rhoda. Please.”

Rhoda nodded.

We began running toward the ferry slip.

Behind us, I heard Aníbal scream, “Ayúdeme, por Dios, ayúdeme!”

The night wasn’t over yet, the night was just beginning.

Rhoda wept all the way back to the island, sitting inside on the ferry, and attracting the attention of several grownups who must have thought Christ knew what. We tried to calm her down, but she just kept shaking her head and weeping, so finally the three of us went outside and stood on the deck, but we didn’t say anything to each other we just kept watching the water slide by the boat.

I felt lousy.

When we got to Greensward, we took a jitney up the beach and said goodnight to each other without making any plans for the next day. I went inside the house and could tell immediately that it was empty. This was Saturday night, and the end-of-August parties had already started, a week sooner than they should have. My parents were certain to be out having a grand old time, Daddy guzzling scotch and Mommy shooting green-eyed daggers at him. I went into my room, took off my clothes, put on a nightshirt I had bought from a guy who went to boarding school, and climbed into bed. I kept thinking of Aníbal Gomez facing those hoods. I kept hearing the soft sounds of combat.

I was walking through a castle. Alfred Hitchcock was showing me through the castle. There were large high stone rooms. There were tattered drapes hanging at arched windows. There was a closed door. “Don’t go into that room,” Hitchcock warned me. The door of the room opened a crack. Sandy in her mother’s red wig whispered, “Come to me, Peter, come see my tits.” David was behind her, grinning. His hands came up. He began fondling her nipples. The door closed. “Don’t go into that room,” Hitchcock said again.

The castle was endless.

I tried to follow Hitchcock, but he was walking very fast, and I lost him. I was alone in what must have been the ballroom, with a huge chandelier hanging in the center of it, candles guttering, torn drapes moving at the windows, dust on the floor, knee-deep dust that rose and settled as I walked through it.

The candles went out.

There were things in the darkness, bats or birds. They flew silently about my head. I could hear the soft flutter of their wings. The dust was deeper. I had difficulty moving through it. It was higher on my body, it had risen to my chest.

“That is the dust of corpses,” Hitchcock’s voice said.

The fluttering above my head stopped. There was stillness. The dust had risen to my neck. I pushed through it in panic. I had to get back to the room. The dust touched my nostrils. I began breathing it. It was in my mouth and in my nose. I tried to push it away from my face. I saw the closed door through the darkness, through the dust. The dust was heavy and thick, I pushed through it and breathed it and spit it and choked on it. I reached the door. I forced my hand through the dust and clutched the doorknob. “Come,” Sandy said. “Hurry,” David said. I could not turn the knob. I struggled with the knob. The dust was rising over my head. I was suffocating. “Ayúdeme,” I shouted, “por Dios, ayúdeme!” and the knob turned, and the door opened.

The room was white, white walls, white ceiling, white floor, white drapes flowing over windows through which a blinding white light streamed.

They were moaning.

They were in the far corner of the room where the white walls joined, naked and white on the white polished floor, fucking.

I screamed.

“Peter,” the voice said.

I screamed again.

“Oh, Peter,” the voice said.

I opened my eyes.

My father was sitting by the side of the bed.

“Oh, Peter,” he said, “oh, Peter.”

“Get away from me!” I screamed.

“Oh, Peter,” he said, “oh, Peter.”

I got out of bed. I was sweating. I ran out of the bedroom, and then out of the house, and I stood outside breathing hard and saw the light in my father’s bedroom go on. I heard my mother say something in an angry voice, and heard an object falling, and my father cursing, and then the light went out and everything was still. I kept watching the house for a long time.

When I finally went inside, my father was snoring. I tiptoed over to the open bedroom door and looked in. My mother was asleep, too. I went into the living room.

I opened a fifth of Cutty Sark and took it with me into my bedroom. I drank right from the bottle. I must have finished half the bottle, and then I guess I passed out.

I slept until eleven.

It was a bright hot muggy day. The sheets were sticking to me when I woke up, and I was covered with sweat. I felt mean and hot and surly. I looked at the clock on the dresser, and then I called David while I was still in bed and asked him what the plan was for the day.

“You know what the plan is,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know,” he said.

“I don’t think I can get the boat,” I said. “This is Sunday. My father’ll probably want to use it again.”

“Oh,” David said. “Yeah.”

“So it’ll have to wait till tomorrow,” I said.

“Yeah,” David said, and sighed. “Well, I’ll give Sandy a ring, we’ll probably go out to the point.”

“Okay,” I said, and hesitated. “You think I should call Rhoda?”

“Why not?”

“Well, she seemed pretty upset last night.”

“She’s probably fine by now,” David said. “You going to stop by here for me?”

“Yeah, sure, give me a half hour, okay?”

“Right, I’ll call Sandy.”

“And you think I should call Rhoda, huh?”

“Sure,” David said, and hung up.

I put the phone back on the cradle and looked up at the ceiling. There were four squashed mosquitoes near the light fixture in the center of the room. I had killed them at the very beginning of the summer, before my father and I had put up the screens. I thought of the night before, and then sighed and got out of bed. I didn’t feel like calling Rhoda just yet. I felt that if I called her right then, I would probably begin yelling at her over the phone, that was the way I felt. I had a terrible headache and I was a little sick to my stomach. I had never drunk hard liquor before, and I decided now that I didn’t like it at all, not if it made you feel this way afterward. I sneaked the half-empty fifth back into the living room, and then I went into the kitchen and told my mother I’d like some orange juice and cold cereal, but nothing else. She naturally raised a fuss, so I also had scrambled eggs and corn muffins and then vomited everything up in the bathroom.

I was getting dressed for the beach when the telephone rang. It was Sandy, and she sounded very cheerful.

“Hello, gorgeous,” she said, “how do you feel this morning?”

“Just great,” I said, and pulled a face.

“I wonder how Annabelle made out,” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“He shouldn’t have got so drunk.”

“Well...”

“I called Rhoda,” she said, changing the subject. “We want to go out to the point, is that okay with you?”

“Sure.” I hesitated and then said, “You called Rhoda?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, last night...”

“Oh, she was hysterical last night,” Sandy said. “You can’t blame her, can you? I was pretty scared myself.”

“So was I.”

“That was cool,” Sandy said. “What Annabelle did.”

“Mmm.”

“But he should have known better than to drink so much.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Okay, we’ll meet you out at the point in ten minutes or so, okay?”

“Yes,” I said, “fine.”

“It’s very hot,” Sandy said, and hung up.

“Where are you going?” my mother asked.

“Out to the point.”

“The water’s supposed to be rough today,” she said. “Be careful.”

“We’re always careful,” I said.

“Ha-ha,” my mother said.

My father came out of the bedroom in his bathrobe. “Good morning, son,” he said.

“Will you be using the boat today?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Ellie?” he said, turning to my mother.

“We promised the Cordons,” my mother said, “but what do you think? The water’s supposed to be rough today.”

“There aren’t any warnings up, are there?”

“No, but the water’s supposed to be rough.”

“Well, let’s give it a try. We promised the Conlons.”

“All right,” my mother said.

“Sorry, son,” my father said.

“That’s okay,” I said. “So that’s where we’ll be, out at the point.”

“Be careful,” my mother said again, and I left the house.

The beach was suffocatingly hot and thronged with people. This was Sunday and the normal weekday crowd should have been doubled or at most trebled, but the incredible heat had driven the entire world to the shore, and people sprawled now on every available inch of sand, hoping for a vagrant breeze. There was no wind at all, but the ocean was rough nonetheless, with huge waves rolling in and breaking furiously against the shore. The sky was a yellowish white, not a trace of blue anywhere, not a single cloud breaking the glaring oval that stretched like wet skin over ocean and beach. It was difficult to breathe. The sun seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, the air shimmered with diffused light. I remembered that I’d left my sunglasses back at the house, but the sand was too hot to make a return trip even thinkable. By the time I reached David’s house, I was exhausted. He was waiting for me on the sundeck.

“Hot, huh, Poo?” he said.

I nodded.

“How’d you like that Annabelle?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“He shouldn’t have got so drunk. You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” I said, “let’s go.”

We started walking up the beach. It was hard hot work. We were silent for a long time.

“It doesn’t seem real,” I said at last.

“What doesn’t?”

“Last night. Annabelle.”

“It wasn’t real,” David said, and laughed. “The computer dreamed it up.”

“I just hope he didn’t get in any trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

“With the police or anything?”

“Oh, I’m sure he didn’t,” David said.

“How do you know?”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Yeah, that’s just it,” I said.

“He shouldn’t have drunk so much,” David said. “There they are.”

They had spread a blanket near the water’s edge; they both looked up as we approached, but only Sandy waved.

“Damn it, I forgot the umbrella,” David said.

“Oh, great.”

“Why didn’t you remind me?”

“Where’s the umbrella?” Sandy said immediately.

“He forgot it,” I said.

“We’ll roast. It’s like the Sahara out here.”

“Let’s get in the water.”

“I’m for that.”

“Not me,” Rhoda said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said, but she did not smile.

“It’s not as rough as it looks,” Sandy said. “Once you get past the breakers...”

“No, not me,” Rhoda said.

“Okay,” Sandy said, and without another word got up and went into the water. David followed her. I sat on the blanket beside Rhoda. Her face was all squinched up against the glare, and her eyes were red and puffy from the crying she’d done the night before. There were blankets and umbrellas everywhere around us, transistor radios going, girls spreading suntan oil on their bellies and legs, kids throwing balls, kids filling pails and dumping them to make sand cakes, guys doing headstands, couples necking.

“I’ve never seen it this crowded,” I said.

“It’s the day,” Rhoda said. “It’s so hot.”

“It’s like Coney Island, for Christ’s sake.”

Rhoda nodded. Sandy and David plunged through a rolling breaker, disappeared from sight, surfaced some five feet beyond and began swimming toward the deeper water. I watched them. The light glaring from the water was intense. I shielded my eyes with one hand, and then was suddenly aware that Rhoda was staring at me. I turned to look at her. Her face was still closed tight against the sun.

“I’m sorry about last night,” I said.

She nodded, but did not answer.

“Rhoda, I’m sorry. I’m really very sorry.”

“Peter,” she said, “why did you get him drunk?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I asked you to stop...”

“I know you did.”

“... I begged you to stop.”

“I can’t explain it, I really can’t.”

“Peter,” she said, “do you know that I love you?”

“I... I guess I know it,” I said. I was suddenly frightened. All at once, I wanted to get off that blanket and shove my way through the teeming noisy humanity everywhere around us, and splash into the water to where Sandy and David were swimming. I did not want to hear anything else Rhoda had to say. I had the feeling that whatever else she said from this point on would be painful, more painful than the nightmare had been, more painful than the headache, more painful than throwing up in the toilet. I wanted her to stop at once, to leave things exactly where they stood, accept my apology graciously, and merely shut the hell up.

Tilting her head to one side, squinting at me, she began pounding me with words instead, her mouth in constant motion, the metal bands bunking accompanying semaphore as they intermittently caught sunlight. A bead of perspiration slid from my armpit to my ribs, trailed across my chest and ran down over my abdomen. Rhoda’s voice rose and fell, and with it the sounds of the beach, reverberating on the air, muffled, indistinct. There was laughter in counterpoint, sporadic laughter that seemed continuous even though it came from separate sources at different times. The ocean roared, but seemed curiously overwhelmed by the hovering buzz and the laughter and Rhoda’s insistent voice. I felt suddenly apart, as though I had been paralyzed in mid-motion and then gilded with sunshine while everyone around me continued to move and breathe and sweat and make noise. Rhoda’s lips were still in action, her bands blinking. I sat still and silent on the blanket at the water’s edge, a stunned nucleus at the center of incessant turmoil.

She had lain awake all night frying to understand my behavior, she said. She loved me so much, she said, and that was why she couldn’t understand. I had been so gentle in the forest that day, so sweet and loving and gentle, and yet last night I seemed to join the others in their malicious conspiracy to intoxicate Aníbal. What was it between the three of us, what was the secret that seemed to generate such unanimous enthusiasm for the unerringly wrong idea? It had been wrong to go out with Aníbal to begin with, she should never have allowed us to talk her into it, but when the three of us got together that way, we made all the right things seem shameful and square. Oh, Peter, she said, I don’t want to be square, I want so much to understand you, but what can I think when you deliberately conspire to get a poor man drunk? Did you do it for fun, did you enjoy watching him make a fool of himself, the way you watched those poor unfortunate perverts that day (Lower your voice, I warned) on Violet’s island, why did you do it, Peter? Peter, was it square to find something appealing in Aníbal Gomez, to want to hear him out even when he went on and on about his grandfather, so terribly square to want to grant him the respect of listening? (I don’t need this, Rhoda, I thought, I don’t need you for a conscience!)

So why did you do it, that’s what I’m trying to understand? You knew I didn’t want you to, I tried to stop you often enough, I pleaded with you to stop, and yet you went right ahead with it, getting him so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing, and then pitting him against those three hoodlums, who were those three boys, anyway?

“Some boys,” I said.

“Who?”

“Just some boys.”

Peter, she said, this is just what frightens me, this is just what I was trying to tell you about, this loss of feeling for anything that’s real. Aníbal was real, Peter, he was a very real person, and you got him drunk just for kicks, and then threw him up against those boys without a thought, almost as if he were made of plastic. Peter, we’re not made of plastic yet, we don’t have plastic hearts and livers and lungs, we don’t run around on plastic wheels, we don’t have plastic tapes inside us telling us what to love or hate, not yet we don’t.

“Nobody said we did,” I answered.

“Peter, don’t I matter to you at all?” she asked.

“Rhoda,” I said, “I don’t know if you realize how serious the situation was last night.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

“Those guys weren’t fooling around,” I said. “If they’d have caught us...”

“Then why didn’t you try to stop them? Why’d you send Annabelle?”

“I didn’t send anybody.”

“Sandy did. She sent a skinny little...”

“He wasn’t skinny.”

“He was skinny, and he was drunk.”

“Well, he shouldn’t have got drunk,” I said, and sighed and looked out over the water. I felt intimately but mistakenly involved with her, as though everyone around us wrongly assumed we’d been whispering lovers’ secrets to each other, as though even our silence now blatantly advertised a relationship that didn’t really exist. I had not asked her to love me. I had not even asked her to understand me. I felt suddenly trapped. Anxiously, I searched the water, looking beyond the crashing surf to the choppy waves hoping that David and Sandy would come out to join me. I thought again that I should get up and leave Rhoda, plunge into the ocean, let the cold water shock me back to life, wash off the sunshine gilt that was paralyzing me. I didn’t want her to start crying again, though; I couldn’t bear the thought of her crying again. At the same time, I didn’t want anymore of this crap, either.

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t find this conversation very pleasant.”

“Neither do I.”

“So let’s talk about something else.”

“No, let’s talk about what you did last night.”

“Oh, Rhoda, for Christ’s sake, get off it!” I had raised my voice, and I turned swiftly now to see if I’d attracted anyone’s attention. The couple on the next blanket were soul-kissing. A tidal wave could have moved in from Hawaii to inundate California, the Middle Western states and the entire Eastern seaboard without disturbing them. I looked back at Rhoda and whispered, “What the hell did I do that was so awful, would you mind telling me?”

“You behaved like a coward,” she said.

“Oh, thanks.”

“You ran.”

“That doesn’t make me a coward.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“I didn’t want my skull bashed in. Also, Rhoda, I came back for you. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that I came back for you.”

“No, I haven’t forgotten that. Why’d you come back, Peter?”

“Because you were in danger.”

“Then why didn’t you stay and help Annabelle?”

“Because Annabelle means nothing to me.”

“Do I?”

“I don’t know, Rhoda.”

“All right,” she said.

“And that’s the truth.”

“All right,” she said again.

“Rhoda,” I said, “let’s get this straight, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

“You’re a swell person,” I said, “and I really like you.”

“Thank you.”

“And most of the time, I enjoy being with you. That day in the forest, for example, when we were talking, I felt... Rhoda, I felt almost happier than I’ve ever felt in my life. I hope you believe me, Rhoda.”

“I believe you, Peter.”

“And I find you very attractive, too, and sexy, well, I really shouldn’t talk this way.”

“I don’t mind, Peter.”

“But Rhoda, when you start analyzing everything...”

“I’m sorry, Peter.”

“It’s just that you make me feel awful.”

“I’m sorry. Really I am.”

“You see, Rhoda...”

“Yes, Peter?”

“We didn’t mean any harm last night.”

She stared at me silently for a long while. Her eyes were wide and serious, challenging the sun’s glare, challenging my face, challenging my words. She suddenly looked old. I had once seen a photograph of an Oklahoma sharecropper, a woman with suffering silence in her eyes, pain drawing her mouth tight, weariness etched into every line of her face. Rhoda looked just that way now.

“Didn’t you?” she said at last. “Didn’t you mean any harm?”

“We were only trying to have a little fun,” I said.

“A little fun,” she repeated blankly.

“We didn’t know the night was going to turn out the way it did. Rhoda, we couldn’t have known.”

“No, you couldn’t have known,” she said.

“Rhoda, for Christ’s sake, don’t start in again. You make me feel...”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, you’re sorry, but you keep doing it all the time. Why can’t you just...?”

“Just what, Peter?”

“Just... just shut up every now and then?”

“Not speak?” she said. “Not think?” she said.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

“I didn’t want to come here today,” she said, “I knew I shouldn’t have come.”

“Then why the hell did you?”

“Because Sandy was so sweet on the phone, and I thought...”

“Sandy doesn’t bear grudges,” I said.

“Must you always side with her?”

“You shouldn’t have bit her.”

“She shouldn’t have sent Annabelle to fight those...”

“Are we back to that again?”

“Yes, we’ll always be back to that again!”

“Rhoda,” I said, “you’re beginning to give me a fat pain in the ass.” I rose suddenly, brushed sand from my thighs, and said, “I’m going in.”

“Peter...”

“Yes?” I had my hands on my hips, and I was looking down at her.

“Nothing,” she said.

“I thought maybe you wanted to come in,” I said, and grinned.

“No. I’m afraid.”

“You’re afraid of too many things,” I said. “That’s your trouble.” I looked down at her a moment longer, and then turned and walked to the water’s edge and plunged through the crashing surf. The ocean was cold and dark. I swam underwater for perhaps fifteen feet with my eyes wide open, but I couldn’t see a thing. When I surfaced, I opened my mouth to gulp in some air, and a high choppy wave hit me full in the face. Coughing, I treaded water, and looked around for David and Sandy, spotting them farther out. I swam over to them.

“Hi,” Sandy said.

“Hi, beautiful.”

“Nice lovely calm day, isn’t it?” David said.

“Oh, delightful,” I said.

“I’m bare-assed,” Sandy said.

“Really?”

“Look,” she said, and held up her bikini pants.

“What’s the difference between America and France?” David asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, the perfect straight man. “What’s the difference between America and France?”

“In America,” David said, “your goose is cooked, but in France,” he said, “your cook is goosed,” and suddenly Sandy let out a surprised yell and leaped about three feet out of the water. I couldn’t imagine what it was at first; the only thing I could think of was a shark. And then I realized that David had goosed her, and I burst out laughing.

“You sneaky bastard,” Sandy said, laughing, and swam over to him with her sopping wet pants in one hand, and then hit him on the head with them, and tried to duck him. I went to his rescue and the three of us wrestled around out there for maybe five minutes, laughing and yelling, and then Sandy put on her pants, and we floated on our backs for I guess another fifteen minutes or so.

By two o’clock the heat was intolerable.

“You’re going to die, Rhoda,” Sandy said, “unless you get in the water.”

“I’m afraid of it today,” Rhoda said.

“If you want to go in...”

“No.”

“... we’ll stay with you. We won’t let her drown, will we?”

“Certainly not,” David said.

“I’m all right,” Rhoda said. “I don’t mind the heat.”

“You’re sweating like a pig,” David said.

“Ladies don’t sweat, they glow,” Sandy said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s a line from a play we did last term.”

“It sounds like a great play.”

“It was a very good play, as a matter of fact.”

“Did anybody bring sandwiches?”

“Rhoda, where are those sandwiches you made?”

“I’m not hungry yet,” I said.

“It’s too hot to eat, anyway,” Rhoda said.

“Why don’t we get off the beach?” Sandy suggested. “Go have a picnic lunch someplace.”

“Where?” David asked.

“The forest,” Sandy answered.

“What forest?” Rhoda said.

“Where the fire was.”

There was very little motion on the beach. The sun had robbed everyone of the will to move, the sun had fused bodies to blankets. Conversation had stopped, there was scarcely any laughter. An unfamiliar silence shimmered on the air like heat itself, broken only by the incessant rumble of the surf and the droning of the sand flies. The flies were everywhere. They circled the head and landed on the neck and shoulders. They crawled over bellies and legs, stinging, elusively taking wing whenever you slapped at them.

“This is impossible,” Sandy said. “What do you say?”

“Where’s the forest?” Rhoda asked.

“The center of the island.”

“Is it nice?”

“It’s horrible,” I said.

“It’ll be cooler than here,” David said.

“It’ll be private,” Sandy said.

“Rhoda?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t think so.”

“Well, it’s no damn good here,” Sandy said. “Come on, Rhoda.”

“I don’t mind the heat.”

“Look at the sweat pouring off you.”

“In China...” Rhoda started.

“If you won’t go in the water...”

“... they drink hot tea in order to sweat, and then they sit in the shade of a tree, and the sweat evaporates, and they feel cool all over.”

“This isn’t China,” David said, “and there aren’t any trees on the beach.”

“And I’m sweating enough without any tea,” Sandy said.

“Come on, Rhoda.”

“No,” Rhoda said, “I like it here.”

“Rhoda, you can be pretty goddamn obstinate, you know that?” Sandy said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I can stop off for some beer,” David said, and shrugged.

“Come on, Rhoda.”

“No.”

“Okay, we’ll go without you.” Sandy got off the blanket. Her pants were still damp and sand was clinging to them. She brushed the sand off with swift flat palm strokes. Then she adjusted her top, and said, “Are you coming, Peter?”

“That forest gives me the creeps,” I said.

“It’ll be cool.”

“I’ll sneak out some beer,” David said.

“If your parents...”

“That’s all blown over.”

“Come on,” Sandy said.

“Well...” I said.

“Oh, look, it’s too hot to argue,” she said, and picked up her beach bag, slung it over her shoulder, and began threading her way through the sprawled bodies, heading for the dune.

“Poo, you are making a big mistake,” David said. He took his towel in both hands, and snapped it like a whip at a sand fly on the blanket, missing. He shrugged philosophically, and then started off after Sandy.

“It is pretty hot,” I said.

“You can go if you want to,” Rhoda said.

“Well...”

“Go on. If you want to.”

“Will you be all right?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded again.

“I think I ought to,” I said. I turned away from her gaze. “It’s so hot here,” I said.

“Yes, go,” she said.

I picked up my sneakers. “You sure you’ll be okay?”

“Yes,” she said, and again nodded.

“Okay then,” I said. “Hey, wait up!” I yelled to David, and ran after him.

We walked single file on the narrow boardwalk, Sandy in the lead with her beach bag hitting against her thigh, David with his towel slung around his neck, me trying to keep up while struggling to get my sneakers on. David began humming one of his symphonies. When we got to his house, he went inside and I sat down on the porch steps to tie my sneakers. Sandy was on the railing, looking off toward the beach. Her long hair hung limply, sticking in spidery tendrils to her cheeks. She raised her hand idly and wiped sweat from between her breasts, and then left her hand under the bra, as though trying to feel her heartbeat.

“Jesus, it’s hot,” she said.

I stood up and bounced a bit in my sneakers. “What do you suppose it is?” I asked.

“Ninety-eight, I’ll bet.”

“More like a hundred.”

“Rhoda’s an idiot,” Sandy said.

“She’s okay,” I said.

I sat on the steps again. Everything was so still. Sandy began jiggling her foot. Inside the house, we heard Eudice say something, and then David’s voice answering. Sandy raised her eyebrows. We both listened, but the house was silent again. In a little while, David came out with his poncho. He winked at us and started down the steps. We followed immediately.

“Trouble?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Have you got it?” Sandy said.

“Yep. Six bottles.”

“Two each,” Sandy said, and grinned. “Good.” She gave her beach bag a little twirl, slung it over her shoulder again, and began walking. David fell into step beside me.

“Know what else I’ve got?” he whispered.

“What?” I whispered back.

“Guess,” he said, and winked.

“Oh.”

“Mmm,” he said, and that was when we heard Rhoda’s voice behind us.

“Peter!” she called. “Peter, wait for me!”

“Oh, shit,” David said.

Sandy turned. “Well, well,” she said, “it’s Rhoda.”

We waited for her on the path. She was carrying the blanket and a large brown paper bag. She was out of breath when she reached us. Panting, she said, “You forgot the sandwiches.”

“We thought we’d lost you,” Sandy said, and smiled.

“May I still come along?”

“Get too hot for you on the beach?” David asked sourly.

“I changed my mind,” Rhoda said.

“Come,” Sandy said.

We began walking. I took the sandwiches from Rhoda. David looked back at me with a disgruntled expression on his face. We walked in silence, the beach bag hanging from Sandy’s shoulder, thudding against her thigh with every step she took. The sun was hot. We were climbing up and away from the beach. The sound of the ocean was very far behind us now. We continued to climb. I suddenly wished that Rhoda had not joined us.

I wasn’t sure why I felt that way exactly. I only know that as we got closer to the forest, as I saw the burnt trees in a shimmering haze ahead of me and above me, I remembered that once there had been a fire here, remembered that this was where Sandy had killed the gull, this was where David and I had pounded him to a pulp. And then I remembered sitting with Sandy behind the huge black boulder, and I thought of what David had picked up at the house, and of what we might have done to Sandy if Rhoda hadn’t suddenly decided to join us. That wasn’t exactly it, though. That wasn’t all of it. I don’t know what it was. I was frightened. I wanted to tell Rhoda not to go into the forest, the way Hitchcock had warned me not to go into the room. I wanted to tell Rhoda to get the hell back to the beach.

The burnt pines were gnarled and black against the sky.

“Are you all right?” I asked Rhoda.

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said.

“Do you want me to carry that blanket?”

“No, I can manage.”

We found the huge boulder, as black as the skeletal trees surrounding it. Sandy went to it unerringly and kicked aside some bleached and rodent-picked bones that might have been the gull’s, I don’t know. We spread the poncho on the ground. I sat with my back against the boulder, and Rhoda sat beside me. I was trembling. David opened four bottles of beer.

“No, I don’t want any,” Rhoda said.

“Take one,” Sandy said. There was a sudden flick of harshness in her voice.

“All... all right,” Rhoda said.

David handed her an open bottle, and then sat on the poncho with us. Sandy was still standing. She accepted the bottle of beer David offered to her, tilted it to her mouth, said, “Skoal,” and drank. “Mmm, that’s good,” she said. “Isn’t it good, Rhoda?”

“It’s just that it’s so bitter,” Rhoda said.

“Got to take the bitter with the sweet, baby,” David said, and laughed. He drank, belched, said, “Beg your pardon,” and drank some more.

“It’s just as hot here as it was on the beach,” Sandy said.

“Not a breeze,” David said.

“Why don’t we go?” I said, and started to get up.

“After all that climbing?” Sandy said. “Sit down, Peter.”

I eased myself back against the boulder. Sandy finished her beer and threw the bottle into the bushes.

“Another one?” David asked.

“Why not?” she said.

“Isn’t anybody hungry?” Rhoda asked.

“I’m famished, baby,” David said, and laughed again. There was an odd sound to his laughter. He seemed very nervous. He belched again, drained his bottle, and tried to throw it into the bushes where Sandy had thrown hers. But the bottle hit the branch of a burnt tree, and the branch broke off and fell to the forest floor. A cloud of black dust rose on the air. The sound of the crackling branch echoed and then died. David handed Sandy another open bottle.

“Skoal,” she said.

“Skoal,” David said, and again laughed the same nervous laugh.

“You’re not drinking, Rhoda.”

“I really don’t like the taste of it,” Rhoda said, and put her bottle down.

Good, I thought.

“It won’t go to waste,” Sandy said, and shrugged.

“We’ll share it,” David said.

“Share and share alike, right,” Sandy said, and giggled. “Right, Peter?”

“What?”

“Share and share alike, right?”

“Oh,” I said, “yes.”

“Wouldn’t anyone like a sandwich?” Rhoda asked, and reached into the brown paper bag.

“Don’t knock over that beer, honey,” David said.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I...”

“Here, let me have that,” Sandy said. She lifted Rhoda’s bottle, and then, holding a bottle in either hand, drank a little from each one and said, “Major truth: it is very hot in this goddamn forest. Remember that day, Peter? Remember the truth serum?”

“Yes,” I said, and glanced at Rhoda.

“Hey, you said we would share it,” David said, and got up and walked to where Sandy was standing. She handed him the bottle. He drained it and threw it into the bushes.

“There’s ham,” Rhoda said, “and there’s also roast beef. What would you like, Peter?”

“Peter would like to finish his beer,” Sandy said.

“I thought...”

“Wouldn’t you, Peter?”

“Well, I can eat at the same time,” I said, and shrugged. “I’ll have a ham sandwich, Rhoda.”

“Rhoda made those sandwiches with her own little hands,” Sandy said. “Didn’t you, Rhoda?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Going to make someone a great little wife,” David said, and sat down again.

“Can you sew, Rhoda?”

“Well, not really too well.”

“She can’t sew, David.”

“Pity. I guess she won’t make someone a great little wife.”

I took the sandwich, bit into it, and washed it down with beer. “Doesn’t anybody else want to eat?” I asked.

“I’ll have something,” Rhoda said, and reached into the bag again.

“I thought you said it was too hot to eat,” Sandy said.

“That was on the beach,” Rhoda answered, and again I thought Good, and couldn’t understand why I’d thought it, or even what I meant by it.

“And this is in the forest,” Sandy said, “and it’s hot as hell in the forest, too.” She lifted the half-full bottle she was holding in her hand, and suddenly poured beer onto her breasts and into the front of her bikini top. “Ahhhhh,” she said, “that’s better,” and tossed the empty bottle away. “But now my top is wet,” she said, giggling. “Peter, my top is wet.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Don’t you like girls who say things like My top is wet?”

“Yes, sure,” I said.

“Don’t you appreciate my honesty?”

“Sure I do.”

“Why don’t you take it off?” David suggested.

“Ho-ho,” Sandy said, and rolled her eyes.

“Are we out of beer?” David asked.

“When you’re out of beer,” Sandy said, “you’re out of beer.”

“You can have what’s left of this,” I said. “I don’t think I can finish it.”

“What’s the matter, Poo?” David said. “On the wagon?”

“No, I’m just not... thirsty,” I said, and shrugged.

“Never mind,” David said, “it won’t go to waste.”

“God, it’s hot!” Sandy said.

David took the bottle, drank a little from it, and then handed it to Sandy. “Share and share alike,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, and made a pretty little curtsy. She finished the beer, carefully put the empty bottle down on the ground, and took off the top of her suit.

Rhoda did not immediately see her. Her head was bent, she was chewing on her sandwich. She took the sandwich from her mouth and then tried to dislodge a piece of roast beef that had got caught in her bands, still not seeing Sandy, and then finally freeing the stubborn sliver of meat. She looked up. She caught her breath, and immediately turned away.

“What’s the matter, Rhoda?” Sandy asked.

“Noth... nothing,” she answered.

“Rhoda, you’re going to choke on your sandwich,” Sandy said, and giggled.

You mean she’s going to swallow her braces,” David said, laughing.

“I... I... Peter,” she said, “I think I’d like to go now, please.”

I sat stunned and uneasy and aware. I thought This is outrageous and then immediately realized I was only relating to Rhoda’s shock and not to any belief of my own. This is marvelous, I thought, this is stimulating and daring, and was immediately overcome by fresh guilt when Rhoda plaintively touched my arm, but I could not take my eyes from Sandy. This is shameless, I thought, and the thought excited me, and I was thrilled and then embarrassed by my masculine response, and I thought I’d better get Rhoda out of here before something terrible happens, and then I began to anticipate what might happen, the way I’d anticipated getting Aníbal drunk, and stupidly I said, “Rhoda... fi... finish your sandwich.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said, and got up off the poncho.

Sandy stepped into her path.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Back... home. To the house. The house. Out of here. Out,” she said.

“What’s your hurry?” Sandy said. “Finish your sandwich. Peter wants you to finish your sandwich.”

“No,” she said. “Put your... cover yourself. Sandy, cover yourself.”

“Why?”

“They can see.”

“Who?”

“The boys.”

“So what?”

“They can see.”

“Yes,” Sandy said.

David, who had been sitting quietly on the poncho, suddenly said, “Why don’t you take yours off, Rhoda?”

“No!” she said sharply, and whirled toward him, and saw the smile on his face, and instantly stepped back and away from him. She almost collided with Sandy. Turning, she saw the identical smile on Sandy’s face, and knew at once that she was trapped. Her hands fluttered up toward her breasts. She looked at me where I sat still and silent against the black rock.

“Peter,” she said, “please.”

“Do it,” Sandy said.

“I couldn’t. I can’t. Peter, I can’t. Peter...”

“Do it,” David said.

“Please don’t make me. Peter, please.”

I took a deep breath. “Do it,” I said.

Her eyes searched my face. She seemed about to say “Peter” again, her lips seemed pursed around my name, but nothing came from her mouth. She broke away suddenly instead, trying to step wide around Sandy, who grabbed her wrist and swung her back toward the poncho. “No, please,” she said, and Sandy came swiftly toward her, hands outstretched, reaching for the bra top.

“Don’t!” she shouted.

David came off the poncho, his fists clenched, a contorted look on his face, rose in one swift smooth sudden motion to seize Rhoda from behind while Sandy pulled the bra top down. Her breasts burst free, she tried to raise her hands to cover them, but David grabbed both her wrists and Sandy slapped her hard across the face, twice, the way she had slapped her that night we’d found her crying on the dune. She was not crying now. She fought wildly as they dragged her to the poncho, kicking. This isn’t real, I thought, this isn’t happening, trying to free her hands, I wanted to kiss her, I wanted to kiss her breasts, I wanted to hit her, David and Sandy grunting, the sounds muffled like the sounds on the mainland when Annabelle faced the hoods, I wanted to stop them, I wanted to laugh hysterically, “Oh, Peter,” she said, “oh, Peter,” I wanted to shout Leave her alone, can’t you see? can’t you see? lips pulled back over metal bands, eyes wild and frightened, I wanted to save her and destroy her, trying to cover her breasts with her forearms, David forcing them away, I wanted to love her and protect her, I did not want involvement, I wanted to kiss her gently in the forest sunshine and listen to the sounds of life around us, I thought of Spotswood, New Jersey, and a clearing washed with yellow light, “Don’t let them!” she screamed, “Peter, don’t let them!” and I remembered her column and what she had said about a last summer, hers and maybe everybody’s, and I thought Are you trying to scare me, Rhoda? and was scared, and hated her, I’m so afraid of winter coming, and saw a confused tangle of bodies on the slippery poncho, unreal, moving too fast, Sandy’s slender brown legs flashing, Rhoda’s white and heavy breasts, David’s arm muscles straining to keep her pinned, “I don’t want to!” she screamed, and I thought You have to, “Stop them!” she screamed, and I thought Them? You mean us, don’t you? You silly cautious girl, this is the party, we’re the party, don’t you know that? and felt an overwhelming sense of oneness with David, and found myself rolling over suddenly on the wet poncho, rolling toward Rhoda and her big white tits, moving together with David as if his body were my body, his muscles and hands were mine, Sandy falling suddenly against my back, taut and smooth and wet with sweat, kiss her, I thought, kiss Rhoda, and remembered for the last time that day on Violet’s island and heard Sandy whisper, “Get her!”

We clutched for her breasts. “Leave me,” she murmured, but we did not leave her, grabbed her breasts in rage instead, “Leave me, please,” she mumbled, but we did not leave her, swept our hands in fury over her body, “Something,” she said, “please,” and together we stripped her naked. We pulled her pants down over her belly, “Please,” she moaned, and her thighs, “Something,” she whimpered, and her legs, “Something, something,” she begged, and Sandy slapped her again, and she cowered on the sticky rubber poncho, shivering as we stood over her breathing harshly, our bodies covered with sweat, the forest silent and dead around us, Rhoda naked, her pants bunched stupidly around her ankles, naked, there was nothing we could not see. We reached for her pants together, pulled them over her feet, hurled them into the bushes. She tried to twist away, tried to turn her body, raise her knees to hide herself, but we shoved her flat to the poncho again, and David said, “Hold her,” and we held her. She seemed dead. She lay on the poncho with her eyes closed and her mouth tight, and I thought She’s dead, we’ve killed her.

He was taking off his trunks.

“Spread her,” Sandy said.

She gave a final futile twist as we forced her legs apart, trying to turn over on the poncho and away from him as he walked to her, and stood above her, and suddenly crouched, poised.

We did it to her.

He did it to her first, and then I did.

I was last.

As we walked out of the forest, Sandy said, “Is she dressed yet?”

“Who?” David asked.

“Whatshername.”

I turned to look over my shoulder.

She was standing by the round black rock, whimpering. She stooped crookedly to pull up her pants, and then hunched her shoulders and dressed herself that way, whimpering and hunched, flinching at every crackling forest sound. She looked up only once, as she fastened the top of her suit, and her eyes accidentally met mine, and then, quickly, she ducked her head, and sidled away through the stunted bushes, her head turned away from us, moved from us silhouetted against the black trees in gnarled silhouette, the dead distorted trees, not hurrying, moving with a slow broken crooked gait.

I watched her go.

“She’s leaving,” I said.

“Good,” Sandy said.

“Do you think she’ll tell?” David said.

“Not a chance,” Sandy said, and smiled. “She’s too scared.”

“Why, that’s right, she is,” David said.

“Too scared of everything,” I said.

We grinned. We all looked at each other and grinned. Then we began laughing. We must have laughed for about three or four minutes, our arms wrapped around each other, just standing in a tight closed circle, unable to stop laughing, laughing until the tears ran down our cheeks.

The weather turned bright and clear that last week in August.

We took my father’s boat out every day, sailing to Violet’s island, listening to QXR or ABC, the three of us happily lounging on deck and soaking up sunshine, going in for a swim whenever we felt like it. We saw Rhoda again maybe once or twice before the summer ended, but then only casually at Mr. Porter’s or down on the dock, playing with the younger kids near the pilings. We always said hello to her, and she always answered shyly, her eyes turned away, “Hello,” her metal bands catching sunlight for just an instant before she ducked her head.

The Greensward season ended officially on Labor Day, but most of the summer people left the island on the Saturday or Sunday before. In fact, they had to run four additional ferries that Sunday to accommodate the heavy traffic. Our families caught the nine o’clock boat out, trotting down to the dock with the rest of the islanders, all of us looking like gypsies, carrying belongings wrapped in blankets, bulging suitcases, bird cages, bicycles — it was a regular exodus scene. The two fags, Stuart and Frankie, came running onto the dock at the very last minute, carrying Violet’s valises. Out of breath, wearing pendant earrings and white makeup, smelling of pumpkin, she allowed Stuart to help her aboard, and then stood on deck with both of them and waved tearfully at the island as the ferry horn sounded twice in warning.

A sharp wind was rising off the bay.

The ferry eased away from the dock, there was the clanging of bells, the engines were reversed, the boat slipped out into the water, away from the island. Violet stood on the port bow with her arms around her boys, whispering.

On the starboard bow, David, Sandy, and I huddled together against the wind.

We talked softly as the boat moved further and further away from the island. The wind was very sharp by the time we reached the center of the bay. Sandy put her arms around us, and we grinned and embraced her, but the wind was very cutting, it sliced through our clothes, it raged across the deck and finally drove Violet and the two boys inside to sit with the others.

We stayed on deck, huddled together.

It almost seemed as if winter had already come.