Things You Should Know

GEORGICA

A phosphorescent dream. Everything hidden under cover of night becomes abundantly clear, luminescent.

Hiding in the dunes, she is a foot soldier, a spy, a lusty intruder. The sand caves in around her, the silky skin of another planet.

What was so familiar by day is inside out, an X ray etched in memory. The sands of Main Beach are foreign shores. With her night-vision goggles she scans the horizon on the lookout. At first there is just the moon on the water, the white curl of the waves, the glow of the bathhouse, the bleached aura of the parking lot. Far down the beach Tiki torches light figures dancing, ancient apparitions in a tribal meeting. Closer, there is a flash, the flick of a match, a father and daughter burst out of the darkness holding sparklers. They have come to the sea to set the world afire; thousands of miniature explosions erupt like anti-aircraft fire.

“More,” the little girl shouts when the sparkler is done. “More.”

“Do you think Mommy is home yet?” the father asks, lighting another one.

Checking her watch, she feels the pressure of time; the window of opportunity is small, twelve to twenty-four hours. Ready and waiting; her supplies are in a fanny pack around her waist, the car is parked under a tree at the far edge of the lot.

She has been watching them for weeks, watching without realizing she was watching, watching mesmerized, not thinking they might mean something to her, they might be useful. Tall, thin, with smooth muscled chests, hips narrow, shoulders square; they are growing, thickening, pushing out. Agile and lithe, they carry themselves with the casualness of young men, with the grace that comes from attention, from being noticed. These are hardworking boys, summer-job boys, scholarship boys, clean-cut boys, good boys, local boys, stunningly boyish boys, boys of summer, boys who every morning raise the American flag and every evening lower it, folding it carefully, beautiful boys. Golden boys. Like toasted Wonder Bread; she imagines they are warm to the touch.

She checks to be sure the coast is clear and then crosses to the tall white wooden tower, a steeple at the church of the sea.

She climbs. This is where they perch, ever ready to pull someone from the riptide, where they stand slapping red flags through the air, signaling, where they blow the whistle, summoning swimmers back to shore. “Ahoy there, you’ve gone too far.”

She puts out supplies, stuffing condoms into the drink holders. She suspects they think the town is providing them as a service of some sort; she waits to read an angry letter to the editor, but no one says anything and they are always gone, pocketed, slipped into wallets, a dozen a day.

Carefully, she climbs back down the ladder and repositions herself in the sand. As she crawls forward, the damp sand rubs her belly, it slips under the elastic waistband of her pants and down her legs, tickling.

It began accidentally; fragments, seemingly unconnected, lodged in her thoughts, each leading to something new, each propelling her forward. At cocktail parties, in the grocery store, the liquor store, the hardware, the library, she was looking, thinking she would find someone, looking and seeing only pot bellies, bad manners, stupidity. She was looking for something else and instead she found them. She was looking without realizing she was looking. She had been watching for weeks before it occurred to her. An anonymous observer under the cover of summer, she spent her days sitting downwind, listening to their conversations. They talked about nothing — waves and water, movies, surfing, their parents and school, girls, hamburgers.

She found herself imagining luring one home. She imagined asking for a favor — could you change a bulb? — but worried it would seem too obvious.

She could picture the whole scenario: the boy comes to her house, she shows him the light, he stands on a chair, she looks up at his downy belly, at the bulge in his shorts, she hands him the bulb, brushing against him, she runs a hand up his leg, squeezing, tugging at his Velcro fly, releasing him.

They have a mythology all their own.

She caught herself enjoying the thought — it was the first time she’d allowed herself to think that way in months.

Now, she catches herself distracted, she puts her goggles back in place, she focuses. A cool wind is blowing the dune grass, sand skims through the air, biting, stinging, debriding.

A late-night fortune hunter emerges from the darkness, creeping across the parking lot, metal detector in hand. He shuffles onto the beach, sweeping for trinkets, looking for gold, listening on his headphones for the tick-tock of Timex, of Rolex. When he gets the signal he stops and with his homemade sifter scoops the sand, sifting it like flour, pocketing loose change.

She hears them approaching, the blast of a car radio, the bass beat a kind of early announcement of their arrival. Rock and roll. A truck pulls into the parking lot, they tumble out. This is home plate. Every morning, every night, they return, touching base, safe. Another car pulls in and then another. Traveling in packs, gangs, entourages, they spill onto the sand. And as if they know she is out there, they put on show, piling high into a human pyramid. Laughing, they fall. One of the boys moons the others.

“Are you flashing or farting?”

Pawing at the sand with their feet, they wait to figure out what comes next.

There is something innocent and uncomplicated about them, an awkwardness she finds charming, adolescent arrogance that comes from knowing nothing about anything, not yet failing.

“We could go to my house, there’s frozen pizza.”

“We could get ice cream.”

“There’s a bonfire at Ditch Plains.”

They piss on the dunes and are off again, leaving one behind—“See ya.”

“Tomorrow,” he says.

The one they’ve left sits on the steps of the bathhouse, waiting. He is one of them — she has seen him before, recognizes the tattoo, full circle around his upper arm, a hieroglyph. She has noticed how he wears his regulation red trunks long and low, resting on the top of his ass, a delicate tuft of hair poking up.

A white car pulls into the lot. A girl gets out. The light from the parking lot, combined with the humidity of the sea, fills the air with a humid glow that surrounds them like clouds. They stand, two angelic figures caught in her crosshairs. They walk hand in hand down to the beach. She trails after them, keeping a safe distance.

The night-vision glasses, enormously helpful, were not part of her original scenario. She bought them last weekend at a yard sale, at the home of a retired colonel. “They were mine, that’s the original box,” the colonel’s son said, coming up behind her. “My father gave them to me for Christmas, they were crazy expensive. I think he wanted them for himself.”

“Is there some way I can try them?”

He led her into his basement, pulling the door closed behind them. “I hope I’m not frightening you.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“We unwrapped on Christmas Eve, my father turned off all the lights and made me try. I remember looking at the Christmas tree, weaving around the room, watching the lights move and then tripping, going down hard, and starting the new year with two black eyes like a raccoon.”

“May I?”

He handed her the glasses, she reached out, feeling her way forward, their hands bumped. There was something terrifying about this unfamiliar dark; she stared at the glowing fish tank for comfort.

“The ON button is between the eyes.” She flipped them on and suddenly she saw everything — ice skates, an old rowing machine, odd military memorabilia, a leaf blower, hammers and saws hanging from pegs. She saw everything and thought that in a minute she was going to see something extra, something she shouldn’t see, a body in a clear plastic bag, slumped in the corner, a head on a stick, something unforgivably horrible. Everything had the eerie neon green of a horror movie, of information captured surreptitiously.

“If you’re interested I’d be happy to throw in a bayonet and a helmet,” he said, handing her one of each.

The boy and his girl are on the sand, making out. There is something delicate, tentative, in how they approach each other. Kissing and then pulling back, checking to see if it’s okay, discovering how it feels, a tongue in the mouth, a hand on the breast, the press of a cock against the thigh.

He lifts her shirt, exposing an old-fashioned white bra. She unhooks it for him. Her breasts are surprisingly large, his hands are on them, not entirely sure what one does, his lack of skill endearing.

She feels the urgency of their desire. Without warning she finds herself excited.

He takes his sweatshirt off and lays it on the sand. They are one atop the other. She imagines the smell of him, suntan lotion, sweat, and sand, she imagines the smell of her — guacamole, fried onions, barbecue, stale cologne. She works either in a local restaurant or as a baby-sitter: formula, vomit, sour milk, stale cologne.

He rises for a minute, unzips his pants. His erection, long and lean, throbs in the moonlight. The girl takes it in her mouth. The boy kneels frozen, paralyzed by sensation, while the girl bobs up and down, like one of those trick birds drinking from a water glass.

She becomes alarmed, hopes they don’t keep at it, not wanting to waste her shot.

“The condom, put on the condom,” she is thinking out loud.

And then, finally, he pulls away, falls back on the sand, reaches into his pocket, locating it. He has trouble rolling it on — the girl helps. And then the girl is upon him, riding him, her bazoombas bouncing, floating like dirigibles. The boy lies back flattened, devastated, his arms straight up, reaching.

As soon as the condom is on, she feels her body opening. As soon as the girl is upon him, she is upon herself, warming to the touch. She wants to be ready. She is watching them and working herself. This is better than anything, more romantic, more relaxing than actually doing it with someone.

It ends abruptly. When they are done they are embarrassed, overwhelmed, suddenly strangers. They scramble for their clothing, hurry to the car, and are gone — into the night.

She waits until the coast is clear and then rushes toward the spot, finds it, and switches on her other light, a head-mounted work light, like a miner’s lamp. She plucks the condom from the sand, holding the latex sheath of lust, of desire, carefully. The contents have not spilled, that’s the good news, and he has performed well — the tip is full, she figures it’s three or four cc. Working quickly, she pulls a syringe — no needle — from her fanny pack and lowers it into the condom. She has practiced this procedure at home using lubricated Trojans and a combination of mayonnaise and Palmolive dish detergent. With one hand, she pulls back on the plunger, sucking it up. Holding the syringe upright, capping it, taking care not to lose any, she turns off her lights and makes a bee-line back up the beach to her car.

She has tilted the driver’s seat back as far as it goes, and put a small pillow at the head end for her neck — she always has to be careful of the neck.

She gets into the car and puts herself in position, lying back, feet on the dash, hips tilted high. She is upside down like an astronaut prepared to launch, a modified yoga inversion, a sort of shoulder stand, more pillows under her hips, lifting her. The steering wheel helps hold her in place.

She is wearing sex pants. She has taken a seam ripper and opened the crotch, making a convenient yet private entry. She slips the syringe through the hole. When she’s in as far as she can go, she pushes the plunger down — blastoff.

Closing her eyes, she imagines the sperm, stunned, drunken, in a whirl, ejaculated from his body into the condom and then out of the condom into her, swimming all the while. She imagines herself as part of their romance.

After a few minutes, she takes a sponge — wrapped in plastic, tied with a string — and pushes it in holding the sperm against her cervix.

Meditation. Sperm swimming, beach sperm, tadpole sperm, baby-whale sperm, boy sperm, millions of sperm. Sperm and egg. The egg launching, meeting the sperm in the fallopian tube, like the boy and girl meeting in the parking lot, coupling, traveling together, dividing, replicating, digging in, implanting.

She has been there about five minutes when there is a knock at the window, the beam of a flashlight looking in. She can’t put down the window, because the ignition is off, she doesn’t want to sit up, because it will ruin everything — she uses her left hand to open the car door.

“Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you, but you can’t sleep here,” the police officer says.

“I’m not sleeping, I’m resting.”

The officer sees the pillows, he sees the soft collar around her neck — under the dim glow of the interior light, he sees her.

“Oh,” he says. “It’s you, the girl from last summer, the girl with the halo.”

“That’s me.”

“Wow. It’s good to see you up and around. Are you up and around? Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” she says. “But I have these moments where I just have to lie down right then and there.”

“Do you need anything? I have a blanket in the back of the car.”

“I’ll be all right, thank you.”

He hangs around, standing just inside the car door, hands on his hips. “I was one of the first ones at the scene of the accident,” he says. “I closed down the road when they took you over to the church — it was me with the flares who directed the helicopter in.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“I was worried you were a goner. People said they saw you fly through the air like a cannonball. They said they’d never seen anything like it.”

“Umm,” she says.

“I heard you postponed the wedding,” he says.

“Canceled it.”

“I can understand, given the circumstances.”

She is waiting for him to leave.

“So, when you get like that, how long do you stay upside down?”

“About a half hour,” she says.

“And how long has it been?”

“I’d say about fifteen minutes.”

“Would you like to get a cup of coffee when you’re done?”

“Aren’t you on duty?”

“I could say I was escorting you home.”

“Not tonight, but thanks.”

“Some other time?”

“Sure.”

“Sorry to hear about your grandmother — I read the obituary.”

She nods. A couple of months ago, just after her ninety-eighth birthday, her grandmother died in her sleep — as graceful as it gets.

“That’s a lot for one year — an accident, a canceled wedding, your grandmother passing.”

“It is a lot,” she says.

“You a birder?” he asks. “I see you’ve got binocs in the back seat.”

“Always on the lookout,” she says.

In a way she could see going for coffee, she could see marrying the local cop. He’s not like a real cop, not someone you’re going to worry isn’t going to make it home at night. Out here she’d worry that he’d do something stupid — scurry up a telephone pole for a stuck cat.

He’s still standing in the door.

“I guess I’d better go,” he says, moving to close the car door. “I don’t want to wear your battery down.” He points at the interior light.

“Thanks again,” she says.

“See you,” he says, closing the door. He taps on the glass. “Drive carefully,” he says.

She stays the way she is for a while longer and then pulls the pillows out from under, carefully unfolds herself, brings the seat back up, and starts the engine.

She drives home past the pond, there is no escaping it.

He was drunk. After a party he was always drunk.

“I’m drunk,” he’d say going back for another.

“I’m drunk,” he’d say when they’d said their good-byes and were walking down the gravel driveway in the dark.

“I’ll drive,” she’d say.

“It’s my car,” he’d say.

“You’re drunk.”

“Not really, I’m faking it.”

An old Mercedes convertible. It should have been perfect, riding home with the top down in the night air, taken by the sounds of frogs, the crickets, Miles Davis on the radio, a million stars overhead, the stripe of the Milky Way, no longer worrying what the wind was doing to her hair — the party over.

It should have been perfect, but the minute they were alone there was tension. She disappeared, mentally, slipping back into the party, the clinking of glasses, bare-armed, bare-backed women, men sporty and tan, having gotten up early and taken the kids out for doughnuts, having spent the afternoon in action; tennis, golf, sailing, having had a nice long hot shower and a drink as they dressed for evening.

“Looking forward to planning a wedding?” one of the women had asked.

“No.” She had no interest in planning a wedding. She was expected to marry him, but the more time that passed, the more skittish they both became, the more she was beginning to think a wedding was not a good idea. She became angry that she’d lost time, that she’d run out of time, that her choices were becoming increasingly limited. She had dated good men, bad men, the right men at the wrong time, the wrong men a lot of the time.

And the more time that passed, the more bitter he became, the more he wanted to go back in time, the more he craved his lost youth.

“Let’s stay out,” he’d say to friends after a party.

“Can’t. We’ve got to get the sitter home.”

“What’s the point of having a baby-sitter if you’re still completely tied down?”

“It’s late,” they’d say.

“It’s early, it’s very early,” he’d say.

And soon there was nothing left to say.

“You’re all so boring,” he’d say, which didn’t leave anyone feeling good about anything.

“Good night,” they’d say.

He drove, the engine purred. They passed houses, lit for night, front porch lights on, upstairs bathroom light on, reading light on. He drove and she kept a lookout, fixed on the edges of the road, waiting to catch the eyes of an animal about to dash, the shadow of a deer about to jump.

When he got drunk, he’d start looking for a fight. If there wasn’t another man around to wrestle with he’d turn on her.

“How can you talk incessantly all night and then the minute we’re in the car you have nothing to say?”

“I had nothing to say all night either,” she said.

“Such a fucking depressive — what’s wrong with you?”

He accelerated.

“I’m not going to fight with you,” she said.

“You’re the kind of person who thinks she’s always right,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

Coming into town the light was green. A narrow road, framed by hundred-year-old trees, a big white house on the left, an inn across the way, the pond where in winter ice-skaters turned pirouettes, the cemetery on the far side, the old windmill, the Episcopal church, all of it deeply picturesque.

Green light, go. Coming around the corner, he seemed to speed up rather than slow down, he seemed to press his foot harder into the gas. They turned the corner. She could tell they weren’t going to make it. She looked at him to see if he had the wheel in hand, if he had any idea what he was doing, if he thought it was a joke. And then as they picked up more speed, as they slipped off the road, between two trees, over the embankment, she looked away.

The car stopped and her body continued on.

She remembers flying as if on a magic carpet, flying the way you might dream it, flying over water — sudden, surprising, and not entirely unpleasant.

She remembers thinking she might fly forever, all the way home.

She remembers thinking to cover her head, remembers they are by a cemetery.

She remembers telling herself — This is the last time.

She remembers when they went canoeing on the pond. A swan came charging toward the boat like a torpedo, like a hovercraft, skimming the surface, gaining on them. At first they thought it was funny and then it wasn’t.

“Should I swing my paddle at him? Should I try and hit him on the head? Should I break his fucking neck? What should I do?” he kept asking, all the while leaving her at the front of the boat, paddling furiously, left, right, left, right.

Now, something is pecking at her, biting her.

There is a sharp smell like ammonia, like smelling salts.

She remembers her body not attached to anything.

“Can you hear us?”

“Can someone get the swans out of here?”

Splashing. People walking in water. A lot of commotion.

“Are you in pain?”

“Don’t try to move. Don’t move anything. Let us do all the work.”

She remembers a lot of questions, time passing very slowly. She remembers the birds, a church, the leaf of a tree, the night sky, red lights, white lights in her eyes. She thinks she screamed. She meant to scream. She doesn’t know if she can make any noise.

“What is your name?”

“Can you tell me your name?”

“Can you feel this?”

“We’re going to give you some oxygen.”

“We’re going to set up an IV, there may be a little stick.”

“Do these bites on your head hurt?”

“Follow this light with your eyes.”

“Look at me. Can you look at me?”

He turns away. “We’re going to need a medevac helicopter. We’re going to need to land on that churchyard up there. We’re going to need her stable, in a hard collar and on a board. I think we may have a broken neck.”

She thinks they are talking about a swan, a swan has been injured.

“Don’t go to sleep,” they say, pinching her awake. “Stay with us.”

And then she is flying again. She remembers nothing. She remembers only what they told her.

“You’re very lucky. You could have been decapitated or paralyzed forever.”

She is in a hospital far away.

“You have a facet dislocation, five over six — in essence, a broken neck. We’re going to put you in a halo and a jacket. You’ll be up and around in no time.”

The doctor smiles down at her. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She can’t nod. She tries to but nothing happens. “Yes,” she says. “You think I’m very lucky.”

In the operating room, the interns and residents swab four points on her head. “Have you ever done this before?” they ask each other.

“I’ve watched.”

“We’re going to logroll you,” the doctor tells her. And they do. “Get the raised part at the back of the skull and the front positioning pin lined up over the bridge of the nose, approximately seven centimeters over the eyebrows with equal distance between the head and the halo all the way around.”

“How are your fingers? Can you move your fingers?”

She can.

“Good. Now wiggle your toes.”

“You don’t want it too high, it pitches the head back so she just sees sky, and you don’t want it too low because then she’s looking at her shoes,” the doctor says. He seems to know what he is talking about.

“Feel my finger on your cheek — sharp or dull?”

“Sharp.”

“Let’s simultaneously tighten one anterior and its diagonal opposite posterior.”

“Thanks. Now pass me the wrench.”

“Close your eyes, please.”

She doesn’t know if they’re talking to her or someone else. Someone looks directly down at her. “Time to close your eyes.”

She is bolted into a metal halo, which is then bolted into a plastic vest, all of it like the scaffolding around a building, like the Statue of Liberty undergoing renovations. When they are done and sit her upright — she almost faints.

“Perfectly normal,” the doctor says. “Fainting. Dizziness.” He taps her vest — knock, knock.

“What am I made out of?”

“Space-age materials. In the old days we would have wrapped you in a plaster cast. Imagine how comfy that was. I assume you didn’t have your seatbelt on?”

“Do these bites on your head hurt?” one of the residents asks.

“What bites?”

“Let’s clean them, put some antibiotic on, and make sure she’s up to date on tetanus,” the doctor says. “Get some antibiotics on board just be to sure, you never know what was in that water.”

“Where am I?”

“Stonybrook,” the resident says as though that means something.

“Did someone say something about a swan?” she asks.

They don’t answer.

Her grandmother is the first one who comes to see her. Ninety-seven years old, she gets her cleaning lady to drive her over.

“Your parents are in Italy, we haven’t been able to reach them. The doctor says you’re very lucky. You’re neurologically intact.”

“He was drunk.”

“We’ll sue the pants off them — don’t worry.”

“Did anything happen to him?”

“Broke a bone in his foot.”

“I’m assuming he knows the wedding is off.”

“If he doesn’t, someone will tell him.”

“Does that come off for bathing?” her grandmother points at the plastic vest.

“No. It’s all bolted together.”

“Well, that’s what perfume was invented for.”

Her girlfriends come in groups.

“We were fast asleep.”

“We heard the sirens.”

“I thought something exploded.”

“He broke a bone in his foot?” she asks.

“His toe.”

There is silence.

“You made the papers,” someone says.

In the late afternoon, when she’s alone, the innkeeper arrives.

“I saw it happen, I water the flowers at night right before bed. I was outside and saw your car at the light. Your fellow had the strangest expression on his face. The car surged forward, between the trees, it went out over the water and then nose-down into the muck. I saw you fly over the windshield, over the water. And he was standing up, pressed against the steering wheel, one hand in the air like he was riding a bucking bronco, his foot still on the gas, engine gunning, blowing bubbles into the water. I dialed 911. I went looking for you.” He pauses. “I saw you flying through the air but I couldn’t see where you landed.”

A human gyroscope, a twirling top. She landed at her grandmother’s house, a big old beach house on the block leading down to the ocean. She landed back in time, in the house of her youth. She sat on the porch, propped up in a wicker chair. Her grandmother read her stories of adventure and discovery. At night, when she was supposed to be sleeping, her mind wandered, daydreaming. She dreamt of a farmhouse by the water, of a small child hiding behind her skirt, a dog barking.

It was a summer in exile; off the party lists. No one knew which side to be on, there was talk of a lawsuit, “too ugly for summer,” friends told her.

“To hell with them,” her grandmother said. “I never liked any of them, their parents, or their grandparents. You’re a young woman, you have your own life, what do you need to be married for? Enjoy your freedom. I never would have married if I could have gotten out of it.” She leaned forward. “Don’t tell anyone I told you that.”

At ninety-seven her grandmother set her free. At the end of the season her parents came home from Italy. “Pretend it never happened,” her mother said. “Put yourself out there and in no time you’ll meet someone new.”

In the morning, she goes back to the beach, her hair smells of salt, her skin tastes of the sea, the scent of sex is on her, a sweet funk, a mixed drink, her and him and her, rising up, blending.

She goes back down to the beach, proud, walking like she’s got a good little secret. As soon as she sees him, she blushes.

He doesn’t know she is there, he doesn’t know who she is, and what would he think if he knew?

She watches as he squirts white lotion from a tube, filling his hand with it, rubbing the hand over his chest, his belly, up and down his arms, over his neck and face, coating himself. He lubricates himself with lotion and then shimmies up the ladder and settles into the chair — on guard.

If he knew, would he think she was a crook, stealing him without his knowledge, or would he think it was nice to be desired, had from this strange distance?

Another boy, older, walks barefoot down the warm boards of the bathhouse, his feet moving fast and high, as if dancing on hot coals. She stays through the morning. He is not the only one, there are others. It is a constant low-key sex play, an ever-changing tableau.

This year they have new suits, their standard Speedos replaced with baggy red trunks. Beneath their trunks, they are naked, cocksure, tempting, threatening. It is always right there, the bulge, enjoying the rub of the fabric, the shrinking chill of the sea.

She watches how they work, how they sweep the deck of the bathhouse, set up umbrellas, how they respond to authority — taking direction from the man with the clipboard. Before settling on two or three of the strongest, most dominant, she watches how they play with each other. She chooses the one with the smoothest chest, and another with white hair, like feathers fanning out, crawling up his stomach, a fern bleached blond.

They are becoming themselves as she is losing herself.

It’s not like she’s been alone for the whole year — she’s dated. I have a friend. We have a friend. He has a friend. The friend of a friend. He has four children from two marriages, they visit every other Saturday. He’s a devoted father. I know someone else, a little afraid of commitment, good-looking, successful, never married. And then there’s the widower — at least he understands grief.

The man from two marriages wants her to wear a strap-on dildo and whack him with a riding crop. The one afraid of commitment is impotent. Even that she doesn’t mind until he tells her that it is because of her. The widower is sympathetic. He becomes determined to get her pregnant, “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll put a bun in the oven.” He comes before they even begin. “It’s not for lack of trying,” he says.

And then there’s the one who never wants children. “I would never want to subject someone so innocent to the failings of my personality,” he says. And she agrees.

The idea of them causes her gut to tighten.

The heat is gaining, the beach swelling with the ranks of the weekenders. It is Friday afternoon, they hit the sand acting as if they own it.

A whistle blows downwind, the boys grab the float and are into the water. “It’s no game,” the head honcho says as they pull someone out, sputtering.

Two cops in dark blue uniforms walk onto the beach and arrest a man lying on the sand. They take him away in handcuffs and flip-flops, his towel tossed over his shoulder. She overhears an explanation. “Violated an order of protection, stalking his ex-girlfriend. She saw him from the snack bar and dialed 911.”

The temperature goes up.

She is sticky, salt-sticky, sex-sticky, too-much-sun-sticky. Walking back to the parking lot, she steps in something hot and brown. She walks on, hoping it’s tar, knowing it’s shit, walks rubbing her foot in the sand, wanting it off before she gets to the car.

The day is turning sour. In the drugstore, by the pharmacy counter, where a long line of people wait to pick up prescriptions for swimmer’s ear, athlete’s foot, Lyme disease, someone pinches her elbow.

She turns. Still sun-blind, she has the sensation of everything being down a dark tunnel, her eyes struggle to adjust.

“All better?” the woman asks.

She nods, still not sure whom she’s talking to — someone from before.

“You don’t come to the club anymore?”

She catches the woman looking into her basket: sunblock, bottled water, condoms, ovulation kits, plastic gloves, pregnancy tests, aspirin.

“Seeing somebody special?”

“Not really,” she says.

“What’s the saying—‘Don’t marry the ones you fuck? Don’t fuck the ones you marry?’ I can never remember how it goes.”

She says nothing. She used to think she was on a par with the others, that for the most part she was ahead of the pack, and now it’s as if she’s fallen behind, out of the running. She feels the woman inspecting her, judging, looking through her basket, evaluating, as if about to issue her a summons, a reprimand for unconventional behavior.

At home, she showers, pours herself a glass of wine. If the accident threw her life off course, her grandmother’s death made it clear that if this was something she wanted to do, she needed to do it soon, before it was too late. She pees on an ovulation stick, the stripe is positive — sometime within the next twenty-four hours the egg will be released. She pictures the egg in launch position, getting ready to burst out, she pictures it floating down her tubes, floating like slow-motion flying.

She slips back in time. A routine doctor’s appointment, an annual occasion; naked in a paper robe, her feet in the stirrups.

“Come down a little closer,” the doctor says. Using the speculum like pliers, he pries her open. He pulls the light closer and peers inside her.

“I’ve been wondering about timing — in terms of having a baby, how much longer do I have?”

“Have you ever been pregnant?”

“No,” she says. “Never pregnant.”

Everyone she knows has been pregnant, pregnant by boyfriends they hated, boyfriends who asked, Can’t you get rid of it? or, worse yet, promised to marry them. Why has she never been pregnant? Was she too good, too boring, too responsible, or is there something else?

“Have you ever tried to get pregnant?”

“I haven’t felt ready to start a family.”

He continues to root around inside her. “You may feel a little scrape — that’s the Pap test.” She feels the scrape. “Try,” he says. “That’s the way to get pregnant, try and try again. It doesn’t get any easier,” he says, pulling the equipment out, snapping the gloves off.

Dressed, she sits in his office.

“I was thinking of freezing some eggs, saving them for later.”

“If you want to have a baby, have a baby, don’t freeze one.” He scribbles something in her chart and closes it. He stands. “Give my regards to your mother. I never see her anymore.”

“She had a hysterectomy ten years ago.”

Sperm banks. She looked them up online; one sent a list of possible candidates categorized by ethnic background, age, height, and years of education, another sent a video with an infertile couple holding hands and talking about choosing donor insemination. She imagined what would happen later, when the child asked, Who is my father? She couldn’t imagine saying R144, or telling the child that she’d chosen the father because he had neat handwriting, he liked the color green, and was “good with people.” She would rather tell her child the story of the guards, and that she was born of the sea.

Her preparations begin in earnest at dusk. As other people are shaking up the martinis, she puts on her costume: her sex pants with nothing underneath, a silk undershirt, and then the insulated top she wore when they went skiing. She rubs Avon Skin So Soft over her hands, feet, face. She puts on two pairs of high socks, in part for warmth, in part to protect against sand fleas, ticks, mosquitoes. She pulls on a hooded sweat jacket, zips it, and looks in the mirror — perfectly unremarkable. She looks like one of those women who walk a dog alone at night, a mildly melancholy soul.

She fills the pockets of her sweat jacket with condoms — Friday night, there’ll be lots of activity. She now thinks of herself as some sort of a sex expert, a not-for-profit hooker.

She cruises through town, stopping in at the local convenience store, ice cream parlor, pizza place, the parking lot behind the A&P, getting a feel for the night to come.

There are families walking down Main Street, fathers pushing strollers, mothers holding their toddlers’ hands.

She hears the sound of a baby crying and has the urge to run toward it, believing that she alone understands the depth of that cry, profound, existential. There is something unnameable about her desire, unknowable unless you have found yourself looking at children wondering how you can wrest them from their parents, unknowable unless you have that same need. She wants to watch someone grow, unfold — she likes the name Mom.

She drives farther out of town, scouting. She goes to where they live — crash pads, shacks that would be uninhabitable if they weren’t right by the beach. She knows where they live because one rainy afternoon she followed a truck-load of them home.

There are no cars, no signs of life. A picnic table outside one of the shacks has a couple of half-empty glasses on it. The door is open — it’s actually off its hinges, so she doesn’t feel so bad going in.

Stepping inside, she breathes deeply, sharp perfume. Dark, dank, brown shag carpeting, a musty smell, like old sneakers — hard to know if it’s the house or the boys. Bags of chips, Coke cans, dirty socks, T-shirts, pizza cartons on the counter. It’s an overnight version of the guard shack. Four bedrooms, none of the sheets match. In the bathroom a large tube of toothpaste, a dripping faucet, grime, toilet seat up, a single bar of soap, two combs and a brush — all of it like a stable stall you’d want to muck out.

She pokes around, taking a T-shirt she knows belongs to her best boy. She takes a pair of shorts from another one, a baseball hat from a third, socks from a fourth. It’s not that she needs so much, but this way no one will think much of it, at most it will be a load of laundry gone missing.

As though the boys were still at summer camp, their names are written into the back of their clothes, each in his own handwriting — Charlie, Todd, Travis, Cliff.

She drives back to town, to a different beach, moodier, more desolate. Hunkering down in the dunes, she immediately spots two people in the water — male and female. She takes out her birding glasses, identifying the boy — one of the older ones, diving naked into the waves. He swims toward the woman and she swims away. Hide and go seek. The woman comes out of the water, revealing herself, long brown hair, her body rounded and ripe, a woman, not a girl. He swims to shore, climbs out after her, and pulls her down onto the sand. She frees herself and runs back into the water. He goes after her and, pretending to rescue her, carries her out of the sea to a towel spread over the sand. They are like animals, tearing at each other. He stops for a moment, rummages through his clothing, takes something out — she can’t see what, but she’s hopeful. Their mating is violent, desperate. The woman both fights him and asks for more. He is biting the woman, mounting her from the back, the woman is on her hands and knees like a dog, and she seems to like it.

Finished, they pack up. They walk past her, see her, nod hello as though nothing ever happened. The woman is older, wild-looking, a kind of earthy goddess.

When they are gone she hurries across the sand. She finds the condom half covered in sand — limp debris. Something about the intensity of their coupling, so sexual, so graphic, leaves her not wanting to touch it. She unzips her fanny pack, pulls out a pair of latex examination gloves, pulls them on and then carefully rescues the sample—2.5 cc, usable if a little sandy.

She goes back to the car, assumes the position, and, making an effort to be discreet, inseminates. She stays in position for half an hour and then continues her rounds.

The romance of the hunt. She walks up and down looking for her men. The beaches are crowded with bonfires, picnics, catered parties. The air is filled with the scent of starter fluid, meat cooking; barbecue embers pulse, radiant red like molten lava.

She puts on the night-vision glasses, the world glows the green of things otherworldly and outside of nature. Everything is dramatic, everything is inverted, every gesture is evidence, every motion has meaning. She is seeing in the dark, seeing what can’t be seen. A cigarette sails through the night like a tracer. She has to maximize, it’s not enough to try just once, she wants to fill herself, she wants many, multiple, may the best man win. She wants competition, she wants there to be a race, a blend, she wants it to mix and match.

It is still early — the girl doesn’t get off until ten or possibly eleven. She lies back in the sand, rubbing the points on her head where the screws were, dreaming. She glances up at the bathhouse. On the roof is a weather vane — a whale, a mounted Moby spinning north, south, east, west, to tell which way the wind blows, its outline sharp against the sky. She dreams of old whalers, fishermen, dreams she is in a boat, far from shore, in the middle of the open sea. She thinks of her grandmother, freeing her. She thinks of how proud her grandmother would be that she’s taken things in hand.

Finally they arrive. Creatures of habit, they go back to the same spot where they were yesterday, this time moving with greater urgency. There is something genuine, heartfelt in the sex habits of the young — it is all new, thrilling, scary, a mutual adventure.

She retrieves and extracts her second sample. In the car, with her hips up high, she inseminates and she waits.

She imagines all of it mingling in her like sea foam. She imagines that with the sperm and the sand, she will make a baby born with pearl earrings in her ears.

In the local paper there is a notice for a childbirthing class. She goes, thinking she should be ready, she should know more. There are only two couples; a boy and girl still in high school and a local couple in their mid-thirties — the husband and wife both look pregnant, both sip enormous sodas throughout the class.

“When are you due?” the instructor asks each of them.

“In three weeks,” the girl says, rubbing her belly, polishing the baby to perfection. “We didn’t plan for the pregnancy, so we thought we better plan for the birth.”

“Four weeks,” the other woman says, sucking on her straw.

“And you?”

“I’m working on it,” she says. And no one asks more.

On the table is an infant doll, a knitted uterus, and a bony pelvis.

“Your baby wants you,” the childbirth teacher says, picking up the doll and passing it around.

The doll ends up with her. She holds it, thinking it would be rude to put it back down on the table — she might seem like a bad mother. She holds it, patting the plastic diaper of the plastic infant, pretending to comfort it. She sits the doll on her lap and continues taking notes: gestational age, baby at three weeks, three months, six months, nine months, dilation of the cervix, the stages of labor.

“All pregnancies end in birth,” the instructor says, holding up the knitted uterus.

Leaving the hospital, she runs into the cop coming out of the emergency room.

“You all right?” she asks.

“Stepped on a rusty nail and had to get a tetanus shot.” He rubs his arm. “So, how about that coffee?”

“Absolutely, before the end of summer,” she says, getting into her car.

She is a woman waiting for her life to begin. She waits, counting the days. Her breasts are sore, full, like when they were first budding. She waits, thinking something is happening, and then it is not. There is a stain in her underwear, faint, light, like smoke, and overnight she begins to bleed. She bleeds thick, old blood, like rust. She bleeds bright red blood, like a gunshot wound. She bleeds heavily. She feels herself, hollow, fallow, failed. And bleeding, she mourns all that has not happened, all that will never happen. She mourns the boys, the men, the fiancé, her grandmother, the failings of her family, and her own peculiar shortcomings that have put her in this position.

She becomes all the more determined to try again. She counts the days, keeps her temperature charts and watches her men.

She will try harder, making sure that on the two most viable days she gets at least two doses — no such thing as too much. She continues to prepare. August, high tide, peak of the season. The local newspapers are thick with record numbers of deer jumping in front of cars, a drowning on an unprotected beach, shark spottings. The back pages are filled with pictures of social events: the annual hospital gala, the museum gala, the celebrity tennis match, benefit polo, golf tournaments, the horse show. This summer’s scandal involves a man who tried to get into “the” country club, was loudly rejected, and then showed up at the front door every day waiting for someone to sign him in as their guest.

She makes a coffee date with the cop. At the last minute he calls to cancel.

“They’ve got me on overtime. Can I get a rain check?”

“Yes,” she says, “but it’s not raining.”

She goes on with her rounds, her anthropological education. She gets bolder. Out of curiosity she goes to the other beach, the one she has always heard about, notorious for late-night activity.

There are men in the dunes, men who tell their wives that they’re running out for milk, or a pack of cigarettes, and find themselves prowling, looking for relief. With her night-vision glasses she can see it all quite clearly; rough, animalistic, horrifying and erotic — pure pornography.

A Planned Parenthood vigilante, throughout her cycle, she continues distributing the condom supply. She wants to keep them in the habit; she wants them to practice safe sex. She tracks her boys; she has to keep up, to know their rhythms and routines. She has to know where to find them when the moment is right. She adds a new one to her list, a sleeper who’s come into his own over the course of the summer — Travis. An exceptional swimmer, it is Travis who goes into the undertow like a fish. He puts his fins on, walks backward into the water and takes off.

Every morning he is in the water, swimming miles of laps back and forth, up and down — the ocean is his Olympic sized pool. Sometimes she swims with him. She puts herself in the water where he is; she feels her body gliding near his. She swims a quarter mile, a half mile, moving with the current. She feels the sting of the salt in her eyes, strings of seaweed like fringe hanging off her ankles, the tug of the riptide. She swims not thinking she could be carried out to sea but that she is a mermaid and this is her habitat. She swims to the next lifeguard stand, gets out, and walks back, having perfected walking on sand, keeping her feet light, barely making a mark.

It is nearly the end of summer. She has been taking her temperature, peeing on sticks, waiting for the surge that tells her she’s ripe, ready.

Late afternoon at Main Beach, her boys assemble to be photographed for the town Christmas card. They pile onto the stand, wearing red Santa hats, sucking in their stomachs, flexing their muscles. On cue they smile. She stands behind the official photographer and, with her own camera, clicks.

Does it matter to her which of them is the father of her child, whose sperm succeeds? She likes the unknowing, the possibility that it could be any one of a number of them, and then sometimes she thinks she wants it to be him, the boy with the hieroglyph, with the baby-sitter/waitress girlfriend — he strikes her as the most stable, most sincere.

Soon they will go back to school and the summer romance will end. They will leave and she will stay on.

The day the stick turns positive, she makes her rounds.

Travis has a new girlfriend, a blonde who works at the snack bar. She finds them on the other side of town by the marina. They make out for more than forty minutes before Travis leads her to a platform at the end of the dock. When they are done, they dive into the water for a quick swim and she finds herself checking her watch, worrying that the sperm is getting cold. When they leave she has trouble locating the condom, finally finding it, dangling from a nail on one of the pilings almost as though he knew and left it for her. Five cc — a very good shot.

She inseminates herself, lying back in the car, knees hooked over the steering wheel, blanket over her for warmth. It is cooler in the evenings now; she has a layer of long underwear on under her sex outfit, and a spare blanket in the car. The boys and girls all wear sweatshirts declaring their intentions, preferences, fantasies: Dartmouth, Tufts, SUNY, Princeton, Hobart, Columbia, NYU.

She lies back, looking up at the sky; there is a full moon, a thousand stars, Orion, Taurus, the Big Dipper. She lies waiting and then moves on. The wind is starting to blow. At the end of every summer there is always a storm, a violent closing out of the season, it charges through literally changing the air — the day it passes, fall begins.

Her favorite couple is hidden in a curve of dune. They are already at it when she arrives. Leaving the night-vision glasses in the car, she travels by moonlight with just her fanny pack. The wind is hurling sand across the dune; the surf crashes unrelentingly. They do it fast, now practiced, they do it seriously, knowing this will be one of the last times, they do it and then they run for cover.

The condom is still warm when she finds it. She holds it between her teeth and, using both hands, scoops the sand, molding it into a mound that will hold her hips up high. She inseminates herself lying in the spot where they had lain. She inseminates, listening to the pounding of the waves, the sea ahead of the storm, watching moonlight shimmering across the water.

A phosphorescent dream: she thinks she feels it, she thinks she knows the exact moment it happens; the sperm and the egg finding each other, penetrating, exploding, dividing, floating, implanting, multiplying. She imagines a sea horse, a small, curled thing, primitive, growing, buds of hands — fists clenched, a translucent head, eyes bulging. She feels it digging in, feeding, becoming human. She wakes up hungry, ready. In May she will meet her, a little girl, just in time for summer — Georgica.