—Is she… scraped up?
—Not too bad.
—Does it look like she fell down some stairs?
He looked at me. He had no conception of what I knew. Fathers never know that about their daughters. Partly it’s because they don’t want to know, but really it’s because they cannot know. It’s psychologically dangerous to see inside your daughter’s brain. And I knew so much more than most girls my age because of the way I listened.
—Tonight do you want to go to dinner at Villa Volpe?
—Yes!
—Maybe just the two of us? We’ll give Mommy a break, let her take it easy at home.
My shoulders fell far down beneath my neck. I nodded. I longed for something that was in the past, only I didn’t know it yet. Vic once said to me, Families are silly. The whole concept is silly. He said that because he didn’t want his family. But he would have wanted one with me. Me and him at the supermarket, pushing around a pudgy Vic Jr. in a cart, buying grape tomatoes.
We pulled into the parking lot. I was saddened by the glass of sunlight on the macadam, by the fake smile on my father’s goateed mouth. He would have died for me, but because he was a man, he didn’t know how he was hurting me by doing the things he thought had nothing to do with his daughter.
—I’ll pick you up at four thirty. Right here. The car will be right here, but I want you to wait inside the gate, do you understand?
—Yes.
—No disobeying.
—No disobeying, I repeated. He kissed my forehead.
I brought the book I was reading. All the books I read were hand-me-downs from my parents. My mother’s V. C. Andrews, my father’s Dean Koontz. In this case it was Stephen King’s The Stand. I liked how massive it was, that it would last me a month.
I chose a chaise longue near the tiki bar. I removed my terry jumper and laid myself down like my mother, legs bent and knees pinched together. I read my book and concentrated on the way I looked reading it. I was only ten years old and yet I remember having that thought that day. Only a few years earlier I’d been a pure child. Reveling in the space between the Christmas tree and the corner of the wall where the colored lights blinked for me alone and it looked like heaven. Or wearing a princess dress to go to Maggie’s Pub, this seamy place with a green plaid carpet and high-top tables. We’d go when my mother was in the mood for chicken wings. She loved the cheap parts of an animal, all varieties of offal, but wings were the easiest parts to come by, and we’d go for nickel-wing nights and I’d play on the crummy carpet beneath our table; they would talk and I would play with my dolls down there. Their voices, their love, above my head. Below, all the independence I needed. I didn’t yet know my mother was a hypochondriac or that she could be crueler on occasion than she already was. I didn’t yet know my father’s secret, or maybe he didn’t have it yet. There is nothing in the world better than the past.
That day at the rich pool, as I moved my body like an older girl, I noticed a man at the bar, perhaps because he noticed me. He had a mustache and wore a white linen shirt and khaki swim trunks. He was in his mid-forties, the age of my parents. He was sitting sidesaddle on the stool so that he could take inventory of the landscape. He was sipping something tall, reddish, and tropical. His bare knees made something thump inside of me. The way he held his drink. I could see up the hollow of his shorts, a miraculous darkness. I imagined my parents a few miles away, rustling in a hot, damp bed. I imagined my grandmother in Orange, pinioned against her brown couch with the Doberman piss.
I made a fire between the insides of my knees. I thought of the word fucking. I wrote it inside my skull in Lite-Brite.
The man was close enough to talk to me from the bar. He waited until the bartender made drinks from his gun at the other end. I heard the man clearly over the splashing water and the summertime songs on the speaker.
He engaged me, to begin with, about Stephen King. He said he admired a young woman reading such a big book. That he called me a young woman was both tantalizing and repulsive. He told me his name was Wilt and that he was from Boise, Idaho. He was getting his parents’ place ready to sell. They had just died, his dad of emphysema and his mom of suicide by cancer shortly thereafter. He laughed and I laughed, too, as though I knew what he meant.
—Joan, he said. I’ve never met a woman under the age of forty with the name Joan. Isn’t that funny?
I didn’t smile or nod. I’d learned that from my mother. Men go wild for a woman who is quiet like a cat. A woman who doesn’t always approve.
—Joan likes mystery and horror and long walks on the beach.
—I don’t like the beach, I said.
—She doesn’t like the beach because it’s very sandy. The sand is insidious. The sand makes her skin crawl.
—Well, I like the beach in Italy.
—Ah. Joan makes an exception for the Mediterranean. The sand there is more like pebbles. Less insidious. She enjoys fruit cups on the blue and white hotel towels.
I smiled. In the water a girl about my age was tossing a penny and diving for it. She was pale and wore goggles.
I knew what rape meant but only vaguely. I knew it meant sex against one’s will, but sex to me was what I saw on HBO. Soft-core hydraulics.
