The New Yorker Stories

girl—people new to Saratoga, who really had no friends there yet. The little girl was named Alison, and she took a liking to Dan—came up to him without hesitation, the way a puppy that’s been chastised will instantly choose someone in the room to cower by or a bee will zero in on one member of a group. She came innocently, the way a child would come, fascinated by . . . by his curly hair? The way the sunlight reflected off the rims of his glasses? The wedding ring on his hand as he rested his arm on the picnic table? And then, as the rest of us talked there was a squealing game, with the child suddenly climbing from the ground to his lap, some whispering, some laughing, and then the child, held around her middle, raised above his head, parallel to the ground. The game went on and on with cries of “Again!” and “Higher!” until the child was shrill and Dan complained of numb arms, and for a second I looked away from the conversation the rest of us were having and I saw her raised above him, smiling down, and Dan both frowning and amused—that little smile at the edge of his lips—and the child’s mouth, wide with delight, her long blond hair flopped forward. He was keeping her raised off the ground, and she was hoping that it would never end, and in that second I knew that for Dan and me it was over.

We took a big bunch of pink peonies back to the city with us, stuck in a glass jar with water in the bottom that I held wedged between my feet. I had on a skirt, and the flowers flopped as we went over the bumpy road and the sensation I felt was amazing: it wasn’t a tickle, but a pain. When he stopped for gas I went into the bathroom and cried and washed my face and dried it on one of those brown paper towels that smell more strongly than any perfume. I combed my hair. When I was sure I looked fine I came back to the car and sat down, putting one foot on each side of the jar. He started to drive out of the gas station, and then he just drifted to a stop. It was still sunny. Late afternoon. We sat there with the sun heating us and other cars pulling around our car, and he said, “You are impossible. You are so emotional. After a perfect day, what have you been crying about?” Then there were tears, and since I said nothing, eventually he started to drive: out into the merging lane, then onto the highway, speeding all the way back to New York in silence. It was already over. The only other thing I remember about that day is that down by Thirty-fourth Street we saw the same man who had been there the week before, selling roses guaranteed to smell sweet and to be everlasting. There he was, in the same place, his roses on a stand behind him.

We swim, and gradually work our way back to the gunwale of the Whaler: six hands, white-knuckled, holding the rim. I slide along, hand over hand, then move so that my body touches Jerome’s from behind. With my arms around his chest, I kiss his neck. He turns and smiles and kisses me. Then I kick away and go to where Annie is holding on to the boat, her cheek on her hands, staring at her father. I swim up to her, push her wet bangs to one side, and kiss her forehead. She looks aggravated, and turns her head away. Just as quickly, she turns it back. “Am I interrupting you two getting it on out here?” she says.

“I kissed both of you,” I say, between them again, feeling the weightlessness of my legs dangling as I hold on.

She continues to stare at me. “Girls kissing girls is so dumb,” she says. “It’s like the world’s full of stupid hostesses who graduated from Sweet Briar.”

Jerome looks at her silently for a long time.

“I guess your mother’s not very demonstrative,” he says.

“Were you ever?” she says. “Did you love Anita when you had me?”

“Of course I did,” he says. “Didn’t you know that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I know,” she says, as angry and petulant as a child. “How come you don’t feed me birdseed?” she says. “How come you don’t feed the carrier pigeon?”

He pauses until he understands what she is talking about. “The letters just go one way,” he says.

“Do you have too much dignity to answer them, or is it too risky to reveal anything?”

“Honey,” he says, lowering his voice, “I don’t have anything to say.”

“That you loved her and now you don’t?” she says. “That’s what isn’t worth saying?”

He’s brought his knees up to his chin. The scab by his elbow is pale when he clasps his arm around his knees.

“Well, I think that’s bullshit,” she says. She looks at me. “And I think you’re bullshit, too. You don’t care about the bond between women. You just care about hanging on to him. When you kissed me, it was patronizing.”

There are tears now. Tears that are ironic, because there is so much water everywhere. Today she’s angry and alone, and I float between them knowing exactly how each one feels and, like the little girl Alison suspended above Dan’s head, knowing that desire that can be more overwhelming than love—the desire, for one brief minute, simply to get off the earth.

Girl Talk

Barbara is in her chaise. Something is wrong with the pool—everything is wrong with the pool—so it has not been filled with water. The green-painted bottom is speckled with goldenrod and geranium petals. The neighbor’s cat sits licking a paw under the shade of the little mimosa tree planted in one of the raised boxes at one corner of the pool.

“Take a picture of that,” Barbara says, putting her hand on top of her husband Sven’s wrist. He is her fourth husband. They have been married for two years. She speaks to him exactly the way she spoke to her third husband. “Take a picture of a kitty licking its paw, Sven.”

“I don’t have my camera,” he says.

“You usually always have it with you,” she says. She lights an Indonesian cigarette—a kretek—waves out the match and drops it in a little green dish full of cherry pits. She turns to me and says, “If he’d had his camera last Friday, he could have photographed the car that hit the what- do-you-call-it—the concrete thing that goes down the middle of the highway. They were washing up the blood.”

Sven gets up. He slips into his white thongs and flaps down the flagstone walk to the kitchen. He goes in and closes the door.

“How is your job, Oliver?” Barbara asks. Oliver is Barbara’s son, but she hardly ever sees him.

“Air-conditioned,” Oliver says. “They’ve finally got the air-conditioning up to a decent level in the building this summer.”

“How is your job?” Barbara says to me.

I look at her, at Oliver.