“Ophelia,” he said, almost to himself. Then, “Okay. Another beer.”
When he left I got out of the pool, knowing that I was done swimming for the summer, and hating Chet for wrecking my secret pond. I wrapped myself in the large beach towel I’d brought to the pool and ran through the house toward the bathroom nearest my room on the second floor. My chest hurt, as though the anger inside of me was a balloon, slowly inflating but never going to pop. In the bathroom with the rattling vent turned on and the shower going, I screamed repeatedly, using the nastiest words I knew. I was screaming because I was mad, but I was also screaming to keep myself from crying. It didn’t work. I sat on the tiled floor, and cried until my throat hurt. I was thinking of Chet—the scary way he looked at me—but I was also thinking of my parents. Why did they fill our home with strangers? Why did they only know sex maniacs? After showering, I went into my bedroom and looked at myself naked in the full-length mirror on the inside of my closet door. I’d known about sex for almost my entire life. One of my earliest memories was of my parents doing it on a large towel in the dunes on some beach vacation. I was three feet away, digging in the sand with a plastic trowel. I remember that my baby bottle was filled with warm apple juice.
I turned and looked at my body from all sides, disgusted by the patch of red hair sprouting between my legs. At least my breasts were barely noticeable, unlike my friend Gina who lived down the road. I pulled my shoulders back and my breasts completely flattened out. If I held a hand between my legs I looked the same as I had when I was ten years old. Skinny, with red hair, and freckles that darkened my arms and the base of my neck.
I dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, even though the night was still sweltering hot, and went downstairs to make myself a peanut butter sandwich.
I stopped swimming in the pool. I don’t know if Chet continued to look for me there. I would see him sometimes on the top step that led to the apartment above my mother’s studio, smoking a cigarette and gazing toward the house. And he was occasionally in our kitchen, speaking with my mother, usually about art. His eyes would find me, then slide away, then find me again.
My father took off that summer for about three weeks. It happened immediately after a visit from several of his English friends, including a young poet named Rose. He introduced us by saying, “Rose, meet Lily. Lily, meet Rose. Do not compete. You are both beautiful flowers.” Rose, skinny and with large breasts, smelled of clove cigarettes, and when she shook my hand she stared at the top of my head. I was worried that after my father disappeared Chet would show up in the house more often. Instead, another man showed up, with a Russian name. I liked him, but only because he had a beautiful shorthaired mutt named Gorky. We hadn’t had any animals at the house since Bess, my cat, had died three months earlier. With the Russian around, Chet disappeared from view for a while, and I was beginning to feel safe. Then Chet came to my bedroom late on a Saturday night.
I knew it was a Saturday because it was the night of the important party, one that my mother had been talking about for over a week. “Lily, darling, take a bath on Saturday because of the party.” “Lily, you’ll help your mother make the spanakopita for our party, won’t you? I’ll let you hand them out the way you like.” It was strange that she cared about this particular night. She had parties all the time, but usually with teachers and students from the college. For this party, people were coming from New York to meet the Russian. My father was still gone, and my mother was nervous, her short hair sticking out at the back because of how often she ran her fingers through it. I stayed away from the house for most of that Saturday, walking through the stretch of pine trees to my favorite place, a meadow edged with stone walls that abutted a long-abandoned farmhouse. I threw rocks at trees until my arm began to