never been permitted to do and would not be permitted to do now, she lay perspiring in the shade, staring up at the motionless leaves. Mrs. Malone was a good-humored woman who liked sports, but the heat got her down. One of her favorite activities had always been shoveling the snow off the long cement walk that led up to her front door. Her children slipped out of her as easily as if she were a water slide into the crowded pool of their household.
Maggie never knocked when she went to the Malones; she just walked around back and let herself into the kitchen through the screen door. Mrs. Malone treated her as if she were a member of the family, which was strange considering that she had more than enough family to go round. But Maggie loved the easy feeling, and responded by being more solicitous and communicative than the Malone children, who, with the exception of Helen, the eldest, were simple machines. Mrs. Malone, Maggie supposed, was a simple machine, too. She seemed to like her family, her husband, and her house with a kind of straightforward good humor. Maggie threw herself right into this; she was constantly struck by what a welcome change it was from her own family, in which she felt as if she were moving through a carnival fun house, waiting for a skeleton to leap out from behind a closed door. Mr. and Mrs. Malone had met in the fifth grade at St. Cyril’s School in an Irish section of Manhattan, and when they were together they seemed more like brother and sister than husband and wife, at least from Maggie’s experience of married people.
“Doesn’t all that hair make you hot, Pee Wee?” Mrs. Malone said, as she turned from the sink and looked Maggie up and down. “Nope,” said Maggie, the way she always did when she was asked that question, and she threw her hair over her shoulder, pushed her damp bangs back with the flat of her hand and sat down at the redwood picnic table in the kitchen.
“Can we go swimming?” she asked.
“Did you bring your suit?”
“I left it here the last time.”
“Is that red one yours?” Mrs. Malone said, rinsing some forks. “I was wondering where that came from. I asked Aggie and she said it wasn’t hers, but I put it in her underwear drawer anyway. Go up and get it and get your partner in crime and we’ll all go.”
“Are you going swimming too?”
“No I am not,” said Mrs. Malone, wiping her hands on a dirty dishtowel. “I’ll sit by the pool and put my feet in and wish it was a month from now and I was twenty pounds lighter.”
The pool was in the next town, at what was called the Kenwoodie Club. It was really nothing more than a swimming pool and a nine-hole golf course surrounded by a chain-link fence, with an entrance gate where a guard checked laminated membership cards. Nearly all the people Maggie went to school with spent the day there, doing cannonballs off the diving board or spitting in the baby pool.
Helen Malone had become famous at the Kenwoodie Club after a trip to California the summer before, when she had emerged from the locker room one day in the closest thing the club had ever seen to a bikini. It was an abbreviated two-piece with push-up cups, and a bottom half that rode a full two inches below her navel. Mrs. Malone had been asked to see that the suit stayed at home next time. “If they think I can control Helen Malone,” she had muttered in the car on the way home that day, “they’ve got another think coming.”
Even her own mother talked about Helen Malone in the third person, as though she were someone none of them knew. Maggie thought that the only person who truly acted as if she knew Helen Malone was Helen herself. Her legend was considerable. At Sacred Heart Academy all anyone needed to do was mention Helen Malone’s name and the girls became stern and watchful. She was known to be terribly sophisticated, and perhaps even something more than that. But what really riveted all of them, all the freckled, pleasant, ordinary girls with whom Helen shared study hall and Bible history and glee club, were two things. The first was that Helen was beautiful. This was never agreed upon, of course; there were girls who said she was odd-looking, that