Goodbye, Columbus Read Free Page B

Polynesian maiden, albeit one with prescription sun glasses and the last name of Patimkin. She brought a little slurp of water with her when she crawled back towards the pool’s edge, and at the edge she grabbed up with her hands and held my ankles, tightly and wet.

    “Come in,” she said up to me, squinting. “We’ll play.”
    “Your glasses,” I said.
    “Oh break the goddam things. I hate them.”
    “Why don’t you have your eyes fixed?”
    “There you go again.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll give them to Doris.”
    Doris, in the surprise of the summer, had gotten past Prince Andrey’s departure from his wife, and now sat brooding, not, it turned out, over the lonely fate of poor Princess Liza, but at the skin which she had lately discovered to be peeling off her shoulders.
    “Would you watch Brenda’s glasses?” I said.
    “Yes.” She fluffed little scales of translucent flesh into the air. “Damn it.”
    I handed her the glasses.
    “Well, for God’s sake,” she said, “I’m not going to hold them. Put them down. I’m not her slave.”
    “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that, Doris?” Sitting there, she looked a little like Laura Simpson Stolowitch, who was, in fact, walking somewhere off at the far end of the pool, avoiding Brenda and me because (I liked to think) of the defeat Brenda had handed her the night before; or maybe (I didn’t like to think) because of the strangeness of my presence. Regardless, Doris had to bear the weight of my indictment of both Simp and herself.
    “Thank you,” she said. “After I invite you up for the day.”
    “That was yesterday.”

    “What about last year?”
    “That’s right, your mother told you last year too—invite Esther’s boy so when he writes his parents they won’t complain we don’t look after him. Every summer I get my day.”
    “You should have gone with them. That’s not our fault. You’re not our charge,” and when she said it, I could just tell it was something she’d heard at home, or received in a letter one Monday mail, after she’d returned to Northampton from Stowe, or Dartmouth, or perhaps from that weekend when she’d taken a shower with her boyfriend in Lowell House.
    “Tell your father not to worry. Uncle Aaron, the sport. I’ll take care of myself,” and I ran on back to the pool, ran into a dive, in fact, and came up like a dolphin beside Brenda, whose legs I slid upon with my own.
    “How’s Doris?” she said.
    “Peeling,” I said. “She’s going to have her skin fixed.”
    “
Stop
it,” she said, and dove down beneath us till I felt her clamping her hands on the soles of my feet. I pulled back and then down too, and then, at the bottom, no more than six inches above the wiggling black lines that divided the pool into lanes for races, we bubbled a kiss into each other’s lips. She was smiling there, at me, down at the bottom of the swimming pool of the Green Lane Country Club. Way above us, legs shimmied in the water and a pair of fins skimmed greenly by: my cousin Doris could peel away to nothing for all I cared, my Aunt Gladys have twenty feedings every night, my father and mother could roast away their asthma down in the furnace of Arizona, those penniless deserters—I didn’t care for anything but Brenda. I went to pull her towards me just as she started fluttering up; my hand hooked on to the front of her suit and the cloth pulled away from her. Her breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them. Then, in a moment, it was the sun who kissed us both, and we were out of the water, too pleased with each other to smile. Brenda shook the wetness of her hair onto my face and with the drops that touched me I felt she had made a promise to me about the summer, and, I hoped, beyond.

    “Do you want your sun glasses?”
    “You’re close enough to see,” she said. We were under a big blue umbrella, side-by-side on two chaise longues, whose plastic covers sizzled