If You Knew Then What I Know Now Read Free Page B

Each time, the cord of the headphones connects us, the power streaming from my hands to his ears, and he is dazed by the rhythm while I scrutinize his face, music rippling across it.
    The days pass on the houseboat, one the same as the next until one afternoon something across the lake catches my dad’s
attention. He rushes in from the deck, crosses the kitchen where I’m seated at the table, and unzips his duffel bag. He runs across the kitchen again, this time clutching his spyglass, his small, handheld telescope. I love this telescope, though I’m not allowed to use it without his permission because it’s expensive. In fact, its smooth bronze tubes and glass lenses weigh so heavily in my hands, it actually feels expensive.
    But what he’s looking at now, I have no idea. Usually we only look through the telescope at night, pointing it at the stars or the moon with its dark patches like birthmarks—one of us finds something bright and flashing in the sky and then passes it to the other one to share. He and the other dads hunker now behind the railings and take turns, one eye looking through the telescope with the other one squeezed shut. They point, grip each other’s shoulders and snicker, until one of them whispers something, and my dad lets out a huge laugh, an explosion that seems to reach over the water.
    He never laughs that way at home. There, he’s the quiet one compared to my mom, my younger brother, and me, and he’s always telling us he can’t hear the news or his baseball game.
    Leaving my books and Walkman in the kitchen, I tiptoe across the boat and hop into my bunk bed. There’s a small window with a stiff, pleated curtain Velcroed over it. My fingers peel it back slowly, trying to keep the snagging sound quiet enough that it won’t wake Jimmy from napping in the bunk above me, one of his feet hanging over the side, his breathing
soft and constant like the rhythm of the lake waves. Far off in the frame of the window, a sailboat floats, small, white and shining. A woman stands at the prow, her long yellow hair hanging down.
    From this far away, her skin is so orangey that I think she’s wearing a bathing suit like my mom’s, one that covers her whole torso. But when I notice the dark blue wrapped around her lower part, I understand that she’s wearing a bikini, just not all of it. Jimmy and Eric will want to see this—even though without a telescope, her nudity is completely featureless—so I stand up and look over the lip of the mattress. Jimmy’s mouth is open and dark, his limbs are thrown over his sleeping bag. Before I wake him, I wonder what I will say about the naked woman and worry it will be wrong. Once, a kid I knew from school who lives in my neighborhood showed me a magazine of his dad’s filled with pictures of naked women. We squatted in the woods behind my house, and he turned the pages. One of the images was of a lady lying back on a floor, her knees bent, her legs parted. The neighbor pointed between them, glanced at me for my reaction. In a quiet, drawn-out voice I told him it looked disgusting. He grimaced and rolled up the magazine. The next day at school, the other boys in our class teased me for what I called the naked woman.
    In my bunk, I smooth the curtain back in place so the woman disappears, though I still hear the dads ogling her. What would Jimmy say about the naked woman if he were here instead
of me? I prop myself up with pillows and watch his elegant foot as he dozes, knowing I could reach it if I lifted my hand. I want Jimmy to like me. I want to be like Jimmy, or I want to be Jimmy. Or I want to touch Jimmy.
    Later that evening, we’re all on the roof doing nothing. The naked woman’s sailboat has drifted off to its own cove. A dark edge of trees reaches across the lake on one side of the boat, and on the other is a straight line of water drawn across the horizon. Above that blue line, the sky