Object lessons
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 her nose was thin and pointed. But they never said this in front of the boys they knew. Helen’s eyes were a clear blue, and her nose straight and small, but her lips were full, as though they’d been inflated, and her hair was full, too, full and glossy. Mrs. Malone sometimes said that at the hospital they’d given her Liz Taylor’s baby by mistake.
    But, more important, her beauty seemed to stand for something inside her, a kind of apartness, and a feeling that she knew exactly where she was going and how she was going to get there, and that she would go, happily, alone. She rarely spoke, never gossiped, was never silly, and had never seemed young. She was grown up, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. Perhaps this was what obsessed Maggie and Debbie about her most. They rifled through her drawers constantly, trying on her old prom dresses and tossing her underwear back and forth as though they were playing hot potato, embarrassed by their curiosity but compelled by it, too. There were always letters from boys they had never heard of, and some of them wrote poems. “I long to peel you like a ripe peach,” someone named Edward with an address at Cornell University had written, and Debbie had read it over and over. “What does that mean?” she said, her freckled cheeks scarlet.
    “You don’t even peel peaches,” Maggie said, and Debbie looked at her pityingly. “What do you want him to say, that he wants to peel her like an orange?” Maggie stared at the envelope. “The stamp is upside down for love,” she said.
    Last year, Maggie remembered, Sister Regina Marie had asked them to write

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