Page 26 - WTP Vol. X #7

Summer John (continued from preceding page) through my legs. It always made Old John laugh,
and then I’d laugh, too.
“What do you do?” I eventually asked when were returning to the point at our cove.
“Always keep one for supper and one for breakfast,” he avoided. “Wha’d’ya do?”
“I go to school, of course. I’m going into ninth grade. What’s your profession?”
He snorted again. “I do what I can.” “I mean it, John.”
“I’m an escaped convict.”
I was thrilled. “Like Magwitch in Great Expectations! That’s a book on our list for next year so I read it ahead. So I’m Pip? You steal these boats? I could change my name.”
“Bahrrow ‘em. No one the wiseah. Ya name’s okay. ‘Leenda,’ they say. Means pretty. Changed mine to John. Lotta Johns. Lotta leaves ont trees, ev’ry one jus’ ta leaf.”
I agreed. “It’s my father’s middle name. Dr. Theodore John McDermott. He makes me eat calcium tablets bigger than communion wafers because the Russians resumed above ground testing, and he’s afraid the Strontium-90 will leach calcium from my bones.”
We neared the point, and I slowed the boat. He held the wheel as I turned, reached for a sweatshirt. While it was still over my head, Old John said, “It wasn’t such a bad thing you done with eitha boy, the ministah’s son. Was t’othah one, Jay’s fault, talkin’ ‘bout you.”
I’d described kissing Jay when he’d walked me back from the beach in the dark and confessed about going into the apple orchard behind the cabins one night with the Swampscott boy, how I’d run away from Tim after fighting him off.
With the sweatshirt still covering my face, I said, “No, I was all wrong. Diane told me what Tim did. I knew Kathy liked him and didn’t tell her. When he said to meet him, I did. Back home in New York, I’m a Good Girl. Up here, they’re all blond and I’m not, so they think I’m a ...” I couldn’t repeat the word Jay had called me.
Old John pulled the sweatshirt down so my turtle 19
head popped out. “Jus’ ‘cause you wanted some kis- sin’ and have th’sense of a buttahfish?”
We were at the point then, and I started clambering off the boat, but not before Old John caught my sleeve. I thought it was to steady me. He made me fall back against him. His smoky, sweaty smell was friendly by then. But he pulled me to him and kissed me harder than either boy had. Those mottled teeth hitting mine! He tasted sickening of beer and age, and I pushed him with enough force that I fell out
of the boat. My heart thundered with adrenalin. Stunned, I treaded water and saw minnows scatter. Old John backed the boat away.
“You said you didn’t like girls,” I shouted. He yelled over the motor, “I like you!”
~
Linda was neither an old child nor a young adult. On the number line, she saw herself going up only to fourteen for her recent birthday, a primer page in a Universal encyclopedia of possibly infinitely num- bered, disconnected dot to dots. She’d heard a sing- song: Freshmen don’t know they don’t know; sopho- mores know they don’t know; juniors don’t know they know; and seniors know that they know! Linda didn’t know that she didn’t know she possessed any agency, nor that she lacked fear. She only knew things hap- pened. The Earth moved around the Sun, and the Moon around the Earth in ways better explained by science than mythology, which is what Linda called religion ever since, at eleven, she had been stunned by her mother’s reaction to Sputnik, “But where does God live now?”
The convict’s kiss shocked, flattered, repulsed, and disappointed her. Those were some dot to dots to
try to connect. All the recent kisses had no different effect from her secret practice at home against the wooden leg of a Queen Anne chair while the family had watched TV. So far, kissing was all mechanics and momentum, no communion. She thought there must be something wrong with her. She was like the Betsy McCall paper doll on the last page of her mother’s monthly magazine. She had stopped cutting out and playing with them but still looked for them every month. Betsy McCall was flat, two-dimensional, a little girl. Linda was a big girl who acted like a boy and felt nothing when kissed.
The next day, Linda was in hiding, waiting at the point for Old John.