With all due modesty (and New Englanders are like that, too), the Danes had as much claim as any to the founders’ crown. Our house lay at the end of the Neck, the last of the forty-three shingled cottages, right up against the old battery and with its own little cove hollowed out from the rocks. According to the deed in Daddy’s library, Jonathan Dane laid claim to the land in 1697, which predated the formation of the Seaview Association and the building of the Seaview Beach Club by about a good hundred and seventy years.
I had always thought our location the best on Seaview Neck. If I wanted company, I walked out the front door and turned left, down the long line of houses, and I was sure to see a familiar face before I had gone a hundred yards. If I wanted privacy, I turned right and made for the cove. This I did almost every morning. My window faced east, and the old wooden shutters did little to keep out the early summer sunrise, so I would wrap myself in my robe, snatch my towel from the rack, and plunge my naked body into the water before anyone could see me.
The pleasure varied by the season. By September, the Atlantic had been sunning itself all summer long, drawing up lazily from the tropical south, and my morning swim amounted to a tingling soak in a warm salt bath. In May, a month after the chilling rains of April, the morning after Nick and Budgie drove us back from the Seaview clubhouse, the experience resembled one of the more barbaric forms of medieval torture.
Worse, Budgie herself sat waiting for me on the rocks when I emerged from the water, in full-body shiver. “Hello there,” she said. “Towel?”
I flung myself back into the Atlantic. “What are you doing here?”
“Nick was up at dawn, leaving for the city. Rather than go back to bed, I thought I’d find you here. Industrious of me, wasn’t it? Aren’t you cold?”
Water sloshed against my bare chest. Cold? I was numb all the way through, trying to banish the image of Nick in bed with Budgie, Nick rising at dawn and Budgie rising with him. Straightening his tie, smoothing his hair. Kissing him good-bye.
“It’s bracing,” I said.
She held up my towel and shook it. “Don’t be shy. We were housemates once, weren’t we?”
I waved my arms, treading water, trying to come up with an excuse.
“Oh, never mind. I’ll join you.” Budgie rose and pulled off her hat, pulled off her striped blue-and-white sweater and her shirt. I stared in astonishment as her body unwrapped itself before me, exposing her pale skin to the cool morning. She wore a peach silk envelope chemise underneath, edged with lace, without girdle or stockings. She leaned down, grasping the hem, and I whirled around to face the open ocean and the waves rolling along the horizon in long white lines.
Budgie was laughing behind me. “Look out below!” she called, and I turned my head just in time to see her long, narrow body slice like a knife into the water nearby.
She came up shrieking. “Oh, it’s murder! Oh, my God!”
“You’ll get used to it.”
Budgie tilted her head back, soaking her hair until it emerged dark and shining against her skull. The absence of a hairstyle emphasized the symmetrical arrangement of her features, the high angles and pointed tips; the startling size of her Betty Boop eyes, which lent such an incongruous innocence to her otherwise sharp face. She was always slender, but her slenderness had now reached undreamt-of heights and lengths, an impossible skeletal elegance. Next to her, I felt rounded and overfull, my edges blurry.
“How do you stand it, every morning?” she asked me, smiling, waving her arms next to her sides. Her small breasts bobbed atop the surface of the water like new apricots.
“Don’t you remember?” I said. “You used to do it with me, when we were little.”
“Not every morning. Only when I had to get away or go mad. Let’s race.” Without warning, she spun her body around and began to stroke across the cove, her long arms reaching and plunging through the waves, her pink feet kicking up spouts of water.
I hesitated, hypnotized for an instant by her rhythmic limbs, and followed her.
For all her flurry of activity, splashing water in every direction, Budgie wasn’t moving fast. I caught up with her in less than a minute and passed her; I reached the opposite side of the cove and touched off the rocks for the return journey.
By the time I coasted past our starting point, Budgie was no longer behind me. I looked around and saw her running naked from the rocks on the opposite side, along the narrow spit of beach to where my towel lay folded on a boulder. For a second or two, her body was silhouetted against the stark gray stone of the abandoned battery, while the sunrise cradled her bones in radiance.
Then the towel covered her. She rubbed herself dry from head to each individual sand-covered toe, finishing with a thorough scrubbing of her hair, and held out the towel in my direction. “Your turn,” she said, giving it a jiggle.
I had no choice. I found the rocky bottom with my toes and pushed through the surging water, feeling with painful exactitude the inch-by-inch exposure of my skin to the cool air and to Budgie’s gaze, from breasts to waist to legs to feet, traced in foam.
“Well, well.” She handed me the towel. “You’ve kept your figure well, all things considered. Of course, the cold water helps.”
I averted my eyes, but there was no missing the pucker of her nipples, or the shocking absence of anything but Budgie between her legs.
She must have caught my horrified expression. She looked down and laughed. “Oh, that. I picked it up in South America, the winter before last. Everybody sugars there, all over. You do know about sugaring, haven’t you? All that nasty hair?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“You can’t imagine the pain. But the men just love it to death, the little dears.” She laughed again, her bright brittle laugh. “You should have seen Nick’s face.”
The towel was wet and sandy, but I covered myself anyway, dried myself as best I could, shaking with cold. When I could no longer disguise the distress on my face, I turned away from Budgie, found my robe, and belted it around my waist.
“You’re such an hourglass, Lily, with your itsy waist and your hips and chest. Just like our mothers in their corsets, before the war. Do you remember?” Behind me, Budgie was putting on her own clothes. I heard the slide of fabric against her skin, the little grunts and sighs she made as she pushed her arms and legs into their slots.
“I remember.”
“I can’t think why it’s gone out of fashion. But there it is. There’s no accounting for men’s tastes. Let’s lie in the sand together, like we used to.” She jumped down from the rocks in a thump of displaced sand.
She looked so curiously alone, lying blue-lipped and shivering on the beach, with the sand sticking to her dark hair and her bones sticking up from her pale skin, that for reasons unknown I lay down next to her, a few feet away, and stared up at the lightening sky without speaking. A few lacy clouds streaked across, tinged with gold, the same way they had when we were children, lying on this precise patch of sand.
Budgie broke the silence first. “You don’t mind me talking about Nick, do you? After all these years?”
“No, of course not. That was ages ago. He’s your husband.”
She giggled softly. “I still can’t believe it. Mrs. Nicholson Greenwald. I never thought.”
“Neither did I.”
“Oh, you’re remembering what I said before, aren’t you? What a child I was, thinking that was important. Of course it’s a nuisance, the way those old cats treated us last night at the club. I’d forgotten people still thought that way.”
I