In July 1961, Joan invited me to go sailing. I had completed my second year at Victoria College. Patrick had finished his fourth at Cornell. They planned to sail her down the coast of Baja California, or as far as they could over the holiday. Fourth of July was a Tuesday, but Kenneth had booked the whole weekend free. Joan paid my train fare.
I remembered the schooner they owned—the yacht, I would call it—how I might look on the deck of their yacht. How it would feel to dive into slippery water. I imagined us eating breakfast, two couples with Pacific-tanned cheeks, orange juice on the table. How jealous my best friend would be in Victoria—even if she had a steady boyfriend who proposed regularly and zipped her up island in his MG. I would come back tanned, pimples smoothed from salt.
I called her to say I was taking the train to visit my sister in California, that I would spend Fourth of July weekend on my brother-in-law’s yacht. Lucky you, she’d said. I don’t have any sisters who marry rich men with yachts. Then she told me her boyfriend knew a secret spot to watch the Dominion Day fireworks. He was taking her in the MG, she might let him keep going this time.
She didn’t know I had let Patrick “keep going.” But I didn’t feel prepared by our time on the island that summer. If anything, I felt more chaste. My belly had stayed hard. If it’s so easy—if a man need only breathe the wrong way, and I’d let him erupt inside me—I must be good. I didn’t realize, at first, you needed to bleed.
I didn’t think about that night too often. I thought about the week we met the brothers when I got stung by the jellyfish. Later that evening, after Eugene had struck his knuckles with a belt, Patrick came to my room. I was lying under my bed, reading Nancy Drew with Dad’s Kwik-Lite flashlight. Patrick crawled under the bed with me. When he straightened his legs, his feet poked from the end of the bed frame, but when he bent them, his kneecaps pushed the wood slats. I closed my book. He reached for my flashlight and switched it off. We lay in silence. When I tried to slide out, he found my hand and pressed my wrist to the floor. He said: Are you my wife? I told him I didn’t think so. I tried to pry off his fingers. After a while, he relaxed his grip. I breathed in hot air that smelled like corn from his mouth. Eventually it started to feel nice, like we were holding hands.
When I think of us in 1961, before we launched the yacht into the water, an image returns to me: my sister in shorts, opal earrings that greened in sunlight, me with trousers hiked over my knees, two bronzed boys rinsing the hull with water, all of our palms pressed to the wood, as if feeling for a pulse.