“Enough passing for now,” said Mrs. Montjoy. She gathered up some glasses and told me to wash them. “People never keep track of their own,” she said. “It’s easier just to wash them and bring in clean ones. And it’s time to get the meatballs out of the fridge and heat them up. Could you do that? Watch the oven-it won’t take long.”

While I was busy in the kitchen I heard Mrs. Hammond calling, “Ivan! Ivan!” She was roaming through the back rooms of the house. But Mr. Hammond had come in through the kitchen door that led to the woods. He stood there and did not answer her. He came over to the counter and poured gin into his glass.

“Oh, Ivan, there you are,” said Mrs. Hammond, coming in from the living room,

“Here I am,” said Mr. Hammond.

“Me, too,” she said. She shoved her glass along the counter.

He didn’t pick it up. He pushed the gin towards her and spoke to me. “Are you having fun, Minnie?”

Mrs. Hammond gave a yelp of laughter. “Minnie? Where did you get the idea her name was Minnie?”

“Minnie,” said Mr. Hammond. Ivan. He spoke in an artificial, dreamy voice. “Are you having fun, Minnie?”

“Oh yes,” I said, in a voice that I meant to make as artificial as his. I was busy lifting the tiny Swedish meatballs from the oven and I wanted the Hammonds out of my way in case I dropped some. They would think that a big joke and probably report on me to Mrs. Montjoy, who would make me throw the dropped meatballs out and be annoyed at the waste. If I was alone when it happened I could just scoop them up off the floor.

Mr. Hammond said, “Good.”

“I swam around the point,” Mrs. Hammond said. “I’m working up to swimming around the entire island.”

“Congratulations,” Mr. Hammond said, in the same way that he had said “Good.”

I wished that I hadn’t sounded so chirpy and silly. I wished that I had matched his deeply skeptical and sophisticated tone.

“Well then,” said Mrs. Hammond. Carol. “I’ll leave you to it.

I had begun to spear the meatballs with toothpicks and arrange them on a platter. Ivan said, “Care for some help?” and tried to do the same, but his toothpicks missed and sent meatballs skittering onto the counter.

“Well,” he said, but he seemed to lose track of his thoughts, so he turned away and took another drink. “Well, Minnie.”

I knew something about him. I knew that the Hammonds were here for a special holiday because Mr. Hammond had lost his job. Mary Anne had told me this. “He’s very depressed about it,” she had said. “They won’t be poor, though. Aunt Carol is rich.”

He did not seem depressed to me. He seemed impatient-chiefly with Mrs. Hammond-but on the whole rather pleased with himself. He was tall and thin, he had dark hair combed straight back from his forehead, and his mustache was an ironic line above his upper lip. When he talked to me he leaned forward, as I had seen him doing earlier, when he talked to women in the living room. I had thought then that the word for him was courtly.

“Where do you go swimming, Minnie? Do you go swimming?”

“Yes,” I said. “Down by the boathouse.” I decided that his calling me Minnie was a special joke between us.

“Is that a good place?”

“Yes.” It was, for me, because I liked being close to the dock. I had never, till this summer, swum in water that was over my head.

“Do you ever go in without your bathing suit on?”

I said, “No.”

“You should try it.”

Mrs. Montjoy came through the living-room doorway, asking if the meatballs were ready.

“This is certainly a hungry crowd,” she said. “It’s the swimming does it. How are you getting on, Ivan? Carol was just looking for you.”

“She was here,” said Mr. Hammond.

Mrs. Montjoy dropped parsley here and there among the meatballs. “Now,” she said to me. “I think you’ve done about all you need to here. I think I can manage now. Why don’t you just make yourself a sandwich and run along down to the boat-house?”

I said I wasn’t hungry. Mr. Hammond had helped himself to more gin and ice cubes and had gone into the living room.

“Well. You’d better take something,” Mrs. Montjoy said. “You’ll be hungry later.”

She meant that I was not to come back.

On my way to the boathouse I met a couple of the guests-girls of my own age, barefoot and in their wet bathing suits, breathlessly laughing. They had probably swum partway round the island and climbed out of the water at the boat-house. Now they were sneaking back to surprise somebody. They stepped aside politely, not to drip water on me, but did not stop laughing. Making way for my body without a glance at my face.

They were the sort of girls who would have squealed and made a fuss over me, if I had been a dog or a cat.

The noise of the party continued to rise. I lay down on my cot without taking off my dress. I had been on the go since early morning and I was tired. But I could not relax. After a while I got up and changed into my bathing suit and went down to swim. I climbed down the ladder into the water cautiously as I always did-I thought that I would go straight to the bottom and never come up if I jumped-and swam around in the shadows. The water washing my limbs made me think of what Mr. Hammond had said and I worked the straps of my bathing suit down, finally pulling out one arm after the other so that my breasts could float free. I swam that way, with the water sweetly dividing at my nipples…

I thought it was not impossible that Mr. Hammond might come looking for me. I thought of him touching me. (I could not figure out exactly how he would get into the water-I did not care to think of him stripping off his clothes. Perhaps he would squat down on the deck and I would swim over to him.) His fingers stroking my bare skin like ribbons of light. The thought of being touched and desired by a man that old-forty, forty-five?-was in some way repulsive, but I knew I would get pleasure from it, rather as you might get pleasure from being caressed by an amorous tame crocodile. Mr. Hammond’s-Ivan’s-skin might be smooth, but age and knowledge and corruptness would be on him like invisible warts and scales.

I dared to lift myself partly out of the water, holding with one hand to the dock. I bobbed up and down and rose into the air like a mermaid. Gleaming, with nobody to see.

Now I heard steps. I heard somebody coming. I sank down into the water and held still.

For a moment I believed that it was Mr. Hammond, and that I had actually entered the world of secret signals, abrupt and wordless forays of desire. I did not cover myself but shrank against the dock, in a paralyzed moment of horror and submission.

The boathouse light was switched on, and I turned around noiselessly in the water and saw that it was old Mr. Foley, still in his party outfit of white trousers and yachting cap and blazer. He had stayed for a couple of drinks and explained to everybody that Mrs. Foley was not up to the strain of seeing so many people but sent her best wishes to all.

He was moving things around on the tool shelf. Soon he either found what he wanted or put back what he had intended to put back, and he switched off the light and left. He never knew that I was there.

I pulled up my bathing suit and got out of the water and went up the stairs. My body seemed such a weight to me that I was out of breath when I got to the top.

The sound of the cocktail party went on and on. I had to do something to hold my own against it, so I started to write a letter to Dawna, who was my best friend at that time. I described the cocktail party in lurid terms-people vomited over the deck railing and a woman passed out, falling down on the sofa in such a way that part of her dress slid off and exposed a purple-nippled old breast (I called it a bezoom). I spoke of Mr. Hammond as a letch, though I added that he was very good-looking. I said that he had fondled me in the kitchen while my hands were busy with the meatballs and that later he had followed me to the boathouse and grabbed me on the stairs. But I had kicked him where he wouldn’t forget and he had retreated. Scurried away, I said.