“Sally, are you still with me? Say something.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“Come on.”

“I can’t talk.”

“I want you to talk. Tell me what you’re feeling. At least if you like what I’m doing.”

“You know I like it.”

“Yeah”—working me harder with his tongue—“but I want to hear it. Say it, Sally. Do you like this?”

“Yes.”

This is what I was thinking: never in a million years would I have believed him capable of such patience, restless old Mel, pacing the dayroom, jumping up and down on the sidelines in rec therapy when the therapist wouldn’t let him play because he showed off.

“Okay,” he said. “Now what do you want?”

“You know.”

“Say it.”

“I can’t.”

He pressed into me, so I could feel everything.

I was swimming with the seals, I was a seal, no one could see me.

“I want you inside,” I said.

Still on top of me, he struggled out of his trunks, shimmied them down, kicked them off. And then there I was, lying back on the scratchy cushions, the insides of my thighs already aching from clutching the pontoon and now from holding him. I was making noise, I couldn’t remember ever having made noise before. He was opening me up, more and more.

“What are you thinking of, honey?”

“You,” I said.

“If you knew how much I wanted—” he said. “How I waited—” He pushed all those tangled strands of seaweedy hair back from my forehead.

I was gagging, trying not to.

“What’s the matter?”

I couldn’t answer.

“You’re scaring me,” he said. “Don’t—” And then he began to come.

I am swimming with the seals, I thought, and just let it happen.

21

And after. The room was still, golden, each object stood out with great clarity. The late-afternoon sun through the blinds striping the green and brown rag rug, a purple and white yarn god’s eye on the wall, framed photographs of babies and children propped in the bookcases. Mel beside me, eyes closed. His head was turned so that the sapphire caught a gleam. I could barely see his chest move.

“You asleep?”

“Nah,” he whispered. He opened his eyes and pulled me to him. “You’re a wild one. My wild wild baby.”

“We sure made a mess of this sofa. I hope your mother’s friend doesn’t have a cow.”

“She’s an old hippie, it’s cool. Say, honey, are you okay? What was that, anyway, at the end?”

“I don’t know. It’s never happened before. I guess I’m retarded, or something.”

His eyes narrowed. “You’re not retarded.” Then, more gently, “Did you come?”

“Yes.”

The hair under his arms was sparse and ginger colored and I touched there, lightly, to see if he was ticklish. He wasn’t. In response, he picked up my left arm and slowly licked every single stripe, one by one. “Connect-the-dots,” he said. “I shouldn’t encourage you, but I’ve always found these awfully sexy.”

“You wanted me at Willowridge?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?”

“Where could we have done it?”

“In the upstairs bathroom, you know, the one with the rug.”

“Mmmhmm. Where else?”

“By the lake.”

“I like by the lake.”

“I knew you’d have beautiful skin.”

“Why didn’t you do anything?” I asked him. “Say anything?”

“I thought maybe you had a thing with Lillith. I wasn’t sure.”

“I wasn’t sure either.” Then I asked, “Am I your first Asian woman?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“You’ve just had white?”

“There was a black girl for a while, before Bethie.”

“I always had white guys.” Like two counted as always. Plus Daddy, but did he count? I didn’t know.

When Mel dropped me off a little before midnight my aunt was waiting up. She said Uncle Richard had had chest pains all evening and the doctor had told him to take it very easy.

For the next four days, this was the routine: mornings, I kept my uncle company. We played gin rummy, watched TV, or I just sat in the rocking chair and read while he nodded off on the couch. Sometimes, asleep, he’d cry out, single syllables in Cantonese, startling me. “What were you dreaming?” I asked him later, and he shook his head. “Who knows? You remember your dreams, Niece?”

At lunchtime my aunt would take over. I’d pack a beach bag and go sit on the front curb to wait for Mel. The second time we’d snuck into the Don Ce Sar they’d really given us the hairy eyeball, so we’d started going to the public beach farther down the coast. We’d sun for an hour or two and then hightail it to the condo, grabbing a bite on the way—Denny’s, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, it didn’t matter to us—and spend the afternoon in bed. Each time I came it was like a little of Monkey King was blotted away. Something that had never happened with Carey. “What was it like with your husband?” Mel asked me, and I had to answer: “He was rough.”

“No wonder,” Mel said.

“I wasn’t really there,” I said.

Mel was very good at me, but I did my own studying. The first time I made him come in my mouth his fingernails on my wrist drew blood. The feeling of power this gave me was unexpected, and I was careful with it, as I would have been with any new responsibility.

At dusk we’d get up to take the friend’s canoe out on the lagoon. There were alligator warnings posted, and though it seemed to me that they must be more day creatures than night, I avoided trailing my fingers in the still water. Worse than possible alligators was the real presence of gnats and mosquitoes, which had mutated to monster proportions in this climate, as well as those strange squishy bugs I’d noticed when I was mowing the lawn. At the Cumberland Farms next to the gas station we purchased Deep Woods Off! and rubbed it all over each other’s exposed parts.

Mel and I took turns steering. It was easy to catch a paddle in the murky weeds, or run aground in unexpected shallows, especially when dark had fallen completely and we were traveling only by starlight and moonlight, but we weren’t headed anywhere in particular, and since there was no current, there was no danger. Mostly we just drifted, drinking the bottled Cokes we’d gotten addicted to—I could swear Coke was sweeter in the South—and talk and smoke. Sometimes we’d mix rum in with the Coke.

“You have the sexiest fingers,” Mel said once, when we were passing the bottle.

“My piano teacher used to say I had the widest hand span of any child she’d ever taught.”

“I didn’t know you played the piano.”

“Badly.”

I told him about the after-dinner recitals where Mimi sang Chinese love songs in a piercing falsetto. Xiao Lu, who was studying the violin, had a repertoire of fancy pieces, starting with “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” which I suspected he played much more slowly than he was supposed to, so he would be sure not to make any mistakes. A lot of the music was modern, so that it was hard to tell if he was making a mistake at all if you didn’t watch Aunty Winnie’s face.

I never played as well as I did when I was alone, and I didn’t dare look up for fear of meeting the frozen polite expressions of the guests. What were they really thinking? Unlike Xiao Lu, I played faster than I was supposed to, to get it over with. Afterward there was always a surprised silence, as if the audience hadn’t really expected it to end. “So good, so good,” the grown-ups would murmur, and my mother’s voice would rise over them all—“Oh, no, she’s terrible, really.”

After me came my sister, the comic relief. She’d announce her piece—“Indian War Dance”—and then pound it out as forcefully as possible. The applause for her was more enthusiastic. “She doesn’t practice” was my mother’s only comment on Marty, as if that were the only reason she wasn’t a musical genius.

The only guest who seemed to prefer my playing to Marty’s was Mr. Lin, a friend of Daddy’s who lived by himself in the top floor of a rickety house in a bad neighborhood downtown. Mr. Lin was an artist who had been chased out by the Communists. Ma said he was too sad to paint anymore.