The tempo varies, they slow, they stare; there in the afternoon light of her small tower of a room, a rookery, a beacon, the gray shingles of the walls, like mirrors, maybe it is she, and not the sun, that shines. Maybe her light is spreading out over the sea and bouncing back, maybe her fire will ignite the whole sky. The tempo speeds, mouths move to places they’ve never been. And she is ready, she has prepared. She produces a small, gleaming square from a shoebox beneath her bed; she hands it to him. But this breaks the rhythm, and he seems confused by it. Together they figure it out, rolling and unrolling. But then, they can’t figure it out. What seemed so easy now is challenging, and there is a maze of movements and spaces that they can’t navigate. He flags, fades, he doesn’t want to stay, to keep trying. They have an hour, and it has only been twenty minutes.
He stands at the foot of the bed; he puts his briefs back on. He can’t, they can’t, she thinks; it isn’t as easy as she has been expecting. And now he has his pants in his hand. She doesn’t understand; isn’t this what boys want? This is what I want. Is this not what I should want? she thinks. He has one leg in his pants, he knocks a book off the windowsill, he’s about to say something. The door opens, her mother, in the spotlight of the sun stands and doesn’t see, and then does.
“Dear God, close the door.”
She does. Now there is nothing left to say. He knows how to sail, he says, he can get the boat back. She knew he had taken the lesson only to get close to her; now she’s shown too much, and he has seen everything, and she has found out nothing about what is on the other side of afternoon sun and nakedness. And her mother, now she has seen, and knows what Gwen is trying to discover. For the first time in five weeks, she is glad her father has gone. She knows he is not just cruising, he is running, just like this local boy will be, blazing across the thoroughfare, leaning hard into the wind.
Her mother stands on the other side of the closed door with her hand still on the knob. Their Gwen is fifteen, and she has learned what beds are for; she is ruined now, gone too, like her brother. She has lost them both. Never again will she be the one they love most. At least she has her littlest for a few more years, before this shadow falls on her too.
She drops her hand abruptly from the knob, not wanting to run into the boy as he leaves. She hurries down the back stairs, forgets the sheets in a knot on the hallway floor. She goes to the kitchen first, but then decides he will come through here. Then she nips quick through the china closet and dining room, must avoid him if he has the nerve to come down the main stairs. She runs into the rug room and sits in the chair by the fire, the one spot that can’t been seen from the dining room or the front door, in case he leaves by boat. Had there been a boat at the dock? She hears the back door slam; he must have biked, or God, driven, what if he drives?
Her husband would’ve taken the boy by the scruff of the neck, down to the Whaler; “Men can only really talk in boats,” he used to say. Now she knows what that means. She feels sick. Sick at too many things, and she laughs at what her husband would say to this boy who has taken something from their daughter.
“Well, now you have to marry her.” A straight face, just to see how long the poor kid could take it, to watch him grip the edges of the boat, looking for a way out, for some alternative. Then he’d make the boy scrub barnacles off the rocks in front of the house, and if the boy asked why, her husband would say, “Snails too,” and in answer to the boy’s questioning look her husband would respond, “Keep going and you’ll be musseling these rocks.” At lowest tide the lower edges of the rocks shine blue and black, sharp as ravens’ wings. Often she has stood precariously on those rocks in rubber boots, shorts, and a bra, with a cultivator and leather gloves. She’d pull and toss, pull and toss. Off the rock and into the bucket. Her husband would’ve made a good dinner off that boy’s big mouth, if he were here. If she hadn’t run away from the boy. If she hadn’t chased away the man.
Gwen, clothed, comes downstairs ready to face her mother, or at least knowing it can’t be avoided. Gwen looks out the front door first to the wide-open porch, its sun and shadow. She isn’t there, or in the kitchen. She has to, of all things, call her name, “Mom.” Her mother sits in the rug room. Gwen sits down in a wicker chair, so much wicker in one house, she thinks, as it creaks under her. Her mother looks into the cold ashes of the fireplace. And Gwen looks at the oar hung above the mantel. It is small, three feet at most. She often wonders what it was for, a canoe? Maybe a toy, do they make toy oars? Her mother sighs. She can’t just say, all her yelling with their father, and she can’t just say. Always sighs. This is why he leaves, always disappointment and no chance of redemption. Gwen refuses to be the first to speak. She will not apologize, no matter how many sighs make her feel queasy and dirty and wrong.
“You’ll need to see a doctor.” This is what her mother says. This is where she begins. Practical. Gwen is not sure that this is better than yelling, than questions, than outrage. Is this what she expects of me? Did she already know?
“You’ll need to have tests,” she continues, “begin a prescription, and you should ask the boy, I’m afraid I don’t know his name, for any history or pertinent information.”
Is this desire? Is this what my mother thinks sex is? A questionnaire, a form to be filled out in a waiting room. What if it is? What if sex is boys backing out of rooms with their shirts in their hands? She needs to find the answer. She needs to find a source beyond her mother, whose hands tremble in her lap, who, in these last few weeks, attacks the ringing phone only to be disappointed. What will the local boy tell his friends? What can she tell hers? There is nothing, and so they must try again. There must be more to this thing. Her mother continues: Pill. Blood test. Pap smear. Contraception. Conception. Infection. Medication. Infatuation. Graduation. How soon can she see him again? Tomorrow? Can they try again tomorrow?