In the locker rooms I'd been in, the white women always seemed embarrassed by their nakedness and wrapped towels around their waists before slipping off their underpants, but here most of the women were buck-naked. Some of them were skinny, with angular hips and jutting collarbones. Others had big pillowy behinds and huge swinging breasts, and they were bumping their butts together and pushing their breasts up against each other as they danced.
As soon as the women saw me, they stopped dancing. One of the naked ones came over and stood in front of me, her hands on her hips, her breasts so close I was terrified her nipples were going to touch me. Dinitia explained that I was with her and that I was good people. The women looked at one another and shrugged.
I was going on thirteen and self-conscious, so I planned to slip my bathing suit on underneath my dress, but I worried this would only make me more conspicuous, so I took a deep breath and stepped out of my clothes. The scar on my ribs was about the size of my outstretched hand, and Dinitia noticed it immediately. I explained that I had gotten it when I was three, and that I'd been in the hospital for six weeks getting skin grafts, and that was why I never wore a bikini. Dinitia ran her fingers lightly over the scar tissue. "It ain't so bad," she said.
"Hey, 'Nitia!" one of the women shouted. "Your white friend's got a red bush coming in!"
"What did you expect?" Dinitia asked.
"That's right," I said. "Collar got to match the cuffs."
It was a line I'd heard Dinitia use. She smiled at it, and the women all shrieked with laughter. One of the dancers bumped her hip up against me. I felt welcome enough to give a saucy bump back.
Dinitia and I stayed in the pool all morning, splashing, practicing the backstroke and the butterfly. She flailed around in the water almost as much as I did. We stood on our hands and stuck our legs out of the water, did underwater twists, and played Marco Polo and chicken with the other kids. We climbed out to do cannonballs and watermelons off the side, making big geyserlike splashes intended to drench as many people sitting poolside as possible. The blue water sparkled and churned white with foam. By the time the free swim was over, my fingers and toes were completely wrinkled, and my eyes were red and stinging from the chlorine, which was so strong it wafted up from the pool in a vapor you could practically see. I'd never felt cleaner.
THAT AFTERNOON I WAS alone in the house, still enjoying the itchy, dry feeling of my chlorine-scoured skin and the wobbly-bone feeling you get from a lot of exercise, when I heard a knock on the door. The noise startled me. Almost no one ever visited us at 93 Little Hobart Street. I opened the door a few inches and peered out. A balding man carrying a file folder under his arm stood on the porch. Something about him said governmenta species Dad had trained us to avoid.
"Is the head of the household in?" he asked.
"Who wants to know?" I said.
The man smiled the way you do to sugarcoat bad news. "I'm with child welfare, and I'm looking for either Rex or Rose Mary Walls," he said.
"They're not here," I said.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Twelve."
"Can I come in?"
I could see he was trying to peer behind me into the house. I pulled the door all the way closed except for a crack. "Mom and Dad wouldn't want me to let you in," I said. "Until they talk to their attorney," I added to impress him. "Just tell me what it is you're after, and I'll pass on the message."
The man said that someone whose name he was not at liberty to disclose had called his office recommending an inquiry into conditions at 93 Little Hobart Street, where it was possible that dependent children might be living in a state of neglect.
"No one's neglecting us," I said.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure, mister."
"Dad work?"
"Of course," I said. "He does odd jobs. And he's an entrepreneur. He's developing a technology to burn low-grade bituminous coal safely and efficiently."
"And your mother?"
"She's an artist," I said. "And a writer and a teacher."
"Really?" The man made a note on a pad. "Where?"
"I don't think Mom and Dad would want me talking to you without them here," I said. "Come back when they're here. They'll answer your questions."
"Good," the man said. "I will come back. Tell them that."
He passed a business card through the crack in the doorway. I watched him make his way down to the ground. "Careful on those stairs now," I called. "We're in the process of building a new set."
*
After the man left, I was so furious that I ran up the hillside and started hurling rocksbig rocks that it took two hands to liftinto the garbage pit. Except for Erma, I had never hated anyone more than I hated that child-welfare man. Not even Ernie Goad. At least when Ernie and his gang came around yelling that we were trash, we could fight them off with rocks. But if the child-welfare man got it into his head that we were an unfit family, we'd have no way to drive him off. He'd launch an investigation and end up sending me and Brian and Lori and Maureen off to live with different families, even though we all got good grades and knew Morse code. I couldn't let that happen. No way was I going to lose Brian and Lori and Maureen.
I wished we could do the skedaddle. For a long time Brian, Lori, and I had assumed we would leave Welch sooner or later. Every couple of months we'd ask Dad if we were going to move on. He'd sometimes talk about Australia or Alaska, but he never took any action, and when we asked Mom, she'd start singing some song about how her get up and go had got up and went. Maybe coming back to Welch had killed the idea Dad used to have of himself as a man going places. The truth was, we were stuck.
When Mom got home, I gave her the man's card and told her about his visit. I was still in a lather. I said that since neither she nor Dad could be bothered to work, and since she refused to leave Dad, the government was going to do the job of splitting up the family for her.
I expected Mom to come back with one of her choice remarks, but she listened to my tirade in silence. Then she said she needed to consider her options. She sat down at her easel. She had run out of canvases and had begun painting on plywood, so she picked up a piece of wood, got out her palette, squeezed some paints onto it, and selected a brush.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm thinking," she said.
Mom worked quickly, automatically, as if she knew exactly what it was she wanted to paint. A figure took shape in the middle of the board. It was a woman from the waist up, with her arms raised. Blue concentric circles appeared around the waist. The blue was water. Mom was painting a picture of a woman drowning in a stormy lake. When she was finished, she sat for a long time in silence, staring at the picture.
"So what are we going to do?" I finally asked.
"Jeannette, you're so focused it's scary."
"You didn't answer my question," I said.
"I'll get a job, Jeannette," she snapped. She threw her paintbrush into the jar that held her turpentine and sat there looking at the drowning woman.