by Philip Roth
As it happened, Brenda finally won, though it took more games than she’d expected. The other girl, whose name sounded like Simp, seemed happy to end it at six all, but Brenda, shifting, running, up on her toes, would not stop, and finally all I could see moving in the darkness were her glasses, a glint of them, the clasp of her belt, her socks, her sneakers, and, on occasion, the ball. The darker it got the more savagely did Brenda msh the net, which seemed curious, for I had noticed that earlier, in the light, she had stayed back, and even when she had had to msh, after smashing back a lob, she didn’t look entirely happy about being so close to her opponent’s racket. Her passion for winning a point seemed outmatched by an even stronger passion for maintaining her beauty as it was. I suspected that the red print of a tennis ball on her cheek would pain her more than losing all the points in the world. Darkness pushed her in, however, and she stroked harder, and at last Simp seemed to be running on her ankles. When it was all over, Simp refused my offer of a ride home and indicated with a quality of speech borrowed from some old Katherine Hepburn movie that she could manage for herself; apparently her manor lay no further than the nearest briar patch. She did not like me and I her, though I worried it, I’m sure, more than she did.
“Who is she?”
“Laura Simpson Stolowitch.”
“Why don’t you call her Stolo?” I asked.
“Simp is her Bennington name. The ass.”
“Is that where you go to school?” I asked.
She was pushing her shirt up against her skin to dry the perspiration. “No. I go to school in Boston.”
I disliked her for the answer. Whenever anyone asks me where I went to school I come right out with it: Newark Colleges of Rutgers University. I may say it a bit too ringingly, too fast, too up-in-the-air, but I say it. For an instant Brenda reminded me of the pug-nosed little bastards from Montclair who come down to the library during vacations, and while I stamp out their books, they stand around tugging their elephantine scarves until they hang to their ankles, hinting all the while at “Boston” and “New Haven.”
“Boston University?” I asked, looking off at the trees.
“Radcliffe.”
We were still standing on the court, bounded on all sides by white lines. Around the bushes back of the court, fireflies were cutting figure eights in the thorny-smelling air and then, as the night suddenly came all the way in, the leaves on the trees shone for an instant, as though they’d just been rained upon. Brenda walked off the court, with me a step behind her. Now I had grown accustomed to the dark, and as she ceased being merely a voice and turned into a sight again, some of my anger at her “Boston” remark floated off and I let myself appreciate her. Her hands did not twitch at her bottom, but the form revealed itself, covered or not, under the closeness of her khaki Bermudas. There were two wet triangles on the back of her tiny-collared white polo shirt, right where her wings would have been if she’d had a pair. She wore, to complete the picture, a tartan belt, white socks, and white tennis sneakers.
As she walked she zipped the cover on her racket.
“Are you anxious to get home?” I said.
“No.”
“Let’s sit here. It’s pleasant.”
“Okay.”
We sat down on a bank of grass slanted enough for us to lean back without really leaning; from the angle it seemed as though we were preparing to watch some celestial event, the christening of a new star, the inflation to full size of a half-ballooned moon. Brenda zipped and unzipped the cover while she spoke; for the first time she seemed edgy. Her edginess coaxed mine back, and so we were ready now for what, magically, it seemed we might be able to get by without: a meeting.
“What does your cousin Doris look like?” she asked.
“She’s dark—”
“Is she—”
“No,” I said. “She has freckles and dark hair and she’s very tall.”
“Where does she go to school?”
“Northampton.”
She did not answer and I don’t know how much of what I meant she had understood.
“I guess I don’t know her,” she said after a moment. “Is she a new member?”
“I think so. They moved to Livingston only a couple of years ago.”
“Oh.”
No new star appeared, at least for the next five minutes.
“Did you remember me from holding your glasses?” I said.
“Now I do,” she said. “Do you live in Livingston too?”
“No. Newark.”
“We lived in Newark when I was a baby,” she offered.
“Would you like to go home?” I was suddenly angry.
“No. Let’s walk though.”
Brenda kicked a stone and walked a step ahead of me.
“Why is it you rush the net only after dark?” I said.
She turned to me and smiled. “You noticed? Old Simp the Simpleton doesn’t.”
“Why do you?”
“I don’t like to be up too close, unless I’m sure she won’t return it.”
“Why?”
“My nose.”
“What?”
“I’m afraid of my nose. I had it bobbed.”
“What?”
“I had my nose fixed.”
“What was the matter with it?”
“It was bumpy.”
“A lot?”
“No,” she said, “I was pretty. Now I’m prettier. My brother’s having his fixed in the fall.”
“Does he want to be prettier?”
She didn’t answer and walked ahead of me again.
“I don’t mean to sound facetious. I mean why’s he doing it?”
“He wants to … unless he becomes a gym teacher … but he won’t,” she said. “We all look like my father.”
“Is he having his fixed?”
“Why are you so nasty?”
“I’m not. I’m sorry.” My next question was prompted by a desire to sound interested and thereby regain civility; it didn’t quite come out as I’d expected—I said it too loud. “How much does it cost?”
Brenda waited a moment but then she answered. “A thousand dollars. Unless you go to a butcher.”
“Let me see if you got your money’s worth.”
She turned again; she stood next to a bench and put the racket down on it. “If I let you kiss me would you stop being nasty?”
We had to take about two too many steps to keep the approach from being awkward, but we pursued the impulse and kissed. I felt her hand on the back of my neck and so I tugged her towards me, too violently perhaps, and slid my own hands across the side of her body and around to her back. I felt the wet spots on her shoulder blades, and beneath them, I’m sure of it, a faint fluttering, as though something stirred so deep in her breasts, so far back it could make itself felt through her shirt. It was like the fluttering of wings, tiny wings no bigger than her breasts. The smallness of the wings did not bother me—it would not take an eagle to carry me up those lousy hundred and eighty feet that make summer nights so much cooler in Short Hills than they are in Newark.
2
The next day I held Brenda’s glasses for her once again, this time not as momentary servant but as afternoon guest; or perhaps as both, which still was an improvement. She wore a black tank suit and went barefooted, and among the other women, with their Cuban heels and boned-up breasts, their knuckle-sized rings, their straw hats, which resembled immense wicker pizza plates and had been purchased, as I heard one deeply tanned woman rasp, “from the cutest little shvartze when we docked at Barbados,” Brenda among them was elegantly simple, like a sailor’s dream of a Polynesian maiden, albeit one with prescription sun glasses and the last name of Patimkin. She brought a little slurp of water with her when she crawled back towards the pool’s edge, and at the edge she grabbed up with her hands and held my ankles, tightly and wet.
“Come in,” she said up to me, squinting. “We’ll play.”
“Your glasses,” I sai
d.
“Oh break the goddam things. I hate them.”
“Why don’t you have your eyes fixed?”
“There you go again.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll give them to Doris.”
Doris, in the surprise of the summer, had gotten past Prince Andrey’s departure from his wife, and now sat brooding, not, it turned out, over the lonely fate of poor Princess Liza, but at the skin which she had lately discovered to be peeling off her shoulders.
“Would you watch Brenda’s glasses?” I said.
“Yes.” She fluffed little scales of translucent flesh into the air. “Damn it.”
I handed her the glasses.
“Well, for God’s sake,” she said, “I’m not going to hold them. Put them down. I’m not her slave.”
“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that, Doris?” Sitting there, she looked a little like Laura Simpson Stolowitch, who was, in fact, walking somewhere off at the far end of the pool, avoiding Brenda and me because (I liked to think) of the defeat Brenda had handed her the night before; or maybe (I didn’t like to think) because of the strangeness of my presence. Regardless, Doris had to bear the weight of my indictment of both Simp and herself.
“Thank you,” she said. “After I invite you up for the day.”
“That was yesterday.”
“What about last year?”
“That’s right, your mother told you last year too—invite Esther’s boy so when he writes his parents they won’t complain we don’t look after him. Every summer I get my day.”
“You should have gone with them. That’s not our fault. You’re not our charge,” and when she said it, I could just tell it was something she’d heard at home, or received in a letter one Monday mail, after she’d returned to Northampton from Stowe, or Dartmouth, or perhaps from that weekend when she’d taken a shower with her boyfriend in Lowell House.
“Tell your father not to worry. Uncle Aaron, the sport. I’ll take care of myself,” and I ran on back to the pool, ran into a dive, in fact, and came up like a dolphin beside Brenda, whose legs I slid upon with my own.
“How’s Doris?” she said.
“Peeling,” I said. “She’s going to have her skin fixed.”
“Stop it,” she said, and dove down beneath us till I felt her clamping her hands on the soles of my feet. I pulled back and then down too, and then, at the bottom, no more than six inches above the wiggling black lines that divided the pool into lanes for races, we bubbled a kiss into each other’s lips. She was smiling there, at me, down at the bottom of the swimming pool of the Green Lane Country Club. Way above us, legs shimmied in the water and a pair of fins skimmed greenly by: my cousin Doris could peel away to nothing for all I cared, my Aunt Gladys have twenty feedings every night, my father and mother could roast away their asthma down in the furnace of Arizona, those penniless deserters—I didn’t care for anything but Brenda. I went to pull her towards me just as she started fluttering up; my hand hooked on to the front of her suit and the cloth pulled away from her. Her breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them. Then, in a moment, it was the sun who kissed us both, and we were out of the water, too pleased with each other to smile. Brenda shook the wetness of her hair onto my face and with the drops that touched me I felt she had made a promise to me about the summer, and, I hoped, beyond.
“Do you want your sun glasses?”
“You’re close enough to see,” she said. We were under a big blue umbrella, side-by-side on two chaise longues, whose plastic covers sizzled against our suits and flesh; I turned my head to look at Brenda and smelled that pleasant little burning odor in the skin of my shoulders. I turned back up to the sun, as did she, and as we talked, and it grew hotter and brighter, the colors splintered under my closed eyelids.
“This is all very fast,” she said.
“Nothing’s happened,” I said softly.
“No. I guess not. I sort of feel something has.”
“In eighteen hours?”
“Yes. I feel … pursued,” she said after a moment.
“You invited me, Brenda.”
“Why do you always sound a little nasty to me?”
“Did I sound nasty? I don’t mean to. Truly.”
“You do! You invited me, Brenda. So what?” she said. “That isn’t what I mean anyway.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. You’re so automatic about it, you don’t even mean it.”
“Now you’re being nasty to me,” I said.
“No. Just stating the facts. Let’s not argue. I like you.” She turned her head and looked as though she too paused a second to smell the summer on her own flesh. “I like the way you look.” She saved it from embarrassing me with that factual tone of hers.
“Why?” I said.
“Where did you get those fine shoulders? Do you play something?”
“No,” I said. “I just grew up and they came with me.”
“I like your body. It’s fine.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“You like mine, don’t you?”
“No,” I said.
“Then it’s denied you,” she said.
I brushed her hair flat against her ear with the back of my hand and then we were silent a while.
“Brenda,” I said, “you haven’t asked me anything about me.”
“How you feel? Do you want me to ask you how you feel?”
“Yes,” I said, accepting the back door she gave me, though probably not for the same reasons she had offered it.
“How do you feel?”
“I want to swim.”
“Okay,” she said.
We spent the rest of the afternoon in the water. There were eight of those long lines painted down the length of the pool and by the end of the day I think we had parked for a while in every lane, close enough to the dark stripes to reach out and touch them. We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them—at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away. So we moved back and forth from chairs to water, from talk to silence, and considering my unshakable edginess with Brenda, and the high walls of ego that rose buttresses and all between her and her knowledge of herself, we managed pretty well.
At about four o’clock, at the bottom of the pool, Brenda suddenly wrenched away from me and shot up to the surface. I shot up after her.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
First she whipped the hair off her forehead. Then she pointed a hand down towards the base of the pool. “My brother,” she said, coughing some water free inside her.
And suddenly, like a crew-cut Proteus rising from the sea, Ron Patimkin emerged from the lower depths we’d just inhabited and his immensity was before us.
“Hey, Bren,” he said, and pushed a palm flat into the water so that a small hurricane beat up against Brenda and me.
“What are you so happy about?” she said.
“The Yankees took two.”
“Are we going to have Mickey Mantle for dinner?” she said. “When the Yankees win,” she said to me, treading so easily she seemed to have turned the chlorine to marble beneath her, “we set an extra place for Mickey Mantle.”
“You want to race?” Ron asked.
“No, Ronald. Go race alone.”
Nobody had as yet said a word about me. I treaded unobtrusively as I could, as a third party, unintroduced, will step back and say nothing, awaiting the amenities. I was tired, however, from the afternoon’s sport, and wished to hell brother and sister would not tease and chat much longer. Fortunately Brenda introduced me. “Ronald, this is Neil Klugman. This is my brother, Ronald Patimkin.”
> Of all things there in the fifteen feet water, Ron reached out his hand to shake. I returned the shake, not quite as monumentally as he apparently expected; my chin slipped an inch into the water and all at once I was exhausted.
“Want to race?” Ron asked me good-naturedly.
“Go ahead, Neil, race with him. I want to call home and tell them you’re coming to dinner.”
“Am I? Ill have to call my aunt. You didn’t say anything. My clothes—”
“We dine au naturel”
“What?” Ronald said.
“Swim, baby,” Brenda said to him and it ached me some when she kissed him on the face.
I begged out of the race, saying I had to make a phone call myself, and once upon the tiled blue border of the pool, looked back to see Ron taking the length in sleek, immense strokes. He gave one the feeling that after swimming the length of the pool a half dozen times he would have earned the right to drink its contents; I imagined he had, like my Uncle Max, a colossal thirst and a gigantic bladder.
Aunt Gladys did not seem relieved when I told her she’d have only three feedings to prepare that night. “Fancy-shmancy” was all she said to me on the phone.
We did not eat in the kitchen; rather, the six of us—Brenda, myself, Ron, Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin, and Brenda’s little sister, Julie—sat around the dining room table, while the maid, Carlota, a Navaho-faced Negro who had little holes in her ears but no earrings, served us the meal. I was seated next to Brenda, who was dressed in what was au naturel for her: Bermudas, the close ones, white polo shirt, tennis sneakers and white socks. Across from me was Julie, ten, round-faced, bright, who before dinner, while the other little girls on the street had been playing with jacks and boys and each other, had been on the back lawn putting golf balls with her father. Mr. Patimkin reminded me of my father, except that when he spoke he did not surround each syllable with a wheeze. He was tall, strong, ungrammatical, and a ferocious eater. When he attacked his salad—after drenching it in bottled French dressing—the veins swelled under the heavy skin of his forearm. He ate three helpings of salad, Ron had four, Brenda and Julie had two, and only Mrs! Patimkin and I had one each. I did not like Mrs. Patimkin, though she was certainly the handsomest of all of us at the table. She was disastrously polite to me, and with her purple eyes, her dark hair, and large, persuasive frame, she gave me the feeling of some captive beauty, some wild princess, who has been tamed and made the servant to the king’s daughter—who was Brenda.