Story 7: Cradle

As Natalie walked down the path to the dock, Janie greeted her from the picnic table, where lunch was being set up.

“Well, Natalie,” she said, pronouncing her words carefully, “how’s Michael?”

Natalie turned around and looked at her. Janie’s severely dyed hair was a hard dark red for summer. Her all-black swimsuit had a ruffle from the waist to the hips and covered as much of her flab as any one-piece could. “Fine,” Natalie said, and continued to the dock.

Janie called after her. “Now, Natalie,” she said, “don’t you swim out to the buoy.”

Natalie ignored her. She left her towel on a chair and positioned herself at the edge of the dock.

Lake Tapawingo had murky waters at best, and the rocks on the bottom underneath the ladder grew a thick coat of slimy lake plants. Occasionally a crawdad or fish would make contact. So Natalie’s preferred method of entry was diving off the dock as hard and straight and forward as possible or jumping off the boathouse, hugging her knees.

This time her body arced so perfectly that her hands sliced into the top of the water, and she skimmed for 10 feet just below the surface. She turned and looked back at the dock and the small figures at the table; Janie had not followed her down yet. Sidestroke suited her best, especially when she switched from one side to the other, exercising both sets of obliques. Natalie wasn’t a strong swimmer; she’d never swum laps or done much endurance swimming at all. Someday I’ll swim across, she thought. She reached the buoy and circled it a few times. She liked to float near it on her back and stare at it until it became abstract and her mind emptied. Then she was held in the lake’s undulating skin. The water rose slowly around her face; when it almost flowed into her nose and eyes she moved her hands and feet languidly to surface. When you’re in the water, does it still reflect the sun and make you more likely to sunburn? How big are the fish in this lake?

She turned on her stomach and looked but saw only sunlight through greenish water filled with floating specks. The water made her eyes feel full of grit. Wonder what’s in this lake water. Voices reached her from both shores, and a boat drove by, rocking her, getting water up her nose. Maybe floating was her only strength: lying down in water’s vehicle and letting it move her where it wanted. A rescuer would certainly come by eventually, though she hoped it would be someone younger and more male than Janie. Perhaps Han Solo, but then she reminded herself that he had been frozen in The Empire Strikes Back. Natalie certainly didn’t want to wait for rescue until the next episode of Star Wars came out. But then she flailed at the water, kicking droplets as high as she could. What was she doing out here, stopped by the buoy separating her from the boats and held by the water that Janie feared? And Michael would be coming down the road in a few weeks. Natalie didn’t want either of them near her, but she didn’t know how to keep them at bay. Everything at the lake this summer was conspiring to keep her in place.

Last night she had said to Michael, “I’ve never kept anything from you before,” and he had agreed. She had expected him to point out that she hadn’t been honest with him for months, but instead he had said “True” and then waited for her to respond. She had nothing new to say. She had confessed that she’d had an abortion before she told him she was pregnant, and now she wanted the entire situation to be over.

Natalie sighed and ended her buoy ritual by swimming in on her back, frog-style, orienting herself by staring at the house across the lake. She forced herself not to look directly behind her—she wanted to navigate by something other than sight, by the slant of sunlight or shapes in her peripheral vision. She almost ran into the boathouse—not too far off—and turned around to face Janie standing at the point where the path met the retaining wall. Natalie could have climbed up the ladder to the dock, but she liked finishing her swim by picking her way over rocks in the shallows. It reminded her of how decisions can be made too quickly, like her impulse to sleep with Michael last Thanksgiving without using birth control. Back here, she could see everything ahead of her. As she teetered on one slimy, unstable rock after another between the dock and the boathouse, Janie had plenty of time to comment on her love of danger, and she didn’t restrain herself. Natalie tried to ignore her, get past, but then she tripped and hit her knee on a rock just as Janie reached her peak.

“You scare me, Natalie, you really do! I’m not strong enough to swim out after you!”

Natalie’s knee bled a little, which made her speculate again on the composition of the lake water. She stopped on the path next to Janie, dripping, and said loudly enough for those at the table to hear, “Then go home where you don’t have to see it. Go home and sleep it off!”

Natalie retrieved her towel and trotted back to the table, wrapping it around her waist, over her plaid bikini. Janie followed her but kept walking, through the yard and across the street.

“Where is she going?” Natalie’s mother asked.

“Home. And I hope she stays there.” Natalie combed her hair back with her fingers so that it would drip down her back, not in her face. She felt embarrassed but relieved.

“She’s our neighbor and our guest, Natalie,” her mother scolded, shaking her head. “I’d rather she didn’t leave hungry and angry.”

Natalie smiled at Chris, who had just moved to Lake Tapawingo last week, and at his parents, who introduced themselves as Joe and Beryl Burnet. She squeezed in next to her mother. The white picnic table barely accommodated Chris and his parents, Natalie and her parents, her aunt and uncle, and their five children, who tended to act and speak as if they were a unit.

“I was just talking about my job with Janie,” Chris said, “but she seemed a little too drunk to understand.”

“I didn’t think she was drunk,” Natalie’s mother said. Chris let a little smile hover around his lips, which, Natalie noticed, were very red. His tan cheeks rounded even more when he smiled.

“What job?” Natalie asked.

“Actually, it’s an internship at the weekly in Lee’s Summit. Three days a week, but I don’t need to show up until 10.”

“We’re both working at weeklies!” Natalie said. “I work for the paper at the lake.”

“I didn’t know you were a journalism major,” Chris said.

By now their parents were listening intently. “No, English. I want to work for a book publisher, but there aren’t any around here.”

“You could start your own,” her uncle suggested. He handed her a plate with an undressed burger and macaroni salad. Condiments arrived from various corners of the table, and Tom arranged an onion-and-pickle-relish stick person on top of her hamburger.

“If you give me the money,” Natalie laughed, digging into the macaroni. Then she noticed the relish. “Uncle Tom, you know I don’t like pickles!” He laughed at her and smashed her bun down onto the burger.

Chris hadn’t finished his thought. “Well, I’m a journalism major. At MU.”

“Good place for it,” Tom said.

“I write a column for the student paper, under the pseudonym ‘Green,’” Chris said.

“Green,” Tom said, drawing out the word. There was a pause in the conversation. Then he laughed. “Oh, I get it. Your name is Burnet, which is a salad green, and your nickname is Green. Very clever.”

“Is it now?” Chris asked softly. His parents whispered something to each other.

“You write such inflammatory stuff you need a fake name?” Tom asked.

“According to some guys.” Chris looked more and more nettled.

But Tom was not quite done. “A salad with burnet is like love without a woman,” he said. He raised an eyebrow at Natalie, as if to ask, “Who is this person?”

Natalie decided to change the subject. “Well, I don’t write anything for the paper. I just catch other people’s mistakes. They told me last week I was the best proofer they’ve ever had.”

“I’m sure you are,” her father said, smiling. “Chris, why don’t you write an article about moving here? Then Natalie can proof it.”

“My articles don’t need checking. They’re perfect,” Chris said, laughing.

Natalie’s parents exchanged a glance. “That sounds like a challenge,” her father said.

“I think it is,” Natalie said, turning to Chris. “I’ll take you up on it.”

“For that, you need hotdogs,” Tom said, getting up and circling the table until he found them and taking them to the grill. Natalie laughed out loud. He returned with twelve of them, cooked and impaled on a metal skewer. To Natalie he seemed to come and go magically in his orange swim trunks and ratty white tank top, each time bringing more food. One by one, they plucked off the hotdogs. Natalie’s father passed the buns down the table, then the mustard.

“I want ketchup,” Natalie said. “And cheese and chopped onions.”

Chris and his parents finished their burgers and said they had to get back home. Natalie walked them to the street, trying to ignore the feeling that each person at the table was critiquing them and her conversation with Chris. The three of them said goodbye to her as if from a great height, at least half a head above her. A curtain moved slightly in the front window of Janie’s home. But when she sat down, no one said anything. With an evil grin, Tom picked up a plate of brownies from the seat next to him, and the cousins went to fetch their ice cream from the refrigerator. Soon hot fudge sundaes were circling the table.

**

At noon on Tuesday, Natalie slumped over the desk at the Lake Tapawingo weekly, reading an article about boat engines for the third time because the author rewrote it obsessively. “Once or twice more and I’ll be an expert,” she muttered to herself. Just then the door opened.

“Talk to yourself a lot?” Chris asked.

“Only when I’m really bored.”

“Are you the only one here?”

“The editor went out to lunch with the production department and left me in charge.”

He sat down in a chair beside her black metal desk, turning the furniture in the room shabby next to his white t-shirt and blue chino shorts. Ironed, Natalie noticed, unlike most of the shorts she saw during the school year in Boulder. He was holding two sheets of paper in his hands, which he held out to her.

“Here’s my article on how weird Lake Tapawingo is.” He shrugged. “I tried to be diplomatic, but it’s still pretty blunt.”

“That’s what I would expect from you,” Natalie said. He nodded.

“That barbeque on Saturday,” he said. “Do you always get in fights with your neighbors?”

“That was a first,” Natalie said, resting her chin on her hands, proofing neglected for the moment. “Janie’s been after me as long as I can remember.”

Chris leaned toward her. “I could smell it too. She likes vodka.”

“Oh, don’t I know it.”

“To make up for it,” Chris said, “we’ll just have to be really nice to her from now on. Nice, but firm. And brief.”

Natalie laughed. “We?”

“She’s my neighbor too. But you’re my favorite neighbor so far,” Chris said, “though I hope that’s not all we’re destined to be.”

“You and I have a destiny?”

“Why not?” he asked.

She laughed and shook her head. “Well, I have a boyfriend,” she said. “He’s coming to visit in July.”

“You don’t seem very excited about the old home-town honey,” Chris observed.

Natalie had nothing to say to that. Michael was a topic too complicated to explain at work.

“You know,” Chris said, “if you went out with me—”

Natalie stared at him.

“—just for one night, just one night, you’d have a basis for comparison.”

“That’s true, I would,” Natalie said. Then she felt suspended, as if her ordinary life had suddenly fallen away, leaving her in midair.

After he left, she read his article. As he had said, its grammar and spelling were perfectly correct. One phrase stuck in her head all that day: “The cradle that is Lake Tapawingo.”


**

Chris took Natalie dancing at a country western bar off I-70, on Crackerneck Road. “I’m not really a fan of country,” he told her in the car, “but this bar is the closest and the band does play rock and blues.”

Where Michael was respectful, Chris was confident. When he took her in his arms on the dance floor, she followed him without hesitation. He spoke close to her ear, telling her he was going to be a journalist because he liked to ask people questions.

“I don’t,” Natalie said into his shoulder, raising her voice to be heard over the music. “I wait for them to tell me.”

“Tell you what?” She had to lean closer to him to hear. Their faces brushed against each other.

“Their histories,” she said, turning her head in what she hoped was a casual way.

“Afraid I was going to kiss you?” he asked, grinning.

“No!” Natalie said.

“Liar. I was thinking of it, but I could tell you were chicken.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said. “But why so eager? You hardly know me.”

“I saw you and I wanted to be with you,” he said.

At home that night, she made a list in her diary. She hadn’t written since January 30, the day before her abortion. She put his name at the top: Chris


is a journalism major (who, what, where, when, why, and how).

decided to become one sometime after a teacher told him he asked too many questions. Still can’t stop asking questions (who).

likes to talk. Obviously (who).

works hard in school because his parents are teachers and he’s an only child. I work hard because my father is a professor and I’m the only child (who and why).

hasn’t ever skied on snow, just on water (what!).

thinks Midwesterners are the strongest Americans (who).


She had challenged him on that, and he said: “Easterners act tough, and Westerners think the landscape makes them tough, but Midwesterners put down roots. Other people settled in the East or chased their dreams to the West, but we knew there was work to be done right here.”

That was another “why.” Or a “who.” Natalie forced herself to stay awake long enough to complete her list: Chris


doesn’t drool when he kisses (and how!).

wants to live in a big Midwestern city, like Chicago or St. Louis (where).

wants me to come over on Friday (when).


She’d said “yes” to the last item, but then she wondered what category her answer fell into. Did how she’d said it mean something? He’d parked the car at his parents’ house, gotten out and opened her door, and grasped her hand. The car, interior cold from the air conditioner, let the night air slip in as he pulled her close to him again. Natalie hadn’t thought about how their date might end, but apparently he had. He brushed her hair away from her face and kissed her. Then he asked, “My house on Friday? We’ll have it mostly to ourselves.” She nodded. “Was that a yes?” he asked, and kissed her again. “Yes,” she said, and put her arms around his neck. He pressed her against the car and kept her there for a long time before walking her home. As she lay in bed, sliding into sleep, Natalie could still feel the imprint of his body on hers.

**

It was dusk on Friday, and they were sitting on Chris’s dock, their fingers orange from the Cheetos they ate, one by one. Watching him, Natalie placed another one on her tongue and let it dissolve, her mouth open so he could see. Chris grew nervous.

“I feel like a mouse sitting next to a cat.”

“That’s what boys in high school called me. ‘The cat.’”

He looked at her oddly. “Why?”

“’Cause I never went out with anyone for very long until my senior year. That’s the way they thought I was with guys.”

“So let me see … you chased them, pounced on them, batted them around, and then dropped them dead at your parents’ feet?”

Natalie didn’t care for that description, but then she wondered if Michael would agree with Chris. “Well, the first two might be true, but not the second two.” She shifted away from him, toward the road. A light flickered on in Janie’s living room, and Natalie could see her moving around, straightening up.

“I must have hit a sore spot,” Chris said.

“Not really.” Natalie shrugged. “But I feel guilty about being here with you when I have a boyfriend.”

Chris was silent for a moment. Then he grinned. “How’s the comparison going?” he asked.

“It’s just until the Fourth of July,” Natalie informed him, a little resentfully. “Then he’ll be here.”

“Oh, a month is all I get?” His tone was rueful, making Natalie sad and frightened at once. She was revealing herself to him almost in spite of her intentions. Chris turned her face up to his. “I’m not sure that’s enough for me.”

“This is only our second date.”

“I know. But you’ve made a good impression.”

Then she wanted to cry. Wait ’til you hear the whole story, she thought, and it must have shown on her face.

“Aha!” he said. “You have more secrets. Tell me.”

She took off her shoes and dangled her feet in the water, which was still warm, and he sat down behind her, wrapping his arms and legs around her. “Now,” he said. “Let’s talk about boyfriends and girlfriends.”

Natalie didn’t say anything.

“You go first,” he said. “I have a feeling that your love life has been more eventful than mine.”

Half-forgotten rituals of Catholic confession came into Natalie’s head. Forgive me, for I have sinned … it has been … five years? After a few minutes he tightened his arms around her, just a little. Then she focused on a small light on a dock all the way across the lake. She had not expected that she would find this secret so hard to share. “This boyfriend?”

“Yeah?”

“I got pregnant last Thanksgiving and didn’t tell him until after I had an abortion.”

His chest tightened against her back, but he was quiet. She stared at the light without blinking until her eyes watered.

“You lied to him,” Chris said, finally breaking the silence. “Why?”

“I was afraid he’d want to marry me, and I knew I couldn’t.”

“You don’t love him?”

Natalie shook her head. “I did at first.” But after her last semester of high school, she had come to Lake Tapawingo without him, enjoying the simplicity of aloneness, of not having to do. She read books without analyzing them. She argued Reaganomics with her father without thinking it through. With Michael, she’d realized, she had constantly to reach for her best, and it was wearing her out. “And I wasn’t going to bear a child to a man I didn’t want to marry.”

“It’s not as if I’ve never had a pregnancy scare,” Chris said. “I know girls who’ve had abortions; you’re not the first. It’s the lie that bothers me. I wonder what you’ll tell me.”

“I told you what happened.”

“True.” He leaned against her, speaking close to her ear. “You know, I’ve been looking for an imperfect girl. You just might fit the bill.”

Natalie stiffened. “It’s your turn,” she said into his shoulder, wiggling a little, wondering whether her urge to confess had been sound.

“I think we’re a lot alike,” he said.

“In our imperfection, you mean?”

He laughed a little harshly. “Yes. Both of us have had one serious relationship. Both of us have played a little. I lost my virginity when I was fourteen. How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“That was your junior year. Tell me about him.”

“His name was Ben. I’ve spent enough time talking about him, I think.”

“OK!” His voice carried across the lake, Natalie thought, and woke up early sleepers who had their windows open. He asked her, “Was he the reason you got the rep as the cat?”

“No, that was before him. I’d go out with a guy for a month and get bored.”

“I had a serious girlfriend my senior year,” Chris said, stroking her arms. “We thought she was pregnant once. That freaked me out, so I slept with someone else, which kinda ruined things.”

“I can imagine,” Natalie said.

He sighed. “Everyone loved Susan, so the last three months of high school were hell. Luckily she decided not to go to MU at the last minute.”

“I think my guilt trip is a little worse than yours,” Natalie said.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I’m not shocked very often, but I’m shocked that you didn’t tell him right away.”

“I lied,” Natalie said. “I know. It’s practically all I think about.”

“You didn’t have to tell me about Michael,” Chris mused. “You get points for that.”

They were silent for a minute. Then Natalie turned around and asked. “Why are we still here?”

He pulled her back until they were lying down on the dock facing each other. Starlight reflected from the lake back up to the sky. “I’m here because you draw me. What about you?”

“The same,” Natalie said.

“Here’s the deal,” Chris said, with firmness in his voice. “You break up with Michael, and I’ll trust you.”

No boats were allowed after dark, and Chris’s parents had only dim lights in their back yard. “They’ve gone to bed,” he told her when she looked up at the house. He wrapped his arms and legs around her and kissed her for a long time. They stayed out on the dock until the spiders came up from their webs underneath and started biting. Then he walked her home.


One day in mid-June, Natalie came home from a walk with Chris to find her mother at the sewing machine on the screened porch, surrounded by yards of green madras. She turned and smiled at Natalie, who was distracted by the sight of Janie sitting in the glider.

“It’s a wrap skirt to match your suit,” her mother said, holding up the bikini bottom of Natalie’s blue-and-green-plaid swimsuit to the fabric. “I’ll have it finished today.”

Janie asked Natalie, without looking at her, “How’s Chris?”

Her mother was stretching out the seam, getting ready to sew again. She paused almost imperceptibly.

“Fine,” Natalie said.

“That’s what you said about Michael the other day.”

“They’re both fine,” Natalie repeated.

Janie turned to face her. “I know you think I’m a fat drunk,” she spat, her breath smelling of onions at the moment, “but I’ve never cheated on anyone. I’m too romantic for that.”

Then Janie got up and handed something to her mother, whispered in her ear. She left the screened porch without looking at Natalie. Natalie’s mother sighed, and her shoulders collapsed backward: she did these two things every time someone spoke to her in a way that presaged a fight. Natalie had watched animals approach each other the same way, one walking up aggressively and the other backing off subtly. Her mother seemed to get stuck in these situations an awful lot, except now the fight was over.

“Why can’t I complete a simple task without being asked to serve as referee?”

Natalie had no answer to that question.

Her mother continued. “I like to make clothes for a girl who doesn’t have any bulges or bumps. It reminds me of being young and taut…without so much history behind me. …”

Not that Natalie’s mother would have allowed a bulge to show if she had one—she would have dieted or girdled it into submission. She meant the scars on her stomach from a cesarean and a hysterectomy, both occasioned by her only daughter’s appearance in the world. Natalie had seen them only a few times. On the rare occasions when her mother dressed or undressed in front of people other than her husband, she exposed as little of her body as possible. And when she was sad, she would often slide down into a chair and rub her stomach, as if the incisions had awakened and needed to be soothed back to sleep. When Natalie occasionally dreamed of them, they served as evidence of her violent desire to get into the world.

During the abortion, Natalie remembered, she had thought her uterus would never stop contracting. She had wondered how many contractions it had taken to expel her 2-inch fetus and how much of the rest was just blood. She imagined the sensation of contractions around a full-term baby.

The seam was finished. Her mother called her over to try on the skirt. Natalie took off her shorts and slipped into it. There was a small silver picture frame resting in her mother’s lap. As she knelt down to pin the hem in one liquid motion, she placed the frame on the sewing machine. The girl in the picture had a heart-shaped face, dull blonde hair, and an engaging smile.

“Do you recognize her?” her mother said, her mouth full of pins.

“Janie?” Natalie guessed, squirming as the raw edge of the cotton fabric tickled her calf. Then she added, looking down on her mother’s dark red hair, “She’s dyeing her hair to match yours. She wants to be you.”

“Why don’t you return it to her later,” her mother said, but it wasn’t just a suggestion.

“Why?” It seemed everyone demanded something from her these days—Michael, their relationship as it once was; Chris, to break up with Michael; and her mother, friendship with Janie.

“So you can talk to her. It’s awkward, having to tiptoe around the two of you.”

“When she’s drinking, she won’t leave me alone.”

“Sometimes people act in annoying ways because they’re disappointed, Telie,” her mother mumbled, scooting a quarter of the way around her. “They think they see other people going the same way they went and want to warn them.”

“You think I’ll end up with badly dyed hair?” Her mother laughed, a couple of pins hanging from her lip, and then stopped abruptly. Natalie knew she felt guilty for mocking Janie.

“Did it ever occur to you simply to tell her to stop?”

“I guess I never thought she could act any other way.”

Her mother looked up at her with a smile that seemed a little too broad. “I know you think I’m not direct enough with people. But this is the way I do it. First I wait to see if people will stop annoying me on their own. Obviously Janie won’t. Then I try to give them a hint—which you did at the barbeque.” Natalie grinned to herself. Her mother wasn’t joking, wasn’t even being ironic. She simply thought Natalie had no tact. “Then I ask a question, as in, ‘Do you always act this way?’ Finally I ask them to stop.”

“Do you ever tell them?” Natalie inquired, pretty sure what the answer would be.

“Well, I did just now.” Natalie twisted around to look at her. Her mother was smiling again as she placed the last pin, tugged on the skirt to make sure the edges were even, and stepped back to look.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well, Natalie,” she said, directing her to turn slowly while she checked the hem, “I think you always wanted me to tell people. Not you. Now take that off and I’ll sew it up.”

**

That night, as she swam back and forth along the moonlight’s path in the lake, Natalie made a decision. She had been avoiding Michael, not returning his phone calls, out of guilt and reluctance to make a scene. Now was the time, she figured. Time to clear out her system, enjoy Chris for the rest of the summer, and return to school ready for a new start in her sophomore year of college. She called him the next day, right before lunch break.

“Don’t come visit,” she said, without preamble.

“I have to,” he insisted. “We need to work through this.”

She tried to tell him that the distance made it impossible. She explained that she was tired, but tiredness is not very compelling to someone who’s desperate.

“I know it’s a challenge. But that’s what I love about you. You’re not easy.” Natalie could hear coworkers chatting in the background. She wondered if he would cry in front of them or hide his tears.

“I want less work and more fun,” she said.

He was quiet for a few seconds, and then he asked, “Did you feel this way at Thanksgiving?”

“A little bit.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was hoping I could get back what we had.”

**

By the time Fourth of July weekend rolled around, Natalie and Chris had spent every possible moment together for several weeks. His parents were going to a big party in Kansas City, but Natalie’s family was gathering at her grandparents’ house, so Chris invited Natalie over. “If I can tear you away from your family,” he said, laughing.

Natalie came downstairs and tried to slip out the door, but she couldn’t get past her uncle quickly enough.

“Someone has a date, I see,” Tom laughed. “With Mr. Perfect Journalist.”

“And he’s the boy next door,” Aunt Lydia added.

“He’s more interesting than her family,” her father said.

“Bye!” All the cousins waved.

As Natalie turned to leave, Tom ejected himself from the couch and walked her to the door, where he took her wrist in his calloused, well-scrubbed doctor hand. “It hasn’t been a good year for you so far, has it?” he asked her softly. Behind them, the rest of her family laughed at her father’s latest story about an obnoxious student.

“No,” Natalie admitted, smiling up at him. He could always tell when she was troubled. He had concluded something was wrong after she’d stopped seeing Ben, after the rape and its unpleasant aftermath at school. Was a breakup always a signal, for her, that something was wrong? If that was the case, Natalie thought, then she’d never be without a man. She felt hemmed in.

“Chris seems to have brought back your sparkle,” Tom said. He kissed her hand and tossed it away, saying, “Off with you!”

Natalie scooted by Janie’s house as fast as she could, remembering the picture frame still sitting on her dresser. She could smell onions and wood smoke. Chris was grilling steaks. He had already heated rolls and made salad and put them on the table, along with red wine. They ate while a warm wind blew through the house and talked about what their families must be doing. Natalie said her mother would be trying not to argue with Tom’s wife. “There’s always a little tension between them.”

“My Mom would never let that go on,” Chris said. “She’d drag her upstairs for a serious discussion.”

“I believe it,” Natalie said. She had spent one or two evenings watching movies on TV with him while his parents were around. They had kept a keen eye on her. “Did you tell your parents anything about me?”

“Just basic stuff, where you’re from and where you go to school. Why?”

“Not about Michael.”

“Oh no,” he said. “They still don’t understand why Susan and I broke up. They thought I was really stupid to give her up.”

“Do you miss her?”

“No, I really don’t.”

“I don’t miss Michael either.”

“No, but you still feel guilty.” Natalie frowned at him, and he laughed. “Come on, you know you do.”

“Not really,” Natalie said, crushing the remaining croutons with her fork. Chris’s plate was clean; he’d used the last roll to mop up the juices from his steak. “It just that I feel I’ve gone from one man to another.”

“Well, we’ll be by ourselves all next semester,” Chris reminded her. “Take what you can get while you can get it.”

They laughed and clinked their glasses together.

“Michael sounds like the male equivalent of my girlfriend Susan,” Chris went on. “And people like that, I’ve discovered, will keep you feeling guilty to hold you close.”

He did the dishes, refusing to let her help. Then they went downstairs, where he had laid a blue-and-green star quilt on the floor and piled up bed pillows. “Are you always this prepared?” Natalie asked him, feeling a little managed.

“Tonight I’m taking care of you. Feel free to do the same for me sometime.”

As they lay close to each other on the quilt and watched the Fourth of July celebration on the Mall in DC, Natalie considered what he might mean. She’d always associated taking care of someone with martyrdom on the part of the caretaker and passive acceptance on the part of the receiver. But she was beginning to believe Chris intended a quite different thing.

Since the revelations about their romantic lives, they hadn’t done much more than kiss. All week she’d worried about this evening. She remembered the night on the dock, how since then he’d held himself a little distant from her. All without saying anything direct. If he had dismissed it, she would have worried more, but she hadn’t wanted to sue for forgiveness. She’d apologized to Michael for lying; that was enough. She had no such duty to Chris, and that freedom attracted her.

Natalie turned off the TV with her toe and pulled him closer.

He made love the same way he danced, with confidence. Briefly she wondered just how many girls this much experience required. And she had to laugh when he pulled a condom from underneath one of the pillows. “Good thing I didn’t rearrange them when I sat down,” she teased him.

“I wanted tonight to take away any doubts you have. Because I have none.”

When Natalie walked in her front door that night, Tom and Lydia and her parents were curled up on the couches, talking. The cousins lay sprawled on the floor, asleep. As Natalie picked her way over them to get to the stairs, Tom said softly, “Did you celebrate independence?” He was looking at her earnestly, while the rest of them, in the way they feigned indifference, magnified their concern. Just then Natalie realized how closely they followed her. This is what being an only child means, she thought, glad that she and Chris shared that trait.

“Yes,” she assured him, “we had a good Fourth.” On her way upstairs, she added under her breath, “And our own little celebration.”

**

Natalie didn’t go to bed right away. She waited until the house was quiet before putting Janie’s picture frame in her shorts pocket, where it fell heavily against her leg, and going across the street. All the windows were dark. She raised her hand to ring the doorbell, stopped, and looked at her watch. It was midnight. Natalie loved summer nights and always stayed awake as late as possible, especially on a night with a slow breeze. What didn’t Janie like about them? She considered coming back in the morning but then rang the bell three times anyway. When Janie came to the door, Natalie could tell she had woken her up, which gave her a certain satisfaction.

“Mom showed me your picture,” Natalie said, holding it out. “It’s pretty.” Then she turned around, walked down to the dock, and dove in, shorts and all. She hoped Janie was watching and that it kept her up with worry. At night, at least, with everyone indoors, no one would bother her about how far to swim.