by
Kathryn A. Kopple
IT HAPPENED a long time ago. So long ago that the details need to be hauled up from the deepest well of memory—one at a time. Who was older? Who was younger? Who led? Who followed? There were three of us in the pool. It was late and dark and there was no moon that night. We had scaled the fence between houses. We shed our clothes and slipped into the neighbor’s big round pool. Naked. Innocent. We didn’t think about our nakedness, our bodies. Our hands and legs became a tangle; an arm brushed against a breast, a foot found a buttock. We were free. The neighbor’s blue vinyl pool was our paradise, our octopus’s garden in the sea.
In those days, our house sat near the base of a long hill. All the houses in the neighborhood looked the same. One-story boxes, ranch houses. I never knew why they called them ranch houses since we didn’t live on a ranch. We didn’t even live on a farm. We lived in an old mill town.
The first time I saw the Bakers I was out in the front yard picking dandelions. They moved into the neighborhood about the same time we did. I'd heard the Bakers had children but they were all grown up. I couldn’t understand why the Bakers wanted to live in a place with so many little kids hollering and running around, cutting across their property, like it was some community playground—not that anyone paid the Bakers much attention. This was back when Wilma and Betty sported halter dresses and the Jetsons rocketed about in slick pantsuits. Samantha Stevens had that cute, wiggly nose and the pony-tailed Jeannie wore puffy harem pants. Even my mother bleached her hair, showed her knees. But then my parents were a lot younger than the Bakers. They were standoffish and plain, except that Mr. Baker owned a convertible. He took the best care of that car, washing it every Saturday and polishing it like a jewel. I guess I had conventional ideas about things and to my way of thinking a car like that was meant for a much younger person.
Then one day, like the wings of an exotic bird, the rear doors of the car flew open, and out of the convertible stepped two girls with honey-blond hair that fell to the waist and long skirts that swished about the ankles. The sight of them struck me as strange and marvelous, like how it must have been for the seafarers ages ago when they saw a mermaid and promptly crashed their ships upon the rocks.
I was feeling pretty much broken up in those days. Julie, my best friend, never seemed to have time for me anymore. It wasn’t her fault. Her parents were getting a divorce. She spent the weekends visiting her father and his new girlfriend, Mimi, in Long Point. Back then, divorce was fast on its way to becoming an epidemic. No one’s family was immune. Divorce just hit one day, out of the blue, and left behind nothing but debris and heartbreak.
Waving at the girls, I got a swift, ebullient response. Within seconds, we were face to face. The taller of the two introduced herself as Connie. “And this is my little sister, Gail.” But that was as far as we got before Mrs. Baker came over and hustled Connie and Gail back to her house. I went back to the dandelions, setting off explosions of white fluff into the air. And then Mrs. Baker came out her front door and walked over to me.
In those days, our house sat near the base of a long hill. All the houses in the neighborhood looked the same. One-story boxes, ranch houses. I never knew why they called them ranch houses since we didn’t live on a ranch. We didn’t even live on a farm. We lived in an old mill town.
The first time I saw the Bakers I was out in the front yard picking dandelions. They moved into the neighborhood about the same time we did. I'd heard the Bakers had children but they were all grown up. I couldn’t understand why the Bakers wanted to live in a place with so many little kids hollering and running around, cutting across their property, like it was some community playground—not that anyone paid the Bakers much attention. This was back when Wilma and Betty sported halter dresses and the Jetsons rocketed about in slick pantsuits. Samantha Stevens had that cute, wiggly nose and the pony-tailed Jeannie wore puffy harem pants. Even my mother bleached her hair, showed her knees. But then my parents were a lot younger than the Bakers. They were standoffish and plain, except that Mr. Baker owned a convertible. He took the best care of that car, washing it every Saturday and polishing it like a jewel. I guess I had conventional ideas about things and to my way of thinking a car like that was meant for a much younger person.
Then one day, like the wings of an exotic bird, the rear doors of the car flew open, and out of the convertible stepped two girls with honey-blond hair that fell to the waist and long skirts that swished about the ankles. The sight of them struck me as strange and marvelous, like how it must have been for the seafarers ages ago when they saw a mermaid and promptly crashed their ships upon the rocks.
I was feeling pretty much broken up in those days. Julie, my best friend, never seemed to have time for me anymore. It wasn’t her fault. Her parents were getting a divorce. She spent the weekends visiting her father and his new girlfriend, Mimi, in Long Point. Back then, divorce was fast on its way to becoming an epidemic. No one’s family was immune. Divorce just hit one day, out of the blue, and left behind nothing but debris and heartbreak.
Waving at the girls, I got a swift, ebullient response. Within seconds, we were face to face. The taller of the two introduced herself as Connie. “And this is my little sister, Gail.” But that was as far as we got before Mrs. Baker came over and hustled Connie and Gail back to her house. I went back to the dandelions, setting off explosions of white fluff into the air. And then Mrs. Baker came out her front door and walked over to me.
“Violet Weinstein, is it?”
“Yes, it is,” I responded.
“Violet, huh?”
“Violet Elizabeth.”
Mrs. Baker looked me up and down. “My nieces wanted me to ask you over for ice cream.”
The Bakers' house smelled like detergent. My house smelled different, like rotting vegetables and the weird foodstuff my parents bought at the Coop. I was eager to get invited to anyone’s house for treats in those days because my mother had ideas about what we should eat, and it didn’t include normal things like Oreos and hotdogs. She fed us tofu, which she claimed tasted exactly like cottage cheese. “Only better.”
Connie and Gail were in the kitchen. The windows were wide open and I could hear the kids next door splashing in the pool. Mrs. Baker scooped out the ice cream into four bowls. She handed them to the girls to place round the table. Mr. Baker asked if I liked ice cream.
“Everyone likes ice cream,” I said.
“They sure do,” Connie said.
The Bakers bowed their heads in silence. Connie and Gail also bowed their heads. My head went down too. Our heads were bowed for the longest time. I watched the vanilla ice cream melt into the chocolate. It was nearly soup when the heads went up again and I found myself looking at Mr. Baker. He smiled, rubbed a hand across his flabby lips, and got to work on his ice cream. Connie exchanged glances with Gail and then burst into laughter.
“What’s so funny?” asked Mr. Baker.
Connie pulled herself together. “You know, Uncle John.”
“What’s that?”
She smiled sweetly and turned to me. “My uncle didn’t think you would eat with us.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because he says you're Hebrew,” Connie said.
“Like the hot dog,” Gail said.
It sounded odd—wrong somehow—hearing Connie and Gail talk about Hebrews and hotdogs. I tried to speak but I was at a loss for words, the same way I would have felt had if she had said I had blue eyes when my eyes were really green or that I spoke French instead of English.
“I’m not,” I said, managing to find my voice.
Mr. Baker put down his spoon. “Violet, you are just a child but you are old enough to know that lying is just plain wrong.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, you most certainly are,” insisted Mrs. Baker.
Connie burst into laughter, and Gail too.
“That's enough,” said Mr. Baker, his voice dropping like stone into the pool of mirth created by the girls’ guffaws. “When I was a child and I lied, I was given a good beating for it. I learned pretty quick to tell the truth, no matter what.”
Connie and Gail fell silent. I got the feeling that Mr. Baker meant business. The hurtful words dug into me, and yet hadn’t my mother tried her best to prepare me for moments like this by denying any suggestion that our father was a Hebrew. “Your father,” she would say, “is a New Yorker.” And that was the end of that discussion, the idea of New York being sufficiently grand and sophisticated to silence further inquiry. As for the Bakers, my mother acted as if they’d never been born.
The subject never came up again. Connie often came over to get me. We spent a lot of her time on the Baker's back porch. We played a lot of Hang Man and Twenty Questions. The Bakers kept a pretty tight leash on their nieces. They weren’t allowed to wander the neighborhood. They weren’t allowed to leave the property without permission.
“I can’t wait to go home,” Connie said to me one day. “I miss my dog.”
It killed me to hear the longing in her voice. I didn’t want her to go anywhere. I suspected that Connie was getting bored with me.
“You don’t like it here?”
“It’s okay. I just miss my dog.” She gathered up her long blond hair, coiling it in her hands, before letting it fall around her shoulders again.
“It must be really great to have a dog.”
“My dog is great.”
“What kind is it?”
“German Shepard.” She turned to me. “You want to sleep out in the backyard with me and Gail tonight?”
*
We swam in circles; the water was dark and cold. It was luscious to skinny-dip, daring too. I couldn’t imagine anything better until from the Bakers' back porch the floodlights came on, vehemently bright, like a comet or one of those flairs that explode off the sun. Before I knew what was happening, Mr. and Mrs. Baker, identical in terry-cloth robes of fire-engine red, were screeching at us to get out of the pool.
It wasn’t that easy—getting out of the pool—because between us and our clothes, which we’d left in a heap alongside our sleeping bags, stood the Bakers. The thought of them watching me as I climbed naked over the neighbor’s fence made me frantic. I would have run home, with or without my clothes, but Connie grabbed my arm. “Don’t go!”
“All right then,” said Mr. Baker, taking charge of the situation in a grim voice. “Come on, get over here.”
Connie tightened her grip on my arm. I could see the trapped, wild look in her eyes. She begged me again not to leave her alone. So over the chain-link fence I went, dropping into a crouch on the Baker’s lawn before making my way like a panicked chimpanzee—hunched over, hands dangling at my sides—across the lawn.
“Go ahead,” said Mr. Baker, as I loped past him, “go sit down.”
Sit down! But then I realized that sitting was better than standing, that I could cover my chest more or less, although as far as that was concerned, I really was flat as a board. Being skinny and several years younger, Gail didn’t have to worry too much either. She had very little to hide, but not Connie. She had a woman’s body with breasts of lavish proportions, spilling out all over the place, like two gorgeous, wayward melons.
Mrs. Baker just looked horrified. “Disgusting.” she said. She held up a pair of underpants made of white cotton and decorated with little violets. “Are these yours? Are they? Are they!” she screamed at Connie.
I never felt so sorry for anyone in my entire life. Connie couldn’t stop from shaking. She’s cold, I thought. She’s freezing cold.
“You could at least look at your aunt when she’s talking to you,” said Mr. Baker. He wasn’t nearly as furious as Mrs. Baker. His eyes weren’t rolling in his sockets but fixed intently on Connie, like he’d come upon a frightened animal and didn’t want to scare it off. He turned his head slightly. I felt his eyes run up and down my skin like a snake.
*
After that night, I never saw Connie or Gail again. The Bakers lectured us for a good hour, but finally gave me my clothes and sent me home. The next day, I told my parents what had happened. I figured that, if I didn’t, Mrs. Baker would tell them. It was best they heard about it from me.
“So you were skinny-dipping in the neighbor’s pool.” My father had that amused glean in his eye. Few things rattled him. My mother wasn’t happy about what I’d done, but really she couldn’t get herself too worked up.
“Just as long as she stays away from those people,” she said to my father, as if he was to blame for my transgressions.
*
Summer ended and school began before I told anyone else what went on that night. I had gone over to Julie’s house and we sitting under the mulberry tree in her backyard. We liked to crush the shriveled berries and then paint our hands purple with them. As I told her what happened, it occurred to me that Mr. Baker was the first man who had seen me naked. The thought of it made me sick. I wished I had kept my mouth shut because immediately she told her brothers.
“Not the old guy!” cried Mickey when he heard.
Bob spit a wad of phlegm into the grass. “There’s something strange about those people.”
Mickey and Bob were kind of wild, so I wasn’t surprised when they came up with a way to get back at the Bakers. Still, I got the feeling that there was something more than mischief in it for them; they were acting out of chivalry, a need to show the Bakers that they couldn’t treat their sister’s friend like that.
That Friday night we snuck out armed with cans of spray paint. Mr. Baker’s blue convertible was sitting in the driveway as usual. Mickey and Bob took one side of the car, Julie and I the other. The whole thing lasted five minutes, at most.
But morning told the whole story. Huge splotches of red paint on the hood, the cars doors made obscene by black and silver curses, and the formerly pristine white leather interior utterly ruined. As I stood there in horror, looking at what I had done, Mr. Baker came out of his house. Seeing his precious baby, he stopped short and clutched at his hair, as stricken as if someone had died. Then he began to circle the car, round and round. Finally, he put his hands on the hood, motionless except for his head, which kept bobbing up and down.
*
Months passed before I realized that Mr. Baker wasn’t going to call the police. I’m not sure why. Weeks went by in which I fully expected the cops to show up on my doorstep. But they never did. One day, I came home from school to see a For Sale sign on the Bakers' lawn, and shortly after a young couple with a baby bought the house. The Bakers were never heard from again.
I was relieved to see them go. Why Mr. Baker didn’t call the police, try to have me arrested, I’ll never know. But something tells me that, more than anything, he wished he'd been in that pool with us, and that all these many years later I still can’t get undressed in front of a man without thinking of him.
Credits: This work originally appeared in a somewhat different version in Light and Dark Magazine. It has since been edited by the author.
