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the lake. Alex, Mary realized, was growing up. She might remember this night her whole life, the night we came back to Pinestead, the choice we made. 4 ecky and Melina followed her everywhere. Becky took on the physical world with vigor; she’d swum out to the raft unaided at ‹ve, earlier than her older sisters. And yet she tended to cling, to both her baby sister and her mother. They dragged their dolls to Mary’s side wherever she went. It was ‹ne. Mary wanted to keep an eye on them, but she was surprised. Now they watched her pin up the ‹rst load of bedsheets and towels on the line among the maple trees. Up the lakeshore from the cabins, in a clearing hidden from the driveway and the beach by a few skinny maples, the clothesline was her personal delight. Laundry hanging from a line made no great advertisement for a resort, but the freshness of sun-dried sheets pleased Mary. It was sunlight that helped save her life as a child, she thought. They didn’t have any antibiotics at the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital in 1922; they put the kids out in the sun, every day. Sunlight helped kill infection, they told her. She loved to press her face into newfolded , sweet-smelling sheets. It sure beat using a tumble dryer, but now they’d have to get one for winter. No question. She hadn’t thought of that until now. “Mom,” said Becky. “Why aren’t you smiling?” Like a warning dart: am I heading into some kind of a funk? Mary turned and smiled at Becky and said, “Oh, just remembering this and that. Let’s get out that big old hammock, shall we? I’m gonna stay where you loaf all day, where they boil in oil the inventors of toil, on the big rock candy mountain. Remember that song? Is it time to loaf? Let’s go get it.” The hammock where she and Jim had pressed into each other from tip to toe, one afternoon years ago. After three years of marriage, Mary had admitted to herself that sex might be losing its glory. She even found herself crying sometimes as 30 B she lay next to Jim in bed, that it wasn’t like it used to be. Good, yes, but not like it used to be. Her incredible abundance of physical reactions to Jim Leader’s attentions seemed to be fading away. The ‹rst two years they were together, he had only to hold her hand as they walked from the dining commons toward her boardinghouse in Ann Arbor, and things would happen to her. She’d swell and open up just when his hand touched hers. She’d even wet herself thinking about him. She wanted to leap on him behind the nearest hydrangea bush; she couldn’t wait till they were alone together. As the years went by, something changed. In order to have a good time, she had to work at it. Produce it in herself. Surely the tears on her cheeks that night were foolish. How dare she weep for this, for sex losing its newness—and anyway, who knows, maybe it was just advancing age. Inevitable. But at times, almost like a miracle, it would be right there again, that effortless, unasked-for astonishment. Oh yes you do love him, the angels would cry. Like the day he put this very hammock up between the two maples. They stared at it like two kids and then climbed in, of one mind. Sandy and Sharon, their two babies, were napping. A hammock, what a joke that turned out to be in later years, whoever had time for a hammock? In later years the kids turned it into a swing, then a way of initiating cousins into life at Pinestead. A competition . How many rotations could you stand before begging for it to stop, maybe tumbling out and having the wind knocked out of you? They thought she didn’t know what they were doing. But she had an ear out, always, in case it went too far. Still, that ‹rst day. Jim and Mary gazed at it, the clean white canvas and the blond yokes at each end, swinging between their maple trees, and as one they climbed in. Their bodies pressed together, and her head came to his chin, her slight, taut ‹gure lost itself in his. High overhead, waving leaves gentled...
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