Praying for Sleep

cove of grass and picked flowers, Lis noticed a motion from the state park nearby and stepped closer to explore. A boy of about eighteen stood with a girl several years younger. She was backed against a tree and he was clutching the bark on either side of her shoulders. He would ease forward and kiss her then back away quickly as she wrinkled her nose in mock disgust. He reached suddenly for her chest. Lis was alarmed, thinking that a wasp or bee had landed on her and he was trying to pick it off. She felt an urge to call out to him to leave it alone. They sting when they’re scared, she nearly shouted, astonished that a high-school boy wouldn’t know this plain fact of nature.
    It wasn’t of course a bee he was after but the button of her shirt. He undid it and slipped his fingers inside. The girl crinkled her face again and slapped his knuckles. He withdrew his fingers reluctantly, laughed then kissed her again. The hand crawled back inside and this time she didn’t stop him. Their tongues met outside their mouths and they kissed hard.
    An eerie radiation of warmth consumed Lis. She couldn’t tell from which portion of her body it arose. Maybe her knees. Drawing some vague conclusions about the spectacle of the two lovers, Lis cautiously lifted her own hand to her blouse, beneath which was her swimsuit. She undid buttons, mimicking the young man, and eased her fingers under her suit as if his hand directed hers. She probed, with no discernible results at first. Then as she fumbled the heat seemed to rise from her legs and center somewhere in her belly.
    “Lisbonne!” her father called harshly.
    Gasping, she jumped.
    “Lisbonne, what are you doing? I told you not to wander far!” He was nearby though apparently he hadn’t seen her crime—if a crime it was. Her heart quivering madly, she began to cry and dropped to her knees. “Looking for Indian bones,” she called in a shaking voice.
    “How horrible,” her mother shouted. “Stop that this minute! Come wash your hands.”
    “You should respect the remains of the dead, young lady! When you’re dead and laid out, how’d you like someone to molest your grave?”
    The girls returned to the picnic blanket, washed and sat down to the meal, while Father talked about the paste that astronauts would have to eat on extended space flights. He tried, without success, to explain to Portia what zero gravity meant. Lis was unable to get down more than a few bites of anything. When they finished she hurried back to the cleft in the bushes on the pretense of looking for a dropped comb. The couple was no longer there.
    Then came the part of the day that Lis had been dreading. Father took her down to the dark water. He removed his shirt and slacks, beneath which he wore his burgundy trunks. He had a dense body—not strong but with fat distributed evenly, in approximation of muscles.
    Her shirt came off, then her culottes, revealing the plain red swimsuit. A thin woman now, Lis was a thinner girl then, but she pulled in her stomach vehemently—not in shame at a belly but hoping, futilely, that it might inflate her chest.
    They strode into the cold lake. A championship swimmer in college, Andrew L’Auberget was, he’d told his daughter on a number of occasions, troubled by her fear of the water. He never missed an opportunity to get her into a pool or river or ocean. “It’s dangerous, yes. It’s far too easy to drown. That’s why you must learn to swim, and swim like a fish.”
    Nervously she flexed her knees, feeling the gracious bed of mud beneath her arched toes. Father made a stern show of these lessons. When he noticed that she was resisting putting her head under water he ordered her to take a breath and pushed her face beneath the waves. Panic finally sent her scrambling upright. As she sputtered and shivered he laughed and told her, “See, that wasn’t so bad. Again, for ten seconds. I can do it for two minutes. Two whole minutes without a breath!”
    “No, I don’t want to!”
    “You take that tone, you’ll go under for twenty seconds.”
    She practiced her strokes, beating the water with splayed fingers, which he forced closed into paddles. He supported her and held her buoyant while she swam in place.
    “Calm down, girl! Water won’t kill you. Calm down !”
    She rested on his palm, trying to coordinate her legs and arms. Just as she struck a rhythm that approximated a breaststroke, a wave rolled in and lifted her from his hand. For a