The Progress of Love

Sophie.
    He threw the other half.
    The boy with the ponytail was putting on his boots.
    The black-haired boy held out his hand to the girl. She shook her head. He dived into the folds of her skirt, she cried out in protest. He threw something else into the water, after the pieces of bathrobe.
    Sophie’s lighter.
    Sophie heard the girl say something—it sounded like “you fucking crud”—and then the three of them began to climb the bank without another look toward the lake. The black-haired boy was leaping gracefully; the other boy followed quickly but more awkwardly; the girl climbed laboriously in her hiked-up skirt. They were all out of sight when Sophie rose out of the water and hoisted herself up onto the rocks.
    The girl’s cigarette—Sophie’s cigarette—was not stubbed out but cast down in a little vein of dirt, dirt and rubbly stones between the rocks.
    Sophie sat on the rocks, drawing in deep, ragged breaths. She didn’t shiver—she was heated by a somber, useless rage. She needed to compose herself.
    She had an image in her mind of the rowboat that used to betied up here when she was a child. A safe old tub of a rowboat, rocking on the water by the dock. Every evening, after dinner, Sophie, or Sophie and one of her brothers (they were both dead now), but usually just Sophie, would row down the lake to Bryce’s farm to get the milk. A can with a lid, scoured and scalded by the Vogelsangs’ cook, was taken along—you wouldn’t want to trust any Bryce receptacle. The Bryces didn’t have a dock. Their house and barn had their backs turned to the lake; they faced the road. Sophie had to steer the boat into the reeds and throw the rope to the Bryce children who ran down to meet her. They would splash out through the mud and haul on the rope and clamber over the boat while Sophie gave out her usual instructions.
    “Don’t take the oar out! Don’t swamp it! Don’t all climb in at one end!”
    Barefoot, as they were, she would jump out and run up to the stone dairy house. (It was still there, and served now, Sophie understood, as a cottager’s darkroom.) Mr. Bryce or Mrs. Bryce would pour the warm frothy milk into the can.
    Some Bryce children were as old as Sophie was and some were older, but all were smaller. How many were there? What were their names? Sophie could recall a Rita, a Sheldon or Selwyn, a George, an Annie. They were always pale children, in spite of the summer sun, and they bore many bites, scratches, scabs, mosquito bites, blackfly bites, fleabites, bloody and festering. That was because they were poor children. It was because they were poor that Rita’s—or Annie’s—eyes were crossed, and that one of the boys had such queerly uneven shoulders, and that they talked as they did, saying, “We-ez goen to towen,” and “bowt,” and other things that Sophie could hardly understand. Not one of them knew how to swim. They treated the boat as if it was a strange piece of furniture—something to climb over, get inside. They had no idea of rowing.
    Sophie liked to come for the milk by herself, not with one of her brothers, so that she could loiter and talk to the Bryce children, ask them questions and tell them things—something her brothers wouldn’t have dreamed of doing. Where did they go to school? What did they get for Christmas? Did they know any songs? When they got used to her, they told her things. They told her about thetime the bull got loose and came up to the front door, and the time they saw a ball of lightning dance across the bedroom floor, and about the enormous boil on Selwyn’s neck and what ran out of it.
    Sophie wanted to invite them to the Log House. She dreamed of giving them baths and clean clothes and putting ointment on their bites, and teaching them to talk properly. Sometimes she had a long, complicated daydream that was all about Christmas for the Bryce family. It included a redecoration and painting of their house, as well as a wholesale cleanup of their yard. Magic glasses appeared, to straighten crossed eyes. There were picture books and electric trains and dolls in taffeta dresses and armies of toy soldiers and heaps of marzipan fruits and animals. (Marzipan was Sophie’s favorite treat. A conversation with the Bryces about candy had revealed that they did not know what it was.)
    In time, she did get her mother’s permission to invite one of them. The one she asked—Rita or Annie—backed out at the last minute, being too shy, and the