The Progress of Love

showing her pink stomach.
    “Is it just those two?” the girl said.
    “Just the two. We’ll watch them.”
    “I can’t let any adults in. If it’s just the two, I guess I could watch them. I’m having my lunch.” She said to Cynthia, “Do you want to come in the pool?”
    “Yes, please,” said Cynthia firmly.
    Meg looked at the ground.
    “Just a short time, because the pool is really closed,” I said. “We appreciate this very much,” I said to the girl.
    “Well, I can eat my lunch out there, if it’s just the two of them.” She looked toward the car as if she thought I might try to spring some more children on her.
    When I found Cynthia’s bathing suit, she took it into the changing room. She would not permit anybody, even Meg, to see her naked. I changed Meg, who stood on the front seat of the car. She had a pink cotton bathing suit with straps that crossed and buttoned. There were ruffles across the bottom.
    “She is hot,” I said. “But I don’t think she’s feverish.”
    I loved helping Meg to dress or undress, because her body still had the solid unself-consciousness, the sweet indifference, something of the milky smell, of a baby’s body. Cynthia’s body had long ago been pared down, shaped and altered, into Cynthia. We all liked to hug Meg, press and nuzzle her. Sometimes she would scowl and beat us off, and this forthright independence, this ferocious bashfulness, simply made her more appealing, more apt to be tormented and tickled in the way of family love.
    Andrew and I sat in the car with the windows open. I could hear a radio playing, and thought it must belong to the girl or her boyfriend. I was thirsty, and got out of the car to look for a concession stand, or perhaps a soft-drink machine, somewhere in the park. I was wearing shorts, and the backs of my legs were slick with sweat. I saw a drinking fountain at the other side of the park and was walking toward it in a roundabout way, keeping to the shade of the trees. No place became real till you got out of the car. Dazed with the heat, with the sun on the blistered houses, the pavement, the burned grass, I walked slowly. I paid attention to a squashed leaf, ground a Popsicle stick under the heel of my sandal, squinted at a trash can strapped to a tree. This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you’ve been driving for a long time—you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of your being there to see them.
    Where are the children?
    I turned around and moved quickly, not quite running, to apart of the fence beyond which the cement wall was not completed. I could see some of the pool. I saw Cynthia, standing about waist-deep in the water, fluttering her hands on the surface and discreetly watching something at the end of the pool, which I could not see. I thought by her pose, her discretion, the look on her face, that she must be watching some by play between the lifeguard and her boyfriend. I couldn’t see Meg. But I thought she must be playing in the shallow water—both the shallow and deep ends of the pool were out of my sight.
    “Cynthia!” I had to call twice before she knew where my voice was coming from. “Cynthia! Where’s Meg?”
    It always seems to me, when I recall this scene, that Cynthia turns very gracefully toward me, then turns all around in the water—making me think of a ballerina on point—and spreads her arms in a gesture of the stage. “Dis-ap-peared!”
    Cynthia was naturally graceful, and she did take dancing lessons, so these movements may have been as I have described. She did say “Disappeared” after looking all around the pool, but the strangely artificial style of speech and gesture, the lack of urgency, is more likely my invention. The fear I felt instantly when I couldn’t see Meg—even while I was telling myself she must be in the shallower water—must have made Cynthia’s movements seem unbearably slow and inappropriate to me, and the tone in which she could say “Disappeared” before the implications struck her (or was she covering, at once, some ever-ready guilt?) was heard by me as quite exquisitely, monstrously self-possessed.
    I cried out for Andrew, and the lifeguard came into view. She was pointing toward the deep end of the pool, saying, “What’s that?”
    There, just within my view, a cluster of pink ruffles appeared, a bouquet, beneath the surface of the water. Why would a lifeguard stop and