The View from Castle Rock

in my flimsy dress.
    “Feeling a tad sick?” said Mrs. Montjoy, with the briefest possible smile. It was like the signal for a smile, when the occasion did not warrant the real thing. She had large white teeth in a long tanned face, and her natural expression seemed to be one of impatience barely held in check. She probably knew that what I was feeling was fear, not sickness, and she threw out this question so that I-and she-need not be embarrassed.
    Here was a difference, already, from the world I was used to. In that world, fear was commonplace, at least for females. You could be afraid of snakes, thunderstorms, deep water, heights, the dark, the bull, and the lonely road through the swamp, and nobody thought any the worse of you. In Mrs. Montjoy’s world, however, fear was shameful and always something to be conquered.
    The island that was our destination had a name-Nausicaa. The name was written on a board at the end of the dock. I said it aloud, trying to show that I was at ease and quietly appreciative, and Mrs. Montjoy said with slight surprise, “Oh, yes. That was the name it already had when Daddy bought it. It’s for some character in Shakespeare.”
    I opened up my mouth to say no, no, not Shakespeare, and to tell her that Nausicaa was the girl on the beach, playing ball with her friends, surprised by Ulysses when he woke up from his nap. I had learned by this time that most of the people I lived amongst did not welcome this kind of information, and I would probably have kept quiet even if the teacher had asked us in school, but I believed that people out in the world-the real world-would be different. Just in time I recognized the briskness of Mrs. Montjoy’s tone when she said “some character in Shakespeare”-the suggestion that Nausicaa, and Shakespeare, as well as any observations of mine, were things she could reasonably do without.
    The dress I was wearing for my arrival was one I had made myself, out of pink and white striped cotton. The material had been cheap, the reason being that it was not really meant for a dress but for a blouse or a nightgown, and the style I had chosen-the full-skirted, tight-waisted style of those days-was a mistake. When I walked, the cloth bunched up between my legs, and I kept having to yank it loose. Today was the first day the dress had been worn, and I still thought that the trouble might be temporary-with a firm enough yank the material might be made to hang properly. But I found when I took off my belt that the day’s heat and my hot ride on the train had created a worse problem. The belt was wide and elasticized, and
of
a burgundy color, which had run. The waistline of the dress was circled with strawberry dye.
    I made this discovery when I was getting undressed in the loft of the boathouse, which I was to share with Mrs. Montjoy’s ten-year-old daughter, Mary Anne.

    “What happened to your dress?” Mary Anne said. “Do you sweat a lot? That’s too bad.”
    I said that it was an old dress anyway and that I hadn’t wanted to wear anything good on the train.
    Mary Anne was fair-haired and freckled, with a long face like her mother’s. But she didn’t have her mother’s look of quick judgments marshalled at the surface, ready to leap out at you. Her expression was benign and serious, and she wore heavy glasses even when sitting up in bed. She was to tell me soon that she had had an operation to get her eyes straightened, but even so her eyesight was poor.
    “I’ve got Daddy’s eyes,” she said. “I’m intelligent like him too, so it’s too bad I’m not a boy.”
    Another difference. Where I came from, it was generally held to be more suspect for boys to be smart than for girls to be, though not particularly advantageous for one or the other. Girls could go on to be teachers, and that was all right-though quite often they became old maids-but for boys to continue with school usually meant they were sissies.
    All night long you could hear the water slapping against the boards of the boathouse. Morning came early. I wondered whether I was far enough north of home for the sun to actually be rising sooner. I got up and looked out. Through the front window, I saw the silky water, dark underneath but flashing back from its surface the light of the sky. The rocky shores of this little cove, the moored sailboats, the open channel beyond, the mound of another island or two, shores and channels beyond that. I thought that I would never, on my own, be