Wanda Fonda came back with a tray of glasses of lemonade. The sweating glasses made me instantly wish that I had said I wanted some.
“You look like you’re going to upchuck, Betty,” Ted said. “Do me a favor and lean over the side when you do.”
Betty looked at the glass of lemonade being held out to her by the freckled Wanda Fonda, then turned to release her last meal into the Atlantic.
“Attagirl,” Ted said.
“Uncle Ted?”
“Yes, Wanda Fonda?”
“I’m glad you brought Nu’ott with us.”
Ted smiled warmly at me. “Of course I brought him out here. He’s a sailor at heart. A lover of the sea. An admirer of the wind. A free spirit. A mighty Viking! Or perhaps a Moor.”
My eleven-year-old ears liked the sound of that.
“Go up there and raise the foresail, Wanda Fonda.”
I watched as she did. The girl pulled a line and the sheet of canvas slid up the front side of the mast and I thought it was just beautiful. The sun found Wanda Fonda’s face and I thought she was beautiful as well.
We sailed on, tacking once to make a forty-five-degree turn. Betty tried to put on a strong front. Ted tried to talk to her over the roar of the wind, and she politely pretended to listen, but she was not faring well. Wanda Fonda had found again her station next to me and had even managed to inch her arm close enough to mine that we ever so slightly touched.
“I’d say we make a run!” Ted shouted. “Ready to come about, Wanda Fonda?”
Wanda Fonda’s lithe body sprang into action as she made her way forward and grabbed a crank and some line, I didn’t know what, and clearly listened for Ted’s next words.
Which were, “Hard-a-lee!” if hard-a-lee is three words and not one. Ted let loose the line behind him, then pushed me down into the cockpit and let the boom swing quickly over me. The sail luffed, making a sound I immediately loved, then caught the wind as the boom swung out well to the starboard side of the boat.
Wanda Fonda dropped the foresail, then cranked as fast as she could, and the blue and white spinnaker went up and ballooned out.
“That Wanda Fonda is a heckuva sailor,” Ted said.
Now, with the full strength of the wind, we were really moving. The spray, the sun, the breeze, Jane’s thighs, it was all intoxicating. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the movement, the smells, the wet luxury of it all. The sky was the bluest I had ever seen, and the ocean seemed a part of it.
Betty was lying on the long cushion now, her face turned to the sky, as green as I had ever seen a person and growing paler. Jane was unimpressed by the coming about and lay still and magnificent under the sun; her skin seemed to bronze in front of me. She grew darker as Betty grew lighter.
Betty looked from stem to stern and then to Ted and asked, “How much did this boat cost?”
“A lot,” Ted said.
“Does it bother you to have so much?” she asked.
Ted paused, perhaps considering the question, perhaps considering lunch, and said, “Not yet.”
“Well, it bothers me,” Betty said.
“Then I won’t share it with you.” Ted laughed. “Did you know that horses can’t throw up? That’s all a cow does, back and forth, stomach to stomach, but a horse can’t. Strange.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Wanda Fonda asked me.
“No, and I don’t want one,” I said.
“I go to a private school. All girls.”
“Girls beat me up, too.” I turned to hear Ted telling Betty about how to make perfect pickles every time. “Where the bathroom?” I asked.
“The head,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s called the head. The bathroom is called the head.”
“Where’s the head?”
“Below,” Ted said. He turned to Betty. “Now, Nu’ott’s mother, she had a head on her shoulders. Brilliant woman. I wish I’d hired her, but, you know, I never thought to do that. Perhaps because I’m a privileged white male.”
“Come on,” Wanda Fonda said, taking my hand. “I’ll show you.”
I peed into the toilet, mostly into the toilet as the rocking of the boat made the project a challenge. When I came out, Wanda Fonda had pulled her pants to her ankles, revealing loud pink, high-waisted panties.
“Would you like to see my tattoo? We’ve all got them.”
I had never seen a tattoo, and I was, honestly speaking, interested, but I said, “You should pull up your pants.”
“Are you scared?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Of me?” she asked.
I nodded. “What’s the tattoo a picture of?”
She pulled down the front rim of her underwear and revealed a red circle with a stem, obviously a fruit, and I said, “An apple?”
“No, stupid, it’s a cherry.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It has to do with sex.”
Oddly, it was when she called me stupid that I first took a liking to Wanda Fonda. Enough of a liking that I decided to try my cyclopean eye at Fesmerizing her. I leaned into my stare. Before she could complain or clock me one across the head, she relaxed into that cow-eyed state that I so welcomed. I looked about the cabin and wondered what I might have her do, and I came up with nothing. I did have her pull up her pants. Then I remembered that I was eleven, almost twelve, and though sexual activity or exploration with Wanda Fonda was clearly out of the question, I did very much enjoy the idea of seeing actual tits. I instructed Wanda Fonda to go up on deck, make her way to Jane, and toss Jane’s bikini top overboard. I knew that it was already undone; the ties were lying teasingly alongside her as she lay facedown on her towel. I gave a post-Fesmer suggestion that she would remember none of my instructions and spend the rest of the trip fawning over Betty.
I followed back up the companionway topside. Wanda Fonda went directly to Jane and stood over her, blocking the sun.
Jane lifted her head and looked back at Wanda Fonda. “What is it, Wanda Fonda?”
The girl said nothing, but as Jane raised herself while lifting her shades to get a better look at the face over her, Wanda Fonda snatched the bikini top from the towel and tossed it into the air. The wind played with the abbreviated garment top for many seconds before letting it fly away from the boat and high into the air. Jane sat up and watched the article’s flight.
I looked at her breasts, and though I was sort of thrilled to be seeing them, I thought finally that her chest looked a lot like mine, only puffier.
“Why did you do that, Wanda Fonda?” Jane asked.
“Do what?”
Jane didn’t become even slightly upset, she just lay back down and said, “Never mind.”
It was all terribly disappointing, the breasts and the reaction. The sight of Jane’s breasts was made the more uninteresting by the fact that she simply didn’t care that I was seeing them. She paraded her boobies out and about for the rest of the time on the boat. Her eyes, hidden behind the dark glasses, became of far more interest to me. It was her eyes, the ones I couldn’t see, that seemed to work on my under-construction libido. I wanted, needed to see Jane Fonda’s eyes. I therefore set to the business of casting my cyclopean stare her way.
“What’s wrong with you, Nu’ott?”
I was terrified once again that I would be thought insane, but I persisted, raised my left brow another millimeter.
“Excuse me, but would someone, Ted, please ask this child what’s wrong with him?” Jane said.
I wondered as I worked on her, if her sunglasses would diminish the effectiveness of my gaze. I could not see behind them to detect any shift toward the desired cow-eyed state, so I pushed my suggestion that she toss her glasses overboard. It turned out that the dark lenses must have actually amplified my power because she whipped them from her face and tossed them out into the ocean without the slightest pause. Jane’s eyes were sad-making, not weak, not really sullen, but cheerless, tenebrific. I pushed the suggestion that I was sorry and that she should not associate me with the action, but I knew that I needed to back off. My ability, two successes in a row, scared me greatly. I remained quiet for the rest of the trip. Betty was entertained mercilessly by the cherry-tattooed Wanda Fonda and Jane sat around with eyes and tits unabashedly uncovered and Ted railed on about the first television—“It was nothing but static, but what moving static it was”—and how baseballs were made—“In Haiti, by women who bend all the way down and stand all the way up with every stitch”—and whether inflammable and flammable were really the same word—“I mean, invariably and variably don’t mean the same thing.” Except for the wind-driven ride itself, I had pretty much controlled the action on the boat.