“Feeling better, darling?” her grandmother asked when she came down for breakfast.
“Uh-huh,” Lissie said. She had eaten only a sandwich for lunch yesterday afternoon, her grandmother carrying it on a tray, together with a glass of milk, to her room. She was ravenously hungry now and she devoured her eggs, bacon and toast with scarcely a word, and then went upstairs to dress, eager to get out of the house. Her parents had still not called from Italy, though they’d left on the twelfth, and this was already the sixteenth. She dressed swiftly, putting on a peasant blouse, a green mini, and a pair of beat-up sandals. She liked miniskirts because they showed her long legs to good advantage. God knew she had little else worth showing... well, her behind maybe, her behind wasn’t too bad. But her legs were terrific, she thought, and she firmly believed that someone somewhere should one day erect a monument to Mary Quant. She did not feel the same way about whoever had invented the bikini. As president and co-founder of the Itty-Bitty Titty Committee, she would not have been caught dead on a beach with nothing but a strip of cloth covering her nonexistent breasts. She favored tanksuits or maillots instead, cut rather high on the thigh to emphasize her legginess and hopefully to detract from whatever she was lacking elsewhere, giving her a long coltish look she considered somewhat sexy.
She left the house at about eleven, telling her grandmother she’d be back sometime that afternoon, and not to worry about lunch, she’d get something to eat in town. She was familiar with the town, knew all the teenage haunts, and headed for the nearest one now, a lobster-roll joint called Marty’s, on the beach a mile or so from her grandparents’ house. The town was crowded with its usual share of tourists: fat red-faced men in Hawaiian print shirts; women in halters, shorts and high-heeled wedgies; runny-nosed little kids eating ice cream cones or chocolate bars; all of them thronging the boardwalk and the shops selling silver, scrimshaw, leather goods and touristy crap like ashtrays in the shape of lobsters. She was walking past one of the new art galleries, had in fact stopped to look in the window at a painting of an old house, obviously derivative of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World — which she adored because somehow it reminded her so much of herself — when she saw Pee Wee Rawles standing alongside a bicycle outside the five and ten.
Pee Wee was a Henderson student like herself — or like what she had been before this June — a red-headed feisty-looking kid with freckles all over his face and his arms, a good foot and a half shorter than Lissie and not particularly liked by any of Henderson’s girl students because his sexual preferences, as he frequently proclaimed, were entirely oral. He’d been a junior this past trimester, which would make him a graduating senior when he went back to school in the fall.
Lissie guessed he was sixteen going on seventeen. He was wearing cut-offs and a T-shirt stenciled with the words KISS ME, I’M IRISH. He was barefooted, and his feet were dirty. He had not seen her yet, he was in fact fiddling with something on the rack behind the bicycle seat when she first spotted him. Normally, she’d have avoided him like the plague he was. But just seeing a Hendy like herself up here in the boondocks filled her with a sense of camaraderie, the old school tie, all that shit, that completely negated the awful fact of Pee Wee himself. Pee Wee was first a Hendy and only next a terrifying creep.
“Hey!” she yelled. “Pee Wee!”
He looked up sharply, squinting into the sun, frowning, and finally recognizing her. He had settled to his satisfaction whatever had been troubling him on the rack, and he swung one leg up over the bicycle seat as she walked over to him. The first thing he said was, “It’s Warren.”
“What?” she said.
“My name is Warren.”
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”
He nodded curtly, driving the point home, and then immediately said, “What are you doing here?” and grinned broadly.
“I’m visiting my grandparents,” she said.
“Yeah, no kidding?” he said. “How long’ll you be here.”
“Till the twenty-sixth. How about you?”
“My folks have a place for the summer,” he said.
His voice seemed a bit deeper than when she’d last talked to him, and he also seemed somewhat taller, but maybe that was because he was sitting on a bicycle. In any event, she could understand why he no longer chose to be called Pee Wee. For the longest time — and only because one of her playmates in the building they’d lived in on Central Park West couldn’t pronounce the name Melissa — she herself had been called Missie, a nickname she’d detested. Pondering all this, wondering if Pee Wee had changed his personality along with his name, she realized they had both fallen silent, end of conversation, nothing more to say, nice to’ve seen you.
“Where you headed?” he said.
“Marty’s,” she said.
“Out of business,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Silence again.
“Why?” he said. “You want something to eat?”
Well, here we go, she thought, some things never change. Call me Warren, call me Ishmael, I’m still good old Sixty-nine Rawles.
“Because there’s a new place near the lighthouse, makes better lobster rolls than Marty’s used to,” he said.
“I’m not really hungry,” she said. “I just had breakfast. I thought some of the kids might be there.”
“Most of the kids hang out on the beach behind the Dunes,” he said. “You ever been up there?”
“I thought that was a private beach.”
“Yeah,” Warren said, grinning, “but we’ve sort of requisitioned a corner of it. You want a ride up there?”
“You going there?”
“In a minute. I’ve got to drop this off at the house first,” he said, “indicating the package he’d fastened to the rack. If you want a ride...”
“Sure,” she said.
“Well, hop on,” he said.
The house his parents were renting was several blocks from town, not on the beach itself, as her grandparents’ house was, but on a tree-shaded side street called Sea Grape Lane. Riding through town on the crossbar of the bike, Lissie found it difficult to keep her skirt down, and found herself frowning back at the men trying to see up under it. Never kids. Kids just didn’t seem to give a damn about such things, it was all so free and easy with kids. Only men. Men her father’s age or older, all of them trying to catch a glimpse of her panties.
She couldn’t possibly imagine what was so fascinating about her panties. Or anybody’s panties, for that matter. Walk down the main street, you could see as many panties as you cared to in any of the lingerie shops. But here were grown men, some of them ancient, in fact, craning for a look up her skirt, and it bothered her. Even some of her parents’ friends, whose own daughters wore minis, for Christ’s sake, would sometimes openly stare at her legs whenever she sat down, hoping for a glimpse of those cherished panties of hers. She was sometimes tempted to put on a mini with nothing at all under it, surprise hell out of them.