There was an exotic woman who came to the pool that summer. Her name was Patricia Morgan and she had had polio and wore steel braces on her legs. She was from Massachusetts and had come to Dunleith because her husband was a physicist at Chemistrand, the new industry that was going to save the town. She wore gorgeous white linen blouses and khaki-colored skirts and brown and white saddle oxfords. If a Chinese mandarin had decided to start dropping by the pool in the mornings it would not have been stranger or more seductive to me. She represented something I longed for, but barely knew existed, a world of rational thought, coolness, Puritan simplicity. I had known a girl in Kentucky whose older sister had gone off to Massachusetts to school, to a place called Wellesley. She had come home from her freshman year in. college bringing notebooks full of notes concerning a book called Ulysses and had let us read the notes. I lay in the sun and thought it over. Devoe Tyson and the Ulysses notes, the possibility of a place like Wellesley, this strange, exotic woman in her saddle oxford shoes. The heat played with my brain, mixed with the smell of chlorine from the pool and the melting mayonnaise on my half-eaten sandwich.

The heat that summer was like a force. During the night it invaded you and fluffed you up. Dared you to move your legs out from underneath the sheets. All sheets were white back then and bleached and ironed and applied like poultices to beds. It was cooler underneath those sheets than on top of them. I do not know what physical theory explains this. Perhaps it was connected to the fans. My father was a passionate believer in fans. He had ceiling fans in every room, tall fans to blow the air through the doors, short fans to cool our feet and legs, oscillating fans which he would bring into a room and continually adjust to blow on whoever was around. “I don’t want that fan on me,” I was always saying, but he would ignore that and fix it so the oscillation was a constant breeze, six inches to the left, then six to the right, blowing my hair into my eyes and back again. I would get up and move to another part of the room. He would follow me and adjust a fan to blow on my legs and feet.