The August Mediterranean was placid. A tideless and uniform giant paddle pool with only a little raw sewage seeping into it to mar its clear perfection. Around the sewer pipe grew knotted clusters of shiny black mussels. Some in shells the size of teardrop-shaped oranges. Others, babies, tiny as the tip of a ballpoint pen. I treaded water staring at the mussel bed, I would watch, fascinated, as the effluent from the pipe hung motionless in the otherwise crystal water below me. Brown-gray, the cloud of detergent, bathwater, human waste, and shards of toilet paper rocked with the fluorescent bright green seaweed that clung in ribbons to the mouth of the jagged pipe. Tiny fish would dart in from a circling school to snatch an unspeakable morsel here and there from the gray-brown cloud of waste.

When a long sanitary napkin lazily emerged from the pipe, magnified to mattress size by the water, the startled fish raced away. I, however, a boy with a healthy mother and two sisters, knew this was no predator but the constant, if discreet, companion of women. It was an item that had no name but was part of that second world of which we never spoke—at least not casually. A world in which being “Off the Roof” during “That Time of Month” was kept hidden, not out of shame, but because the inner workings of women’s bodies were, like the exact nature of the Trinity, above casual discussion.

Here in the great leveler, the sea, where things were what they were, the pad began to float up to the surface, a few air bubbles preceding it. It had just enough buoyancy to propel it gradually upward toward the sun. A slight, very slight, out-of-focus trace of dissolving blood falling away behind it, as it rose in the dappled light, obscured the background momentarily as it undulated upward.

As I backed up, using my hands to propel me into an unsteady reverse so that I would not block the pad’s ascent and spoil the fine effect, my left little toe grazed a half-open mussel shell. Its vivid yellow-orange interior disappeared as it snapped shut at my light touch but not before the edge of the shell had opened up a slight painless cut at the extremity of my toe.

A small wound I forgot until later, hot sand, now caking the opening, began to irritate.

“Go wash it off in the seawater,” said Dad. “The salt is a natural disinfectant.”

So spoke my father, a doctor of theology. After letting the sea do its natural best to cleanse my little toe, Mom put a Band-Aid on it, and I was pronounced well.

“Can I go back in after lunch?” I asked.

“Sure, the water’ll be good for it,” said Dad.