I walked up the beach swinging it in my hand; Jennifer walked next to me giggling. When we got closer to her mother and dad, she suddenly snatched the thing away and threw it into the water and said, “You really mustn’t.” And because it all seemed so dumb and because I didn’t know why she was being so giggly about it all and because I was a little nervous about her parents who were “such nice English people, so refined” like my mom had said, I didn’t bother going in after it.

For the rest of that vacation Jennifer would look at me and giggle and say, “He doesn’t know, poor dear!” I never did figure out what I had done. It was one of those things that was a real mystery and sort of drives you crazy like when you know a word but can’t remember it and just as you are about to say it, Rachael shouts out the wrong word trying to help you remember the word you’ve forgotten that was on the tip of your tongue, and then you know you’ll never remember it. By the end of the vacation all Jennifer had to do was look at me and roll her eyes and I would get mad and walk away from her. It happened so often Mom asked me why I didn’t want to play with Jennifer anymore. What had happened, she wanted to know.

The way she asked it it sounded like she was suspicious I had done something bad and was ashamed, and that’s why I wouldn’t talk about it. But because I didn’t even understand what Jennifer had meant or what the thing was, I just said that girls bored me. Mom kept asking though, and so in the end I lied to her, saying Jennifer “took the Lord’s name in vain.” Then Mom was pleased with me that I did not want to hear profanity, and she told Dad, and he said that he was glad I was developing “spiritual sensitivity.”

Mom said that I did not have to play with Jennifer anymore if I didn’t want to and that we would pray for her instead. Janet said that upper-class British had “dreadful language” for educated people, as bad as Dad’s Unregenerate working-class mother.