Having recently answered Tibbet’s question about this, she was able to respond faster.—So I can watch the dolphins.

Unlike Tibbet, he seemed to approve. His eyes were still focused on her breast. She wondered if the bathing suit was stained there.

He asked—What do they do?

—Them? They dance. They fight. They play. They make the most beautiful sounds.

Blum considered this, then stepped into the house and brought out a lab book, a bound notebook with a speckled cover and a label on the front. This was the type of book that Tibbet and Eh kept their notes in. He handed it to her along with a Bic pen. The lab book was untouched and had a weight to it, each blank page waiting for words.

—Put the date and your name on the label.

She checked his face to make sure he was serious, examined the pen, then wrote lightly on the label so it could be scratched out later if necessary.

He said—Every twenty minutes get out of the water and take some notes. Write down whatever you notice.

He walked away.

In a way he scared her. She knew what to expect from the other men, what the limits and expectations were, but not from him. As soon as he was gone, she glanced at her left breast, but could see nothing different.

NINE
June 11–16, 1965

For the next few days, she worried about when Blum would ask for her notes and if he would approve. Underwater, she didn’t know when twenty minutes had passed. So she simply waded out whenever she felt enough time had passed and dried her hands carefully, thinking about what she’d seen. At the top of each page, she wrote down the date. With each new entry, she noted the time. After that, she’d pause, uncertain.

She didn’t have any love of words. People with good hearing, they blathered all day long, saying whatever occurred to them, the speaking and hearing so effortless they didn’t bother to enunciate or think through the meaning or syntax or their emotions. Meanwhile she had to concentrate to know what they were saying, staring at the mouth, piecing the sounds together to deduce the most basic content. Hearing took her work. At times it felt like she had laboriously translated an ancient scrap of Sanskrit, only to find a grocery list.

Complicating this was the fact that what people said with their mouths didn’t always agree with what they said with their bodies. She figured this fact out in middle school when one day she happened to be close enough and the room quiet enough to hear the two girls in her class talk about their roles in the school play. The shorter one with the dark hair said it’s not that she was jealous. She said this with her arms crossed over her chest, her body hunched and furious.

Over time, Cora learned to focus on the language of the body first, then secondly to listen to what their mouths were saying.