The three of them, Annie, Sigrid, and Joe, had a kind of spiritless family life, eating breakfast together, sharing domestic chores. Annie had lost her passion for hamburgers, and ate so much of Sigrid’s colorless, starchy food that she put on weight.

“I can’t get over it,” Joe said to her. “I mean, maybe there’s a real Jap sub out there.” The girl he’d been talking to left the bar stool and disappeared into a dark corner where a young man lay sprawled in a wooden captain’s chair among the shadows.

Other people drifted in and talked over the possibilities. Annie never looked at a newspaper, not because Lavan had told her that the press was controlled by the capitalists and all the news was biased, but simply because the very idea of sitting down to actually read a newspaper seemed preposterous.

She really wondered if she’d missed the news that war had been declared between Japan and the United States, knowing at the same time that, of course, it hadn’t. People were excited by the momentary death of electricity. Joe made drinks steadily. Bourbon mostly. Annie had two drinks, and found herself talking to a group of people with faintly English accents, which, she judged, were put on. She realized suddenly that these people were the very ones who lived in the houses up in the hills.

Like the people at the party St. Vincent had taken her to, these people, too, developed an intense, if brief, interest in her. They were older than she had thought they would be, the men were perfumed and the women had that lifeless deep tan of middle age, of passive self-indulgence and idleness. They bought her more drinks. She made up a fanciful story for them, thinking they were not the sort to come to a drive-in. She told them she’d been brought up in Paris, that her parents had been killed in a plane accident, their private plane, that she had determined to make her own way in the world—that she intended to become a pianist, that her fiancé had been drowned in the south of France—

The lights came on.

Later, someone said a duck had got itself entangled in the underwater alarm system. It became a village joke. No one ever found out what had really happened.

She and Joe swam together. She observed that their limbs were somewhat alike, blond limbs covered with light-blond down. He told her he hated his sister’s dyed hair. He told her stories about Minnesota Indian families he’d known. He longed for cold winters where you could see your breath, where trees were black against the snow. He rolled over closer to her on the sand and said, “I didn’t want to come out here, but we were so poor after Mama died and Pa just went to the dogs drinking, so Sigrid and me, we’ve gotten jobs, you know, and kept ourselves together but I don’t know what it’s all about, this life, maybe I’ll go back someday and get a farm of my own. Boy! I miss those winters.”