Her remarks that day were perfunctory. I suspected her of cutting back the usual presentation. And then it became obvious. Who was there for her to impress? She showed us into the Seventeenth-Century Gallery. She motioned toward the portraits mounted on darkened walls, and said, “Dutch. Seventeenth century.”

She was going to lead us into another wing!

But I had studied in secret to surprise her. I got the attention of the visitors, and before my mother could usher them out, I offered up the history of Protestant Baroque. How I loved what I had memorized—with neither Catholic churches to embellish with religious images, nor a court to foot the bill for grandiose art, with the Calvinist edict not to corrupt God’s majesty with fantasy, “So it was to the objects in the world around him that the Dutch painter turned,” I intoned.

Apple-polishing toady.

“You’re in my way,” my mother said through her teeth when I came to the end of my speech.

The button I wore at the time said, “You Look the Part.”

Warren rides a bike to the dining hall wearing a T-shirt that has printed on it, “One Less Car.” He got it in town at the place whose best-selling T-shirt in summer says, “So Many Tourists, So Few Bullets.” Tourists are the ones who invariably snap them up.

Summer slows us down. Does it slow you down, too? I like to close a book I’ve been reading on the porch and picture you swimming in your backyard pool. I see you swimming alone, with no one waiting to wrap you in a robe when you climb out. This letter is a robe I hold out to you.

The article didn’t say if you swam before or after you work. Wouldn’t the chlorine bother you if you swam before you painted? But maybe you have that new filtration system, the one that uses ions. I don’t feel like I’ve been in a pool unless I come out with eyes red and stinging.

I told you I never had a pool, but that gives the wrong impression. My best friend was a champion swimmer. We wanted to be wet, and every weekday we were. Even after a shower, our skin smelled chlorinated. With a strainer on the end of a stick, we would flip the turtles, moles, and frogs from out of our neighbors’ pools. The builder of these pools had since gone out of business, and no longer honored his service contracts. Sometimes we would have missed a frog from the time before. Trapped in the filter, floating in chlorine, the frog would bleach out white. Green or white, the frogs’ eyes were open as we sailed them over fences into other people’s yards.

Warren caught me on the porch with a catalog of your work. He leaned over my shoulder and said, “What does he get for a painting like that?”

I didn’t answer, and he practiced the trick he swears he can do where you flex your arm when a mosquito lights on it so the mosquito can’t detach itself until the sheer force of your blood pressure makes the mosquito explode. He has not succeeded yet, though earlier I saw him rid Little Egypt of a hornet, luring it out with a dead fly placed on the offered straw of a broom. When proud of himself, he chants tongue twisters for us. He made up “Shoes and socks shock Chatty.” Sometimes when I pass his door at night, I can hear from behind it the rapid refrains of “sifted thistles” and “mixed biscuits.”