Stacey was a charmer, it turned out. She was skinny but soft-boned, floppy even, in the way she moved and talked. She had a wide soft mouth that seemed to slow her words, like a child’s endearing impediment. She was enough younger than they to lack some of their inhibitions. She liked to swim naked in the heated pool that came with the somewhat pretentious house Ed bought for them in the new hillside development on Wilson Drive. “Woodrow, Charlie, or Don?” Owen had asked, but Ed was too besotted with the married state to hear any sarcasm. By the second summer, Owen and Ed had gotten used to her nudity and some nights Phyllis joined her in it. It was no worse, after all, than a hot tub, which is supposed to be good for you. The older woman’s figure, breasts and stomach taut now that her spell of child-bearing was forever over, had nothing to lose in the comparison with Stacey’s, which was, younger though she was, droopier. Ed and Owen kept their bathing suits on.

“Aren’t they sweetly shy,” Phyllis said to Stacey. The pool as well as being heated had underwater lights that revealed wobbly truncations of the two women’s hips and water-treading legs. Their heads looked small, with their hair licked flat against their skulls.

“Oh, aren’t men just!” Stacey said back, in her twang. “They’re afraid of having their little jimmies chopped off.”

“Or laughed at,” Phyllis suggested, to make the image less horrific.

“Pretty much the same thang,” Stacey said.

The men being teased sat in the shadows, on aluminum chairs, with cans of beer, while the mermaids wobbled in and out of the pool lights. When Stacey decided to emerge from the water, she would thrash to the ladder and stand on the pool edge and, tipping her head way over, wring out her long dark hair towel-style. If light was behind her, Owen would see her pubic triangle dripping from a point like a wet goatee between her skinny thighs. Languidly, her long feet leaving prints on the flagstones that rimmed the pool, she would seek out a beach towel to wrap herself in. With the hand not clasping the towel at her chest she would fiddle a cigarette from the pack on the little white poolside table and, her head still tilted as when she was wringing her hair, manage with wet fingers to get it lit in her mouth. It was in this pose, Owen thought, that she looked most glamorous, squinting and exhaling, and her drying hair backlit like a burning haystack. Stacey brought whiffs of the counterculture into Middle Falls. Somehow she produced pot in little cellophane envelopes, and Zigzag paper, and the four of them would partake, usually on Sunday nights, in the Mervines’ living room. Fridays and Saturdays there were dinner parties to give or go to, dances for this or that good cause, and the Mackenzies’ house was too inhibiting, with all those children upstairs listening. Ed and Stacey did not intend to have children, at least not immediately. This was somehow shocking to Owen; Phyllis offended him by seeming to agree. “I think it’s better not to hurry,” she said, making her little frosty moue of thoughtfulness. “The kids now have the right idea—have the sex but don’t get trapped.”