counter and back to Hugh Fisher’s lips. (She can’t quite meet his gaze, not until her nerves stop jumping like this, not until she can keep her eyes from filling with tears at the perfection of his beauty, so close as to be within reach.) “I’m afraid I don’t know much about vinegar,” she says.
“No, of course not. A sweet young thing like you. Is your father here?”
“My uncle,” she says, hot with shame. A sweet young thing! Hasn’t he seen she’s a woman now, a swan? Hasn’t he noticed her luminous skin and her shining hair, the glorious new curves to her breasts and her hips? All the boys are noticing her now, the men too, but she hasn’t looked back at any of them, not one. This blossoming beauty of hers is meant for only one man in the world, and he stands before her now, and he won’t look, he won’t see.
“Your uncle. If he’s in the back, I can find him.”
“He’s away.”
“There’s nobody else here? Just you?”
“Yes,” Bianca says, though she’s not quite sure on this point. Laura and Tia Maria were both here a moment ago. Where have they gone? Into the back garden to sneak a cigarette or two?
“I see.” He looks at her kindly, as if she’s a simple child, as if she’s nothing more than the sweet young thing he called her, and reaches into the inside pocket of his seersucker jacket. “Then perhaps you can give him my card. Here, I’ll write my telephone number on the back. Can you give this to him for me?”
He sticks the pencil stub back in his pocket and holds out the card with his strong, smooth fingers. Bianca reaches out and takes it, and when her fingertips inevitably brush against his fingertips, the sensation travels all the way up her arm and down her ribs and her stomach to her legs. She breathes in deeply to smell Mr. Fisher’s particular shaving soap, which doesn’t belong to any of the soap Tio Manuelo stocks on his shelves. The scent is like magic to her. She even wavers on her feet, so intoxicating is this flavor.
“Are you all right?” Mr. Fisher asks, in a voice of true concern.
“Yes, I’m all right.” Fully drunk now, she opens her eyes, which were closed in appreciation of Mr. Fisher’s soap, and this time she meets his gaze, his dazzling blue eyes, and she watches in triumph as they widen, like the flare of a match.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t believe I know your name.”
“It’s Bianca. Bianca Medeiro.” She tucks the card into the pocket of her pinafore apron. “And I think I know where to find your vinegar, Mr. Fisher.”
4.
HUGH FISHER WALKS away with two bottles and an order for more, whatever Tio Manuelo’s got, and Bianca promises to deliver this merchandise herself. To the boathouse, he says. There’s a hatch door on the ceiling, you’ll find it. Before he leaves, he takes her hand and kisses it, first on the back and then—turning it reverently over—in the middle of her palm.
He curls her fist to trap the kiss inside, and he says, in a voice of deep sincerity, “It’s been a pleasure, Miss Medeiro. Until we meet again?”
“Yes,” she answers breathlessly, and for the rest of the day, at least six inches of air exist between Bianca’s feet and the ground beneath them. When she settles into bed that night, she cannot sleep. She presses her palm to her lips—she hasn’t washed that blessed hand, of course not—and thinks, At last, at last, it’s the sign that my life has truly begun.
This time, she does not cross herself.
1.
ON THE MORNING of my mother’s wedding, I watched a pair of lobster boats crawl across the sea outside my bedroom window, setting their pots while the sun rose. They were some distance apart, one to the east of the Flood Rock lighthouse and one to the west, and I wouldn’t have known they were lobstermen—I knew nothing about fishing in those days—except that I had a pair of binoculars, and I saw them dropping the pots, one by one, from the sterns of their boats. Each pot was attached to a rope, and at the end of the rope was a colored buoy that bobbed cheerfully in the water as the vessel pulled away.
Behind me, my mother stirred. “Is that you, Miranda?” she asked, in a slurred, sleepy voice.
“Yes.”
“What time is it?”
“Only five thirty. Go back to sleep, Mama.”
“What”—mumbling—“so early?”
“Watching the lobster boats.”
She sighed and grunted, the way you do when you’re still half-asleep, and you settle yourself gratefully back on a pillow and close your eyes. “Strange girl, Miranda,” she muttered.
I wondered if she remembered she was getting married today. Sometimes when you sleep deeply enough, you forget everything you ever knew, even your own name, and Winthrop Island is possibly the quietest place in the world at night, except for the pulse of the ocean: so black and velvet that sleep comes as easy as that, as closing your eyes. You fall and fall, like an anchor that finds no bottom, and I don’t believe I have ever again slept as I slept throughout that summer of 1951, in my bedroom at my stepfather’s sprawling house on the Island.
Except, on that morning at the beginning of June, the morning of Mama’s wedding, Hugh Fisher wasn’t quite my stepfather. The fateful summer still lay before me, a reel of film waiting to unspool, and how could I know that I was right now witnessing its first momentous scene? I mean, you never do suspect what inconsequential event will change the course of your life. This particular morning, I only thought about the wedding to come. That was the affair of the day, wasn’t it? The great occasion? Instead of sleeping deeply, I’d woken at dawn after a restless night, and now I knelt by the window, holding the binoculars to my eyes as the lobstermen labored on the water, and the sun climbed drowsily above the ocean.
I watched the lighthouse change color, from violet to palest pink to gold, and the surrounding rocks emerge from shadow, and the little buoys multiply in long, bobbing lines behind the boats. I watched the lobstermen shift about. In the easternmost boat, there were two of them: one short and broad-shouldered, wearing a striped shirt and a knitted cap; the other taller and leaner and bareheaded, hauling the wooden cages into the water while his shipmate baited them.
In the second boat, the one to the west, there was only one old man. He moved slowly, dropping maybe one trap for every three from the other boat, and as the light grew I saw the bulge of his tattooed arms, the silvery beard that grizzled around his face. He was nearly bald and chewed a pipe, and in my head I named him Popeye. I thought there was something awful and tragic about the way he baited each pot, attached line and buoy, and dragged it over the edge of the boat. Or maybe I only endowed him with those qualities in retrospect. Memory’s funny that way. At any rate, the eastern boat ran out of pots or something, because it turned around and started back for the harbor, disappearing behind the Flood Rock lighthouse for an instant or two and then reappearing, its white sides brilliant in the glare of the sun. At the same time the boat flashed back into view, Popeye was swinging
