Gather at the River. David Joy

if it meant the occasional burn and a dowsing of QT lotion. “And what did they want with Johnny?”

      I told her how up close they looked nothing like they did from a distance. They were odd looking. Coarse. Rough and worn out. They were wrinkled like old prunes and they smelled fishy.

      “Something’s fishy,” she said, and though I knew it was a joke, I found it hard to laugh. I kept thinking how she had said, “What did they want with Johnny?” Not your daddy, but Johnny, leaving me to feel left out the same way I did when I looked at photographs before I was born: a young family of three, or before my sister; a couple of newlyweds. They had known each other their whole lives; they had dated since they were sixteen. They had been married for twenty years and were in their early forties, and it was the first time since “The Sound of Music” that I had ever really thought of them as people who might attract others, or worse, be attracted to another, especially another who did not resemble Julie Andrews in the slightest.

      “One of them had her hair rolled up,” I said. “Where’s she going, Surfside or Van Werry’s?”—the one and only grocery store down near the drawbridge. Everybody else just laughed and went back to playing spades. There was nowhere to go in that neck of the woods other than Surfside Pavilion, a squat, pink cinderblock building with two pool tables and a few pinball machines and a miniature golf course that was always soggy and warped from years of damp salt air and rain.

      I had seen girls hanging out of car windows hooting and hollering at boys who stood around outside the pavilion smoking cigarettes and waxing their surfboards. My mother liked to use loud girls who hung out of car windows with cigarettes in their mouths and breasts spilling from tight bathing suits as examples of what not to grow up and be.

      “Don’t you ever let me catch you looking like that,” my mother said.

      “So should we hide?” my sister asked without cracking a smile. She was sixteen and had far more clout than I did.

      We had heard all the stories about what girls NOT to be like. It was for this very reason that we had stopped going to Ocean Drive and Myrtle Beach, which had become a haven for teenagers and college kids who wanted to party, have sex, fall into violent and drunken sidewalk brawls, and enter the shag contests at places like The Pad and the Spanish Galleon, where the music of the Tams and the Drifters and Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs blasted all through the night. People said that you could go to South Carolina and get married, get a drink or two, buy some fireworks, get a divorce and still be home in time for the eleven o’clock news.

      Surfside Pavilion paled by comparison, but we had gotten used to it. The quiet; the women like my mother who, if they wore a swimsuit at all, wore a one-piece with boy legs or little skirts. Suits that hid all evidence that children had ever sprung from their bodies.