Daughters of the Revolution Read Online Free Page B

true. But the boy, who had the empathy of a frog, pointed gravely, and the girl cried out, “Two mens in the water!”
    The sitter pulled off her red sweatshirt and the two shirts she wore under it and stood before the children for a terrifying instant in her bra.
    They stood in front of her with their mouths open. “Go—tell—run!” she said, and ran, right up against the waves and through the whitecaps. Then she dove and swam.
    She was not just any sitter, but a certified lifeguard, covered with a rubbery layer of fat. Cold and water did not scare her. Even when she could no longer feel her body, even low in the water, when she could not see where she was going, she swam in a line, the water like fire at her feet.
    One man touched the sides of the boat. She saw long, feminine fingers spread on the bow, not really holding on, just touching it. She could not see his head or face. Then his fingers lost contact with the boat and sank into the water. The other man, buoyed up by a life jacket, flailed toward her.
    Heck saw the shore. He saw a woman on the beach, who wore red clothing and held, in each of her hands, the handof a child. He paddled more shrewdly, to trick the ocean. He would not affront it directly; he would come in from one side. The gray shore lay just ahead and the woman standing on the shore appeared bright, like a red flag. She was the sight Heck set his eye on. His breath crackled in his chest like leaves on fire. Between strokes, he felt Rebozos’s wild stirring of the water. They might not be friends after this.

1968
T HE B IG B ANG
    H e begins with a bang at the center of his story. It’s spring of that revolutionary year, not too far in. Meringues of snow line the sidewalks, but a freshness cuts the air. Goddard Byrd—known to his friends and enemies as “God”—has just emerged from an afternoon at the Parker House Hotel, a virile, uncircumcised male of his class, upbringing and era. His prostate gland and his
praeputium
have not yet been removed, and he is unburdened, just now, of Puritanism’s load. He has drunk a glass of gin, then lain with Mrs. Viktor Rebozos—whom he must remember to call Aileen—and both of them are better for this exercise.
    In bed, she tells him he is a bear, all paws and claws. She insults him, purrs, climbs on top. She wants to know if he could be any wild animal, which would he be?
    An animal? He would be a tiger!
    (She would be a gazelle.)
    He likes himself better this way, his natural shyness tempered by adrenaline. She is more flexible than he, more at ease, depending on the occasion—more pliable. Women
are
pliable, he thinks; they revel in the shifting relations required by husbands, children, lovers, others. (How can this be a matter of opinion?) He can’t tell Mrs. Rebozos these things; she might eat him alive.
    They lie together in the fading afternoon light, the March grisaille. “The most beautiful words in the English language are
sex in the afternoon
,” she tells him, and he can’t, in the moment,find reason to correct her. Mrs. Rebozos’s tongue darts suddenly across his left nipple, and God rises with an animal roar, his body fire and ice.
    She smiles. “I read that in
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana.
”
    “Do it again,” says God.
    Her tongue and lips move excruciatingly over his body, describing ancient erotic techniques from the Orient. He rises obediently as a snake in a basket. God lifts his head to look at her, and feels an organ breach (liver? spleen?). She is so gamine, indeed! She looks like a boy. Almost. Short hair. Hoops in her ears. All of it signifying what? Maybe nothing.
    Eventually, he pins her to her back, which she seems to enjoy, and humps her in the familiar way, running breathlessly toward a goal, which he reaches.
    “You’re beginning to get it, my earnest missionary,” she tells him afterward. “Let’s hope it’s not too late.”
    They share a plate of cold roast beef, a famous roll. Naked, quivering a little,