Edith attended to the steaming and opening. On her way from the Post Office, Sabitha had bought two chocolate eclairs at the bakeshop. She was lying on the couch eating hers.
“Just one letter. For you,” said Edith. “Pore old Johanna. Of course he never actually got hers.”
“Read it to me,” said Sabitha resignedly. “I’ve got sticky guck all over my hands.”
Edith read it with businesslike speed, hardly pausing for the periods.
Well, Sabitha, my fortunes have taken a different turn, as you can see I am not in Brandon anymore but in a place called Gdynia. And not in the employ of my former bosses. I have had an exceptionally hard winter with my chest troubles and they, that is my bosses, thought I should be out on the road even if I was in danger of developing pneumonia so this developed into quite an argument so we all decided to say farewell. But luck is a strange thing and just about that time I came into possession of a Hotel. It is too complicated to explain the ins and outs but if your grandfather wants to know about it just tell him a man who owed me money which he could not pay let me have this hotel instead. So here I am moved from one room in a boardinghouse to a twelve-bedroom building and from not even owning the bed I slept in to owning several. It’s a wonderful thing to wake up in the morning and know you are your own boss. I have some fixing up to do, actually plenty, and will get to it as soon as the weather warms up. I will need to hire somebody to help and later on I will hire a good cook to have a restaurant as well as the beverage room. That ought to go like hotcakes as there is none in this town. Hope you are well and doing your schoolwork and developing good habits.
Sabitha said, “Have you got some coffee?”
“Instant,” said Edith. “Why?”
Sabitha said that iced coffee was what everybody had been drinking at the cottage and they were all crazy about it. She was crazy about it too. She got up and messed around in the kitchen, boiling the water and stirring up the coffee with milk and ice cubes. “What we really ought to have is vanilla ice cream,” she said. “Oh, my Gad, is it ever wonderful. Don’t you want your eclair?”
Oh, my Gad.
“Yes. All of it,” said Edith meanly.
All these changes in Sabitha in just three weeks — during the time Edith had been working in the shop and her mother recovering at home from her operation. Sabitha’s skin was an appetizing golden-brown color, and her hair was cut shorter and fluffed out around her face. Her cousins had cut it and given her a permanent. She wore a sort of playsuit, with shorts cut like a skirt and buttons down the front and frills over the shoulders in a becoming blue color. She had got plumper, and when she leaned over to pick up her glass of iced coffee, which was on the floor, she displayed a smooth, glowing cleavage.
Breasts. They must have started growing before she went away, but Edith had not noticed. Maybe they were just something you woke up with one morning. Or did not.
However they came, they seemed to indicate a completely unearned and unfair advantage.
Sabitha was full of talk about her cousins and life at the cottage. She would say, “Listen, I’ve got to tell you about this, it’s a scream—” and then ramble on about what Aunt Roxanne said to Uncle Clark when they had the fight, how Mary Jo drove with the top down and without a license in Stan’s car (who was Stan?) and took them all to a drive-in — and what was the scream or the point of the story somehow never became clear.
But after a while other things did. The real adventures of the summer. The older girls — that included Sabitha — slept in the upstairs of the boathouse. Sometimes they had tickling fights — they would all gang up on someone and tickle her till she shrieked for mercy and agreed to pull her pajama pants down to show if she had hair. They told stories about girls at boarding school who did things with hairbrush handles, toothbrush handles. Ugga-ugga. Once a couple of cousins put on a show — one girl got on top of the other and pretended to be the boy and they wound their legs around each other and groaned and panted and carried on.
Uncle Clark’s sister and her husband came to visit on their honeymoon, and he was seen to put his hand inside her swimsuit.
“They really loved each other, they were at it day and night,” said Sabitha. She hugged a cushion to her chest. “People can’t help it when they’re in love like that.”
One of the cousins had already done it with a boy. He was one of the summer help in the gardens of the resort down the road. He took her out in a boat and threatened to push her out until she agreed to let him do it. So it wasn’t her fault.
“Couldn’t she swim?” said Edith.
Sabitha pushed the cushion between her legs. “Oooh,” she said. “Feels so nice.”
Edith knew all about the pleasurable agonies Sabitha was feeling, but she was appalled that anybody would make them public. She herself was frightened of them. Years ago, before she knew what she was doing, she had gone to sleep with the blanket between her legs and her mother had discovered her and told her about a girl she had known who did things like that all the time and had eventually been operated on for the problem.
“They used to throw cold water on her, but it didn’t cure her,” her mother had said. “So she had to be cut.”
Otherwise her organs would get congested and she might die.
“Stop,” she said to Sabitha, but Sabitha moaned defiantly and said, “It’s nothing. We all did it like this. Haven’t you got a cushion?”
Edith got up and went to the kitchen and filled her empty iced-coffee glass with cold water. When she got back Sabitha was lying limp on the couch, laughing, the cushion flung on the floor.
“What did you think I was doing?” she said. “Didn’t you know I was kidding?”
“I was thirsty,” Edith said.
“You just drank a whole glass of iced coffee.”
“I was thirsty for water.”
“Can’t have any fun with you.” Sabitha sat up. “If you’re so thirsty why don’t you drink it?”
They sat in a moody silence until Sabitha said, in a conciliatory but disappointed tone, “Aren’t we going to write Johanna another letter? Let’s write her a lovey-dovey letter.”
Edith had lost a good deal of her interest in the letters, but she was gratified to see that Sabitha had not. Some sense of having power over Sabitha returned, in spite of Lake Simcoe and the breasts. Sighing, as if reluctantly, she got up and took the cover off the typewriter.
“My darlingest Johanna—” said Sabitha.
“No. That’s too sickening.”
“She won’t think so.”
“She will so,” said Edith.
She wondered whether she should tell Sabitha about the danger of congested organs. She decided not to. For one thing, that information fell into a category of warnings she had received from her mother and never known whether to wholly trust or distrust. It had not fallen as low, in credibility, as the belief that wearing foot-rubbers in the house would ruin your eyesight, but there was no telling — someday it might.
And for another thing Sabitha would just laugh. She laughed at warnings — she would laugh even if you told her that chocolate eclairs would make her fat.
“Your last letter made me so happy—”
“Your last letter filled me with rap-ture—” said Sabitha.
“—made me so happy to think I did have a true friend in the world, which is you—”
“I could not sleep all night because I was longing to crush you in my arms—” Sabitha wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth.
“No. Often I have felt so lonely in spite of a gregarious life and not known where to turn—”