The sun was not shining brightly yet. That meant that it would be overcast all day. The lifeguard put his shirt on so that he wouldn’t be burned. He had very tender skin for a lifeguard, and this year he wasn’t tanning well. He tanned, then peeled, then didn’t seem to tan again. His day would be spent sitting in the lifeguard’s chair until noon, when the old man who collected fifty cents from cars entering the parking lot would replace him for an hour so that the lifeguard could eat lunch. He couldn’t imagine what good the old man would be if anybody got into trouble, but who knew about the old man’s abilities, and why would anybody get into trouble? The water was too cold to swim in. The people just stood around the shore. He liked the beach, but it got boring halfway through the summer. He dreamed about the damned seagulls, got tired of seeing people’s flesh. He was bored, and when he was bored he squinted a lot; that made him take off his sunglasses to rub his eyes. He usually washed the sand off them twice a day in the water, dipping them gently into the surf and rubbing them against his bathing trunks. He was a careful person. He was careful to flush the toilet, for example. He thought about his roommate, and about eating pizza with Laura, the letter he should write home …
The lifeguard sighed. The beach was beginning to fill up. There was a middle-aged man who hung around his chair sometimes, saying, “Nothing ever happens, does it?” He called the lifeguard “kid.” The lifeguard didn’t like that, but he was undemonstrative. His previous girlfriend had left him because of that. When the lifeguard was a psychology major he had tried to figure out why he didn’t show his emotions easily. He couldn’t figure it out. It could have been for a million reasons. Everything in psychology can have a million answers. He switched majors.
The lifeguard had intended to have an introspective period during the summer — to get a case of beer and drink it and think all day to see what he came up with. His roommate was always figuring out his life, announcing that he was making a mistake about this or doing the wrong thing not to follow through with that. The roommate thought so much about himself that he forgot to feed his goldfish and it died. And of course he didn’t flush the toilet. The lifeguard was pretty depressed. Introspection while he was depressed would probably not be valuable, so he would put it off. If he put it off for six weeks he would be back at Dartmouth, and he never had time to do anything but work then.
As he walked along the beach, the lifeguard passed a little boy with red hair who was sifting sand through a fish-shaped sifter. He was probably five or six, a cute little boy that the lifeguard thought about for a second, then forgot. Later, the lifeguard would remember him vividly, know more about him than he knew about his own son … if there was a son … but the lifeguard was busy trying to think positively. The little boy didn’t enter into his thoughts.
The lifeguard climbed to the top of his chair.
*
On July the twenty-second, Toby and David Warner quarreled. He told her that she should not have allowed Penelope to go to the beach; she said that he was overly protective. Penelope’s measles had been a slight case, and she had been completely well for two days. He said that Penelope had been weepy the night before; she said that was because he always hovered around her. Before the argument began, Toby had been sitting at the kitchen table, looking at the book of photographs. She had attempted to converse with him before they got into the argument; she talked about Diane Arbus’s being influenced by the Chinese belief that people pass through boredom to fascination. It seemed to David that Toby was neither bored nor fascinated; she seemed to be in a fog. He had taken the clothes to the laundromat because it looked like Toby was going to smoke cigarettes and stare at the book all day. There had been several young men in the laundromat. They all looked like the lifeguard to him. Why was she interested in the lifeguard? Why would she be so blunt about it? What could he do about it? He had put too much detergent into one of the machines and it foamed over. The owner had given him a mop-pleasantly, considering the mess he had made. “If you was a hippie I’d feel differently,” the owner had said. David had always been “a nice young man.” Except for dodging the Army, which shocked his parents, he had never even let anyone down. Except Toby. He must have let her down. He folded the clothes crookedly, took some out of the dryer too soon.
“Would you like to go out for dinner?” David asked after the argument.
“Yes,” she said. “That would be nice.” Formal, forced pleasantness.
“Where did you get that book?” he asked.
“At the bookstore.”
“What’s your fascination with it?”
“You still want to fight, don’t you?” she asked.
“I can’t believe you let Penelope go to the beach.”
“Andrew and Randy are with her. They’d bring her back if she felt sick.”
“Randy’s always playing with the Collins’ kids. He’d never notice. What’s his fascination with those little beasts?”
“Tom’s a nice kid.”
“The older one isn’t.”
“The older one’s twelve. He has another set of friends.”
“He got put out of the drugstore today. I was standing there reading a magazine while the clothes were drying, and he and some of his friends lit a pile of napkins on the counter.”
“What happened?”
“The counter girl threw water on it and put it out. The manager put them all out of the store.”
“I don’t know. I can’t forbid Randy to play with Tom because Tom’s brother is screwed up.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“Then what were you getting at?”
“I was just telling you what happened.”
“You want to be argumentative,” she said. “I told you that before.”
David sighed — a very theatrical sigh — and walked out the kitchen door. He stumbled on the dump truck and twisted his ankle. He sat down and rubbed it, waiting for the bleeding to begin. It didn’t bleed; it just hurt.
“Let’s take a walk down to the beach,” he called to Toby.
In a minute the kitchen door opened and she came out. No lover of the sun, she was quite pale. She was smoking. She had on a red T-shirt and cut-off jeans. She looked very maternal — not for any reason he could name. He was tempted to whine to her that he had hurt himself. Maybe that was what was wrong; the children were always complaining to her. He thought about asking how she felt about the children, but there were three of them. What was he going to do about it? He stepped on something and got a splinter in his foot