All the Houses by Karen Olsson Page A

continued to circulate, just as it had in high school, when his activities—fucking a girl in the darkroom, casual drug sales—had been widely noted. Later, instead of courting detention (or worse) he did work in far-flung countries, Bosnia for one, and in the Green Zone he’d been some kind of consultant, and now he was back here, doing something else weighty and unclear.
    Your hair is short, he said. As if the only thing I’d accomplished in the meantime, while he was intervening around the globe, was to get a haircut.
    Yeah, I said. I was in L.A. but now I’m here, I said. There was no way to explain all that had led up to this shorter haircut, all the styles and colors preceding, the layers, the products. I had this impulse to apologize for it, for my hair, that is, because of the way he was looking at it and at me with his head atilt. I’ve never been able to acknowledge attraction as such, not until a person is actually kissing me (and sometimes not even then), and so I couldn’t have said for sure whether the tilt of his head and the steadiness of his stare expressed sexual interest or mere curiosity. I only knew that I myself felt all the old tingling and that it was uncomfortable. Even when he asked for my number, I told myself he was just being polite.
    *   *   *
    My parents used to throw pool parties. All through the late spring and summer they heaved these outdoor occasions into precarious existence, inviting a handful of people over for a “casual” afternoon party and then straining from Friday evening until Saturday afternoon to ready the house and yard and bar. Up until the last minute they would go on desperate hunts for a missing chair cushion or count the number of good towels. The narrow strip of flowerbed had to be weeded, the pool vacuumed, leaves and dead insects (and once, a drowned rat) removed from the drain baskets. My mother would make curried chicken salad and walnut brownies. My father would undertake last-minute runs for more gin, lemons, ice.
    There had been summer vacations when my sisters and I never had dry hair during the daytime, when we were continually diving into the pool, lifting ourselves back onto the flagstone, racing in and out of the house, trailing little puddles behind us. But then Courtney started high school, and she would “lie out” for hours, trying to tan herself, which was slow going in muggy D.C. Not me: I burned before I tanned, and I’d become self-conscious about how I looked in a bathing suit. Even when I went in the pool I would wear an enormous T-shirt, which billowed around me in the water, trapping spheres of air. The T-shirt said RELAX in big black letters, but in the pool that message was distorted into something splotchy and sinister. After I hoisted myself out of the water, I would wring out the bottom of the T-shirt and then pull the wet cotton away from my body to keep it from clinging. Once Dad had started to ask why on earth I was wearing clothes in the pool, but Mom had shushed him.
    I’d just finished eighth grade, and my father was everything at once: the dad of my childhood, who knew all there was to know, who could fix anything, and the clueless dad of my teenage years, who understood nothing, and the elusive dad who was seldom home. I would seek his attention, but on the rare occasion I actually won it I wanted only to shuck it off again.
    The first time I spoke to Rob was at one of those parties. Dad’s friend Dick Mitchell had brought along his infamous stepson. Rob was older than I was, but friends of Courtney’s talked about him and sometimes bought pot from him, or so I’d overheard them say. The common understanding was that he had slept with a teacher. In person, he was dimpled and cocky in a way that maybe only a teenage male in a letter jacket can manage without coming across as a pure numbskull. He had black hair and eyes so intense that I would think of them