All the Houses by Karen Olsson Page B

as green until I studied him again and found that they were brown.
    Because of his reputation I was fascinated. Trying not to look while he moseyed along the pool’s edge and sized up the water. Trying not to look when he pulled one-handed at his red T-shirt and then lifted it—and yet I did see the patches of brown hair under his arms and the strip that began below his navel and ran on downward. A smirk bided its time on his face, illuminated from below by the reflections off the pool.
    Underneath my own large shirt, there was not much difference between me at fourteen and me at eleven, aside from the fact that I was a couple of inches taller. I imagined that I had made an impression on him, though, that he was secretly intrigued by my androgynous style, that if I were to duck inside the house he might follow—though my idea of what would happen next was indistinct. (There was a television commercial in which a woman would take off a baseball cap and toss her head so that her hair swooped in slow motion around her face. In my dream life I did the same, despite the fact that my own hair wouldn’t swoop at any speed.) I was able to partially sell myself on notions that some boys did like me, in secret , and maybe if I hadn’t had an older sister I could have insulated myself with those notions, kept up a belief that I was secretly very attractive , but the fact was that without leaving the house I could easily observe the way boys, sometimes the very same boys, treated certain other girls. It wasn’t the way they treated me.
    Rob nodded at my hat. “Are you an Orioles fan?”
    I shrugged. “We went to a game. I got a hat there.”
    â€œI used to play baseball.”
    â€œWhy’d you stop?”
    â€œThe coach had it out for me. I was more serious about wrestling anyway.”
    Was Jodi Dentoff at that party too? My parents’ friend Jodi, who was a reporter for The Post , would show up in her giant sunglasses, wearing a sarong tied over her black one-piece. A tiny woman, she would sink into a chair with a Bartles & Jaymes and pronounce her contentment—“Oh Eileen, I feel like I’m in the Bahamas , not Washington.” But she would’ve left our number with someone, and as soon as the PIO or Deputy Assistant So-and-so called, she’d dash inside and take a seat on the stairs with the phone cradled against her neck, a notepad balanced on her petite knees.
    Courtney strolled outside in a terry-cloth cover-up, and as soon as she appeared, Rob had no more use for me. I remember him cannonballing into the pool right near where she was standing, and her hopping back as though the splash might singe her. “Don’t be a jerk!” she called when he came like a seal to the surface. “Don’t be a jerk!” he echoed in falsetto. She rolled her eyes . They didn’t speak beyond that, but it was obvious that everything they did was for the other’s benefit. And when she went back inside, he waited maybe a minute or two before asking where the bathroom was. That was almost a year before they actually started dating, but there you have the humid onset.
    I held on to the edge of the pool and kicked, gradually increasing the force of my kicks to see how much of a wake I could generate, and forgot the party, briefly, until my mother told me I was splashing too much. I climbed out of the pool and volunteered to go inside and get more ice.
    Rob and Courtney weren’t on the first floor. I thumped my way up the stairs. Her room was empty, and I thumped back down, then went down some more. Our basement was cold and grubby, with exposed, foil-wrapped pipes above and cracked concrete below, only barely a “finished” basement: dirt seemed to seep in from the edges of the walls, from beneath the floor, from behind the flimsy blackened doors. There was a laundry room and next to that a furnace room, into which I had only dared to peek sidelong,