friends at English school who go to summer camps with names like Gitchigoumi and Oconto, learning to identify animal tracks and survive in the bush. So the boys decide to turn their find into a galley instead of a giant canoe; eight of them sit astride the log, paddling furiously out into open water. They’re going to Australia, the huge rock thirty yards offshore, close enough that you can swim back easily if you’ve got your Junior badge. Even so, the mothers take it in turns to pace along the shore, and the girls take no chances, posting spies at the edge of the dunes where they spread their beach towels and sit rubbing baby oil onto their arms and legs, already brown as barbecued duck. The tall, rough grass makes a perfect screen, and the dunes themselves could be the high walls of a Cossack fortress, below which Turks and Tatars lie plotting.
The girls’ talk jumps about like the sand fleas they bury in shallow graves at the edges of their towels. Bonnie, who has just turned nine, is the youngest; Laura the oldest, and Katia and Tania have both turned twelve this summer. As for the others, they take up the slack between Laura and Bonnie. There’s something insistent, authoritative, about this ranking due to birthdate, something Laura’s grateful for, knowing as she does that otherwise they’d never give her the time of day, not only Katia but all the other girls at the beach, except for Bonnie. If AnastasiaShkurka were here she’d have a natural ally, but Nastia is delicate, prone to sunstroke and heat rash, and her mother keeps her inside in the mornings, when the sun is hottest.
Somehow the conversation turns to Nastia, to how sickly she is, how pale and nervous.
“I don’t think she’s delicate at all,” Tania observes. “I think Nastia Shkurka’s about as delicate as a rubber tire. She hasn’t any guts, that’s all.”
A thrill goes through the group of girls on hearing the word
guts
—it’s a boy’s word, and there’s something daring just in hearing Tania speak it.
“If Nastia woke up one morning with a pimple on her face she’d get a heart attack,” Katia crows. “Nasty Nastia.”
“Shut up.” Laura says this out of loyalty, not because it isn’t true. If Nastia were to grow a pimple she probably would walk round with her chin cupped in her hand, to hide it. She’s always scared to do things her mother wouldn’t like—things her mother would never find out about in a hundred years, like looking at the book Laura found in Sonia’s bedside table, and brought with her once to the Shkurkas’ cottage. “You shut right up,” Laura says, adding a word that’s higher up on the forbidden list than
guts: “Dupo. Smerdiucha dupo.”
The girls shiver. Everyone knows that there’s a war going on between Katia and Laura. Their last fight has acquired mythic status among the girls at Kalyna Beach; everyone’s heard how, that one day it rained, that day of being cooped up indoors with already-thumbed-through books and decks of cards with the queens or aces missing, Katia had started teasing Laura about her weight. Laura had thrown a book at her—a book that had hit not Katia, but the statue their mother had brought up to the cottage and placed onthe mantelpiece, a plaster statue in the shape of a boy and girl kissing under an umbrella. The Martyn children knew the story of that statue by heart: how it was the first luxury Baba Laryssa had ever owned, the first thing she’d ever possessed that couldn’t be worn or eaten. Dyeedo had bought it for her just before he died: it was priceless, their mother claimed. Though if it were such a treasure, why was it up at the cottage? And why had the children heard their father refer to it, when their mother wasn’t around, as “that monstrosity”?
The statue had fallen almost noiselessly; Katia had quickly swept up the pieces with dustpan and brush, but Sonia had known at once. She’d marched in from the screened porch directly to the
The girls’ talk jumps about like the sand fleas they bury in shallow graves at the edges of their towels. Bonnie, who has just turned nine, is the youngest; Laura the oldest, and Katia and Tania have both turned twelve this summer. As for the others, they take up the slack between Laura and Bonnie. There’s something insistent, authoritative, about this ranking due to birthdate, something Laura’s grateful for, knowing as she does that otherwise they’d never give her the time of day, not only Katia but all the other girls at the beach, except for Bonnie. If AnastasiaShkurka were here she’d have a natural ally, but Nastia is delicate, prone to sunstroke and heat rash, and her mother keeps her inside in the mornings, when the sun is hottest.
Somehow the conversation turns to Nastia, to how sickly she is, how pale and nervous.
“I don’t think she’s delicate at all,” Tania observes. “I think Nastia Shkurka’s about as delicate as a rubber tire. She hasn’t any guts, that’s all.”
A thrill goes through the group of girls on hearing the word
guts
—it’s a boy’s word, and there’s something daring just in hearing Tania speak it.
“If Nastia woke up one morning with a pimple on her face she’d get a heart attack,” Katia crows. “Nasty Nastia.”
“Shut up.” Laura says this out of loyalty, not because it isn’t true. If Nastia were to grow a pimple she probably would walk round with her chin cupped in her hand, to hide it. She’s always scared to do things her mother wouldn’t like—things her mother would never find out about in a hundred years, like looking at the book Laura found in Sonia’s bedside table, and brought with her once to the Shkurkas’ cottage. “You shut right up,” Laura says, adding a word that’s higher up on the forbidden list than
guts: “Dupo. Smerdiucha dupo.”
The girls shiver. Everyone knows that there’s a war going on between Katia and Laura. Their last fight has acquired mythic status among the girls at Kalyna Beach; everyone’s heard how, that one day it rained, that day of being cooped up indoors with already-thumbed-through books and decks of cards with the queens or aces missing, Katia had started teasing Laura about her weight. Laura had thrown a book at her—a book that had hit not Katia, but the statue their mother had brought up to the cottage and placed onthe mantelpiece, a plaster statue in the shape of a boy and girl kissing under an umbrella. The Martyn children knew the story of that statue by heart: how it was the first luxury Baba Laryssa had ever owned, the first thing she’d ever possessed that couldn’t be worn or eaten. Dyeedo had bought it for her just before he died: it was priceless, their mother claimed. Though if it were such a treasure, why was it up at the cottage? And why had the children heard their father refer to it, when their mother wasn’t around, as “that monstrosity”?
The statue had fallen almost noiselessly; Katia had quickly swept up the pieces with dustpan and brush, but Sonia had known at once. She’d marched in from the screened porch directly to the
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