Speedboat by RENATA ADLER Read Free Book Online Page A

he pronounced “magazynes” outside the Philadelphia station, and a dining-car waiter who offered you among other cheeses, “camemberry.” I never did meet anyone.
    I was going to be a doctor and an analyst, but in my third year an odd thing happened. There was a group of friends by this time, an improbable, warm set of debutantes and scholars—girls who liked each other, dated each other’s brothers, cousins. I belonged. One night, climbing a brick wall to the dorm long after hours, I got poison ivy. Totally. Again. Those ivy-covered walls. My case, however, was diagnosed as an allergy to something in the chemistry laboratory. I knew just what I did have, but I didn’t argue long. My work had started to be awful. I allowed myself to be persuaded just to drop it. After graduation, we were all many times each other’s bridesmaids. The marriages were in Maryland, Boston, New Hampshire, California, Georgia, Maine.
    Just south of the Mason-Dixon line, on several weekends, young men—clean-cut, friendly, slightly tipsy—from Princeton or the University of Virginia Law School would rise late in the evening and propose a toast to the N.L.A. We all drank to it. I finally asked, and learned it was the Nigger Lynching Association. My friends from those days have changed as much as all the world has. We are still friends. In those days, too, there was the matter of religion, which tended both to start and to inhibit conversation. Once, the father of my roommate asked me whether I had gone to the same boarding school as his daughter. I said no. There was a pause. He asked me how long I had known her. I said a year. There was another pause. Finally, he made another try. “Do you,” he asked, “know Eddie Warburg?” But it turned out all right. Another bridesmaid, this one from Alabama, had brought an Argentine boyfriend from the Catholic University in Washington. He was very rich, with more profound good manners than any Anglo-Saxon I have met, but he had not troubled much with haircuts. After we had all swum awhile outside, the bride’s mother asked me in confidential tones whether I thought she ought to drain the pool.
    “Well, you know, you can’t win them all,” the old bartender said. “In fact, you can’t win any of them.”
    Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener. She would spend hours in her straw hat and gloves, bending over the soil. When somebody walked past her in her work, she was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes, with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.
    Will and I once went for a few days to the Caribbean, where we chartered what was called a yacht. He is married to his work, but there we were. Most of the boats had been rented by people from Chicago or Milwaukee. They were bossed around by the crews and owners. They wore strange shirts and shorts and drank a lot of rum. Our boat, however, was a question of expediency. We wanted to get as quickly as possible to an island which had no airfield. The boat was run by three Swiss—Hans the father, Hans the son, and the mother, Trude, I think, or Hannelore. We tried to find out, in our few hours, why three Swiss happened to be running a yacht in the Caribbean. It turned out that Hans the father had owned a gas station in Geneva. He had sailed, with his family, on the lake there. Then he bought a larger boat and tried the Atlantic. They barely made it. Hans sold the boat in Florida. They went back to Geneva. The family started feeling landlocked. They bought another boat from their profits on the first one, crossed the sea again, and began doing charters. They were not like the lounging, bossy owners. They were still, in fact, scandalized by their last charter—a priest and what he said were his two sisters. It was not the more obvious situation that appalled them. It was that, their boat having no refrigerator, the wife of Hans the father kept the vegetables in the bathtub. The priest, without removing