Girls don't work on docks. That's what the older boy she works with—at the docks—tells himself, as he gauges her. Both the boy and the girl are among the swarm of teenagers who work summers as dockhands, launch drivers, babysitters, lifeguards, waitresses, painters and landscapers in Rock Point. He is a local who owns a little lobster boat, just as she has a boat of her own that brings in extra money. He watches her thumb wrestle with that phony kayak guide. Their group has gathered at Star Rock, a huge granite boulder that serves as their meeting place, summer nights. They pass the evenings in the sightline of the boulder, on the hill. The girl has watched Lobster-Boat-Boy watch her—for weeks—all summer, really. But now, as the summer is ending, evening comes fast, hastening her feeling of time.

On this warm summer night, the usual breeze off the Atlantic is snuffed to a fetid calm. The boy gets up, takes a cold beer from the cooler. He hands her one, helps himself and goes back to his spot in the circle. After a while, she grows antsy, bored of their talk of striped bass caught at dawn, the small crop of clams in the mud flats, and the low yield of lobsters in the pots off Mussel Cove. With a week's worth of tips in her pocket, she feels too good to be bored.

Time to meet the boy's bold stare. She walks over, takes hold of his calloused hand. She leads him away, down the hill. She guides him in the dark to the beach, to the cleft. They walk in, trying not to slip as they step over slimy rocks. The split sides of speckled gray rock rise above them. She leads him deep into the cool crevice, where the rock narrows and leaves barely room enough for two. Clammy seaweed presses against her neck and rough barnacles nip through her thin shirt. She kisses him. The girl has kissed and been kissed before, but not by this boy.

After a while, they rejoin the others. She feels conspicuous, yet what they may think doesn't interest her. She makes another decision, to go. She leaves her friends drinking at the rock, circled around a small fire built more for amusement than warmth. Going by, she brushes her fingers along the boy's back. He doesn't look her way, he doesn't stand up, he doesn't walk her home. They are nothing official. She doesn't realize they won't be. Later, he'll mock her: tell his friends girls don't pump gas or know how to replace a bent propeller. He'll accuse her of being too fancy—a summer person. Somebody who owns a Bird Boat, who gives sailing lessons. He doesn't say what he doesn't really know he means: girls don't lead.

Far from fancy, she bought the sixteen-foot wooden sloop with her own money. All winter she patched, she scraped, she sanded. Bent over the hull, under a plastic tarp, she finally finished, and painted her boat a bright, cobalt blue. Her first season in the water, the boat still has no name painted on the stern. She's still thinking, trying to decide what name best fits her very first vessel.

Tonight, from her bare feet to the roots of her long, thick hair, her body feels swelled with blood and pricked with nerves, alive, but calm and magically slaked. Walking down the hill, holding her sandals, she creates her own little breeze. The air caresses her bare, ropy arms. She billows in the memory of the boy's hands along her neck, her body pressed between rock and his muscled chest.

The girl's cottony thoughts are interrupted, as she nears home, by blare and beat. Rock and roll tumbles into her savory night from the open windows of her house.

The counter of the small, dim kitchen is crowded with empty bottles, red plastic cups, crumpled napkins. She stubs out a burning cigarette abandoned on a butter plate, the unbroken ash inches long. Her parents' friends pulse in and out, helping themselves. She recognizes most of the couples. Rock Point is a small town. This summer, her last summer before college, small has turned from familiar to insular. She's done.

Music blares from the stereo in the crowded living room. Chubby Checkers. Jerry Lee Lewis. Fats Domino. The girl stands in the doorway, watching the older generation mingle, rimmed by four walls but unburdened by inhibition. Her mother's head tips back as she blows smoke into the air. Her father, his patterned tie loose around his neck, dances close to the mother of one of her friends. His blue eyes see her right away. Some nights—like now—she thinks her father knows exactly what she's been doing. Senses when she's been with a boy. The nights she's gone out with her girlfriends he's never even up when she gets home.

She's done her job. She's in before midnight curfew and he's witnessed her arrival. Her father twists the woman in his arms and beckons his daughter to join the party. Shake, rattle, roll. She turns away.

The girl opens a Coke and sits on the rattan stool at the kitchen counter, her back against the wall near the open door to her bedroom. Her unmade bed in view. A bedroom that is hardly a bedroom. Her room is a passageway, a short cut between kitchen and bathroom. No matter how often she closes the two doors, her mother insists, "People don't want to walk around." Her mother has no concept. And besides, "people" is not the right word. More like prying parents, a barge of a younger brother and a thief of a sister.

A friend of her father's stands before her; he adds ice from a bucket and pours bourbon, or scotch, into his cup. He comes to all her parents' parties. He has a painting business and a couple of her friends work for him as their summer job. Mr. Paint-By-Numbers, they call him, because he tells them how many hours they can spend on each area they paint. "I only make money if you paint by numbers," he says. But they like him. As summer jobs go, painting is a good one, plus he buys them beer when they get off on Fridays. He bought a case tonight.

She gives Mr. Paint-By-Numbers sailing lessons once a week. He talks too much—mostly about his business, or his golf game—but at least he's learning. Said he wants to keep up with his son and daughter, who both are taking home trophies from junior regattas. He can take the tiller on his own now. Tacks and jibes easily, although he still has trouble keeping the sail completely full. But he's pretty easy to teach, and he tips.

Which is more than she can say for her one other student—a broad-shouldered, middle-aged woman who lives in the old Mill out by Willet River. When the wind comes up above five knots, the woman—who feels she has to wear one of those bulky, orange, horseshoe-shaped life jackets—yelps and screeches. A slight tip of the hull, or a wave cresting over the bow, and she is hysterical. It's like she's afraid of both wind and water. Forces beyond her ken. The girl can't understand why the woman even wants to sail.

Mr. Paint doesn't leave after he makes his drink. He seems to want to talk. She doesn't. She can't hear what he's saying over the music. His breath smells of old teeth and booze. His head is bent at an inappropriate angle, as if he's talking to her crotch.

She's wearing her favorite jeans, which are worn to thin white threads. She follows his gaze and notices that he's studying a rip. In her crotch. She hadn't realized the crotch seam had parted. They both can see the pale, fleshy inside of her thigh and the edge of her lilac panties. Her ears hum with humiliation. Her disgust at this lewd leaning man is loud enough to temporarily block out the blaring music. She stews in a silence she alone has made, willing him to go away, join his own friends. He leans toward her, bumping her leg. Her lungs burn. He's moving too close, his look persistent and aggressive. Entitled. Does she need this? She slides off the stool and fakes a yawn, but her body is so tense she feels like she can't breathe. She says she's tired. Says she's babysitting early tomorrow morning. Another lie. But her father insists that his girls be polite to his friends. She tries to do what her father asks.

As he steps toward her, she slips smoothly into her dark bedroom and pulls the door closed. This is her house and she knows every hinge. She lifts the wrought iron bar into the keeper. The privacy latch is screwed tightly to the wood. She holds the bar down. On the other side of the door, the thumb press rattles and then stops. The nerve. Without hesitating, she darts the few steps to the opposite door, on the other side of her room. This black bar is loose in the keeper. The L-shaped privacy latch swings freely back and forth on the screw.

He rattles the loose latch on the second door. She guessed right: he's gone around. She presses against the door, holding the side of her hand over the bar. The latch rattles again. Between her fingers, she holds the latch down as hard as she can. Pain rises up and shouts through her fingers.

Another door opens and bangs into hers. The bathroom door. A woman, whose voice she doesn't recognize, is startled. "Oh," she says.

He says, "Excuse me."

She says, "Looking for the head? This house has so many doors." She laughs, a quick, bird-like laugh. Did Mr. Paint touch her? Is she giddy or drunk? The hall outside her door is barely wide enough for two. But something has distracted him; the latch has gone silent.

The girl locks her windows and closes the thin cotton curtains she sewed from old sheets. Someone turns the music louder. Her room is hot, the air stifling. She pulls her mahogany bed over to block one of the doors. She lies awake on the rumpled bed, refusing to move, wanting and not wanting to take off her clothes. Her underwear sticks to her skin. A faint odor of seaweed mixed with the salt of her sweat rises from her shirt. The bottoms of her jeans are wet and heavy with seawater and sand. The dregs of her day melt through her clothes into her sheets. Her hair at her nape soaks her pillow with sweat.

The kitchen latch rattles. Or so she thinks. She gets up to be sure, pressing the side of her head against the wood, listening, her hand pushing down on the metal. Nothing. Her ears (or her mind) must be playing tricks.

All through the night, she hears rattles and clicks. A lull. A rattle. A lull. A click. Only when the house is completely still, when all her parents' people have gone, when smoky daylight seeps into her room from the crack between the curtains, does she leave her room. She firmly locks the bathroom door with the catch hook before she undresses and steps into the shower.

The girl and the boy both work Saturday at the docks. She forgets what day it is and shows up an hour early. He's already working. He says "Hi," and then ignores her, but she won't accept his indifference yet. She knows he's busy. He's on diving duty, hauling a tangled mooring and collecting lobster pots sliced off their buoys. The girl busies herself too. She takes the thick red hose, turns the brass nozzle to its most powerful setting and sprays white splats of gull guano and cracked crab shells off the docks. Earlier that summer, she left the main valve on all night. The pressure was so intense, the force of the water so great that it tore through a weak spot in the rubber and leaked all over the docks. Like sexuality, so difficult to turn off, the pressurized water left a wake of unintended consequences. She patched the hose with two metal compression clamps. As customers start to come in, she fends off poor landings, fills boats with water and gas, adds oil to outboards, tops off gas cans, tosses line, runs credit cards through, and makes change. She's too tired to even think of Mr. Paint-by-Numbers. She's never seen him come to the docks anyway.

During lunch break she sits under an umbrella in a mesh beach chair and whips a frayed end of a towline for her boat. She lays a loop of waxed twine on the bitter end of the line, and then tightly winds the twine two inches down the length of the rope, feeds the end through the loop, and pulls tight. With her Leatherman, she cuts the end and burns it to a hard black nub. This whipped end will never fray again.

After work, she takes down her fringed orange flyers. She cancels her lessons: leaves a message with Mr. Paint-by-Numbers and calls Mrs. Life-jacket. She says her boat is leaking and she won't be able to teach anymore. The woman sobs.

For the rest of the summer, either early in the morning, or in the evening after work, on calm days with a steady wind, the girl will take her Bird Boat out alone. She's named her Privacy. A name she never paints on the stern, although she holds onto this boat for the rest of her life.

Next summer, she will not return to the docks. Hired as a sailing instructor, she will trailer her boat further Down East to a new harbor and board at a simple cedar-shingled yacht club, fleeing predictable Rock Point as much as her hallway of a bedroom. Privacy will follow her from place to place, some summers stored in a borrowed garage or a friend's backyard when she doesn't have the money for a mooring or time away from her job. One day, from the bedroom of her own home, far from Rock Point, she will see Privacy tied fast and secure at a floating dock.

Until then, she explores salt marshes, single-handedly tacks up river, an usher to the wind, competent and content.

Truth

Untruth

We Don't Know and TheyWon't Tell Us

We Don't Know and They
Won't Tell Us