Free Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser Page A

flew spinning through the bright blue air. In the sand a gull walked stiffly and half lifted its wings. Down in the shallow water a thick-chested senior in a tight bathing suit crouched on his hands and knees, so that I could see the blond hairs glowing on his lower spine—suddenly a lanky junior with hard-muscled legs came running down the beach into the water, flung his hands onto the back of his kneeling friend, and flipped gracefully into the air, landing in the water with a splash. Tilted bottles of soda gleamed here and there in the sand beside beach towels, a girl in a turquoise two-piece stood by the foot of the lifeguard stand, looking up and shading her eyes, and high in the sky a yellow helicopter seemed stuck in the thick blue heavy summer air.
    Laughing, whooping, running their hands through their wet hair, Ray and Dennis came striding toward me, kicking up bursts of sand. They picked up their towels and stood rubbing their chests and arms. Water streamed from their bathing suits.
    “So guess who I ran into down by the jetty,” Ray said, laying out his towel carefully in the sand. “Joyce. She said Vicky thinks you’re mad at her.” He threw himself facedown on the towel.
    “I’m not mad at her. I just want—I just need—”
    “Ah just
want,
” Dennis said, holding up his hands as if they were poised over a guitar. “Ah just
need.
” He strummed the guitar.
    Summer had come, season of sweet loafing. I spent long hours lying on the beach, playing ping-pong in my shady garage, and reading on the screened back porch, where thin stripes of sun and shade fell across my book from the bamboo blinds. Even my job at the library seemed a lazy sort of half-dreaming, as I wheeled my cart slowly between high dim shelves pierced by spears of sun. But as I lay on the beach running my fingers through the warm sand, as I bent over to retrieve a ping-pong ball from a cluster of broken-toothed rakes and shiny red badminton poles rusting at the bottom, all the time I was waiting for Isabel. She slept until one or two in the afternoon. No one was allowed to visit her till the middle of the day. Wolf himself never rose before noon and seemed amused at what he called my peculiar habits. “The early bird catches the worm,” he said, “but who wants the worm?” I found myself rising later and later in the morning, but there were always hours of sunshine to get through before I arrived in the dark.
    “Up so soon?” my father said, glancing at me over the tops of his eyeglasses as he bent toward his lunch in the sunny kitchen.
    Sometimes, to pass the time, I took long drives with Ray and Dennis, when Dennis could borrow his mother’s car. My plan had been to get my license as soon as school was out, but I woke each day feeling tired and kept putting it off. We would drive along the thruway until we saw the name of some little town we didn’t know. Then we drove all over that town, passing through the business district with its brick bank trimmed in white and its glass-fronted barbershop with the slow-turning reflection of a striped pole before heading out to the country lanes with their lonely mailboxes and their low stone walls, and ended up having lunch at some diner where you could get twenty-two kinds of pancake and the maple syrup came in glass containers shaped like smiling bears. Dennis wore sunglasses and drove with one wrist resting on the wheel. In his lamplit room with the drawn shades, Wolf had told me how he’d taken the written test six months ago without once opening the boring manual. “And?” I asked. He smiled, raised a finger, and drew it across his throat.
    And at last I made my way up the wooden stairs and disappeared in the dark. “Isabel,” I would say, standing by the chair, “are you awake?” Or: “Isabel, are you there?” Sometimes I felt a touch on my arm and I would reach out, saying, “Isabel? Is that you?” as my hand grasped at air. Then I would hear her laughing quietly from