“Almost, yes.” I laugh.
I want him to kiss me again, or give me a chance so that I can kiss him again, but his mood seems to have changed. “I better get busy with my lemon hunting,” he says. “I like to win things, if you haven’t guessed.”
“You’ll need a lot more than two lemons if you want to win.”
He picks up his basket. “I’m going to hunt the hell out of some lemons, then,” he says. “Good luck, beautiful Carrie.” And with that, Pfeff is gone, running down the walkway and into the night.
22.
I SPEND MUCH of the next hour down on the family dock. I find several lemons on the boats, but my mind is not on the hunt.
I keep replaying what happened. Was that first kiss just a moment of impulse on Pfeff’s part? A boy and a girl in the moonlight, the surf crashing below them?
Or does he like me, because he thinks I am clever and impressive? He used those words.
What else did he say? “You’re like a girl from a movie.” “Good luck, beautiful Carrie.”
But he talked like the kisses were sort of a joke, merely something fun to do so as not to waste the beauty of the evening and the drama of the landscape. And he left in search of lemons.
There was that look in his eyes before he kissed me. The feel of his mouth on mine, the whiff of seawater in his hair.
I am sitting on the edge of the dock when I hear the bell ring. Tipper wants us all to return at the sound of it. The Lemon Hunt is over.
* * *
—
AS EVERYONE CLUSTERS on the Clairmont lawn, Harris announces that it’s time for prizes. Tipper stands by his side like a game show assistant.
Tomkin wins for the lime, of course. The gift is a cube kite: three cubes attached to one another, a bright red bit of geometry to fling into the sky. Then people begin counting up their lemons.
Pfeff arrives last for the reckoning, lemons bulging comically in his front and back pockets and held in his hands. “I lost my basket,” he announces, kneeling dramatically at my mother’s feet. “I suspect it was stolen by one of these weenies.” He gestures at Major and George. “Sorry, one of these buttholes.”
Tipper laughs.
“Anyway, it was stolen with two lemons in it, I might add, but nonetheless, I persevered, and now, my lady, I present you with”—he begins taking the lemons from his pockets, laying them all on the grass—“twenty lemons.”
He wins, beating Bess and Erin, who were tied with fifteen each.
My mother presents Pfeff with a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate to the Edgartown bookshop.
Dessert is lemon mousse topped with fluffy blobs of whipped cream, and rich lemon pound cake soaked in lemon syrup.
I hope Pfeff will come over to me.
I want to go to him.
I can sense him everywhere he goes—talking with my father, horsing around with George and Major, pouring himself lemonade. People bring their dessert plates to the picnic blankets. Bess puts Madonna on the stereo. “Where’s the Party,” “True Blue,” “La Isla Bonita.”
I want to talk to Penny, to tell her about the kissing with Pfeff, but she and Erin have claimed the tire swing and don’t seem easy to interrupt. Yardley is helping her brother put together his kite. So I am alone with my new experience, the secret of what happened on the walkway in the moonlight.
Pfeff, Major, and George settle themselves on a blanket, plates full of cake. I choose a blanket near them, stretching myself out and staring at the stars.
“You have to play tennis,” Pfeff is saying to Major. “Because George will just beat me constantly, and that’s no fun. I need someone at my level.”
“I’m not that vigorous,” says Major. “I didn’t come to this island to exert myself.”
“Tennis is not exertion. It’s a game,” argues Pfeff.
“I exert myself when I play tennis,” George tells Pfeff. “That’s why I’m so much better than you.”
“Look at all this peer pressure,” says Major. “Play Yardley or one of her cousins, Pfeff. I’m sure they all play.”
“Yah, but I have dreams of manly comradeship and competition and stuff,” says Pfeff.
“Oh god, save me,” says Major.
“Well, I just remembered I didn’t bring my racquet,” says Pfeff.
“They’ll have spares,” says George.
“Also, no socks,” says Pfeff. “I’m realizing. And I think no underwear.”
“Uck,” says George.
“I packed in a rush.”