Daisy’s laughing again, this time at two plucked-chicken skinny girls who bickered at lunchtime over which one ate a quarter slice of cheese more than the other. We’re taking an afternoon break, lounging under a tree with a few other counselors. Daisy’s laugh travels through us like a water-fall, and now we’re all roaring about the two starving girls, who are probably off somewhere cry-ing. Or trying to cry—their bodies may have ceased producing tears. Big-mouthed, blonde Katya adds to the hysteria an announcement: the twigs had sores on their buttocks, definite signs of ad-vancing anorexia. It was true; she’d seen them in the locker room.

Red Maple Day Camp, where Daisy taught pre-school during the year, allowed her a junior coun-selor, so she’d hired me that summer because I was too shy to get boy crazy. I was besotted with her guy, Anthony, though he was older, in his twenties, like Daisy. He teased the bejesus out of me with lame song lyrics, but I still fell for them. We’d be at the Merman, where he tended bar, and he’d lean over to whisper in my ear “Let’s steal away tonight.” I sort of wanted to, but then he’d slink off to the kitchen to snort coke with his friends.

Nobody really knew Anthony’s deal. Daisy had casually disclosed, before the campers boarded our bus one morning, that she’d caught him giving her cousin Vito head on Vito’s houseboat. “Don’t look so shocked,” she said, and then assumed her teacher voice, enunciating each word. “Seventy eight percent of all adult males have had at least one homosexual experience.” We hap-pened to be passing the library, where I could have easily verified that statistic, but I didn’t care whether it was true or not. Daisy was fascinating. She had grown up in New York City, in Greenwich Village, and her path had intersected with all the major events of the 1960s. At twelve, she’d lost her virginity to one of Hell’s Angels, and that was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. She’d missed her chance to fly to Dallas on a class trip in November of ’63 because the entire school simultaneously contracted the flu. If her parents had bothered to sign permission slips, she might have gone to register voters in Mississippi or Alabama with her progressive high school. Then, in college, she’d dropped acid with Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey or someone else in their inner circles while making the rounds of love-ins, and had even trimmed Yoko’s bangs once as a favor to John. She frequently quoted Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, to whom she’d been per-sonally introduced by her Psychology professor. She’d married that professor and had a daughter, Monica, but he’d signed up for active duty and was killed in Viet Nam four days after the baby’s birth. She never made it to Haight Ashbury, but sang with a group called the Fugs in Thompkins Square Park.

Here on Long Island, late last Saturday night or in the wee hours of Sunday morning, she’d had serial sex with seven men on Anthony’s parents’ front lawn. She did it for revenge, because earlier that day, at the mall, Anthony had called her a fat slut and made her walk behind him. Part of me liked this development because, if Anthony didn’t want her, maybe he’d truly prefer me. I was dim and even a little—well, not very sensitive, even for sixteen. Although I liked Daisy and wished her no ill, certain things were meant to be, and once my and Anthony’s love fully manifested, she’d evaporate, or just trail off like cigarette smoke. Maybe she’d even take up with a captain of industry instead of a ne’er-do-well like Anthony, leaving me to reform him with my genuine love. His abus-ing Daisy did make me ache for her, but I’d learned to ignore those feelings. Something in me al-ways shut down at the hint of anyone’s suffering, even my own.

Lies or not, Daisy was a good boss. Every morning we drove a group of boisterous kids to camp and afterwards took charge of the three- and four-year-olds. She showed me how to assure good tips from their parents. At pool time, we gently pushed the monsters’ little faces underwater and sent notes home saying they’d learned to swim. Team sports, too, were important to fathers cooped up in corporate offices and mothers sweating about the tennis courts. We could say their darlings played baseball because, even though they ran around like lunatics and whacked each other with miniature plastic bats, they were, technically, on a field. We also corralled them into dance, music, and art classes, breaking up much of the same roughhousing. At day’s end, one of the ridiculed anorexic junior counselors, Loreen, and I would wipe their hands and faces with damp cloths be-fore reloading them on the home-bound buses. Loreen knew me from school and sometimes invit-ed me to jog with her after work, but I always declined. Daisy had diagnosed her as an exercise compulsive and I didn’t want to catch that.

Daisy’s laughing again on Saturday morning at her parents’ kitchen table. We’re dropping off Monica with her grandparents before picking up Daisy’s ultra-cool City friend from the Cayuga Park Long Island Railroad station and heading out to the beach. We’re sipping iced tea and nib-bling leftover cake when her mother arrives home from the beauty parlor.

Daisy slams her fist on the table. “They made her look like a rooster!” she shrieks.

Her mom, Dorothy, pats her soft, ginger hair that flies up in tufts. “Oh yeah,” she says, hand on one hip like a model. “Guess who was prettier than you when she was your age? And had a better figure? And snazzier clothes?”

Daisy licks some chocolate icing off her fork. She actually is quite overweight, but so is the rest of her family. Not that they’re so much fatter than other people, it’s the way they’re fat. They’re not meat fat, for instance, from eating beef and pork chops, which would make them large all over with a stubborn, unmovable appearance. Nor are they potato chip chubbies with large lower bellies and elliptical chins, or bread fatties who are even top and bottom, or even sweet fatties, round like pan-cakes. Her family appears rather boneless, as if something in their inner structures went ping and their skeletons came apart, sinking into undefined flesh. Daisy’s cut-off denim shorts and shim-mering mermaid tank suit don’t flatter her shape, but of course she’s prettier than her mother. Her mother is old!

Dorothy dumps the cake in the garbage then practically beans us with the empty platter she waves at us. “Just for that, I’m not watching your kid today. She’s staying with you,” she says. “And if I hear anything about you and some stupid fella, I’ll kick your ass.”

Daisy’s face flushes and her upper lip quivers with unspoken words, but she gets up slowly, scraping her chair, and goes to find her daughter. I’m still trying not to laugh at the thought of old Dorothy busting out a few martial arts moves.

“What’s got you, Helen Marie?” she asks me.
“It’s Haley,” I mutter between gasps.
“Oh, yeah, Haley.” She shakes her head disapprovingly. “What’s your mother think of that? The name she gave you isn’t good enough?”

The kids at school had always called me Harry because of my harelip, but now that I’ve completed my final surgery, to mask the scar, and all that remains is a thin line barely lighter than my skin, I’ve become Haley. My mother hates it and complains about it to her church Bingo friends, which is probably where Dorothy caught wind of it.

I join Daisy in the living room where Monica is trying to distract her grandfather, a big, kindly stranger, from reading his newspaper. “You be good or I’ll tell Sister Sumpter,” he says, which starts Daisy howling again. “Sister Assumpta was my first-grade teacher!” she yells. He looks puzzled, as if he’s never met her before, but his eyes drift back to his newspaper. He could have been joking, or he might have lost his mind. Had he actually forgotten that his daughter grew up and had a child of her own?

“I can’t believe he remembered that,” Daisy mumbles softly as we leave the house. “Good old Sis-ter Assumpta.” We settle Monica in the back seat with a book, then take side streets to the train sta-tion, to my relief avoiding the firehouse. Once, Daisy saw a firetruck on her block and inexplicably burst into tears. I plied her with cigarettes and soda—she always kept a can of Tab on her dash-board—but to no avail. “His belly button fell off!” she’d sobbed out several times, and then the tears stopped as abruptly as they’d started. She resumed her cool, authoritative poise, and never revealed who she was talking about. I was too scared to ask.

But today, Rae is coming. The beach would be more fun without Monica in tow, but my disap-pointment is sugared by the fact that I’ll finally meet the girl whose brother is a talent agent. She must know tons of famous people. For Daisy, thoughts of the City stir up more stories from her past. “They flew me down to DC to identify the body,” she says. I assume she’s speaking of the soldier who had died in Viet Nam, Monica’s nameless father. Maybe it was his belly button that fell off? I’d lost three nights’ sleep the first time I heard this story, but now it doesn’t faze me. I wait out a beat before pressing on. “What was it like?” I ask her.

“He looked like red meat, that’s all,” she says, her eyes intent on the road. She turns a corner and pulls into the train station parking lot.
We’re early. She raises her sunglasses to examine my face. “You know, you’re looking stunning lately,” she says. “Really.” I smile into the side-view mirror. Last summer, when I still had the harelip and some acne, I couldn’t look at people. Things had changed since the surgery, but really, I wasn’t beautiful. I looked like everyone else, which was all I desired. “Anthony thinks you’re adorable. A younger, skinnier me!” My heart wants to burst out and do a little cheerleader dance in the steaming parking lot, although aside from us both having straight brown hair and thick eye-brows, Daisy and I look nothing alike. I have no charisma or star quality, while she’s a zaftig Ali McGraw or Barbara Hershey. But she’s insisted I weave a few strands of my hair into hippie braids like hers, and Katya’s helped us tame our brows into identical, thin arches. There must be a way to determine exactly what Anthony said, but we’re distracted by a willowy brunette in pink satin capri pants and dark sunglasses as she descends the staircase. “Rae!” Daisy shouts.

I relocate to the back seat next to Monica while Rae slips in beside Daisy. She smells of crushed jasmine tea leaves and her voice is barely above a whisper. She’s really too hip for us, or for me, anyway. I’m dying to ask her about her brother’s rock star clients—Frank Zappa or David Bow-ie—but she and Daisy just chatter about people I’ve never met. Monica’s leafing through Great Tree and the Longhouse, a book about the Iroquois I’d been assigned in middle school. She’s only seven, but apparently she’s some kind of genius, at least according to Daisy. Sadly, though, she still sucks her thumb. I wish I’d brought the Odyssey, to get a jump start on senior year, or at least Fear of Flying, a book everyone at camp is talking about. I stare out the window as we abandon our compact suburb for the ocean with its the broadening sky, past the disco party beaches that Rae claims would nauseate her with their fake-cool people.

We wind up at scraggly Lookout Point. Rae and Daisy continue to gossip as they lay out the blan-ket and beer cooler, so Monica and I cross the scalding sand, barefoot, over to the water. She pulls her thumb out of her mouth long enough to say, “Anthony broke up with Mommy because she’s too dependent on him. But really, don’t you think it’s the other way around?”

“Where did you hear that?” I ask her.
“The phone,” she shrugs. “You know how mommy likes to talk. Blah blah blah.”

We crash into the waves, where she screams and plays like the child she is. The sky is overcast but it’s still muggy. Anthony is free now, I think. We might be OK together as long as Daisy finds someone better. But what if I got fat? Would he continue to sing drippy love songs, or would he verbally abuse me and insist that I walk behind him? Would I then be tempted to screw a bunch of guys on his parents’ lawn?

Hordes of seagulls flock close to the ground—I don’t know where they’re coming from. They re-mind me of something my Irish grandmother used to say about birds flying low; it’s nothing good. Monica races them in a crooked path all the way to the blanket and her book. Daisy and Rae have nearly polished off a six pack, I gather from the empty cans scattered around the blanket. They’re giggling now as they sculpt a man out of sand. Rae picks up a stick and places it between his legs, and Daisy adds a clump of seaweed to it.

“What should we call him?” Daisy asks.
“Oh, I don’t know” Rae says. “He’s Haley’s boyfriend What do you want to call him, hon?”
“Anthony will be Haley’s first boyfriend,” Daisy says softly. I try to suppress a smile, which isn’t difficult, because she quickly adds, “It won’t work out. Once you get your driver’s license, gradu-ate, and go to college, you’ll forget all about us.” She looks wistfully at the ocean. I’m hoping she has ESP and that my cards hold at least a summer fling with her discarded lover.

Rae scowls prettily at me then clutches the rainbow shawl she’s draped over her shoulders. She turns to Daisy “Have you heard from Paul?”

Daisy shakes her head. Too quickly. She looks over her shoulder to where Monica and I are con-structing an Iroquois longhouse out of sand.

“I’ve seen him,” Rae says. They huddle together, whispering. Now the husband had not only sur-vived, he had a name. Paul. This was harder to swallow than her other, habitual lies. If I’d ever be-lieved anything she said, it was that she was widowed. Maybe the red meat story wasn’t true, and maybe her husband hadn’t even died in Vietnam, but who would lie about something as important as a life? Perhaps the things my mother says about Daisy are true, then. She’s melodramatic, pos-sibly a drug addict, and at the very least, too loose with her body.

I’m still wondering about this as the four of us eventually make our way to the boardwalk, where Daisy convinces me to drink a beer with her and Rae, Monica nursing a Sprite. The sun sinks over the horizon as high tide claims the longhouse and the naked sand man.

“Anyway,” Rae says to Daisy, “I have someone for you.”

Then Daisy’s dating an actual millionaire, Rae’s friend’s cousin’s friend. While Anthony some-times calls her a c*** with a flap when she talks too much, Mr. Millionaire calls her “my dear Chatty,” with a genuine, or almost genuine, British accent. He’s a well-traveled man who works as a pre-school teacher because he wants to, not because he has to. This sounds really creepy to me now, in a perverted, maybe pedophile way, but seemed charmingly idealistic then.

So she’s out with him the night we have our last camp party on some bedraggled houseboat, which she insists I attend without her to spy on Anthony, who will be serving drinks. “Nothing can’t stop us now,” he says with a wink as he hands me a strawberry virgin daiquiri. Suddenly, his bald spot seems wider and his smile gummier, although he’s still pretty cute. I spend the night half in hiding, not so much to escape him as to avoid Emily Brass and her clique. I’d attended her sweet sixteen last year in pants and then boasted about long dresses being excessive. In truth, my family couldn’t spare the money for a gown, and everyone probably knew it. It’s a humid day in late July that threatens to be a heavy, awful night. I catch a glimpse of Anthony as he flits about the party’s edg-es and wonder if this is the boat he’d given the blowjob on. The USS Fellatio!

A short boy with broad shoulders and a stubbly goatee approaches and asks why I’m smiling. I recognize him from high school. We called him Reed Crush because his last name was unpro-nounceable. He was a senior when I was a sophomore, and a few girls in my class had the vapors over him, so dating Reed Crush became kind of a rite of passage. Although, despite his encyclope-dic knowledge of music and impressive record collection, he was reported to be boring.

“Can’t tell you,” I say. I lean over the rails and gaze into the torpid canal where the boat is docked. Garbage floating around the pilings looks like a murder victim that someone tried to hide. I wonder how much fighting Daisy and Anthony can endure before something truly evil happens.

“Can’t tell me now, or ever?”

He’s been working as the DJ, so ask him, “Don’t you have records to spin?”
“I’m on break.”

My first impulse is to not give him my number when he asks, but there’s Anthony at the bar flirt-ing with someone old enough to be his mother, and I figure, Why not?

Because he’s in college now and can’t tolerate Hollywood movies, Reed takes me to the revival theater, where they’re showing Hard Day’s Night along with old concert footage of Elvis and the Stones. They even have that famous Ed Sullivan Show with The Beatles’ first American appear-ance. The camera pans all sorts of teenyboppers crying, but it circles back to a chubby, pig-tailed girl in a flowered dress, a ringer for Daisy.

“Those kids seemed ecstatic to see the Beatles,” I remark to Reed outside the theater.

He snorts, “Not a dry seat in the house.”
“So many tears,” I sigh. “They could fill a stadium.” He gapes at me.
“I can see I’ll have to move slowly with you.”

He drives me home and kisses me on the cheek. I’m halfway inside before I get his joke about the girls at the Beatles concert. Being with him this summer might not be half bad, I think.

“Could have been me,” Daisy says. “I was at that show.” We’re sitting across from each other at the Merman. She’s asked if I can come out immediately for a drink before heading off to the heavy metal concert at the race track. As luck would have it, Reed is setting up some equipment there, so I’m free until ten. “Tell me, have you guys done it yet?” she asks.

“We’re close,” I say, which couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s only been a few weeks, and we’ve made out exactly twice. “What happened to the millionaire?”

She glances at the bar. “He told me I was beautiful.” She flips her hair and flashes her teeth. “Wit-ty. And brilliant.” I can see the tears she’s blinking back.

“He really likes you,” I don’t know why I say that. To be polite, maybe?
She snorts. “He was supposed to take me out to La Grenouille tonight.”
“Bummer,” is all I can think of to say. Instead of sampling foie gras in a restaurant whose name we can barely pronounce, she’s sitting with me in a bar with coasters and sawdust on the floor.
“I waited and waited. A dozen roses came instead. Finally, he called and he told me. Stupid fuck. He’s married.”
“So, why did he send roses?” I asked.

“Get this. He said, ‘That, my dear Chatty, was a sophisticated flirt.’” She swigs down the last of her vodka tonic and slams the glass emphatically. “You know,” she says, “Anthony and I did it on the first date. I was wearing these same jeans and leotard.” She glances over at the bar where An-thony is rinsing beer glasses. He winks at one or both of us. Or maybe someone else. Does he even know we’re here? It’s almost time to leave, anyway, so I weave my way over to the ladies room. In the hallway on my way back, I feel a hand on my shoulder, and then a wet, clammy mouth on mine. I struggle to break free. I’m surprised that Anthony’s kiss feels sloppier and less thrilling than I’d imagined, although when I remember the cigarette and aftershave smells, they’re not entirely unpleasant.

“I have a boyfriend,” I tell him.
“Reed? That wanna be cherry popper?”
“The one.”

“You know, you’ll still be here tomorrow but your dreams may not,” he says. He flashes a fake grin and then scuttles back behind the bar as if nothing happened. I convince myself that nothing did.

Daisy’s half drunk, so in the parking lot I take her pocketbook and fumble through the tampons, tissues, and tic-tacs until she grabs it back and extracts a huge chunk of wood with a key attached. “Isn’t this sweet?” she says, brandishing it in my face. “Anthony made it. Just for me.” I wonder if she saw him try to kiss me, but she relinquishes the keys anyway and I drive us over to the stadi-um, hoping a cop won’t stop and ask to see my learners permit, which I’d left at home.

Saturday nights, when there are no stock car races, they use the track for concerts. Tonight, blan-kets and lawn chairs spring up everywhere. The first peals of an electric guitar draw us across the stadium, Daisy with an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips. I tell her about the one race I’d been to that ended with the Crasheroos, an event where drivers rammed gussied-up, worthless cars into other wrecks. Although I’d been told, I refused to believe that the Crasheroos were fixed. I wanted to think that grown men had painted their favorite cars pretty pastel colors, even decked them with glitter and sometimes stuffed animals, only to see them destroyed in the chaos. I tell Daisy about the muscled, tattoo-covered guy I saw cry like a baby after he totaled his sparkling pink bomb, which he’d thought to crown with a teddy bear.

“Penis envy,” she says, not removing the cigarette from her mouth. “Castration fantasies.”

This doesn’t make sense, but when I ask her what she means, she says “In college, you’ll read a shitload of books, and eventually you’ll feel nothing. Like me.” We step through a maze of people huddled on closely packed blankets and lawn chairs. “Because you are me.” Don’t know about that, I want to say. I want more than a collection of impressive stories about where I was while im-portant events happened. I want to feel things, to be with someone I more than just like. Instead, I make some remark about how weird the clouds appear when the sky is dark. It’s like night never came at all, I observe, before I realize that it’s the stadium lights illuminating the heavens. Daisy and I continue across the sea of blankets until, finally, we come to one that’s half empty, occupied only by a shirtless man with sandy hair and his small, red-headed girlfriend who’s perched on his flat belly. Daisy makes a beeline for them.

She stands over the guy. “Do you mind if we share?”
He looks up. “Hell no.”
“Got a match?” Daisy asks when we’ve settled in.

He searches his pocket until he comes up with a lighter. He sits up, displacing his pretty girlfriend from his lap and holds it under Daisy’s chin as she bends over the flame. They stare intensely at one another. Then what happens is so sudden; it seems like I blink and the girl scurries to the far corner of their blanket. I blink again, and Daisy and the guy are kissing passionately. He’s groping at her leotard while the red-haired girl looks on and begins to sob. My heart turns over, but I don’t know how to comfort her. Probably, her guy does this all the time and he’s just as promiscuous as Daisy. I know I shouldn’t be here, with these people. Daisy won’t even notice I’m missing.

Reed has one more amp to haul, so I wait for him at the air pumps. Maybe I’m furious at Daisy for convincing me that she’s a widow, when she’s really just—what? Rejected? Scorned? Or maybe she walked away from this Paul guy after he got drafted and then ignored him when he came back alive. I’m feeling guilty because I shouldn’t have left that girl weeping on the blanket. And I’m feeling sorry for poor Anthony. If the sex stories were true, could he be forgiven for treating her badly?

At the diner, I tell Reed everything over French fries and coffee, omitting the part about Anthony trying to kiss me. “I thought it was cool at first, but then I realized it was just, I don’t know, kind of mean.”

“Yeah, well,” he says. “That’s an old hippie thing. Your friend is into free love, or whatever.”

Camp closes in August so they can prep for the school year. Daisy gets a new guy, for real. Not a millionaire, but a solid wage-earner, an accountant or something. I see her around town, a few pounds thinner and sporting a flattering perm. We chat or just wave. She calls me now and then to hang out, but I’m usually busy with Reed, who takes me to miniature golf and roller skating. Or I’m riding bicycles with skinny Loreen from camp. She’s been working with a therapist and has gained two pounds, I’m happy to report.

In my dream one night, Daisy’s built a box for Monica’s toys, but then she crawls in and quietly dies. “How beautiful!” The neighbors exclaim when they find her the next morning. She’s been miniaturized, and her long, luminous hair flows over the tiny box’s sides. Her pale skin and turned-up nose give her the appearance of some fairy tale princess. The neighbors stand around and marvel. “She died so neatly,” someone says.

Or maybe I dream that after it happens.

I’m in bed with a summer cold and don’t hear the telephone or the conversation. I sleep through an afternoon thunderstorm that sends branches crashing against my window. When I wake up, my mother is sitting at the foot of my bed, crying. She grasps my ankle. “Your friend OD’d,” she says.

“What?” I ask. “Who?”
“Daisy. On diet pills. And booze, probably.”
“She’s in the hospital?” I ask.
She nods, “No.” Why is she crying? I wonder. She’d never liked Daisy.

Wakes and funerals have always freaked me out. I walk up to the casket anyway to offer a prayer, trying not to look too hard at someone younger than a grandparent who resembled me so closely. Although, dead and made up, she favors her mother, Dorothy. Katya waves me over to where she’s sitting with some people from Red Maple pre-school and camp. She brings up the time Daisy trained the toddlers to applaud when she entered a room, and they all tell hilarious Daisy stories. Everyone agrees she was a dedicated, creative teacher, even if a bit unconventional. A few of them weep, but I’m frozen. Anthony looks handsome in his dark suit, sitting with his head down. I’m afraid to approach him. I do offer condolences to Dorothy, who thanks me for coming and makes sure that I sign the guest book.

“She was so full of life,” she says, as we’re hugging goodbye. “It’s so hard to believe she’s gone.” We glance over at Anthony, who is extending his hand to Monica. “Nobody wanted this to hap-pen.”

Reed leaves for college in September and I return to my last year of high school, the first without a trace of a harelip. Anthony meets a blonde version of Daisy, just a little skinnier. He rigs his horn to play that old song, Daisy Bell, as if they had been a sweet, old-fashioned couple. But “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do . . .” is not Daisy’s song.

Daisy’s song is nights out in tight jeans and a black leotard, the fat wooden key chain she needs to find her keys because she’s too drunk to find something so small, the bright white and magenta of the TAB can on her dashboard, and her fearful tears over a firetruck. It’s all of this plus the story of catching her boyfriend giving her cousin a blowjob, or losing her virginity at twelve to one of Hell’s Angels, of meeting her first husband in college and her trip to Washington to identify his body freshly home from Viet Nam and how it looked like meat, void of identity. Most of all, it’s her inexhaustible laugh, as boneless and expansive as her body, hovering over us and then break-ing like a wave.