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an appointment for me with an experimental music therapist. She may have had other worries about me, too, based on something I’d told Joey and Lucy, who, in turn, had told Mommy. In retrospect, I think Mommy was handing that “something” over to a professional so she wouldn’t have to deal with it.
    Dr. Frunzhoffa was a German speech therapist with a mustache and straight gray hair parted in the middle. It was Dr. Frunzhoffa’s idea to use the melody and pulse of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to help me deal with my speech impediment. At one point during our appointment, he put on a record and asked me to dance with him. The two of us stood there, a few inches apart, clasping hands, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. His heavy, scratching shoes emphasized his lack of grace as he carried out his mission of distracting me so I would answer his questions.
    Then he finally asked it (or rather sang it): “Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire,” he crooned. “Has a man ever touched you down there?” Another lyric followed. “Has a man had his way with you? Tell me, tell me if it’s true?” I sang: “Daddy loves me, Mommy too, they live hap’ly in the zoo . ”
    “You’re a smart one, Carly,” Dr. Frunzhoffa encouraged me in his German accent, “so you can make up ze next line. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t rhyme. Vot matters is ze truth.”
    We started all over again with the Fred and Ginger line: “Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire … Has a man touched you down there?” To which I responded, “I stood so tall and he did stare / then he sat me on his chair.” Hah! I was invested in keeping the secret I was holding, believing myself clever enough to outmaneuver my therapist. Across from me, Dr. Frunzhoffa’s eyebrows were raised in ecstasy. He must have thought he’d made a brilliant discovery, piercing all my secrets as I circled around them, already learning how to compartmentalize my emotions. No doubt Frunzhoffa was reeling over his certainty that he’d discovered some new form of treatment that would rival psychoanalysis: Music unblocks the unconscious! “Zat’s it, Carly!” he exclaimed. “Now let’s stay with ze same melody! Did he touch you in ze chair?” and as Dr. Frunzhoffa made a half turn around the room, I answered him almost immediately: “Yes, he touched me right down there.”
    “Are you quite sure he touched you dere?”
    “Quite sure, quite sure, in the chair!”
    What Dr. Frunzhoffa would never know was that I would protect my secret attachment at all costs. Love: forever more light and lovely than lurid and sad, even in the face of a late-night shower stall and a boy named Billy.
    When Mommy first brought me to see Dr. Frunzhoffa, the nights with Billy inside the pool house and the swimming pool had been going on for several summers in a row. The trouble I was in hung in the air like the single note of a violin, a note that got imperceptibly higher every second. Still, a week after my appointment with Dr. Frunzhoffa, it seemed Billy and I were safe and in the clear. I was protecting our relationship and in fact would continue taking whatever Billy wanted to give me.
    I was around seven when my “interludes” with Billy started. Like a lot of kids, I’d first discovered sex alone, and by accident. I was five, lying on my narrow five-year-old-kid’s bed. My hand slipped underneath my torso and landed three inches or so below my belly button, and I began moving my body back and forth, very gently, against my own hand.
    Nor were naked bodies unfamiliar to me. Spending Augusts on the Vineyard from the age of five on, I’d been exposed all my life to Windy Gates, a nude beach in Chilmark with high dunes, where the more “artistic” grown-ups hung out alongside children, pets, picnic baskets, and books. The scene there was both innocent and feral. Preadolescent girls and boys ran and leapt like bronzed wildlife down the powdery dunes, all bones and sinew, hair stiff from the