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between the beds, Lynette talked with Art about Vicki. They tried to save money on long distance by making lists of what they needed to say and most of Art’s list was about Vicki. Lynette listened, then calmed him down in a low voice. Before Vicki, Art had had a client list consisting of Lynette; the Balkan Tumblers; a ventriloquist act, Dan and Herkimer; and Joey Zee, a comedian who told jokes so filthy he could be booked only into bachelor parties or late-night shows.
    “There’s no going back to those days,” she told him.
    On her next call, this one to California, to Fern Lawler, her friend from their Rockette days, she made the same point. “Vicki is this family’s meal ticket. Art is going to have to keep her happy, no matter how many ulcers it gives him.”
    “Can we go out to the pool?” Nora pantomimed to her mother, pointing to the door, then to herself and Harold in their bathing suits even though it was already purple outside, the sky saturated with dusk.
Laugh-In
was on the TV on the dresser, but with the sound off. Nora watched while she waited for her mother to answer. Jo Anne Worley was screaming. Even with the sound off, Nora knew she was saying, “Is that another
chicken
joke?!”
    Lynette nodded as she tilted a green bottle of Canada Dry over a glass of ice cubes and continued talking to Fern Lawler.
     
    The pool—billed as
OLYMPIC SIZE
—seemed too big and glamorous for the Ho-Hum Motor Lodge with its sign featuring a yawning man in a nightgown and tasseled cap. There were a few other kids in the illuminated water—tired holdovers from an afternoon shift, who were getting in their last splashes. Their squeals and shouts echoed through the motel’s courtyard. Nora put down the towels she had brought from the bathroom and strapped Harold into his orange life jacket. He always wanted to swim, then got nervous once actually immersed in water, his head tilted back as he treaded furiously. This didn’t seem like any fun at all, but he always wanted to go in again.
    “Stay where you can touch bottom,” she told him, then kept an eye on him while she lined up for the diving board. When her turn came, she cannonballed into the water, resurfaced, lined up again. She loved cannonballing.
    There was another girl making the same circuit. Pretty in a sunburned, chlorine-blond way, smaller than Nora, about her age probably, but it was hard to tell. She had breasts, or at least had a bathing suit with cups inside that made it seem as though she had breasts. Nora was twelve and fried-egg flat, although this didn’t bother her. Still, girls with breasts seemed in another league and so she was made shy by this one. She turned out not to be at all conceited, though. Her name was Cheryl and she opened up the conversation.
    “You do a really good cannonball.”
    “I’m training for the Olympics in diving, that’s why I don’t have to be in school. I’m only fooling around tonight. That’s why we’re staying at this place. The Olympics people only let me stay at places with Olympic-size pools. It’s kind of a regulation.”
    “Oh,” Cheryl said, and left it at that. She was either an extremely trusting sort of person, or didn’t care if Nora was lying. The wind went out of Nora’s sails, which had been billowing with lies the whole trip. She abandoned the stories she was about to tell about her childhood spent traveling alone across Europe by train, the thyroid operation during which she almost died.
    “My father’s an astronaut,” she said, but there was no steam in it.
    “Do you have a radio with you?” Cheryl said.
    Nora shook her head.
    “It’s okay. I do,” Cheryl said, and hoisted herself out of the pool to get it.
    Nora paddled over to Harold, who was standing in water deep enough to push his life jacket up around his ears. Under water, Nora could see his swim trunks ballooning around his hips.
    “We’re going to have a dance party,” she told him. “I’ll let you