Read Rowing in Eden for Free Online Page A

Dickinson’s lines:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Rowing in Eden—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Ah, the Sea!
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Might I but moor—Tonight
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  In Thee!
    Franny’s mother had never read that poem, but she objected to Franny’s naming the boat Eden. Someone might think Franny meant to be suggestive, she said. Franny had painted over the letters, then, and painted in the number affixed to the poem: #58. Because she wanted to have that banner out there in the world. Because she had feelings like the poet in the poem even if she did not yet possess the person to whom she could attach such feelings.
    If that made sense.
    The Des Moines girl, Susan Thomas, seemed to think it made sense.
    More morning noises: the thuds and howls from the antiquated pipes and taps. The mild thunder that meant Ginny Weston now dragged the vacuum cleaner out from the hall closet and across the floorboards. Which was a gift. Ginny Weston had cleaned for the Wahls since Franny was a baby, and the house always felt more peaceful to Franny with Ginny about, waxing floors, ironing, preventing any major outbreaks of domestic discord.
    To rest her chin on her windowsill and stare outside made Franny feel as if she were a dog. A friendly dog. When she had her own house, someday, she would have not just one dog, but three or four. At the dock’s end, the rowboat—white and green—appeared both mysterious and welcoming, like the boats in the van Gogh book at the home of her piano teacher. Boats with a thin stripe of red or some astonishing blue. Red boats. Blue boats. Old boats. New boats. (Was that a line from one of the old children’s books? The Friendly Book ?) Van Gogh’s paintings of boats were somehow more like boats than any other paintings of boats that Franny knew. That is, the painting itself was somehow so clearly an object to be reckoned with, you felt as if you were in the presence of something magical.
    Franny flopped back on the bunk. Pressed her toes hard against the wires supporting the mattress overhead, a fifties’ thing whose cloth cover bore a design of bitter-yellow satellites and mottled-white planets on a sky of gray. When she pushed against the wires, their resistance traveled down her calves and thighs and made her feel pleasantly exhausted.
    Tiny blond hairs had sprouted on her lower legs since the last time she shaved. Nasty-looking, but they felt nice, ticklish when brushed lightly with the tips of her fingers. “A girl should shave her legs every day during the summer,” Martie had warned Franny, and Rosamund agreed but added that, on her spring break, friends had taken her to visit a farm outside New York City where there were girls who did not shave or wear makeup or even bras.
    Fascinating. Repulsive. The idea that a girl could choose not to shave. A girl could choose to become practically invisible. Franny knew this was possible because there had been a girl in her seventh-grade gym class whom Franny recognized as potentially beautiful, yet no one at the junior high ever said a word about that girl. Sometimes Franny had wanted to tell her, “Look, you don’t seem to understand, you could be beautiful!” But, then, she could be of other minds—one of them jealous of the possibility of the girl’s entering the fray, another protective of the safe and happy world in which she lived, ignorant of her moon-maid charms.
    And suppose the girl had not been ignorant. Suppose she had chosen to stay just as she was.
    It must have been about eleven when Franny heard Peg calling for her to come to the basement. Franny did not find Peg in the laundry area, and so she stepped behind the fold-out screen that concealed the spot where Peg kept her “things”: A set of metal