Down at the Dinghy

Part 3
"Well, at the age of two-and-a-half," Boo Boo said biographically, "he sought refuge
under a sink in the basement of our apartment house. Down in the laundry. Naomi
somebody--a close friend of his--told him she had a worm in her thermos bottle. At
least, that's all we could get out of him." Boo Boo sighed, and came away from the
window with a long ash on her cigarette. She started for the screen door. "I'll have
another go at it," she said, by way of goodby to both women.
They laughed.
"Mildred," Sandra, still laughing, addressed Mrs. Snell, "you're gonna miss your bus if
ya don't get a move on."
Boo Boo closed the screen door behind her.
She stood on the slight downgrade of her front lawn, with the low, glaring, late
afternoon sun at her back. About two hundred yards ahead of her, her son Lionel was
sitting in the stem seat of his father's dinghy. Tied, and stripped of its main and jib
sails, the dinghy floated at a perfect right angle away from the far end of the pier. Fifty
feet or so beyond it, a lost or abandoned water ski floated bottom up, but there were no
pleasure boats to be seen on the lake; just a stern-end view of the county launch on its
way over to Leech's Landing. Boo Boo found it queerly difficult to keep Lionel in steady
focus. The sun, though not especially hot, was nonetheless so brilliant that it made any
fairly distant image--a boy, a boat--seem almost as wavering and refractional as a stick
in water. After a couple of minutes, Boo Boo let the image go. She peeled down her
cigarette Army style, and then started toward the pier.
It was October, and the pier boards no longer could hit her in the face with reflected
heat. She walked along whistling "Kentucky Babe" through her teeth. When she reached
the end of the pier, she squatted, her knees audible, at the right edge, and looked down
at Lionel. He was less than an oar's length away from her. He didn't look up.
"Ahoy," Boo Boo said. "Friend. Pirate. Dirty dog. I'm back."

Still not looking up, Lionel abruptly seemed called upon to demonstrate his sailing
ability. He swung the dead tiller all the way to the right, then immediately yanked it
back in to his side. He kept his eyes exclusively on the deck of the boat.
"It is I," Boo Boo said. "Vice-Admiral Tannenbaum. Nee Glass. Come to inspect the
stermaphors."
There was a response.
"You aren't an admiral. You're a lady," Lionel said. His sentences usually had at least
one break of faulty breath control, so that, often, his emphasized words, instead of
rising, sank. Boo Boo not only listened to his voice, she seemed to watch it.
"Who told you that? Who told you I wasn't an admiral?"
Lionel answered, but inaudibly.
"Who?" said Boo Boo.
"Daddy."
Still in a squatting position, Boo Boo put her left hand through the V of her legs,
touching the pier boards in order to keep her balance. "Your daddy's a nice fella," she
said, "but he's probably the biggest landlubber I know. It's perfectly true that when I'm
in port I'm a lady--that's true. But my true calling is first, last, and always the
bounding--"
"You aren't an admiral," Lionel said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You aren't an admiral. You're a lady all the time."
There was a short silence. Lionel filled it by changing the course of his craft again--his
hold on the tiller was a two-armed one. He was wearing khaki-colored shorts and a
clean, white T-shirt with a dye picture, across the chest, of Jerome the Ostrich playing
the violin. He was quite tanned, and his hair, which was almost exactly like his
mother's in color and quality, was a little sun-bleached on top.
"Many people think I'm not an admiral," Boo Boo said, watching him. "Just because I
don't shoot my mouth off about it." Keeping her balance, she took a cigarette and
matches out of the side pocket of her jeans. "I'm almost never tempted to discuss my
rank with people. Especially with little boys who don't even look at me when I talk to
them. I'd be drummed out of the bloomin' service." Without lighting her cigarette, she