Lester adjusted the bobber so that the leader hung six inches lower. Having finished threading a fresh worm on the hook, he cast the line out over the water. The bobber skidded several times and came to rest near a patch of water lilies.
A light breeze skimmed across the water nudging the lifeless bobber toward a rotted stump. If the hook snagged a submerged root, Lester would lose his gear, not to mention losing face with the obnoxious girl. “You see that cove off to the left?” He pointed to a curved section of shoreline fifty feet away. A ridge of emerald algae rimmed the water, which was dappled with a profusion of ivory water lilies. “I hooked a huge pickerel about twenty minutes ago, but he leaped clear of the water and threw the hook.”
The pickerel was the biggest fish Lester had ever hooked—a foot longer than the blue fish he snagged in Buzzards Bay on the Cape Cod Canal. A veritable monster, Lester played him expertly with just the right amount of drag, understanding full well that to try and haul the feisty fish in without weakening him first would have been foolhardy. But, in the end, it didn’t matter. He lost the fish in the shallows no more than thirty feet from shore.
The girl scratched an earlobe. “So the fish got away?” Lester nodded. “No one else saw it?”
“Besides a collection of noisy bullfrogs and a painted turtle, no.” For the first time since the pesky girl arrived, Lester gave her the once over, eyeballing her up and down. Her hair was jet black and close cropped. The olive skin was darkened, deep baked in a permanent, year-round tan. Everything about her was clean, concise and economical. He couldn’t decide if she was modestly pretty or infuriatingly plain.
The girl smiled as though at some private joke, but it was not a particularly pleasant expression. “Lo doobim v’lo ya’ar.” Lester’s mouth fell open. “There was no bear and there was no forest,” the girl translated. “It’s a Hebrew expression.”
Lester wished the girl would go away. Far away. To another galaxy. Instead she prattled on in her coarse, mannish voice. “A fellow goes into the forest and is attacked by a ferocious bear. He has no weapons—no gun, knife, not even a flimsy stick to defend himself. In desperation, he punches, kicks, bites and gouges until the wild beast finally runs away. Then the fellow hurries back to town and tells everyone who will listen about his magnificent adventure.”
“My name is Tovah Moshel. I am staying in Cabin 34B, if you care to visit.” Her pretty hips rocking from side to side, the girl sauntered off down the gravel path toward the guests’ living quarters.
Later that evening the McSweeneys and Moshels sat at a rustic table in the main dining room of the Lake Winnipesauke resort. The girl had a younger brother, Ari, about the same age as Lester's sister, and the two children immediately struck up a friendship. Meals were served family style - bowls of mashed potatoes flavored with cheddar cheese, string beans and baked chicken spread out across the center of the table. Mr. Moshel, a thin, fair-skinned man with the wistful, far off look of a poet or anarchist, had trouble cutting his chicken.
“Did you remember to take your medicine, Moishe?” Mrs. Moshel asked. She was a pretty woman, dark like her daughter but with a warm, engaging smile.
“Yes, I took the pills.” The man’s hands were trembling badly as he raised a slice of chicken to his mouth. “He chewed at an odd angle, his chin tilted to one side, as though all his inner resources were focused on masticating the meat without choking to death. When he finally swallowed, Mr. Moshel turned to Lester. “Very tasty, don’t you think?” Whatever was wrong with him physically hadn’t effected either his sense of humor or appetite.
All the while, Tovah ignored everyone; she cleaned her plate and took a second helping of beans and mashed potatoes. The girl said something to her mother in rapid-fire Hebrew and Mrs. Moshel replied, “It is impolite to speak in a foreign language when other people are present.” In response, her daughter spoke again in her native tongue. Her father smiled and shook his head.
Later back in their cabin Mrs. McSweeney said, “That poor man, did you see how his hands tremble?”
Her husband wagged his head from side to side but had nothing to say. Lester was sitting at the kitchen table cleaning his spinning reel. His plan was to head out early in a small dinghy that was pulled up on the sand and look for the thirty-six inch pickerel. There was no bear and there was no forest. The Israeli girls dismissive sarcasm stuck like a jagged bone in his craw. Just because no one was present to see the fish didn’t mean it didn’t exist. It was not like he lied, pretended that he actually caught it.
Mrs. McSweeney wandered to the screen door and stared out into the darkness. A powdery mother crashed into the wire mesh and flitted away. “I ran into Mrs. Moshel in the ladies’ room. She confided that her husband has this rare, incurable disease. The poor man! He can’t work or do much of anything.”
“Probably came here for treatment,” the husband added and took a sip of lemonade.
Mrs. McSweeney started straightening up the room. “Yes, I would imagine.” She came up behind Lester and watched as he smeared a generous glob of grease onto the main gear sprocket and began closing up the casing on his fishing reel. “The daughter’s pretty, don’t you think?”
“Not my type.” He eased the handle forward until the metal line guide clicked into place then continued to work the reel for another dozen or so revolutions. The action was buttery smooth.
“So what’s wrong with the girl?” his father pressed.
“Not my type,” Lester repeated dully and left the room.
Lester set the alarm for six, was fully dressed and out of the cabin in less than half an hour. The row boat would surely be where he spotted it the previous day near the cove. If he could catch the pickerel - not just any respectable fish but that three-foot brute and mother-of-all-game-fish, Lester McSweeney would march right over to Cabin 34B and lay the angler’s trophy on the front stoop.
Yes, Tovah Moshel, there was a bear!
Not that he had anything to prove, but the Israeli girl had figuratively tweaked his nose and the only reasonable response was probably lurking under a bed of water lilies fifty feet out in a scenic New Hampshire lake.
In May Lester and his father fished South Cape Beach in Mashpee. Lester bought a special lure for the occasion, a Rebel, Wind-Cheater Minnow. You didn’t just cast the six-inch Wind-Cheater and retrieve it like a conventional lure. The savvy fishermen used a special ‘rip and stop’ action to mimic the behavior of a wounded bait fish struggling to regain its swimming form. Surfcasting from the sandy beach, the youth hooked a four-pound striper that fought him like a demon. The picture his father took of Lester with the bass was framed and perched on his bedroom bureau.
Lester flipped his Red Sox baseball cap around so the visor was facing backwards. When he reached the water’s edge the rowboat was gone. Who besides a hard-core fishing enthusiast would be on the water this early in the morning? He scanned the shoreline.
“Crap!” Thirty feet out in the lake the Israeli girl was rowing at a leisurely pace. “What a royal pain in the ass!” Lester abruptly decided to cut his loses and slink back to the cabin.
Too late! Tovah Moshel was waving energetically. Pulling hard with both oars, the girl resumed rowing into the sandy beach. “Were you planning to go out in the boat?”
“Well, I ...”
“It wasn’t a trick question. Either you’d like to use the boat or not.”
There it was again—that peremptory, autocratic tone. Lester didn’t know what he wanted anymore. This boorish girl confounded his brain, pulverized his thinking processes into mental mush. “Yes. I would like to use the boat, if you don’t mind.”
“Well, then, I’ll join you. Help you fish.”
Lester stared at her morosely. Fishing is a solitary pursuit. It’s not like playing baseball or ballroom dancing. “Okay. Let me get my gear situated.” The plan was to row slowly back and forth as close to th
e lilies as feasible to lure the pickerel out. Conditions were ideal. The water was calm with early morning temperatures in the low seventies. It wouldn’t stay this cool for long, though. Tovah sat at the stern of the rowboat next to the rod. “It’s a good day to get a tan, don’t you think?”
“Yes I guess so.”
The girl sprawled out her pretty legs askew and slender chin tilted up to catch the sun. Fifteen minutes passed. “Shouldn’t you have caught something by now?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” They had already made a full pass around the outer perimeter of the cove and Lester was directing the boat toward the deeper water nearer the center.
“What’s that?” The girl said, indicating a well-thumbed paperback wedged beneath a jumble of nylon leaders and lead weights in his tackle box. She reached into the box and wriggled the book free.
The artwork on the cover depicted a band of cowboys riding through rugged hill country somewhere in the Midwest. A huge lake or river loomed in the far distance framed by a handful of scraggily pine trees. “Louis L’Amour,” Lester said. “He’s just about the greatest Western writer in the whole world.”
“Cowboys and Indians.” She tossed the book dismissively back into the box. “Childish nonsense!”
A person could blaspheme God almighty—spit in the face of the Virgin Mary—but, where Lester McSweeney was concerned, you couldn’t say a bad word about Louis L’Amour. He’d read the collected short stories and frontier tales, from cover to cover plus all four Hopalong Cassidy novels. Lester was halfway through the saga of the Sackett clan, averaging a book a month. Just about everything the boy knew about life—betrayal, greed, sacrifice, courage and cowardice—he’d gleaned from his cowboy books.
Lester was trying his damnedest to think of something insulting to say—cut the snippy foreigner down to size— but all he could manage was, “Louis L’Amour’s the smartest guy I know. He’s my hero.” Almost before he opened his mouth, Lester regretted his words. The remark sounded stupid. Utterly childish and inane.
“Ever kissed a girl?”
His mind went blank. “What?”
The Israeli sat up now and stared at him. “Have you ever smooched, sucked face, French kissed, got it on?”
“Well, yes.”
“How many times.” she pressed.
A dragon fly flitted across the bow of the small boat and settles on the golden centerpiece of a lily. It’s transparent wings were tattooed with a delicate fabric of veins. Lester was feeling dizzy, lightheaded from all the rowing and the rising humidity. “I don’t know. A half dozen.”
Tovah let a hand slip over the side and scooped up a handful of water. Her expression was neutral, utterly impassive. “We went to a restaurant Sunday night.” She directed her remarks at the dragon fly. “My mother ordered boiled lobster. When you answered a moment ago, your face turned the same color as the lobster’s shell.” Only now did she look him full him the face. “Why did you lie? Why couldn’t you just say, ‘No, I never kissed a girl.’”
The boy could feel his cheeks burning even hotter than a moment earlier. This was too much! Lester threw the oars aside and began reeling in the line as fast as he could. He had to get rid of this deranged Semite.
There was no middle ground. You couldn’t fish. You couldn’t just laze about in a rowboat. You couldn’t -
“Ask me.”
He stowed his gear in the bottom of the boat and was pulling for shore with choppy, visceral strokes. “Ask you what?”
“If I’ve ever kissed a boy.”
No, he wasn’t going to play this foolish game. They were less than fifty feet from shore. Lester would haul the boat up a good ten feet from the water line, tie the mooring rope to a bush - a double half hitch to show the arrogant creature that he knew something about knot tying, if nothing else, and storm off. No goodbyes, no small talk, no nothing.
“As a matter of fact,” she answered her own question, “I never kissed a boy. Not yet, anyway. And needless-to-say, I’m still a virgin.” She made a disagreeable face. “Now was that so hard?”
Lester gave one last pull on the oars and let the boat glide the last few feet into the sandy shallows. “Congratulations on both counts.”
Tovah watched him secured the nylon rope. She tore a sprig of purple lupine from the side of the trail and twirled the wildflower under her nose. “My father can’t control his hands. They shake quite badly.” She spoke in a casual, off-hand manner. “Sometimes I have to cut his food, help him with his socks or button a sweater. But I don’t do these things in public.”
Lester had already turned away and was headed in the direction of the visitor cabins. He pulled up abruptly. “He has some rare, incurable disease. Your mother mentioned it.”
“A medical condition?” The Israeli girl sighed and threw the flower away. “Sugar-coated lies are so much easier to swallow than bitter truths.”
Lester turned and came back to where the girl was now sitting in the beached rowboat. “Yes, I did hook a 36-inch pickerel over there in the cove, but the stupid fish got away. No, I never had sex or kissed a girl either.” He climbed in and sat opposite. “Now will you tell me why your father’s hands shake so badly?”
Fifteen minutes later, after Tovah Moshel had answered Lester McSweeney’s impertinent question, the boy leaned forward and kissed her on the lips—a drawn out, sweet annihilating gesture. “We’re both still virgins, but at least that’s out of the way.”
At three o’clock in the afternoon the Wasserman family arrived. They drove up to the resort office in a brand new Lincoln Continental. Lester, who had accompanied his sister to the shuffleboard court, watched the family pile out of the fancy car. The mother was a pear shaped woman with calves as thick as bowling pins. The father was also huge, well over six feet with a pendulous gut. A Cuban cigar wedged in the corner of his fleshy mouth, he was decked out in Bermuda shorts and a garish Hawaiian shirt. The son, who looked to be a year or two older than Lester, was quite handsome with a mop of black hair and bushy eyebrows that offset his pallid complexion.
“Hey, I like your beanies!” Sylvia shouted.
Both father and son were wearing Jewish skullcaps. The father scowled at her before lumbering into the motel office to announce their arrival.
“Cripes, Sylvia!”
Later that evening, the Wassermans sat opposite the McSweeneys and Moshels at the supper table. “Hey, boychik,” Mr. Wasserman was staring straight at Lester. “Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?”
Lester’s lips were moving but no audible sound escaped his lips.
“What about you, Morris?” He turned to his son. “Rain gonna damage the rhubarb crop this year?”
“Not if it’s in cans.” Like the straight man in a comedy routine, the boy delivered his punch line without missing a beat.
“Enough with the corny jokes, Herbert.” Mrs. Wasserman chided.
The food, pasta with meatballs and a tossed salad, arrived and the guests began passing the dishes around the table. Herb Wasserman turned to Lester’s father. “What’s your line of work?”
“Hardware,” he replied. “And yourself?”
Mr. Wasserman took a piece of Italian bread and slathered it with butter. “Footwear.”
“Which chain?”
Mrs. Wasserman laughed in a high pitched, squeaky voice. “My husband doesn’t sell shoes.”
“Actually,” Mr. Wasserman added by way of explanation, “I buy in bulk from overseas distributors then resell in the domestic, wholesale market. Think of me as a middleman, sort of like a sports lawyer who negotiates deals.” Lester glanced about the table. Tovah clearly had no interest in anything the portly man was saying, but the adults were listening attentively.
“Our town boasted several shoe manufacturers,” Lester’s father noted, “but they went bust in the late fifties, early sixties. Stetson Shoe Company just up the road a piece in Randolph—they closed down. Coul
dn’t compete with the overseas markets.”
“Chinese,” Mr. Wasserman noted. “can manufacture a sneaker for pennies on the dollar. Labor and operational costs are minimal. I buy a container load—five, ten thousand at a time then locate my own markets here in the good old US of A.”
“Admittedly it’s a bit speculative, Machiavellian, but so what? As the saying goes, carpe diem.” He cracked an insolent grin. “Make the best of present opportunities!” His wife tittered in her high pitched squeaky laugh and everyone turned their attention back to the food.
Shortly before dessert was served, Mr. Wasserman asked, “Is that an Israeli accent?” When Mr. Moshel nodded in the affirmative, the man added, “ We’re making alyiah next year.”
“Immigrating to the land of milk and honey,” his wife added for the benefit of the non-Jews at the table.
“That’s very nice,” Mr. Moshel smiled pleasantly. He folded his hands in his lap, lacing the slender fingers together. The tremors extended from the wrists up the forearm before petering away at the elbows.
“Do you speak the language?” Mr. McSweeney addressed his remarks to Mr. Wasserman.
“My wife and I studied at the Hebrew Teacher’s College in Brookline.” He gestured with his eyes in the direction of his son. “Morris also took a crash course last summer, but he could use some help with grammar.”
Lester stared at Morris Wasserman who, from the moment he arrived, had been ogling the Israeli girl. The Wasserman boy had changed skullcaps opting for a more stylish one fashioned from a plaid fabric and held in place by a single bobby pin. He wore a lemon colored sports shirt with an Izod logo, tan boat shoes and an expensive looking gold wristwatch.
“Say,” the wife interjected, “maybe your lovely daughter could help Morris with his dikdook.”
Dikdook Lester cringed inwardly. The word sounded vulgar, pornographic.