Colony by Anne Rivers Siddons

porch. With huge holes in the screen. So that every black fly and mosquito in Maine would feast off your ass from now until September.”
    Red rage flooded me. “I don’t care if she hears us every night,” I said hotly. “She must know we do it. She must have done it at least once. Here you are, after all. I will not stop…doing that…just because she moved us in over her head. Peter, I know it was on purpose.”
    “Of course it was,” he said. Laughter and anger warred in his long face.
    “Well, are you going to let her stop us?”
    “No,” he said. “I’ll figure something out. We could wait and do it when there’s a thunderstorm. Or we could sneak up here and do it at midmorning, when she’s out calling. Or we could do it over on one of the little islands; the moss there is as soft as a mattress. Or
    we could take the boat out and drop anchor around the point and do it.”
    “Peter! I think you’re afraid to let your mother know you make love to me!”
    “Not afraid of her. Just afraid she’ll spoil it for us, if she catches us at it. I don’t want that to happen.”
    I looked at him more closely. The laughter had left his eyes.
    He was serious.
    “Well, she’s not going to spoil it for me, and she’s not going to catch me at it, as you say, and I’m going to do it with you whenever I please, and I please this very night, after we get back from dinner,” I said indignantly. “The very idea!”
    “Maude…”
    “Hush. Don’t say another word. You are as good as fucked right now, Peter Chambliss. You are at this moment a walking fucked man,” I said.
    “Well, since you put it that way,” Peter said, and put his hands around me from behind and cupped my breasts. I felt the little point of flame lick at my groin.
    “How long does dinner last?” I whispered, reaching around to stroke the hardness of him against my back.
    “Too long,” Peter said. “Way, way too long.”
    He was right. The rest of the evening, though it was essentially over by nine thirty, was too long. When we went back downstairs, Augusta Stallings was there working on a large martini and Peter’s father had retreated to the long sofa before the fireplace and Peter’s mother introduced me and made her destined-to-be-legendary remark about the French and corruption, and from then on the evening and night blurred into one long smear of hot-cheeked, blinded misery. It has remained so in my memory ever since. I can recall certain highlights—the memory of Mrs. Stallings sitting down in a low
    wicker armchair in the living room and missing and landing on her ample, corseted rump on the sisal rug, spilling not a drop of her third drink, is the most vivid, but there were others—but mainly, my first full evening in Retreat is a cipher, a void.
    When I think back now, a low hum of seemly New England voices in the rustic dining hall rushes at me out of memory, and the warm fragrance of clam chowder and hot rolls, and the nodding of many narrow fairish heads, and the pressure of many cool fingers on mine, and the flash of many fine teeth, and the following wash of low conversation as we made our way on to our table. I get a sense of many young men and women who looked much like Peter reaching out to enfold him, not so much with their arms as their smiles, and thinking that I would never, never feel that welcome; I get a flash of several individual faces above cardigans and pearls or blue blazers. One—dark, clever, impish, framed in bobbed hair nearly the color of mine—stands out clearly: Amy Potter, the first time I ever saw her. I hear soft, flat voices asking me if I sailed or played tennis or bridge and assuring me I’d learn in no time. But there is no order and progression to the images. I was too tired and too cowed and, suddenly, too homesick for that other, warmer sea and the indulgent old city beside it.
    When we got home, it was my mother-in-law who finally shooed us upstairs. Peter had lapsed into silence, sitting