The memory is a good one. The sea is deep and warm, and it’s muddy at the bottom but the water is clean. The beach is ours: almost no one comes there apart from us and a few armadillos, so my sister and I swim for hours. She’s 12, I’m 14. We strike out from the Florida shore until we can barely hear our mum calling us to come back in to safety. In the shallows, we turn somersaults. I amuse my sister between tumbles by reciting bits of Dorothy Parker’s verse at her over the waves. “If skirts get any shorter, said the flapper with a sob/There’ll be two more cheeks to powder, and one more place to bob,” I shout between splashes. “One more cash to Bob?” she answers, confused. She can’t hear me. It doesn’t matter. We are laughing. We are happy.
That wasn’t the Parker poem I liked the most though. The one I liked best went like this:
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