occupy my complex mind most thoroughly. My favorites were Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. I'd read the first most recently, so I started into Sense and Sensibility, only to remember after I began chapter three that the hero of the story happened to be named Edward. Angrily, I turned to Mansfield Park,¹⁷⁷ but the hero of that piece was named Edmundo, and that was just too close. Weren't there any other names available in the late eighteenth century for Jane Assten to write about? I snapped the book shut, annoyed with it all, and rolled over onto my bare back. I pulled my legs up as high as they would go and closed my eyes. I would think of nothing but the warmth on my loins, I told myself severely. The breeze was still light, but it blew tendrils of my hair around my face, and that tickled a bit. I pulled all my hair over my head, letting it fan out on the quilt above me, and focused again on the heat that touched my eyelids, my cheekbones, my nose, my lips, my forearms, my neck, soaked through my fair skin...
The next thing I was conscious of was the sound of Charlie's cruiser turning onto the bricks of the driveway. I sat up in surprise, realizing that the light was gone, behind the trees, and I had fallen asleep naked in my father's backyard. I looked around, muddled, with the sudden feeling that I wasn't alone...
"Ch—dad?" I asked. But I could hear his door slamming in front of the house.
I jumped up, foolishly edgy, gathering the now-damp quilt and clothes, and my book. I ran inside to get some oil heating on the stove, realizing that dinner would be late. It would be another night of oil soup in the Duck household. I sighed. Charlie was hanging up his gun belt and stepping out of his boots when I came in.



177. A novel about a field of men that gets turned into a park for women and children. It is seen as a key text in the Masculist movement.

149

Chapter 7

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