Melinda Price Wiltshire

When I was seventeen and vacationing with my family in Montauk, I went with a man down into the cabin of his sailboat. I’d gotten up early while my family was still sleeping and put on the ragged skirt I’d made out of old jeans, and then I walked down the road to the marina …

The clothesline was to blame. Back in Ishewa, his grandmother had a clothesline that stretched the full length of the orchard, and he remembered picking cherries and getting wind-boxed by a pair of shorts. Nothing erotic about that, but things were different here on the coast. Here all his girlfriends had black hair and clotheslines …