Everglades, a mountain resort where he often spent summers as a child with his mother. Those summers days he would get up early and run down to cut a purple snowball flower for his mother to wear, wet and glistening in her hair, at the breakfast table. They were lazy, wicked times, and since he was[Pg 130] the only young boy at the resort, he spent them among young women, playing volleyball with them, doing calisthenics, and staring fascinatedly at the elasticized garments they kept tugging at as the material crept below their shorts line. Afternoons he would lie in the bottom of a boat while his great-breasted mother, wearing a polka-dotted bathing suit that stared at him like a thousand nipples, rowed across the narrow resort river to the hut of a forest ranger who lived in the woods opposite the resort all year long. Stern hunted mussels in the shallow river water alongside the hut, and when his mother emerged from the hut she would say to him in the boat, "A hundred girls at the hotel and I'm the only one can make him." To which Stern answered, "I don't want to hear anything like that." Later, in the afternoon, Stern would sit at the resort bar with his mother, taking sips of her drink while his mother told the bartender, "That doesn't frighten me. I'll give him a little drink at his age. It's the ones that don't get a little drink from their mothers you have to worry about."

[Pg 130]

The men around his mother at the bar told dirty jokes to her, and one afternoon one of them, holding his palms wide apart and parallel, said, "Baby, my buddy here has one this long, so help me." His mother folded up with laughter on her barstool, and Stern, suddenly infuriated, hit the man in the stomach to protect her. His mother pulled him back and said, "You can't say things to his mother. He'll kill for her." Later, getting ready for dinner, Stern's mother would take him into the shower with her and he would stare at the pathetic, gaping blackness between her legs, filled with a terrible anguish and loss. Then he would rush down to cut another flower for her and, in the coolness of the evening, begin to feel very lush and elegant, as though no other boy in the world was having as wicked and luxurious a time as he, the only boy[Pg 131] in a grown-up resort. His mother would tell him, "You're growing up too fast. You know more than kids ten years older than you." And later in the year, at school, Stern would tell his friends, "Boy, do I know things. Did I see things this summer. My mother isn't like other mothers. She just doesn't go around acting like a mother." And yet, with all the panty glimpses on the volleyball court and the barroom sips of drinks, the dirty 

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