Footsteps rasped in the sand behind us, and we looked up to see Mrs. Kasper.

“Heidi-ho,” she said in her hoarse voice. She wore white shorts over a white one-piece bathing suit, and the tips of her feathery blonde hair were dark from the water.

She knelt and placed her martini thermos on the log behind us, next to my mother’s, and I stood up.

“He doesn’t have to leave,” Mrs. Kasper said.

“Yes, he does,” my mother said.

“They’re down there eating hot dogs and baked beans,” Mrs. Kasper told me.

I headed down the beach toward the Kasper place. On my left was the vast lake, Huron, quieting down for the evening. On my right, past low sand hummocks covered with Indian grass, was the woods, mostly pine and birch.

Water, beach, woods—that was about it. At the time, there were very few cottages up there. We were on the wrong side of the state to be fashionable. People gravitated to Lake Michigan, where the scenery was more dramatic and they could watch the sun set rather than rise. But, as a kid, my father had summered with his sister Diana in a rented cottage about ten miles south of us, and they had vowed to have their own places here when they grew up.

We built our cottage back on the verge of the woods, in a thin copse of birches. Aunt Diana was supposed to construct hers in the lot right next to ours the following year, and the workers had even gotten started digging the foundation, but then her husband, Ted, who was a doctor from a Detroit society family, sat down in his office between patients and shot himself through the heart with a .45 he’d saved from the war.

Aunt Diana placed her arm around me, the first night of the wake, as we stared down at Uncle Ted’s corpse in his coffin. “It’s a tale of woe, isn’t it?” she said in a distant, ironic way, as if her dead husband weren’t lying right there in front of us. That’s the way that generation was, suffused with irony. They drank it in with their Scotch, exhaled it in smoke.

Since then I’d had fantasies of rescuing the dead. I’d barge through the door of Uncle Ted’s office just as he raised the gun to his chest. “Stop,” I’d shout. “Think of your wife!” The fantasy went several ways. Sometimes he stopped. Sometimes he pointed the gun at me. Sometimes he went ahead and shot himself.

After a few minutes, I reached the beach in front of the Kaspers’ and turned up the concrete walk that shot on a plumb-straight line through the sand hummocks. The Kasper place was a classic lake cottage of the type that Aunt Diana, an interior designer, admired. Unlike our cottage, which was essentially a suburban ranch house picked up and plunked down in the woods, the Kaspers’ was two stories high, with a weathered wooden exterior, a peaked roof of red shingles, and a flagstone veranda covered with pine needles from the red pines that surrounded the cottage. It was a bit of a gingerbread house, settled back deep in the shadows.

I pulled the screen door open and stepped into the living room, where Sandy and Ramona sat watching television and eating ice cream with chocolate sauce from plastic bowls shaped like gondolas.

Ramona became aware of me all of a sudden, which was typical of her. She had a flock of curly blonde hair and an air of vacancy, as if she were far away most of the time, but when something seized her, she was transformed. She bounced off the couch and ran over and hung onto me as if it had been ages since she’d last seen me, instead of a few hours.

“Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!” she chanted.

“Leave him alone,” Sandy said. She was curled into one of the two big wing-chairs that flanked the couch.

“Hey,” I said.

Instead of replying, she flicked two fingers off her forehead in a mock salute.

I walked past her into the kitchen, which was open to the living room, behind a counter. A frying pan on the stove contained a few scrapings of cold baked beans and half of a charred hot dog. There was an empty carton of vanilla ice cream in the sink. I stood there in the kitchen for a while, watching what they had on television, a summer rerun of Bonanza. Neither of the girls paid any more attention to me.

At a commercial, I left to go to the bathroom, and when I came out Sandy was standing there by the door. Although there was plenty of room for me to walk around her, I couldn’t seem to do it.

“What is it with you?” she said, a favorite expression of hers.

I leaned down and kissed her, astounded at my own bravery. “Tomorrow let’s go see that guy,” I said.

She ducked around me into the bathroom and slammed the door. I walked down the hallway, straight out the front door, and back down to the beach.

It didn’t get dark in the evening up there in August. It just got blue, a blue from which the light bled slowly so that oncoming people on the beach materialized as if from some gloomy mythic afterlife. I didn’t see Mrs. Kasper until I was a few feet away from her. She stood staring out over the lake, all in white, with her white shorts and bathing suit and a white sweater that belonged to my mother draped over her shoulders.

She smiled at me, a thin woman with a hawkish profile, smelling of smoke and gin. “Leaving so soon?”

“There wasn’t anything to eat.”

“They’re little pigs, aren’t they?”

I wondered if Sandy would tell her about our kiss but decided probably not. One reason I preferred the Kaspers over other families we knew was that everyone seemed to operate on a need-to-know basis, like spies who worked for the same government but were all on their own secret missions.

Mrs. Kasper handed me my mother’s sweater, slipped off her shorts, took two quick strides into the water, and made a graceful, shallow dive. I watched her go, remembering that she had been a champion swimmer in college. She got out as far as the first sandbar, then turned right and swam south, until all I could see of her in the fading blue was a white line of foam.

When I got down to the beach the next morning, the water was flat calm and the sun was low, bright, and hot. Huron stretched off into the distance forever, still as a desert, full of shadowy mirages. Nothing moved—not a freighter, not a sailboat, not a bird or splashing fish. Hundreds of years ago, Ojibway had stood on this shore right where I was now, sharing the same view. I had recently told my father this, in one of my sporadic attempts to feel close to him, and he had pointed out that the actual shoreline changed so much that our beach had most likely been thirty feet underwater in the sixteenth century. This became yet another fact that I had to put out of my head in order to go through life as I preferred.

In a few minutes I saw two tiny dots approaching: Ramona and Sandy. They meandered along, taking their time. When they got closer, Ramona, wearing only her bathing suit, barreled into me, and I grabbed her and lifted her into my arms. She was slippery, wet, and solid—a miniature torpedo.

“Ha!” she exclaimed.

“Ha!” I said back.

I put her down, and we splashed along the beach to join Sandy, who was wearing prescription sunglasses and a two-piece purple bathing suit with white flounces around the neckline and thighs. “God bless her, she’s not a fashion plate,” my mother had said one time, which struck me as an unnecessarily harsh way for an adult to talk about a thirteen-year-old.

We headed north. The sun was going to be hot, but right then it was fine, shining over our right shoulders, warming our backs. Ramona and I walked ankle-deep in the water.

Far in the distance there was a speedboat cradled on a hoist next to a small dock. Ramona went running toward it like it was a destination.

“Maybe we can play some cards when we get back?” I said to Sandy. The day before, we had spent two hours playing double solitaire while arguing over whether or not Israeli agents had been morally justified in violating international law to snatch Eichmann from Argentina. I voted yes, Sandy no.

She didn’t say anything, but her silence indicated that we couldn’t rely on our former friendship, since there was that matter of my kissing her involved now. I snuck a glance at her—her small breasts, the set of her narrow face behind her sunglasses. Her hair was long at a time when most girls wore their hair in bobs, which marked her as an original, although I wished she would gather it back in a pony tail; I thought it would be more attractive.

“I had a dream about you last night,” I told her.

“You had a dream about me?” Her attitude suggested that I had no right whatsoever to put her in one of my dreams.

“Forget it,” I said. I actually hadn’t had a dream about her; I had just read about this conversational gambit in a magazine article entitled “Five Ways to Get Girls Interested.”

“No, tell me.”

“Sorry. It’s too personal.”

Her lip curled, but she didn’t say anything. She hurried ahead, grabbed Ramona by the hand, and walked on with her.

When they stopped to examine a piece of driftwood, I walked past them and kept on going up the beach. Pretty soon I came to a break in the sand hummocks where a small path led upward, and I took it. Although it was slower going, I liked it better than the beach. The wind had picked up, and I could see small whitecaps forming far out in the lake—a platoon, a company, a battalion of them, marshalling before heading for shore. A freighter sailed south on the horizon, riding low with its cargo of iron ore for the smelting plants down in Detroit, and disappeared as it sailed farther away from shore to clear the Thumb.

The path wound through stands of pine and birch and the thick, scrubby sand bushes, almost head-high in places, that sprouted out of the hummocks. At that time I liked to look for places to put my feet where no human being had ever put a foot before. Sometimes I would go out of my way to plant my foot directly underneath a bush or even against the side of a tree.

As I stretched my toes into a spiny stand of Indian grass, Sandy came up behind me, slightly out of breath. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“With you it’s not always easy to tell.”

“Where’s Ramona?”

“Don’t worry, she’s fine.” Sandy pointed down to the beach, where her sister was walking waist-deep in the water, reaching down to grab shells and pebbles, sometimes diving in and rising again, her long hair tangled and wet.

I realized that I did worry about her. Ramona had an odd trait: she lacked all sense of direction, which didn’t just mean that she didn’t know which way north was; she didn’t know where she was located in the world, even when it came to the most basic places. She’d been in our house back in Detroit a hundred times, but still I’d watch her head out the back door or down to the basement when she was looking for the bathroom. She was so fairy-like that this misdirection seemed bewitching, but on more than one occasion she’d gotten lost for so long that the police had to be called.

The only place where Ramona was sure of herself was the lake. She was a child of the beach and the shallows, the only person I ever knew who could reach underwater and swiftly scoop up a minnow with her bare hands.

Sandy and I walked in silence along the path. Pretty soon we came to a bench—a crude wooden structure that someone had hammered together and then nailed between two birch trees on a prominence looking out to the northeast. Trees and bushes had grown up around it so that it could barely be seen.

When we sat down, we parted the bushes so we could view Ted’s Motor Cabins, a ramshackle collection of small cottages, white with painted blue shutters, built in a clearing in the woods. Each cabin had a propane tank flush against the side and a small clothesline in front for hanging up towels and wet bathing suits. There were only two cars parked alongside the cabins midweek, and one of them belonged to the man Mrs. Kasper was leaving her family for.

“There he is,” I said, but Sandy had already seen him and was leaning forward intently.

The man lay on a wooden chaise longue halfway between the cabins and the waterline. He appeared to be asleep. A hardcover book was spread face down on his chest. I could see by its design that it was The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West—one of the Book of the Month Club selections that arrived regularly at our house. It struck me as a middlebrow book for a man selected by Mrs. Kasper for adultery, and I immediately disdained him as unworthy.

The man was pale, thin, small. His hairline receded, and he glistened with suntan oil. Next to his chair was a pair of webbed sandals, the kind some intellectuals wore with black socks.

Sandy sat back heavily against the bench, as if simply looking at the guy exhausted her. She took off her sunglasses with a precise gesture, then turned up her face to me.

I kissed her. Her skin felt intensely warm against my cheek, and her lips opened this time. I put my hand on her waist and felt how taut she was beneath her suit, her side running straight down, like a board.

When we stopped kissing, Sandy looked at the sunglasses in her hand, then back at me. “What happened in your dream?”

“We were walking in the woods, and it was very peaceful. A beautiful light was shining through the trees. It was almost like we were in another world.”

“Like we were dead?”

“No. Why would you say that?”

“Just wondering.”

“That’s a great way to ruin a good dream.”

“Oh, jeez,” Sandy said. “Ramona.”

I followed her pointing finger and saw Ramona tiptoeing up from the shoreline in an exaggerated way, like a cartoon mouse creeping up on a cat, heading straight for the man on the chaise longue. Her legs were covered with gray wet sand, as if she were wearing chaps, and she held her hands cupped in front of her and smiled in a crazy sort of way.

When she got to the man’s side she opened her hands suddenly, like a magician flinging up a dove, and a bright splash of water flew through the air, dotted with something flapping and silver that landed on the man’s chest just above Morris West.

The man’s eyes flew open, and he flailed his arms, brushing wildly at his chest and falling off the chair. He landed on his knees, staring at Ramona, who gave a quick bark of laughter. Then she turned and ran down to the beach as fast as she could, her little legs pumping.

Sandy smiled broadly. “She’s a pistol.”

We got up, ducking low, and headed down the path. I threw a glance back at the man, who had stood up and was kicking sand over the fish—it looked like a small perch—suffocating the poor thing. I must have made some noise, because he glanced up sharply. Our eyes met.

Then I put my head down and ran behind Sandy, barely able to keep up with her as she raced along the trail and exploded onto the beach. She grabbed Ramona by one hand and I grabbed her by the other, and we took off.

THE WET HEN SOCIETY takes place in the Midwest in 1962 and tells the story of a women’s writing group, focusing on the relationship between the group’s two co-founders, Emily Berrigan and Tilda Kasper. Like the rest of the women in the group, they are married, have children, and live in a quiet Detroit neighborhood, but Tilda and Emily consider themselves more serious, more ambitious. Both are working on literary novels that they hope will catapult them to fame. In their mid-thirties, they have known each other since college, but as the novel begins their friendship is starting to fray. A New York agent has contacted Emily about representing her novel, and Tilda begins an extramarital affair with the choirmaster at the parish church.

The action is told from the points of view of Jimmy Berrigan and Sandy Kasper, the children of Emily and Tilda, both thirteen years old, as they navigate an uncertain terrain that includes their own sexuality and their mothers’ marital upheavals—Emily’s husband, an overbearing local doctor, feels that Emily is spending too much time on her writing, while Tilda’s spouse is crushed when Tilda announces that she is leaving the family. The novel comes to a dramatic head on a lakeshore in northern Michigan, where the Wet Hens—a name given to them by Dr. Berrigan, which they adopt ironically—meet to spend a star-crossed final weekend together, reading each other’s work.

I’m writing this novel to recreate that period in time—the sixties, but before the real sixties had hit the Midwest—and to summon up my own mother’s fight to become a published writer, which she eventually did, though not without sacrifice.