Under normal circumstances, he had a certain bright-eyed all-American-boy charm, with great appeal for young ladies, old ladies, and dogs.
Today, he looked like an Astronaut who had left his vitamin pills on the bureau and spent six months in space: hollow eyes, hollow cheeks, hollow stomach.
Breakfast, he thought.
A shot of orange juice would make everything seem better.
He looked around his little Eden: bureau, bed, table, chair, two-burner stove.
Then he remembered.

"You share a refrigerator", Mrs. Kirby had said, and somehow, at midnight, after the long drive from New York in pelting rain, that had sounded reasonable.
In the cold light of day, it seemed a lunatic arrangement.
Share bath, maybe -- but share refrigerator?
She had explained it -- something about summer people's eating out and not enough space in the units.
And where was the thing?
He remembered seeing it last night, when he put away his small store of bachelor-type eatables.
Ah, yes -- his half of a refrigerator stood outside, on the "curving veranda" between Unit Number Three and Unit Number Four.

It was still raining, and Mrs. Kirby's cottages bloomed through the gray haze like the names they bore, vivid blue and green and magenta.
Charlie downed his orange juice and one of the long, skinny green pills, his spirits as damp as the day.

This vacation had seemed like a good idea last week, when his doctor had prescribed it.
"Take a full month", the doctor had said.
"Lots of sun, lots of rest.
The red pills are a vitamin-and-iron compound.
This is a sleeping capsule.
The others will make you a little more comfortable until you get it licked.
You young men get to be my age, you won't take flu so lightly".

Charlie had accepted the diagnosis without comment.
The doctor could call it anything from flu to beriberi;
but Charlie knew what was wrong with him and knew, too, that there was no pill to cure it.
He had loved and lost Vivian Wayne to somebody else, had watched her marry the somebody else, and had caught a bear of a cold by kissing the bride good-by forever, which was really piling it on.
He had caught, too, like an ailment, a confirmed distrust of women.
Once burned -- scalded, really, because Vivian had given him every encouragement -- forever shy.
From now on, his was going to be a man's world: the North Woods, duck blinds at dawning, beer and poker and male secretaries.

Meanwhile, he had this miserable cold, and as he leaned against the refrigerator, watching the rain make sandy puddles at his feet, the doctor's prescription for lots of sun seemed like a hollow mockery.
In these damp circumstances, he was an odds-on bet to develop pneumonia.

He looked up to see Mrs. Kirby, awesome in a black-and-yellow polka-dotted slicker, bearing down on him.
"Three-day blow"!
She bellowed triumphantly.
He had noticed before that the natives seemed to regard really filthy weather as a kind of Pyhrric victory over the tourists.
"Fine, day after tomorrow", she added.

"I hope so", he said.
"I've got this cold.
Thought I'd bake it out in the sun".

"Ah".
She studied him briefly.
"You've got a peaked look.
Better get in out of the wet".

Charlie forbore to mention that the wet was somewhat universal, Peony being less than weatherproof.
As for its being fine, day after tomorrow, he had the unhappy conviction that it would never be fine again, with Vivian lost to him forever.
He could imagine her at this minute, honeymooning in Nassau with what's-his-name, lounging on golden sands, looking forward to a life of unalloyed bliss.
All Charlie could look forward to was a yellow pill at noon, a salami sandwich for lunch, and a lonely old age -- if he lived that long.

He leafed through the light reading provided by Mrs. Kirby for her guests: four separate adventures of the Bobbsey Twins (At the Seashore, At the Mountains, On the Farm, and In Danger) and several agricultural bulletins on the treatment of hoof-and-mouth disease in cattle, hideously illustrated.
He dozed, only to dream of Vivian, and woke, only to crash into the night table, bruising his other shin.
He took a yellow pill, only to choke on it, and went for the salami, only to find something alive in the refrigerator -- something pink and fuzzy.

His first thought was that Mrs. Kirby, in her mania for color, had dyed a cat and that cat had somehow managed to open the refrigerator door and climb in;
but on further investigation, the thing proved to be a sweater, of the long-hair variety that sheds onto men's jackets -- pale, pale pink and, according to the label, size thirty-four.
He thought about it for a minute, could find no reasonable explanation for the presence of a sweater in the refrigerator, got the salami, bread, and a Bermuda onion, and put the whole thing out of his mind.

Next morning, he found a note in the refrigerator.
"Would you mind wrapping your onion"?
Said this note.
"The smell permeates everything"!
Everything being the sweater, a lipstick case, and a squirt bottle of Kissin' Kare pink hand lotion.
The note paper was pink, too, and the handwriting small and dainty and utterly feminine.
Not that he had supposed, considering the evidence, that he was sharing this refrigerator with a member of the Beach Patrol.
He scrawled "Sorry" across the bottom of the note and then, against his better judgment, added: "Don't you eat"?
He didn't want to encourage anything here;
but on the other hand, he didn't want her swiping his salami.

"Not onions", came the answer the following day.
"Ugh".

Must have really smelled up her sweater, he thought, and wondered idly just why she kept the sweater fast-frozen.
But then, as he well knew, women are not guided by logic or common sense.
Take Vivian.
Yes, take Vivian.
Somebody had.

Now, if this were Vivian next door to him and if, for some obscure female reason, she kept her clothes in the refrigerator, they would not be pink.
They would be black or white or horse-blanket plaid, chic and splashy, like Vivian herself.
Pink, Vivian once had told him, was for baby girls, and grown-up girls who wore pink were subconsciously clinging to their infancy.

"Why does this girl keep a sweater in the refrigerator"?
He mused aloud.

Eh"?
It was Mrs. Kirby, making her toilsome way along the veranda, laden with a clattery collection of mops, brushes, and pails.
"What's that you say"?

"Oh, nothing.
Just glad the rain's stopped".

"Oh, yes.
Just look at that sky.
Be a scorcher by afternoon".

"I hope so.
I've got this cold".

"So you said".
She scrutinized him.
"My, you're peaked.
You want to watch out that you don't get burned to an ash, first sunny day.
I must remember to warn the girl next to you in Larkspur.
That pale kind's the worst".

That pale kind, Charlie thought.
Hardly an inviting description.
But then, neither was peaked.
He could hear Mrs. Kirby now, warning her pale guest against sunburn.
"I spoke to the fellow next door, too", she might say.
"He's that peaked kind".

Surely there was a better word.
Charlie looked in the mirror.
Run-down, iron-poor.
He looked more closely.
Frail, feeble -- peaked.
Clearly, two damp days with the Bobbsey Twins had done him no good.

The sun, blazing hot as prophesied, was far from kind to Mrs. Kirby's varicolored properties.
When Charlie came up from the beach for his four-o'clock pill, the whole establishment (gaudy enough when seen through mist and fog) looked like a floodlit modern painting -- great blocks of dizzy color, punctuated at regular intervals by the glaring white of five community refrigerators.
This weekend, he thought, he would look around for some more subdued retreat, with Cape roses, maybe, at the door.
He could not imagine a flower's being brave enough to grow beside Peony, Larkspur, and the rest.

The sweater was gone from the refrigerator, and in its place was a large plastic bag, full of wet pink clothes.
No wonder she was so pale, wearing all those cold clothes.

He got a red pill and a beer and then, on impulse, transferred the rest of his salami to her side of the refrigerator and scrawled "Be my guest" on the wrapping.
It gave him a good feeling.

"M-m-m.
Thanks", was her answer the next day.
The note was propped against his pill bottles and bore a postscript: "You're not at all well, are you"?

"I've got this cold", he wrote.
Not that it was any of her business.

"It's none of my business", said the next note, "but my Aunt Elsie used to take lemon juice and honey in hot water for a cold, and she lived to be ninety-six.
I mean, she's still living, and she's ninety-six.
Why don't you try that"?

"I don't have a lemon".
He had to write very small to get it on the bottom of the scrap of paper.

By the next morning, she had turned the paper over.
"Gee, neither do I".

Charlie grinned.
She didn't sound like a pale girl.
She sounded a little like a redhead.
But then, redheads are often pale.

He stuck his head in Mrs. Kirby's little rental office.
"I guess that redhead next to me took your advice.
I haven't seen her on the beach".

"You won't, if you're looking for a redhead.
She's got browny hair".

He spent that afternoon on the beach, looking for a pale, browny-haired girl in a pink bathing suit.
There were pink bathing suits on blondes, and browny-haired girls in red or black or green bathing suits.
There were a sprinkling of daring bikinis and a preponderance of glorified tank suits.
Up on a dune, he saw a girl, all by herself, sitting on a camp stool before an easel and absorbed in her painting.
He paid little attention to her because she was a redhead and because she was wearing white -- one of those bulky, turtle-neck sweaters.
On the beach, there were pale girls and not-so-pale girls.
And he saw them all as he walked up and down.

At two that morning, he was still walking -- up and down Peony, up and down the veranda, up and down the silent, moonlit beach.
Finally, in desperation, he opened the refrigerator, filched her hand lotion, and left a note.
"I've got this sunburn", said the note, "and I used some of your hand lotion.
Hope you don't mind".

"Of course I don't mind", she answered.
"You're having a miserable time, aren't you?
Use all the lotion you want, and for goodness' sake, stay in out of the sun for a couple of days".

This was a very warm, sympathetic girl, he decided.
Sympathy is a fine quality in a woman.
Now Vivian, for instance, was not too long on sympathy.
She felt, and said, that sympathy only made people feel sorry for themselves;
it was a tough world, and you had to be tough to hold your own.
He didn't know what was so tough about Vivian's world, slopping around Nassau with what's-his-name.
Suppose what's-his-name got a sunburn?
Charlie couldn't see Vivian offering any hand lotion.
She might peel him, once the worst of the agony was over.

Charlie spent the next two days in his pajama bottoms, waiting for the fire in his back to subside, and used generous quantities of the hand lotion.

Correspondence passed back and forth.

"How's your sunburn now?
The only thing, this lotion has glycerin in it, and that whitens the skin, so if you're so anxious to get a tan, you may not want to use it".

"I'm not that anxious, but maybe that's why you're so fair".

"That Mrs. Kirby!
I'll bet she told you I was puny, too.
How's your cold"?

"Broiled out.
She didn't say you were puny.
Are you?
What's puny"?

"Puny goes with pale and peaked.
Do you have anything to read while you're shut up?
There are two things here about Surviving in the Wilderness, and a book called 'Tom Swift and His Speedy Canoe';
but the picture of Tom Swift is pretty sinister.
Also the canoe".