When they reach the dollhouse, the man lifts their boards onto a rack in the yard, while the woman stares at the ocean. Mitty feels gluttonous, getting to look at her without restraint. Her posture, pulled tight. The way she gathers her hair to twist it up and away from her neck in one seamless motion, as quick as a string trick.

Mitty’s mother used to say that blaming beauty on genetics is just an excuse to quit. Beauty is about what you distract from by way of what you accentuate, she’d say, conjuring a waistline with a belt. Once you figure out what you don’t want a person to notice about you, you can make everything else louder.

What strikes Mitty about her neighbor is that it seems she is doing neither—accentuating nor distracting. The wetsuit seems obedient to the curves of her body—calves sloping to a fragile ankle, the bight of her lower back. Nothing about her is flattened by neoprene.