The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant

There was a summer in my life when the only creature that seemed lovelier to me than a largemouth bass was Sheila Mant. I was fourteen.”

The narrator sets up the story’s conflict in the first paragraph, ironically contrasting a beautiful teenage girl and a fish. It’s clear he loves fishing more than almost anything; what he doesn’t yet realize is that his first crush, though intense, doesn’t have nearly the same depth of feeling.

“I was on the swim team at school, and to win her attention would do endless laps between my house and the Vermont shore, hoping she would notice the beauty of my flutter kick, the power of my crawl. Finishing, I would boost myself up onto our dock and glance casually over toward her, but she was never watching, and the miraculous day she was, I immediately climbed the diving board and did my best tuck and a half for her and continued diving until she had left and the sun went down and my longing was like a madness and I couldn’t stop.”

The narrator, in the grip of young love, wants to impress his crush, but can’t bring himself to walk over and speak to her. The passage makes clear the narrator’s maddening infatuation by describing his efforts in a run-on, stream of consciousness sentence that rises rapidly in intensity to a fever pitch; echoing the way that Sheila has grabbed the narrator’s heart.

“It was late August by the time I got up the nerve to ask her out. The tortured will-I’s, won’t-I’s, the agonized indecision over what to say, the false starts toward her house and embarrassed retreats— the details of these have been seared from my memory, and the only part I remember clearly is emerging from the woods toward dusk while they were playing softball on their lawn, as bashful and frightened as a unicorn.”

After going through the agonies of the truly smitten, the narrator puffs up his courage and approaches Sheila. The text deflates his overeager ambitions by comparing his attitude to that of a “frightened unicorn”—a delicate, mythical beast.