In Watermelon Sugar

In Watermelon Sugar is the paperback at the center of an early scene in Dominick Birdsey and Dessa’s relationship: she is reading it by moonlight in a lifeguard tower when he joins her. The book becomes more than a conversational prop. Its enigmatic opening gives voice to the scene’s concern with nearness and distance, while the ordinary acts of handing it over, reading aloud, and joking about its author help mark the instant Dominick falls in love with Dessa.

The paperback in the tower

Dessa has saved Dominick a warm spot in the lifeguard tower. When he climbs up beside her, he notices the book in her lap and teases her about reading in the dark. She corrects him: she is reading by moonlight. His concern for her eyesight keeps the exchange lightly playful, but the paperback quickly becomes their shared focus. Asked what is so absorbing, Dessa hands it to him and names Richard Brautigan as its author.

The book is present as a physical object, passed from one person to the other and examined in the tower’s dim light. Dominick squints at its pages; later he closes it and holds it up toward the moon. The scene’s small gestures make reading a joint activity rather than a private one. Dessa first offers the book, and Dominick responds by sounding out its opening for them both.

Dessa as a reader

Dessa admits that she does not fully understand the book, yet cannot stop reading it. Its mystery and intrigue, rather than a settled interpretation, keep her turning the pages. That combination—partial incomprehension and sustained attraction—describes her encounter with the text without reducing it to a puzzle she must solve. For Dominick, her enthusiasm opens a conversation; the paperback lets him see her as someone who follows curiosity even when understanding has not caught up.

The conversation also places the book beside details of Dessa’s independence. She is twenty-one, a senior at Boston College studying early childhood education, works as a waitress, and spends mornings at a Head Start program. Her father had wanted her to return to work in his bookkeeping department, alongside her uncle Costas, at the family car dealership. After three summers there, she wanted a change and the experience of applying for work beyond her family. The book is not presented as the cause of that choice, but it appears in a scene where Dessa talks openly about wanting to make choices for herself.

An opening about distance

Dominick reads the first paragraph aloud: “In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I’ll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.” The lines bring repetition and distance together. The deeds are done again, but the speaker addresses someone elsewhere; the sentence makes intimacy an act of reaching across a separation rather than proof that separation has disappeared.

That language acquires a particular charge in the scene because the words are spoken between two people who are only beginning to know each other. Dominick does not offer an explanation of the passage. Instead, he reads it aloud, letting the book’s voice become part of their conversation. The scene holds open a space between the printed speaker, the person reading, and the person listening. Its meaning is not fully resolved there, but its pattern of presence and distance will return in Dominick’s thoughts.

From reading to courtship

Dessa points out the author’s picture on the covers of his books. Dominick closes the paperback, lifts it toward the moon, and jokes that Brautigan looks like Mark Twain on acid. Dessa laughs and runs a hand through his curly hair, messing it up. The book’s strange opening has led into joking, laughter, and touch: an exchange about reading becomes part of the scene’s physical intimacy without ceasing to be a conversation between two people with distinct interests.

Dominick’s recollection pauses over the uncertainty of this instant, asking whether that small gesture was all it took, before settling on his certainty that he fell in love with Dessa right there. He says the realization came before he had even climbed down from the tower. The paperback therefore belongs to the remembered threshold of the relationship: not as a token that explains love, but as an object around which their first easy conversation and the decisive shift in Dominick’s feelings take place.

The later echo

When Dessa walks to the water and wades in, Dominick remembers the book’s sentence about being here while another is distant. He thinks it again, but cannot tell whether he means Dessa, his brother, or the astronauts above them. The sentence has moved from the paperback into his own inward narration. Its words remain recognizable, while their possible referents multiply; the uncertainty is part of the recollection rather than a riddle the book settles.

This recurrence gives the paperback significance beyond its brief appearance in the tower. The book’s language provides a form for Dominick’s experience, but not a single, stable interpretation: connection and separation can point toward the woman beside him, his brother, or people far beyond the scene. In Watermelon Sugar thus enters the narrative through a specific act of reading and returns as an echo in Dominick’s thoughts. Its importance lies in that movement from shared object to remembered language, and in how a sentence first encountered aloud continues to organize what he cannot quite name.