The Tribes of Palos Verdes

by Joy Nicholson

  I’m going to be the only girl to surf Palos Verdes.

  Sometimes I dream I’m a boy.

  * * *

  The next day I carry my board, balancing it on my head down the cliff stairs to the bay. Jim follows, embarrassed, dragging his board under his arm like a suitcase. The water is calm and flat like the circle in a turquoise ring, but Jim bites his lip, scanning the horizon.

  “People will laugh, maybe we should learn somewhere else.”

  “Oh Jim, don’t be such a pussy, just close your eyes and go in.”

  For a minute I think he is going to punch me, but instead he smiles.

  “You’re insane, you crazy girl.”

  He slaps me hard with a frond of seaweed. Together we fight, kicking water into each other’s nostrils, struggling to push each other into the whitewash. I jump in and climb on the board, holding its rail down with one hand the way pro surfers do. Jim jumps in, too, and pushes me off. I flounder in the water angrily, spinning and defeated.

  “You surf like a girl,” he says.

  “You suck,” I say, “like a troll.”

  He puts his right foot forward, and then his left, and says, “Which way are you supposed to stand?”

  As I think about this, I forget how mad I am.

  “Whichever way feels better,” I tell him.

  * * *

  “Do you have the face you deserve after thirty?”

  My mother cuts this quote out of a magazine and pastes it to the refrigerator. My mother is thirty-four. My father is forty-one.

  My father looks at the quote and laughs, gathering my mother in his arms.

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” he says. “When the times comes, I know doctors who can make you look twenty again.”

  “Maybe they can just replace my head,” she says, pushing my father away. “Or maybe they’ll just replace me when no one’s looking.”

  * * *

  My mother was a model at Bluff’s Department Store in Michigan when she met my father. She had what her agency called “the look of the moment.”

  Like Jackie Kennedy, my mother kept her eyes shrouded in huge, black, oval sunglasses all day. She hated the agency’s endless nagging about her waistline, the exercise classes they sent her to, and the diet pills they gave her. But it’s easy to see she loved the attention.

  Here’s a picture of my mother when she was skinny. Jim keeps it in his room, in a white frame on his desk. My mother’s sitting on a knoll in a park, her legs demurely crossed, hands on her cheeks. She wears a white French suit, rosette beaded pumps, and a slender gold watch. She is surrounded by cute male models, each holding out a long-stemmed rose for her. She smiles giddily; there are so many flowers, she cannot choose among them.

  It is an advertisement for the spring suits of 1964.

  Today her hair is still styled like Jackie Kennedy’s was in 1964.

  * * *

  My mother eats in secret while my father is at the hospital. First she only eats salty things that come in bags or plastic boxes. The sweet things come later.

  After school and my lessons, I come home to the smell of plastic bags, salsa, and American cheese, all melting in the double oven. Torn tendrils of Dorito packs litter the stovetop, stinking like crossed wires as they melt on the coils.

  My mother comes from her room only to get more bags, smiling blandly at me and Jim. Through the walls, we hear the sound of bags being popped open.

  She puts an unopened bag of chips in her lap and claps her hands over the mouth of the bag so that it explodes open jauntily. Then it is quiet, until enough time has passed, and then there is another clapping sound, and then more quiet.

  Puggles the dog stays in my mother’s room, eating the crumbs that explode from the top of the bag. Puggles likes chips very much and wags his tail at the sound of any ripping plastic, even if it is only Dr. Phil Mason, our father, unwrapping a fresh batch of dry cleaning.

  My mother gains weight quickly. Her Swedish cheekbones completely dissolve as her waistline expands.

  “Don’t hurt her feelings,” Jim says when I stare.

  * * *

  My mother met my father when she was eighteen. She was a model, and my father was in medical school. Their parents said they were too young to get married, but they eloped to Chicago and called from a pay phone outside the county courthouse. My mother said she didn’t want to get married, but my father says it was like this: When he found out she wasn’t really pregnant, it was too late, they were married already.

  When I ask why they didn’t get a divorce right away, my father sighs. Then he tells me love is like the ocean. It goes far deeper than people understand.

  * * *

  Nobody likes a new girl. When we first came here from Michigan, everyone laughed at my fancy white boots. When the girls tried to trip me, rolling their eyes, I knew it would be the same as it was in Michigan, even though my father said California would be different. The girls would never accept me, and I’d eat lunch alone again.

  I knew Jim would be popular though, and the pretty girls would try to steal him. When I ask him to prick his finger, become my blood brother, he tells me I’m getting fruity.

  “We already have the same blood, stupid. We’re stuck with each other.”

  * * *

  Today there’s a new girl at my school from Vermont. She’s very pale, with a delicate face and wavy brown hair. She smiles shyly at me as we each eat our lunches alone on the grass. I don’t smile back at her, but she introduces herself anyway, telling me her name is Laura. I chew and nod silently, not giving my name. Then I notice her arms are turning pink in the sun.

  “Maybe you should move to the shade,” I say, finally.

  “I wish I wasn’t so pale. The girls are all calling me Casper behind my back,” she confides.

  “Isn’t there any sun in Vermont?” I say. When she flushes, I amend myself quickly. “When we moved here I was superwhite, too.”

  As she smiles again, I look her up and down, appraising.

  I say, “No offense, but no one wears a blouse. The teachers don’t care if you wear a white T-shirt under your uniform.”

  “Oh,” she says, blushing.

  “It’s no big deal, just F.Y.I.”

  When the end-of-lunch bell rings, she puts out her hand for me to shake. “We could meet at snack period,” she says, hesitating, “or would you rather eat alone?”

  When we meet at snack period, I tell her about the Bayboys. “They’re the best surfers at Lunada Bay. I’m gonna surf with them, even though I’m a girl.”

  She nods her head and starts to tell me all about her horse. But I interrupt. “Riding waves is way better than riding horses.”

  Then I demonstrate, imitating the Bayboys, standing up on the rickety bench. “See, the water tries to push them sideways, but they lean back and put their arms out, like this,” I say.

  When the bell rings, I say, “I’d invite you over after school, but my mom’s sick.” Then I invite her to the beach, after my piano lesson.

  “Okay,” she says, wrinkling up her nose like a baby rabbit.

  The rest of the day I make big plans. Maybe we’ll have sleepovers at her house, with popcorn and movies. We’ll rent Endless Summer, the best surf movie of all time. By the time school’s over, my stomach is twisted into happy knots. But as we walk through the gate, Cami Miller walks up behind us, leading a small group of girls, flipping her blond hair.

  “You don’t want to go with her,” Cami whispers. “Medina Mason is the weirdest girl in the whole school. No one likes her.”

  Laura hesitates, looking at me and then at the other girls.

  “I don’t care what you do,” I say softly, closing my eyes, praying.

  When I open them again, she’s walking off with Cami’s group. She’s laughing, wrinkling her ugly nose.

  In between periods the girls corner me as I do my homework in the bathroom. Big Annie holds me down while Cami hands Laura a bottle of glue.


  “Do it,” Cami says, eyes shining.

  Laura takes the bottle, trembling. She starts to squirt glue into my hair, but her hand shakes so hard she drops it on the cement floor. When Big Annie bends over to pick the bottle up, I kick her in the ass, knocking her flat. I lock eyes with Laura, raising my hand high over her head, fist wavering, tears in my eyes. Then I stab Cami with a No. 2 pencil. I jab it so hard the lead breaks off in her arm.

  Instead of giving me detention, the principal sits me down in the anteroom of his office, shuts the dividing door, calls my father at the hospital. I watch through the cracked, yellowing Plexiglas as he talks on the phone; frowning, nodding his head, doodling on his calendar. After he hangs up, he opens the door, tells me to come in. He clears his throat, adjusts his glasses. He says he knows how difficult it is to be a scapegoat.

  “But when the girls provoke you,” he says, patting my arm, “try humming a song.”

  * * *

  My father sends me to a famous psychiatrist in a big, mirrored tower.

  “What is it about you that the other girls don’t like?” he says, pad of paper and studious pen in hand. “Did you have a falling out with one of them?”

  “Fuck them,” I answer. “Girls never like me, and I don’t like them.”

  Scribbling away, the bearded man tries again.

  “Are you close with your brother?” he asks.

  “Fuck you.”

  He prescribes children’s tranquilizers. But he’s the crazy one.

  * * *

  At home, after my piano lesson, my fingers are sore from banging the piano keys too hard. I pick up an empty cellophane package and show it to Jim.

  “Mom ate another whole bag of Oreos today,” I say. “I found this in the trash.”

  “Don’t act like a poor person, Medina,” my brother says, sighing as he turns up the volume. “Only poor people count how much food there is.”

  “You don’t care how she acts. Even if she eats like a pig!”

  My brother throws the channel changer hard against the carpet and yells, “If you talk about it, it’ll make it worse!”

  As I pick up the dislodged batteries, I breathe hard and concentrate on inserting the shiny shapes between the nest of wires. My brother leans over, gently taking the channel changer away, folding the batteries exactly into place.

  “Sorry for throwing it at you,” he says, then makes a frog face that usually makes me laugh. When I don’t even crack a smile, he twists me into a half nelson, tickling me until neither of us can tell if I’m laughing or crying.

  I don’t say anything to my mother about the Oreos. Instead I throw away all the junk food in the house, but my mother grabs her car keys from the foyer, leaves the house, and returns later with a stuffed brown sack. She smiles at me and toasts me with a can of chocolate Yoo-Hoo.

  She says, “Yoo-Hoo, skinny, Yoo-Hoo, I see you.”

  * * *

  In my mother’s checkbook ledger, there are hundreds of checks written out to Ralph’s Market, sometimes more than one a day. My father looks through the ledger, shaking his head, pounding his fist on the table.

  He tells Jim and me to go to our rooms, but instead we hide behind the door, cupping our ears to its wooden skin. My mother yells at my father. She says she wants to leave Palos Verdes before the sound of the waves drives her crazy.

  “That’s what you said about Chicago wind and Michigan snow, Sandy. Verbatim.”

  My mother cuts him off, tells him he better find us a nice, normal place to live before it’s too late. She insists it’s the waves that are the problem.

  “You promised to get the eating thing under control, Sandy. You said you’d stop the visits to the fridge at night.” My father puts his palms together reasonably. “I’m concerned about your health!”

  “Oh yes, my health.” My mother smiles. “I’m sure that’s the real issue here.”

  “Heart disease is something I know a thing or two about, Sandy.”

  “You don’t care about my health, Phil, you care about my cheekbones.”

  As he walks out, she calls out to him.

  “I know a thing or two about cheekbones.”

  * * *

  I’m lucky it isn’t winter yet, that’s when the waves get big in Palos Verdes. The waves are small and swashy now, two feet, perfect to practice on. For the first hour, I concentrate on pushing myself upward as the wave is in motion. Only the third time I try, I stand up and ride the wave to the shore, wobbling but not falling. When the wave ends I know I’ll always be a surfer. I know I’ll be trying to catch that feeling for the rest of my life.

  Jim is stronger, he pushes his body easily upward. But my balance is a little better, I stand up faster, and stay up longer once I catch a ride. I practice every day, even when the local guys paddle out but Jim goes back to shore, embarrassed, swimming fast.

  My plan is to be good by December. It’s hard to imagine riding big winter waves that tower over my head, but I try to see myself dwarfed by water, zooming across on the diagonal, the lip closing down behind me.

  My father gave me a magazine article about a famous woman surfer in Florida, Frieda Zane. She says the only way to get good is to forget you’re a girl, and surf like a man, aggressive and fierce. She says to hang around with better surfers as much as possible, study the way they stand and move, and ignore them if they laugh.

  “Don’t limit yourself to being a lame chick in the water,” she says. “Use your mind—and your arms.”

  I cut out a picture of Frieda surfing a big, green, velvety wave in Hawaii and hang it over my bed, where I look at it every night before I go to sleep.

  Freida doesn’t explain exactly what to do when other surfers laugh. Sometimes they catcall across the water, imitating me when I push off. “It’s a UFO,” they yell, “an unidentified flailing object.”

  I pretend I don’t hear them, but I do.

  * * *

  Palos Verdes is on an earthquake fault line unrelated to the famous San Andreas.

  “We have our own fault line,” people like to say, “just like we have our own police force and school system.”

  Because of cliff erosion, entire streets on the west end of the peninsula shift about a foot a year, causing sewage problems and huge cracks in the foundations of houses. But Palos Verdes is listed in almost all travel guidebooks as one of the most beautiful coastal regions in America, so the residents stay, despite the certainty their houses will need extensive repairs every four years. The children of these residents learn that money fixes everything, even nature, if there is enough of it.

  * * *

  There is the smell of fast food in every room of our house, even though a housekeeper cleans daily. The bathroom smells like meat. The hallways close to my mother’s room smell like French fries, cheese, steaks. A heavy oil smell hangs like fog over the carpeted corridor, mixing with the odor of chemicals from nitrogen-flushed bags.

  Lately my mother doesn’t allow the housekeeper into her bedroom to clean. “My husband is always in someone else’s bedroom anyway,” she says, listening to the peacocks cry.

  “Mating, Phil,” she says. “I hear you mating.”

  * * *

  I’m on my stomach in the bay, on my surfboard, experimenting with ways to paddle out faster. The waves are getting bigger now. It seems impossible to get out to the wavebreak because the whitewash keeps pushing me back.

  “It’s harder for a girl,” Jim tells me. “Your arms aren’t strong enough.”

  Even though I get mad, I know it’s true. When I try calling a surf shop to ask if there’s a secret trick to good paddling, the guy who answers laughs. “Pretend there’s a great white comin’ at you, girlie.” Then he laughs again and hangs up.

  First I try pushing water through my fingers like I’m doing the breaststroke, but the board keeps going sideways. Next I try using my hands like scoops, feeling salt stinging the scabby spots near my bitten nails. Finally, I try pushing the water with my hand
s and kicking my legs, but my knees keep banging on the hard resin.

  Soon I’m sweating in the rubber, but I can’t take my wet suit off, because there’s nowhere to put it. Sweat and salt water start dripping in my eyes, and I punch the water as hard as I can. The rubber is suffocating me so I unzip the top of my wet suit and balance it on my head, wearing only a cotton T-shirt now.

  Then I get an idea: I imagine I’m a machine—a paddling machine that never gets tired. I plunge my arms about a foot into the water and propel myself forward, counting out loud, “One, two, one, two.” I paddle across the entire bay faster than I’ve ever done it before. The only thing that stops me is a gulp of sea water I breathe in by mistake.

  Choking, exhilarated, I rest for ten minutes, floating on my back. When I look up at the window, I see my mother’s yellow bathrobe reflected in the glass. I wave slowly to her from across the water. Then I put the wet suit back on my head and paddle again, showing off my form.

  When I look up a few seconds later, she’s gone.

  * * *

  The other girls have small purses or backpacks, but I carry a silver plastic shopping bag, big enough to hold my wet suit, so I can change in the bushes on the way to the cliffs.

  The girls laugh, they point, they titter. As we all wait for the bus after school they cup their hands in perfect unison, together in tribes, planning pranks to play.

  “Can I sit here?” Cami Miller is gesturing to a place beside me at the bus stop. A place that is always empty. I ignore her grandly, picking at my nails, humming.

  “Well, can I sit here?” Cami repeats, looking at the other girls, smiling, winking.

  “Sure,” I finally say, “do whatever you want.”

  “But I don’t want to sit here,” Cami says, giggling, then laughing tiny silvery bells. “I don’t want to catch anything.”

  The other girls laugh, in a gaggle. I think of them washing away. I throw my hands out in a wave.

  “Die,” I tell them. “Whatever.”

  Cami is five times as pretty as me now, but she wasn’t always. She only got beautiful when she went to Dr. Rosen for a nose job. All the towel girls go to Dr. Rosen. They tape their chins and ears, sometimes they even get their eyelids ripped open and reshaped into half moons. Tara Pugh had her lips enlarged with fat from her own butt.