The Tribes of Palos Verdes

by Joy Nicholson

  Jim says jogging is stupid, but I like it. Especially knocking low leaves off the eucalyptus trees with my hands and racing the cars uphill. I always avoid the popular kids who gather at the bay at sunset. Instead I veer straight up Rocky Point Road, past the oldest homes in Palos Verdes.

  I wave to the fathers as I race their long, silver cars up the road, keeping my hand up for almost half a block, waving at Mr. McCollum, Mr. Wheatly, then Mr. Rider. They work together in the defense industry. Mr. McCollum, a physicist for Lockheed, worked on the B80 bomber. His daughter is the first girl I ever knew who had an abortion.

  When the fathers honk in the driveway, their kids try to look less stoned.

  “Hi, Dad,” they say, stuffing dime bags of pot in their socks, “what’s up?”

  * * *

  My mother’s yellow bathrobe makes my father very nervous. He says it isn’t healthy to wear pajamas all day.

  “It isn’t healthy to go to the market half naked either,” my mother answers. “But I know how you like tennis skirts.”

  I listen, pretending to do my algebra homework. My father looks up from his medical journals, frowning, unsure of how to respond.

  “I see how you look at the ladies, Phil. Always measuring, always trolling for a great pair of … legs. That’s it, Phil, you’re a leg man, not a…”

  My father picks up his journals and coffee and moves to the guest room. He is good at smooth exits.

  * * *

  My father says no one is as witty as my mother. He says they used to laugh all the time in the first years of their marriage. Today she’s clowning around, reading aloud to me from a copy of the Super Beauty Regimen from Women Now magazine.

  She mimics the magazine’s instructions: “Rub emollient into your skin when it’s wet from the shower. Don’t forget the problem areas!”

  And, “Every woman should examine her body with a cosmetic mirror so she can see her problem areas clearly! Use two mirrors for the backside!”

  My mother continues, musing over the Getting Older Gracefully tips: “Cream lipsticks are moister, cotton puffs are gentler, a raw avocado rubbed with circular strokes over the face and chin is the perfect dry-skin mask. Don’t pull at the eyes and mouth. Don’t crease the forehead. Do glow warmly.”

  “Do go to hell,” my mother says, making a face at the cover model.

  Now she’s looking at a pull-out poster from In Shape magazine. The picture is of a beautiful red-haired woman with puffed-out lips and nice white teeth, sitting on an exercise bicycle and smiling. She is my father’s favorite celebrity, a very famous model named Rain. He has an autographed picture of her in his office, and a swimsuit calendar, too.

  “Do you think this Rain person is prettier than me?” my mother asks, holding the poster close to her eyes.

  “No,” I say, looking at my shoe.

  “Well, your father thinks she’s just the bee’s knees, Medina.”

  She says Rain is young enough to be his daughter and asks if I agree. I look at the picture, trying to decide how old Rain is. My mother gets angry when I don’t figure it out fast enough.

  My mother fishes a small mirror out of her purse, and a pair of tweezers. She begins plucking her eyebrows fast and hard.

  “Have you noticed that your father’s nurses are getting younger every year?” Her voice is very tight all of a sudden.

  I sit very straight, afraid to say anything.

  “What do you think happens to the ones who get older?” She turns her face from side to side. Then she settles back on the cushion.

  “Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Screw the prettiest of them all. I’m the wife.”

  * * *

  As my father reads the newspaper at breakfast the next day, he glances up at my mother and frowns.

  “Watch that third piece of toast, babe,” he cautions her. “Do you really want that?”

  “Should I, Jim?” my mother asks my brother, smiling wide.

  “Go for it, Mom.” My brother moves the cereal box, blocking the line of vision between him and my father.

  “Can you pass the sugar, dearheart?” she asks me, still smiling, her eyes dark and furious.

  Deliberately, she dumps the whole sugar box on top of a piece of toast. White crystals spill out over the kitchen table and make a small mountain on the bread. She takes a huge bite, smiling.

  “Mmmmmmmmm!” she says, looking at my brother, winking.

  My father gets up to go jogging, red, but very calm. He brushes the spilled sugar into a newspaper, rolls it up, and deposits it in the trash can. He kisses me lightly and swoops for my brother, but Jim turns his head away.

  My mother watches him with binoculars as he jogs down the beach.

  “We’re not going to let him get away easy,” she says to Jim.

  * * *

  My mother doesn’t make friends easily. She says women are naturally sneaky, plus they’re also jealous liars. She doesn’t talk much to Mrs. Miller or any of the other tennis ladies, because she says every woman in Palos Verdes is after my father. It’s true that my father winks at Mrs. Miller when we see her at the park. Sometimes he looks at a girl walking down the street so hard he almost crashes the car. He assures me it’s normal to look at pretty women, the way you look at nice sunsets and beautiful paintings. I tell him he should look at sunsets, not at Mrs. Miller, if he wants to stop fighting with my mother.

  Tonight we’re celebrating my father’s birthday at the Beach House Restaurant, when my father makes a joke with the waitress.

  “How come a nose isn’t twelve inches long? Because then it would be a foot.”

  The black-haired waitress likes the joke a lot. She laughs for a long time and tells him he’s a real cut-up. After watching my father watch the waitress sashay away in her short black skirt, my mother takes the car keys, excuses herself icily, and throws them off the balcony into the ocean below.

  I don’t dare laugh. Still, it’s funny to see my father in the middle of a busy street, wearing his nice tweed suit, yelling at my mother’s taxi as it pulls away.

  * * *

  When my father comes home, my mother is packing.

  “This place is full of crazy people, Phil. Homewreckers. Surfers. Loons,” she says while she folds neat stacks of nightgowns into a black leather suitcase. “Jim’s friend Aaron saw you at lunch with her. You know who I mean.”

  “Which her?” My father laughs. Then he says that he often lunches with his nurses, “or pharmaceutical saleswomen, or female staff members.”

  “Or young, attractive tennis ladies,” my mother adds slowly. She looks up for a moment. “By the way, we spoke with a lawyer, we can sue you for humiliation,” she says, folding. Then she looks at my brother. “Tell him, Jim.”

  Jim opens his mouth, but doesn’t say anything. My mother looks at him, eyes pleading.

  I jump in. “He doesn’t want to, Mom’s making him.”

  My mother keeps folding, furious. “Yes, he does.”

  “Hey, sport, do you really want to go with your mother?” my father asks Jim. “What if you end up in a place with no waves?”

  “Why don’t you leave, Dad,” Jim says. “Go chase some tennis skirts.”

  After a long silence, my mother laughs.

  My father steps forward, slapping Jim’s face. A cracking sound reverberates through the room. Jim turns to my mother in shock, touching his face. A current passes between them.

  Almost as if it were an old-fashioned silent film, my brother draws his right arm backward, hurls it forward, and punches my father full in the mouth. When my father goes down, my mother gasps. My father’s sunglasses fly out of his pocket and land on the tile with a crunch. They spin in the silence, until they clatter to a dead stop.

  My mother stands absolutely still, her arms at her sides, looking at my father crouched on the floor, covering his head with his arms. Then she crosses over, standing directly above my father, staring down at him.

  “Okay now,” she says. Her voice i
s rich and soft. My father is still crouched low, as if in the middle of an earthquake drill.

  He looks at my mother as if she were very far away. My mother purses her lips and nods again, then whispers something in Jim’s ear. He leaves the room, dead white, robotic.

  My father stays on the floor.

  My mother stands over him, a small smile on her face. She says Jim is going to protect her from now on.

  “That’s the last time you’ll humiliate me, Phil.”

  * * *

  Later I spy on my father as he’s packing his things to move to a motel. A purple bruise has begun to spread under his mouth like sloppy clown makeup. My mother sits in the bedroom on the suitcase, looking calmly at him.

  “If you go to the police I’ll say he was defending me.”

  “I don’t blame Jim for this, Sandy.”

  My mother stares triumphantly at my father before she goes on.

  “Things are going to change now.”

  “Okay, Sandy,” my father says tiredly. “Truce? For Jim’s sake?”

  As she smiles at him, a ship’s light disappears on the ocean.

  * * *

  The sand rises up on a crest in the middle of P.V. beach, making a throne for the popular kids. Everyone else sits in the furrows and cracks along the cliffs.

  The girls of Palos Verdes sit around in little groups. The towel girls, the Jews, the Chinese girls, the softball players. Each is a clique of seven to fifteen members who sit together in designated areas and talk only to each other. The members of each group dress alike. They wear the same lipstick colors and have similar bathing suits. Their parents have roughly the same amount of money.

  The ones you notice are the towel girls, beautiful creatures who lie on Bill Blass towels, developing dark tans, sitting in their own circle on the high sand, reading fashion magazines with dark Vuarnet sunglasses perched on their upturned noses. They arch their perfect brown backs and adjust their pearls while they wait for their boyfriends to reemerge from the water. Showing the boyfriends how lucky they are.

  The towel girls affect terribly bored facial expressions and eat chilled apple slices out of delicate Japanese coolers. They also keep beer cold in these coolers, beer for the boys who gesture for it later, after a few sets of waves. The girls learn from their mothers, towel mothers who pour perfectly chilled martinis for their husbands after a hard day at work. They learn serving and pouring early.

  There are only a few ways to greet the towel girls. You can walk quickly past them, holding up an index finger as if testing the wind. Or you can nod your head in their general direction without nodding to any specific girl as a mark.

  Nothing that insinuates friendship with a towel girl is acceptable, such as walking clear into the middle of their group and saying, “Hi, Heidi, what’s up?”

  If this etiquette is breached, if you dare address one of these girls in person, she will lean over to her friends, giggle prettily, and say, “Oh my God! Did you hear something?”

  * * *

  A few weeks after the big fight, my father comes home from the motel. He sleeps in the guest room now. I’m the only one who talks to him at breakfast; my mother whispers with Jim, all the while slicing mangos, pouring juice, pulling her hands through her cheerful hairstyle. But she glowers silently when my father suddenly gets up from the table without eating.

  “I’m going for a morning set with the Mad Servers at the tennis club,” he says.

  “Keep your eye on the ball,” my mother says, looking at him.

  * * *

  Usually she makes black-pen lists in the morning. Things to do. Things to buy. School schedules. Lesson schedules. Car pool. Today she makes a red-pen list, taping it to the refrigerator, where my father can see it.

  Sandy’s Day

  1. Phil’s laundry.

  2. Phil’s bills.

  3. Phil’s mess.

  4. Phil’s bullshit.

  5. Family meeting at 6:30.

  At our family meeting she says she’s no longer going to be fake. She announces that the ladies of Palos Verdes can take their perfect lives and shove them up their asses.

  “No tennis clothes. No Lancôme Hydrate. No Perfect Rose lipstick.”

  She won’t cook balanced meals. She’ll sleep all damn day if she feels like it. She’ll eat like it’s going out of style, as many cookies and chips as she likes.

  She tells my father there’s only one way she’ll stop eating—we have to move to a small town she just saw on a TV movie, Blaine, Minnesota, where the women don’t wear tennis skirts, and my father won’t be faced with so much temptation from tennis ladies.

  “It’s the land of ten thousand lakes,” she says dreamily.

  “But you don’t even like water,” I say.

  * * *

  Surfing is many things. Sometimes it’s a religious experience, sometimes pure domination. I tame a patch of milky waves, ride on them as if they were beautiful horses. The girls taunt me at school, chanting, “Fatty Mom. Elephant Mom. Big as a whale. Gross as a snail.” But in the water, they can’t reach me.

  I love stepping into my wetsuit, tightening the zipper slowly up my back, feeling my naked skin against rubber. As I begin to paddle, long strands of wet hair tickle my neck, cashmere soft in the salty water, making me shiver and giggle out loud. Sometimes I lie in the sun for a few moments, hair fanning out, face to the sky, feeling exotic and beautiful.

  It’s a frank sexual pleasure to be wet and warm, lying alone on my stomach near the mouth of the sea, relaxing completely, then pushing my body upward while taming the liquid motion.

  After school, I love to be in the safe, warm curl of a tube.

  * * *

  The winter surf is kicking up. Mountains of water are moving toward our house, carrying more and more abalone shells to the beach. There is a storm off Mexico, Hurricane Alex; the waves are five feet high.

  Jim and I have been surfing for nearly seven months, but we’ve never tried waves bigger than three and a half feet. We huddle together in the yard, deliberating. Jim says we should tell Skeezer we’re sick.

  “Both of us?” I ask. “They’ll never believe it. They’ll say we’re scared.”

  “We’ll say you gave me the flu. I feel sick, I swear.”

  We take our boards to the pool and lay them belly down in the blue, calm water. For a while, we paddle from end to end, discussing different kinds of flu and their symptoms. There’s the Chinese kind that makes you barf for seven days and the Taiwanese kind that gives you the runs. Jim says we can pull off the Taiwanese kind if we take six Ex-Lax pills each.

  “Ex-Lax is disgusting,” I say. “Besides, we’re good enough to go out now.”

  I remind him that he never falls off. “You’re just afraid the older guys will laugh and call you a grommet-fag.”

  “Maybe,” Jim admits, picking at his fingers. “So what?”

  Then I thrash around in the water, making the biggest waves I can, and tell Jim to stand up. He stands up, and laughs.

  “See, you’re not gonna die,” I say, and I slap him a high five.

  We suit up on top of the cliff stairs. I rub Jim’s back before I pull up the big zipper in the back of his wetsuit. By mistake I catch a piece of his skin in the fold. I put my hand over my mouth, sucking in my breath.

  “Oh my God,” I say, “I’m sorry.”

  “What?” he says absently, leaning out to look at the waves. Then, “Damn, I don’t think I can do it.”

  I tell him my secret strategy. “Pretend you’re a barnacle on the back of a whale—stuck on forever. Pretend there’s no way the water can throw you.”

  He shrugs, telling me to forget it. “You always imagine crazy stuff. When I get scared, my mind goes blank and I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

  We smoke an entire joint on the way down. But Jim lights another one at the bottom.

  “Forget it,” he says when we get to the rocks. Looking at the towers of water, he stands still and white, h
olding his board stiff, like a wax statue.

  I push him toward the water.

  “You’re gonna rule the waves,” I say.

  A few of the guys are watching us. Jim gives them the thumbs-up. When he turns, his eyes are raging.

  “Stop poking at me!” he says. “Don’t treat me like a baby in front of everyone.”

  The waves are a translucent emerald green, highlighted by sparks of light thrown by the setting sun. I’ve been paddling for fifteen minutes, but I haven’t reached the wave-break yet.

  The waves are far more powerful than I thought. I can hear stones and heavy shells rumbling against the bottom.

  First I try to go around the break, through to the left, but the current is too forceful, so I throw my board down and fight the whitewash in front of me. My arms are heavy with fatigue, and I’m swallowing mouthful after mouthful of spray. I can’t see the sets that are coming because my eyes are slitted against the sting of salt. Finally there’s a small lull, and I paddle.

  Jim is nearly out. He jumped in at the jetty and started stroking, smooth and fast, riding up and over the wave faces, his powerful shoulders pushing him much quicker than I could follow. At first he tries to wait for me, but I motion him to go ahead. Now I see him with the guys, lined up, ready to go for a turn, astride his board with his legs deep in the water.

  I see Skeezer being spit forward. He dances from right to left, swaying before gaining balance, leaning forward then lurching to the left, perfect. Another set comes. Another lull.

  I paddle ferociously and make a lot of ground. I’m almost there, ten feet away, when the next set comes. Aaron lines up, ready to go, but I see my chance. I scream “Mine! Mine!” and turn around to catch the swell. It’s late, already breaking when I catch it. The wave throws me sideways, but I hang on, stand up, and whip around in the force. Hair slaps over my eyes so I’m blinded. The roar of the water comes down as I slide over the wave, fishtailing back and forth like a sewing needle gone awry. Somehow I stay up, leaning forward, almost retching, ready to fall. But suddenly I’m riding instead, falling from the sky, watching the horizon surge upward. Then I’m kicking out just before the tube closes. I get slapped by the next wave, and the next. I’m holding on to my board with one hand, dog paddling with my other, turning my face away as the current pushes me back and forth.