The Tribes of Palos Verdes

by Joy Nicholson

  “I got it.” I yell to the guys. “I got a wave.” I paddle close to Jim in the next lull. Everyone is amped. Skeezer smiles at me. Tad gives me the thumbs-up.

  “Hey, don’t snake any more waves, Medina,” Aaron says. “There’s a fucking lineup, you know.”

  “Give spaghetti arms a break,” Skeezer calls out. “It took her long enough to find us out here.”

  Jim joins in. “Yeah, mellow out.”

  He smiles at me and takes off on the next wave. All I can see is his muscled back, almost black in the semi-darkness. He stands straight, tall, maneuvering back and forth, graceful and powerful. His hands are low at his side, his left foot barely raised.

  When he kicks out, the board flows sweet and steady, spinning in the water overhead. Even when he goes under, he’s smooth, controlled. He comes up laughing, holding his arm up in the air in triumph. He swims right up next to me, and winks, telling me how perfect I was.

  Walking home later, Jim kicks the dead brush aside for me. He doesn’t say much, but he comes to my room later to say goodnight.

  “Goodnight yourself,” I say, grinning.

  He hangs around for a while, picking through my records and magazines, then he sits down on the floor, putting his big, smelly feet up on the bed. He turns off the lamp. “That was fun today,” he says in the dark, “maybe one of the most fun days I’ve ever had.”

  I nod, smiling, starting to fall asleep.

  “Do you think the best times we’ll ever have are happening now?” he asks softly.

  “Don’t think like that,” I say sleepily. “It’s bad luck.”

  * * *

  At school they test my IQ, tell me to look at a bunch of swirls and tell them what I see. I tell them I see waves, and starfish, and whirlpools. They write words down on a pad of paper, and look at each other, nodding. They put me in with all the smart kids in a class track called Mentally Gifted Minors.

  My father says I’m a lucky girl to get into this program.

  “Nobody likes a brainbox,” I say.

  But brainbox classes are okay. Cami Miller isn’t in MGM, so she can’t tease me, or hold me down and spit in my face, or tell me I’m ugly and a total freak. Plus, the brainboxes don’t joke about my mother; they don’t care about anything except fractions and trigonometry and Harvard and Yale.

  Jim isn’t in any of my classes. He gets stoned before the swirl test. He goes with a few of the other surfers, tells the tall lady he just sees a bunch of black shit on a page.

  They put him with all the popular kids in remedial math, woodshop, metalshop. He smokes pot with them, makes jokes, laughs. He’s the lucky one.

  * * *

  Some of the Bayboys tease me about my flat chest and skinny neck, but a few of them are pretty nice. Once when I step on a sea urchin, Charlie Becker, an eighteen-year-old, helps me pull the slender spines out of my feet. I pretend it doesn’t hurt, even when he digs around with a needle to find the broken-off pieces of the quills. As he dips my foot in water to clean off the blood, he tells me to wear surf booties next time—watertight slippers made of thick rubber.

  “You’ll have better grip; they stick really good to surfwax. And the urchins won’t get you as bad.”

  Then he tells me to keep it up, to forget what the guys say.

  “I’ve been watching you out there. I think you could get pretty good, if you get serious about it.”

  Then he laughs and tells me I better practice a lot, because perfect balance takes years to attain.

  The next day I go to Mrs. Ornage’s house, the old French piano teacher, and tell her I’ve decided to surf more, so I won’t be coming to any more lessons. She sits with her back very straight, playing a small song on the piano, smiling faintly.

  “Yes,” she says, “maybe you will be better at this surfing than you are in piano. It is important to do something that you are good at.”

  That week I also quit flute and tennis.

  * * *

  My father doesn’t spend much time at the house anymore. Even on weekends he plays tennis, then goes to the hospital to catch up on paperwork. On weekdays he works later and later. One day my mother corners him as he leaves, smelling of cedar soap, carrying a tennis bag and a change of clothes. My mother turns to Jim, laughing and whispering, like one of the girls at school.

  “Your father is playing a lot of tennis these days. They say he has a great serve, and a good lob.”

  Jim stays quiet, not sure what she means. My father sighs.

  “Sandy, we have a truce, remember?”

  My mother pushes. “We’re moving to Blaine, remember? That was my deal.”

  My father stands his ground. He avoids looking at Jim; his answer is very slow and precise. “I can’t move to rural Minnesota, I have a good job here.”

  My mother’s eyes are grim, but she smiles. “Well, Jim, it might be you and me then,” she tells my brother, looking at my father. “You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

  Jim looks out the window, nods his head.

  I stay up late, tossing and turning, unable to sleep. Then I go to Jim’s room, wake him up. I ask him if he’d really go to Minnesota.

  “We’re not really moving,” he says, letting me climb in. “We just have to let Dad know I’m on her side.”

  “How come you hate Dad so much?” I say. “He sure wishes you didn’t.”

  Jim says my father is really bad news, he’s sneaky, and he hurts my mother’s feelings for no reason. “Mom’s told me a lot of things about him,” he says. “Really bad things.”

  Then he whispers that my father has millions of girlfriends, my mother found evidence—the seats in his car smell like Chanel perfume and my father isn’t at the hospital when she calls late at night. Plus he comes home smelling like wine and garlic.

  I laugh. I tell Jim there’s no way our father would have a girlfriend.

  “Besides, Mom is bigger, she could hit him,” I say.

  “Normal women don’t hit people, Medina.” Then Jim looks at me. “Besides, Mom would never lie to me.”

  * * *

  Snooping around, I find a picture of my parents just before they married. They are running in the streets of downtown Chicago, a model and a young doctor. My mother smiles as she runs, dark glasses and a flash of enamel teeth. She looks stunning in a white sweater fitted close to her slim body, a set of pearls around her neck. My father wears a black cardigan along with a pair of terrible red golf pants. As they run, they touch shoulders, but their arms are free. They look contemptuously into the lens, but they are happy. They are two people entering the long run, with a wedding ring and a dream.

  * * *

  My dad comes down to the beach while Jim and I are out. He sits on the sand, wearing a visor and tennis shorts. I wave to him from across the water, but Jim ignores him.

  I try to surf extra good, but my fins keep getting stuck in the kelp bed, so my board slides out from under me. Kelp can grow a foot a day, and it can be pretty creepy to paddle through it when it’s high.

  Jim wipes out twice. “Dad’s bringing bad luck,” he says. Then he tells me he’s leaving. But instead of riding straight in, he paddles all the way out and across, to the public cliff stairs, half a mile from our house.

  My father watches him go, looking very small, scooping up handfuls of sand and letting them run through his fingers.

  After a few more waves, I ride in and sit next to my father. I tell him I don’t usually surf so badly; I explain about kelp, how hard it is to paddle through. My father nods, tracing a circle in the sand with his toe. He asks why Jim won’t talk to him anymore. I fib a little, telling him Jim didn’t want to come in through the kelp bed, so he paddled farther to avoid it.

  In the orange smoggy air, I see flecks of sand stuck to the wet tracks on my father’s face just under his sunglasses. I’ve never seen him cry before.

  My father puts his arms around me. He tells me kelp is good because it makes most of the oxygen in the world. I nod, fee
ling very sad.

  “See,” he says, his voice catching a little. “There’re a few things I know.”

  Then I ask him why he and my mother fight so much.

  “There’re a lot of things I don’t know,” he says.

  * * *

  “Look at your famous father,” my mother says, showing us a profile of my father in the Palos Verdes Gazette. He is wearing crisp surgeon’s greens, sitting on a white hospital cot, looking at an X ray of a woman’s chest. A blond nurse hovers over him, three orderlies flank his left side like soldiers.

  My mother says she’d like to tell the real truth to the newspapers. “He doesn’t fix hearts, he ruins them.”

  In fact, my father never ruins anything. He has fixed a lot of hearts. Famous hearts.

  While he’s at the hospital, my brother and I like to look at his books. We sneak into his office, and open to page 223—a naked lady page—Jim’s favorite.

  The patient is lying on the operating table. Her breasts are visible, covered with a transparent greenish sheet. But it’s her heart we are supposed to be looking at. A heart that has arrhythmia mita extremis, a rare congenital disease.

  There are three doctors over her with thin, silver knives. One of the doctors has big, bushy eyebrows. This is my father. He is repairing a “collapsed left artery,” the text says, “with the expert concentration of a master surgeon.”

  But my brother isn’t interested in this. He looks at the lady’s breasts and laughs.

  “You’re so gross,” I tell him. “That lady is sick.”

  “Dad’s the one who’s gross. He’s the one who does it.”

  “He’s looking at her heart,” I say. “He doesn’t care about those.”

  Except, in the picture, my father isn’t looking at her heart, exactly. He’s looking at the camera and smiling.

  * * *

  “I thought you might want to look through this catalog, Sandy. There’s so many things you could be good at.” My father is eating breakfast with us for the first time this week. His words sound stiff, rehearsed.

  My mother smiles as she looks at the course titles my father has circled in the community-college handbook: Art History: The Impressionists from Seurat to Van Gogh, or Yoga, Find Inner Peace!, or the one she laughs at, Summer Gardens: What You Should Know About Drought Tolerance.

  “I already know about drought tolerance, Phil,” she says.

  * * *

  There’s a lot of things you have to know if you don’t want to be x’d out with the Bayboys. Your hair has to be a plain crewcut, or long and feathered like Skeezer’s. You have to wear tan or black boardshorts, the extra-large kind that come to your knees. I wear boy’s boardshorts, because most girl’s bathing suits are weird, either too lacy or very skimpy. Some of the guys think it’s funny that I wear trunks.

  One time Andy Aaron is reading Surfer magazine at the cliffs, when he holds up a full-page ad of a busty girl in a bikini kneeling on the sand.

  “How about them apples,” he says, waving the magazine around, howling like a dog. Suddenly the rest of the guys are howling, too, panting and beating their chests like gorillas.

  Skeezer calls out to me, “Hey, Medina, why don’t you ever wear a bikini like that?”

  Blood rises to my face, but I laugh and pretend to go along with the joke. He asks again, walking over to me, “Why not, Medina? A nice yellow string bikini?”

  “Bikinis are stupid,” I say. “Besides, it would fall down in the first big wave.”

  “It would fall down anyway,” Skeezer says, running his hand up and down in front of my chest, indicating a flat board.

  When I don’t say anything, he draws up his shoulders and smirks.

  “Oh, you’d look all right in a bikini.” He slaps me on the back. “Don’t be so sensitive.”

  I smile but don’t look at him. Later I cut him off and snare his beautiful ride on a good three-footer.

  “Don’t be so sensitive,” I say when he shakes his fist at me.

  But it’s not just hair and swim trunks, there’re other unspoken rules. P.V. surfers never wear colored wet suits, or anything bright or modern, no neon. They only wear black wet suits, holes patched with duct tape, discolored with resin stains. They have one- or two-fin boards. They don’t ride squirrelly, stupid, tricky tri-fins, and don’t like anyone who does.

  Secretly, I don’t care that much what anyone wears. I don’t even care if they surf in sopping wet Levis like some Vals do. For me, the only thing that’s sad is watching people go to work in their suits and ties.

  It feels so great to walk away and go surfing.

  * * *

  My mother is reading a book by a famous TV psychologist who says most of a person’s personality traits are in their genes when they’re born. She tells Jim I was born with the same sneaky gene that my father has, that’s why we’re in cahoots, ganging up against her all the time.

  “Mom says you and Dad are alike,” Jim says thoughtfully. “She knows you have secrets with him.”

  I tell him it isn’t true. My stomach twists around, the way it always does when Jim gets nervous about me.

  “No women like you. The towel girls hate you, too.”

  “They shouldn’t,” I say. “I don’t even talk to them.”

  “That’s just it. You don’t talk to anyone but me. You go around giving people creepy stares all the time.”

  I tell him I don’t feel comfortable around anyone but him.

  He sighs. “I just want you to be normal. I’m tired of defending you to everyone.” Then he tells me to forget it, I wouldn’t understand.

  Even though I offer to give him my new Surfer magazine, he doesn’t respond.

  Instead he says he wishes I were different, sometimes.

  * * *

  My brother and I are in my parents’ bathroom brushing our teeth, because our own sink is stopped up with dog shampoo and fur. Jim is in a really bad mood because my mother was crying all night, and he had to go sleep in her room. Quickly he rifles through my father’s rows and rows of vitamins.

  “I dare you to take these,” he says, pouring out nine bright pink capsules of niacin into his hand.

  “What are they?” I ask suspiciously.

  “Just vitamins, from Dad’s shelf.”

  “If they were just vitamins, you wouldn’t be laughing,” I say.

  “Don’t be a pussy, just swallow them, they aren’t gonna kill you.”

  “If it hurts, I’ll kick your ass,” I say.

  “Oh, you will?” He is punching me, knocking the wind out of me, bending over my face like a hippo. “Kick it then, kick my ass, big mouth,” he says.

  I lie on the tile stunned, trying to breathe. He leans in close, looking very strange, angrily pushing the pills in my face.

  “Go on, tough girl, or are you scared?” He flaps his arms like a chicken’s wings, clucking, “Bok bok bok.” His eyes are bugged out, sweaty hair stuck to his forehead.

  I grab the pills from his hand and swallow them, my eyes closed.

  Within minutes my face is flushed bright red, my palms and feet are itching like crazy, my heart is pounding too fast. I am gasping for air. “How come you made me do that, Jim? I thought we were best friends.”

  “Oh, man,” my brother says, dropping down next to me, hugging me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  And then I’m comforting him, trying to stop him from bashing his head against the floor.

  * * *

  Orky and Corky are trained whales at Marineland, the big sea aquarium near our house. Orky knows how to do back flips and dance to the Donna Summer song called “I Feel Love.” They are both very talented and famous. They’ve been on TV at least six times.

  But one day Cami Miller pins me down after class and calls my mother Orky. I try to stay calm, but she keeps pinching at me, telling me how ugly I am. I punch her in the side of the jaw until she cries. I say, “I dare you to say that again.”

  “Orky, Orky, fat as a whale
, gross as a snail,” Cami says, scratching at me. I punch her hard in the stomach. “Your mother is so gross,” she says, “such a whale.” I pull her hair until it comes away in my hand, and then shove it in her gagging mouth. The principal suspends both of us from school for three days.

  My father comes to my room and says, “I’m going to have to ground you this time. Your mother’s very upset.”

  I tell him how everyone at school makes fun of her, I tell him they call her Orky and make whale noises at me when I walk through the halls. My father turns very red. A vein pops out, pulsating on his neck.

  “From now on, Medina, if the kids call your mother Orky, just pop them one in the nose for me.”

  I start to laugh and say, “That’s what I did. I got suspended.”

  “You’ve got to be smarter next time,” he says. “Wait until after school.”

  * * *

  After school the sky is white. The air crackles like hot paper. The annual heat wave came early, in the middle of winter, just before the big waves started to hit. I’m still grounded from surfing.

  I’m hosing off my surfboard, talking to the ancient Japanese gardener as he soaks the dying spider orchids with a watering can. When my board is clean and cool, I begin to wax it, explaining how to stroke it from one end to the other with a bar of coconut oil so it leaves behind a small residue of film.

  “That way you don’t slip off when it’s wet,” I tell him.

  The gardener smiles, uncomprehending, wiping small beads of sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. He nods his head as he kneels in the bush, ripping away parched leaves with his fingers.

  I’m sharing with him in detail all the different kinds of surf wax—the kinds made with pure coconut and the inferior kinds cut with animal fat. I put the board to his nose and he laughs and says, “No, no … busy right now.”

  I push. “Come on, it’s just coconut. Just smell it a little.”

  There is a tap at the window. A rap, klonck, klonck, and a voice that is girlish and sweet.

  “Medinaaa,” my mother calls, “I want you to come in now. Nooow.” She wiggles her fingers at me and then pounds three times on the glass.