by Beth Labonte
“We’re at Sunset Havens, Graham. Everybody is having sex with everybody!”
Okay, I may have shouted that last part and now everybody in the vicinity is staring at me—including the ten year old boy who’s been feeding his French fries to the birds. I smile apologetically at his grandmother.
“I didn’t mean you,” I explain to her, which doesn’t seem to help at all.
“Didn’t we already talk about this?” asks Graham. “Why would my dad want to swap my mom? She’s younger and hotter than any of the women here.” He waves his arm around, inadvertently motioning to the grandmother. She shoots us a dirty look before grabbing her grandson and vacating the area.
“Maybe your mom wants to swap your dad,” I whisper. “Did you ever think about that?”
“No,” says Graham, crinkling up his nose. “Who would think about that?”
“Boat’s here!” calls out Babette.
“You are so naive,” I mutter, shaking my head as we walk down the pier.
It’s a pretty relaxing little boat ride, I’ll admit that much. Mom and Dad are the only people over the age of eight wearing life jackets—which is good, because Mom almost fell overboard when the captain threw a rubber alligator into the center of the boat—but other than that, it’s been going well.
“And on the right,” says the captain, “if you look closely, you will see a rare animal that inhabits the shoreline of Lake Fillmore. It’s called the Workus-no-morus.” He points to the happy retirees sitting at the outdoor bar overlooking the water. Everybody on the boat waves. One of them actually snaps a picture.
“And on the left, you will see the remains of a pirate ship sunk back in eighteen seventy-six by Sunset Haven’s own, Benjamin Crawford. Benjamin wasn’t about to let his hometown—Florida’s friendliest hometown,” he gives us all a wink, “—be pillaged and burned by some mean old pirates. No, sir. All by himself, he rolled the Sunset Havens town cannon down to the edge of the water—you can still see that cannon today, inside the T.G.I. Fridays on four forty-one—and he pumped that pirate ship full of iron.”
I roll my eyes.
“A few of those pirates did make it to shore,” he continues, “only to be taken care of by Sunset Haven’s resident alligator...Big Al.” On that note, he once again tosses the rubber alligator into the center of the boat. Mom holds it together this time, giving the captain a smug, fool me once, sort of a look. That’s when he reaches behind his back and flings a rubber octopus onto her lap. Mom screams at the top of her lungs.
I wait until Mom has composed herself, and the captain has taken a break from revising history, to broach the subject that’s still freaking me out.
“So, Babette,” I say, leaning over all casual-like and tapping her on the leg. “What are you up to tonight?”
She glances at John. I glance at Graham. Graham looks at his watch.
“Roger invited us to his house tonight,” she says. “For a swap. I hope you don’t mind. It’s um, grown-ups only!” She giggles and looks at John again.
A swap! It’s really happening. And she’s so open about it!
“Graham and I are adults,” I say. “How come we didn’t get invited to this swap?”
“Oh, you don’t want to spend the night swapping with a bunch of boring old fogies,” she says. “All of our clothes will be thrown around everywhere. It’s nothing you’d be interested in seeing.”
My jaw hits the bottom of the boat.
“And what about you?” I ask Mom. “Are you guys going to this grown-ups only swap?” I air quote the word.
“We were invited.” Mom shrugs. “It would be rude not to.”
“You’re kidding?”
“What? It sounds like fun. I’ll probably just watch anyway. I didn’t bring anything to swap except your father.” She laughs and bats a hand at Dad, as if nobody on Earth would ever be interested in him. She’s got some nerve.
“Dad, you’re okay with this?” I ask, feeling sick to my stomach.
“I have to admit I’m curious about it,” he says. “I’ve seen them do it on TV a few times.”
Oh.
My.
God.
Life as I know it is over. I look over at Graham, satisfied to see that he too looks sufficiently horrified. John seems pretty nonchalant about the whole thing, which is even worse. I mean, is that how he reacts when his wife is...is...ugh, I can’t even say it...being intimate, with another man?
“Excuse me,” I say, standing up and diving off the side of the boat, where I drown, mercifully, in the depths of Lake Fillmore.
Just kidding.
In my mind, I totally jumped. In reality, I dug my nails into Graham’s upper thigh until he pried them out, and then we finished the boat tour in silence.
***
“You know we have to follow them, right?” I ask Graham. I’m lying in bed watching him spike up his hair for the evening. He has this obsessive compulsive kind of ritual. It’s like watching Nomar Garciaparra getting ready to bat. First, he squirts gel into each hand, then he rubs them together—left over right, flip, right over left, flip—then he moves his fingers around his head with an impossible to follow series of twists and yanks and scrunches. Impossible to follow, yet always the same. Then he repeats. By the time he’s done, he looks like a totally hot mad scientist who just rolled out of bed. It helps that I’m sympathetic to neurotic behavior—once again, I appear to be marrying my father—and also a huge fan of Doctor Who. I really should get him a trench coat. And a big blue spaceship.
“Of course we’re following them,” says Graham, putting his bottle of gel down and turning to look at me. “What else would we be doing tonight?”
I smile. “You know, you can’t wear that shirt though, right?”
He glances down at his orange button-up with the neon, pink fish all over it. “What’s wrong with my shirt?”
“It glows in the dark, dummy. You bought it at a glow-in-the-dark gift shop at the airport. We’re going to be hiding in the bushes under the cover of darkness, we can’t have you lit up like a Christmas tree. We need to wear black. And maybe ski masks.”
He raises his eyebrows. “My ski mask is red, and it only covers the lower half of my face because I’m not a cartoon bank robber. Also, I left it back in Massachusetts along with the rest of my ski clothes. Because, you know, Florida.” He motions all around us.
“Okay, smarty, what do you suggest we do?”
“Roger’s house is two streets over,” he says. “I thought we’d just walk there, ring the doorbell, and see what’s up.”
“Oh.”
I suppose that’s one way to do it. One boring way to do it. What happened to the crazy guy I fell in love with? I finally come around to wanting to dress in disguise and hide in the shrubs outside swingers parties, and he shoots me down.
“But what if we walk in on some sort of Eyes Wide Shut situation?” I ask. “I’d rather peek in through the blinds than face it head on.”
“Do you want to be the kind of person who goes through life peeking through blinds?” he asks. “No. If we’re going to spend the next twenty years in therapy, we’re going to do it as a result of something we faced head on. Be brave, Sum.”
“Can’t we be brave tomorrow? We can go BASE jumping or something.”
Graham gives me that look, the one that says At this time tomorrow we can free-fall off a sixteen hundred foot antenna tower if that’s what you would really prefer to do.
“Okay, okay,” I say, quickly. “We walk right in. Then what? Are we going to physically pull them out of there? Like, you’ll grab my parents and throw them over your shoulders? Maybe we should bring tear gas. You know, smoke them out?”
Graham laughs. “You’ve got tear gas?”
“Well, no. But we could buy some. You think they sell it at Publix? On the aisle with the bug spray and the lighter fluid?”
Now he’s giving me another look. He’s really got quite the arsenal. This one is more of a How c
an I marry someone who comes up with such terrible ideas? sort of a thing.
“What about my parents?” he asks. “You can’t expect me to throw all four of them over my shoulders.”
“Who cares about them? This whole thing is their fault. My parents are the innocent ones.”
“Actually, it was your father that said he was excited to go because he’d seen something like it on TV. What do you think he was watching, anyway?”
“Eyes Wide Shut,” I repeat. “I told you. There was probably some mix-up with their Netflix and they got the wrong disc in the mail.”
Graham sits down next to me on the bed and pats me on the thigh.
“Well, Sum. This is what happens when you choose to have your wedding at a retirement community. You don’t have to pick out table linens with your parents, but you do have to consider gassing them out of an over sixty-five orgy. Would you say that it was a fair, um, swap?” He gives me a wink.
I give him a Joan Hartwell look of death, then I reach over and mess up his hair.
17
Roger answers the door shirtless.
I repeat, Roger has answered the door shirtless. I look wide-eyed up at Graham, but he seems relatively unfazed by the sight of Roger’s nipples. Okay, breathe Summer. Men go shirtless all the time. It doesn’t mean anything. Maybe Roger doesn’t have air conditioning, and if he walks around his house in a shirt, he’ll die of heat stroke. Is that what I want? For Roger to die?
Rhetorical question, obviously.
As I try to avoid looking at Roger’s chest, I see Janice walk across the living room in nothing but a bra.
I repeat, Janice is walking around in nothing but a bra.
Well, she does have pants on. And shoes. But on top she’s wearing nothing but a black lacy thing, which is enough for me to begin sounding the alarm.
“Mom? Dad?” I yell, pushing my way into the house. “Are you guys here? Are you okay?”
Oh, dear God, there are clothes everywhere. We’re too late. Pants and skirts are strewn about—some hanging from lamps, others in messy piles on the floor. How many people are at this thing? I see six or seven bras hanging over the back of the couch, and...I can barely say it...an equal number of men’s white briefs, stacked up in the middle of the coffee table. Did they all strip buck naked in the living room and then pile their underwear on the table? Why would they do that? Also, where are they all now? Roger can’t possibly have enough bedrooms for something of this scale.
I take a few staggering steps backward, only to bump into the open door of Roger’s entertainment center. I grab onto it to steady myself, and come face to face with a cardigan sweater that’s been draped over the top. Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no.
I’d know that cardigan anywhere.
“Graham!” I shout, but he doesn’t respond. I look around, but he’s nowhere in sight. Even in a glow-in-the-dark shirt, I can’t manage to find him. I yank the cardigan off the door and start making my way toward the kitchen. With or without Graham, I’m in this now. There’s no turning back. Even if Mom and Dad are in their birthday suits, I still might be able to stop them before they do anything they’re going to regret.
As I continue to look around, I recognize Gil by the sliding glass door, taking off his pants. I see a woman lounging on the couch, dangling a clear, plastic, high-heeled shoe off of one foot. And over there by the bookcase is Gloria, pulling a sweater over her head. They’re all giving me strange looks, too. Like I’m some sort of narc. Which I am. But it’s not like I’m going to call the cops. I just want to grab my parents and go.
“Mom? Dad?” I say again, walking into the kitchen. It looks fairly normal in here. Everybody’s dressed, and there’s a buffet set out on the table. I scan it for suspiciously large amounts of whipped cream or chocolate sauce, but nothing seems out of the ordinary. I suppose they’ve already moved that stuff into the bedrooms, along with the raw oysters. I gag a little.
“Has anybody seen my parents?” I ask random people milling around the kitchen. “One’s got short, black, curly hair, and kind of a grouch face, and the other one looks like he was beamed in from outer space?”
“Summer?” says Mom.
I spin around to find her and Dad standing side by side, holding paper plates full of food.
“Oh, thank goodness,” I say, grabbing the plates out of their hands and dumping them into the trash. “We need to get you out of here.”
“What are you doing?” shrieks Mom. “That was perfectly good potato salad!”
“The potato salad doesn’t matter, Mom. What matters is getting you guys out of here while you’re still dressed!” I start pulling them toward the living room.
“Of course we’re dressed!” says Mom. “We’re not supposed to try anything on while we’re eating.”
I stop in my tracks. Try anything on? I slowly turn around and look at them.
“Try anything on?” I ask.
“Like this,” says Dad, smiling and unzipping his fanny pack. “I swapped one of my own neckties for this one. It’s a Donald Trump!” He proudly unrolls the tackiest necktie I’ve ever seen.
I stare at him, uncomprehending, for several moments. Then I turn and walk back into the living room to take another look at the other guests.
Suddenly everything appears slightly less sinister.
Gil, over there by the sliding glass door, wasn’t taking his pants off—he was trying a pair on. His girlfriend, Lorraine, is standing next to him with her hand on his shoulder, making sure he doesn’t fall over. I look at the woman on the couch. She’s removed the clear plastic stripper shoes, and is trying on a pair of sensible brown Birkenstocks. Gloria, by the bookcase, has a long-sleeved shirt on underneath the sweater that she pulled over her head. And Janice isn’t wearing a bra, she’s wearing a black bikini top (although, there really isn’t enough of a difference between a bra and a bikini top to make me completely comfortable). But at least she’s stepped behind a privacy screen before taking it off.
“You guys have been swapping...clothes?” I ask, walking back into the kitchen.
“There you are, Sum,” says Graham, coming up next to me and putting an arm around my shoulders. “Look what I got.” He’s wearing a yellow, argyle sweater vest.
“They’re swapping clothes, Graham,” I say, shaking Mom’s cardigan that’s still in my hand. “Clothes.”
“I know. I realized it the second we walked in. If you hadn’t taken off like that, I would have told you. I traded my shirt for this cool sweater vest.”
“How?” I ask. “We’ve been here for five minutes!”
Graham shrugs.
“Graham? Summer?” Babette and John walk into the kitchen, drinks in hand, looking at us quizzically. “What are you two doing here? This is a private event for Sunset Swishers!”
“Sunset Swishers?” I ask.
Okay, maybe I did have it right the first time. Don’t they always tell you to trust your instincts? Swingers, swishers, there can’t be much difference. Maybe the clothing swap is just the beginning of it. Maybe Dad has to sleep with the wife of whoever used to own that ugly Donald Trump necktie.
“Haven’t you ever heard of swishing?” asks Babette.
“God, no,” I say. “What kind of websites do you think I visit?”
“It’s all the rage,” she says. “Swishing is when you get together with a group of friends, have a few drinks, some food, and then you—”
I clamp my hands over my ears. Graham pulls them away.
“—swap clothes and assorted household items.”
Oh.
“Nadine told us about it because she used to live in New York,” she continues. “That’s where it originated. It’s very economical for those of us on a fixed income. It’s become so popular that Sunset Swisher events are by invitation only!”
“Roger and I have been trading golf shirts for years,” says John.
Golf shirts. They’ve been trading golf shirts. No wonder John looked so blasé about the w
hole thing.
“So, you guys swap clothes?” I ask. “That’s it? Just clothes?”
“Well, like I said, sometimes we swap household items. But that’s really up to the host. What on earth did you think we were doing?” Babette laughs and takes a sip from her cocktail.
I look at Graham who’s giving me another one of his looks. I’m not sure I’ve seen this one before—both of his eyebrows are raised and his cheeks are kind of puffed out. I’ll take it to mean You’re on your own, sweetheart.
“We, um, we thought you guys were swingers.” I say, simply. “You kept making vague references to swapping things. So, we um, we thought you took my parents to a swingers party.”
“Oy, Richard!” says Mom. “We’re at a swingers party!”
“Did somebody say swingers party?” Roger comes up behind Mom, makes an obscene motion with his hips, and plucks a chicken wing off the buffet table. “Because that’s not until Thursday.” A glob of barbeque sauce drips off the chicken wing and catches in his chest hair.
“Where’s your shirt?” I ask. “Why are you the only one strutting around here like David Hasselhoff?”
Roger clamps the chicken wing between his teeth, holds both hands in the air in a sue me gesture, and walks back into the living room. He returns a moment later wearing Graham’s glow-in-the-dark shirt. Figures.
“Look, Summer,” says Babette. “I’m sorry if you misunderstood me. But, my goodness! John and I would never go to a swingers party, let alone take your parents! Why would you even think that of us?”
Several reasons float through my mind—the excessive drinking, the live-like-there’s-no-tomorrow philosophy embraced by all residents of Sunset Havens, the twinkle in her eye every time she jokes about swingers parties—but I can’t actually say any of those things to my future mother-in-law.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I guess I just let my imagination run away with me.”
“So, we’re good then?” asks Graham, clapping his hands together. “Mystery solved? We should probably get going. Let these good folks get back to their swooshing.”
“Swishing,” says Babette.
