The Summer of Naked Swim Parties

by Blau, Jessica Anya.

  “The females are laying eggs in the sand,” Flip said, “and the males are, like, jumping on the females and fertilizing the eggs.” He sounded so smart that Jamie was swooning.

  “But if their eggs are in the sand,” she said, “how come they’re jumping on the females?”

  “Just for fun probably,” Flip laughed, and Jamie laughed, too. “No, really, I think the girls aren’t strong enough to get out of those, like, pits they dig, so they’re, like, totally stuck, you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then the boys totally don’t care. They just spew it out all over the place.”

  The word spew made Jamie blush; it seemed too intimate.

  And then the honk of Betty’s laugh sounded out like a fog horn. It was growing, moving toward Jamie and Flip like an ambulance in traffic. Jamie looked up and saw her mother tumbling down the beach. Betty puffed in and out on a joint that was wedged in her mouth as she swooped down on a grunion and tossed it into the green plastic bucket dangling in her hand. Leon was right beside her. He mumbled something into Betty’s ear that made her laugh so hard she had to pull the joint from her mouth and bend over her knees as if she were vomiting.

  Jamie considered turning away before they saw her, but then, with the wishful thought that Flip might become her boyfriend, she figured it was better to introduce him then, lest he meet Betty at the house later, remember seeing her, and wonder why Jamie never said anything.

  “Mom!” Jamie said.

  Betty looked up, startled, still smiling. “What are you doing here?”

  “Didn’t Dad tell you I might come?”

  “No.”

  “This is Flip.”

  “I thought you had a date tonight with that high school boy Renee has a crush on.”

  Jamie felt like she was hanging upside down, blood rushing from her feet to her head.

  “Nice to meet you Mrs. . . . eh.” Flip took a step forward, his hand jutting out to be shaken, when Betty passed him the joint.

  “What happened to your date?” Betty asked.

  Flip took a hit off the joint, then turned to Jamie and lifted his eyebrows to see if she wanted some. She waved the joint away as casually as her shaking hand would allow. As much as her parents had smoked pot in front of her, Jamie had never imagined that she would smoke pot in front of them. That would be like kissing in front of them, an act a child is naturally inclined to not do with her parents present. Flip extended his arm across Jamie and passed the joint to Leon.

  “Betty,” Leon said, “I think this is Jamie’s date.”

  “Really?!” Betty laugh-honked. “So how was it?” Jamie was on the verge of tearing up with embarrassment when Flip started laughing.

  “Totally awesome!” he said. “We went to the movies and had a picnic dinner.”

  Allen and Lois caught up to the group. They each had a bucketful of fish compared to the single fish slouching limply in Betty’s bucket and Leon’s hollow empty bucket.

  “Sweetheart!” Allen said. “How was your date?” Flip laughed again and said, “I think she’s still on it.”

  “Fred, right?” Allen asked.

  “Flip,” Jamie said. Flip couldn’t talk because the joint had been passed to him again and he was sucking another slow, deep inhale.

  Lois was alternately watching Jamie and Flip. Her mouth was zippered shut, almost puckering. She and Leon didn’t have kids and Jamie always suspected it was because they didn’t like kids, as neither one had ever paid particular attention to her or Renee. But just then, as Jamie stood next to Flip, she thought that maybe Lois, who had to go home with balding, loose-skinned Leon, might, instead, be jealous.

  “Come see our sunken living room!” Betty blurted while Lois rolled her eyes.

  The sunken living room was a giant pit that Allen and Leon had dug into the sand. They carved it out so that there was a built-in sand bench—a cold, damp circular seat. There was also a carved stairway with three steps, so one didn’t have to jump straight into the pit. Jamie jumped anyway, and so did Flip. Betty jumped, too, and for a second Jamie feared she was going to tumble onto Flip’s lap, but she caught herself.

  “Why do we bother with the steps when no one uses them?” Allen said, stepping down into the pit. “What kind of schmucks are we?”

  “I like the steps,” Lois said, and she gingerly stepped down with Leon following.

  Flip sat next to Jamie on the bench, their bodies touching from the shoulder down. Jamie wondered if her parents noticed or cared that a seventeen-year-old boy’s thigh was ironed against her own. Betty lit up another joint and she, Allen, Leon, and Lois immediately launched into a conversation that sounded to Jamie like all their conversations, talking emphatically about things that didn’t interest her: politics, the economy, books she hadn’t yet read, movies she had yet to see. It was as if Flip and Jamie weren’t even there, yet there was a sense that, unlike the past when Jamie might have been shooed away or told to scram, she was now allowed to be there. Somehow, because of her one date with Flip Jenkins, Jamie’s parents had decided that she was grown up enough to sit in their circle and smoke their pot, which Leon kept handing her and which she continually passed off to Flip.

  At three in the morning, Flip drove Jamie home with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right hand on her knee. Betty and Allen were driving in front them, going well below the speed limit on the empty, slick road.

  “You can always tell who the high drivers are ’cause they go so, so slow.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jamie leaned forward in her seat and watched the red brake lights of her parents’ Volvo beam on as Allen glided into a stop at a light. A flash of worry lit up her brain as Jamie imagined the slow-moving car as a perfect target for a speeding drunk—a tin can through which a bullet would effortlessly fly.

  “Your parents are totally cool,” Flip said. “That was, like, the best date I’ve been on in a long, long time.”

  “Really?” Jamie’s worry vanished as she turned to Flip.

  “Yeah, totally.”

  “What’s the worst date you’ve ever been on?”

  “Uh . . .” Flip lifted his hand from Jamie’s knee and scratched his nose. “I guess this girl from San Marcos High. She, like, told me she loved me and started crying, like, from love, you know?”

  “That’s intense.”

  “Yeah, it was totally intense. And the weird thing is, I thought I was in love with her until the moment that happened.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Jamie said, but what she could really see was that she herself was falling so hard for Flip Jenkins that she could imagine crying over it. The urge to be with him was suddenly stronger than any urge she had ever had before: sleep, or food, or a need to use a bathroom.

  “So, beach tomorrow?” Flip asked. They were parked in the driveway behind Allen and Betty, who had already gone into the house.

  “I’ll be there with Tammy and Debbie.”

  “How do you get there?”

  “One of our moms drops us off, usually.”

  “I’ll pick you guys up.”

  “Really?” This, more than anything, seemed like proof that the date had gone well. Flip must not have been comparing her to Rachel Welch, Jamie thought; he couldn’t have minded the Disney reference, and her parents must not have seemed like burnouts.

  “I’ll call you in the morning as soon as I wake up. We could, like, go before lunch.”

  “Cool.” Jamie tried to contain her smile. Everyone at the beach would see her climbing out of the front seat of Flip Jenkin’s VW bus. It was a scene she had never dared to imagine—and before she could conjure up the infinite ways it could go wrong (Flip forgetting to pick her up, Flip changing his mind about her, Jamie suddenly struck with car sickness on the ride to the beach, etc.) Jamie boldly kissed Flip flat on the mouth until it felt as if she had suckled from him a blissful mindlessness.

  4

  Flip came with friends. He came to the beach with friends, he came
to the movies with friends, he came to Jamie’s house with friends. He was only one beer in a six-pack that was permanently bound by a rubber neck cuff. All his friends were cute, surfers, almost interchangeable in their cool-dude drawl, tawny skin, and disregard for hair-combing, shirts, shoes, glasses, jewelry, and anything that didn’t hang on them like skin.

  Betty liked seeing Flip’s friends in the kitchen. She cooked for them, talked to them, laughed at their jokes. By the second week of Jamie’s dating Flip, Betty had yet to walk into the kitchen without a shirt, although she had come fairly close: once wearing a sheer tank top with no bra, and once wearing a loose, diaphanous strappy dress with the arms cut down so low one could see half her breast from the side. Jamie was so relieved that there had been no half-nudity that she never dared mention it to her mother for fear that a recognition of this good service would jinx it and bring it to an end. No one ever spoke to Jamie about her mother’s breasts, but Flip told her, in private, that every one of his friends had a mad, sexual crush on Betty. Jamie was strangely flattered by this thought and, naturally, repulsed.

  With his friends eating Irish oatmeal or quesadillas that Betty cooked up, Flip and Jamie often snuck off to the record room on the pretense of changing the music. Closed up in there, they’d make out or grope for as long as was reasonably possible. Betty was so enthralled with her high school admirers that Jamie and Flip often managed to escape for forty minutes, seemingly without having been missed.

  Unlike Betty, Allen was uninterested in Flip and his friends. He walked though the kitchen, or by the pool when they were swimming, and looked them over as if he were surprised to see them, as if they were foreigners whose every motion was odd to him. And he never got anyone’s name right, stumbling—Chip, er, uh, Fritz—even when he was talking to Flip.

  Tammy and Debbie were mixed into this group, of course. They each dated a couple of Flip’s friends and usually developed crushes on anyone who showed an interest in them.

  One day, the boys wanted to go surfing at Hollister Ranch, a private beach about forty miles away. Debbie couldn’t go because her mother wanted her home for supper, and Tammy couldn’t go because they had Family Night at her church.

  Jamie didn’t want to sit on the beach alone while the boys surfed, so she stayed back with Debbie and Tammy. Allen and Betty were at the nude beach and Renee was still at Outward Bound, so the girls met up at Jamie’s house.

  Lying on towels beside the pool, they dribbled baby oil on one another’s bodies to increase the intensity of their tans, drank warm Tab that Tammy brought over, read Seventeen magazine, and ate carob almonds out of the glass canister Betty used to store what she considered snack food.

  Tammy slipped onto a raft and floated off in the pool.

  “Hand me the carob,” she said, and Jamie placed the open glass container on Tammy’s brown belly.

  Debbie was facedown on her towel, reading, her suit untied in the back to prevent a tan line. Jamie shook out her towel to get rid of carob crumbs, then lay on her belly and looked out at the pool, at the magenta flower beds tucked here and there around the pool, at the sky that was so blue and flat and solid-looking that it resembled an endless taut balloon.

  “Isn’t everything perfect?” Jamie said.

  “Huh?” Tammy tossed some carob almonds in her mouth.

  Debbie turned the page of her magazine.

  “Everything’s perfect,” Jamie said. “I mean, we’re young, there’s nothing wrong with any of us—you know, no deformities or anything, no acne, we’re smart enough—no one’s failing school—we’re super-tan, I mean, we’re like as tan as you can be without passing into a different race—”

  “I’m darker than Lupe,” Tammy said.

  “She is,” Debbie said. “Lupe was, like, scrubbing the top of the stove yesterday and Tammy came in and was standing beside her and their arms were side by side and I swear, Tammy was darker than Lupe.”

  “And I’m blond,” Tammy said. “How many people are as dark as a Mexican but are blond?”

  “Mexicans who dye their hair,” Jamie said.

  “Mexicans don’t dye their hair,” Debbie said.

  “Wait, let me say why our lives are so perfect.”

  “Okay, so we’re tan,” Debbie said.

  “And we don’t really have to do anything, I mean, we’re not like those kids who have to work in factories sewing on buttons, or like Lupe’s daughter who helps Lupe out at Tammy’s house all the time. . . . I mean, really, we just have to show up for dinner every now and then.”

  “I have to go to church,” Tammy said. She paddled the raft, with her one free hand, toward the edge of the pool where Jamie and Debbie lay.

  “But you love church,” Debbie said.

  “It’s not that I love it,” Tammy said, “it’s just that I think it’s good to go. I think my parents are right in making us go. I mean, God wants me there, so how can I say no?”

  “And then there’s Flip,” Jamie went on as if Tammy hadn’t spoken, “I mean, like, I love him. He’s so dang cute and he said he loves me and that’s like the best feeling in the world, like better than thinking that God loves you or your parents love you or your sister loves you. . . . It’s just better than everything.”

  “I need a boyfriend,” Tammy said.

  “Me too,” Debbie said.

  “And I need darker lips,” Tammy said, rubbing her bottom lip with her index finger. “I hate how pale my lips are.”

  “Put on lip gloss,” Debbie said.

  “Yeah, but it, like, comes off when I go swimming. I want to come out of the ocean, and, like, walk toward everyone on the beach and have my lips perfectly rose-colored. You know, like yours.” Tammy turned her head toward Debbie.

  “My coloring is French,” Debbie said. “All French women have these really dark lips.”

  “Get waterproof lipstick,” Jamie said.

  “Lipstick is for old ladies,” Tammy said. “And they don’t make waterproof gloss. You know, it really upsets me sometimes. I, like, come up from a wave and my hair might be scooped back just so and I’ll have on the best suit, like that white one with ties on the sides, but then I know that I look all washed-out because my lips are so pale!”

  “Okay, so with the exception of pale lips, your life is perfect,” Jamie said.

  “No,” Tammy said, “I need a boyfriend.”

  “Go for Brett,” Jamie said. “Flip said he’s so in love with you that he’s intimidated. If you wanted him, he could be your boyfriend tomorrow.”

  “When did Flip say that? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did, I told you last night.”

  “I don’t remember you telling me anything last night.”

  “Maybe I just meant to tell you but forgot.”

  “Go for it,” Debbie said.

  “Brett’s hot,” Tammy said. “I thought he didn’t like me.”

  “He loves you,” Jamie said. “You just have to let him know you’re interested.”

  “I think I love Jimmy,” Debbie said. She had gone on three dates with him and it seemed to be developing into something.

  “You should love Jimmy, he’s, like, the nicest guy I’ve ever met,” Jamie said. And she meant it. Jimmy asked questions when you talked to him; he didn’t just make jokes or quips. Jimmy opened doors. Jimmy helped Betty clear the counter. Jimmy actually went to La Cumbre Plaza with his mother and retarded twenty-eight-year-old brother (who drooled and held Jimmy’s hand) and wasn’t embarrassed to run into friends. Jimmy’s eyes were so huge and brown you’d think you could dip a finger into them and taste them.

  “I bet Jimmy’s a Christian,” Tammy said. “He reminds me of the boys at church except he’s got white sun streaks in his hair and he doesn’t have acne and he surfs.”

  “Jimmy Golden?” Debbie said. “Isn’t Golden Jewish or something?”

  They both looked at Jamie.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “My dad’s the only Jewish person I know.”<
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  Tammy put the glass canister on the tile, then dove off the raft and swam underwater. Debbie stood, tied her suit in the back, and dove in. Jamie was too sun-drunk to stand, so she rolled, as if she were rolling down a grass hill, across the tile until she tumbled into the pool. When she came up, Tammy and Debbie were laughing.

  It didn’t take long for Debbie and Jimmy to become an official couple. And once Tammy turned her full attention to Brett, they were a couple, too (a consortium that allowed Tammy the guiltless freedom to pause and then quickly advance from each of the stations of sexual exploit). And so Flip’s gang of many became a gang of three as Flip, Brett, and Jimmy passed the summer days with Jamie, Tammy, and Debbie.

  Jamie had a romantic fantasy that had persisted since she was eight years old and had watched a teenage couple make out on the Pinocchio boat ride at Disneyland. She wanted to go to Disneyland with a boyfriend; she wanted to sit cozy, pressed against his lap on the Jungle Cruise, hold his hand, and maybe even sing along on Small World, or kiss in the darkness of the General Electric Theater. When Jamie learned that Debbie had a similar fantasy, they were both astounded. When she heard that Flip, Brett, and Jimmy were enthusiastic about the idea of a day at Disneyland, Jamie felt that her already lovely life was becoming so painfully good that guilt for her sister’s chaste life slipped under her skin like splinters you’d need a magnifying glass to find.

  Brett’s father gave him the mobile home for the trip to Disneyland—he even filled it with gas. Brett went to the driver’s cushy, loungelike seat. Tammy sat right beside him in her cushy, loungelike seat. Jamie looked at them and imagined Tammy thirty five years old, the mother of two clean, towheaded kids, wife of someone less like Brett and more like Brett’s big-bellied, Ken-doll-haired father. Flip slouched into the booth seat at the table, picked up the brick-sized, beige remote control, and clicked on the TV.

  “Reception’s no good here,” Brett’s dad said, leaning into the doorway. “Wait till you get on the San Diego Freeway and you’ll be able to pick up channel eleven in L.A.”