The First and Second Time
ROSIE AND HER FATHER sat at a picnic table facing a man-made pond in Tee Winkle Park. Earlier, he’d watched her tennis match at the high school and she still wore her uniform. The ducks waddled to the pond, dunked their feet, and then floated across the water’s surface, creating ripples. This safe, generic park was his preferred site for Big Talks.
“Your body is a temple,” he said, leaning forward with his hands pressed together, fingers creating a steeple; she thought he looked sincere. They were polite and reserved in each other’s company. “And your job is to stay a virgin for that one special man you will marry.” His face came up, punctuating his declaration with a steady gaze. She read the look of disappointment in his eyes, and he must’ve seen it in hers—they both looked away. Two Sundays ago, after a church service, he’d given her a painfully comprehensive version of this same monologue, complete with Bible passages endorsing his position, and he appeared to be making one last abbreviated attempt.
Rosie was fifteen, and her sexual experience consisted of kissing and fondling (buffered by clothing), but she was on fire with curiosity. She’d learned about sex through word of mouth and the occasional Playboy. As a child, she’d invented Baby, whereby she’d powdered and diapered—with a dishtowel—a fellow male playmate’s “private area” and then the procedure was reciprocated. When she got her period at twelve, B had a sketchy sex talk with her because she was “officially a woman.” And although she was aware of the shame and disgrace that B’s sex life had wrought, she was also aware of the payoffs: “Sex can be wonderful,” B had told her, “if it’s with the right person.” But in her observation, men had power, and it appeared that the most power women had was through their ability to obtain men.
And how could she be made for just one man? She wanted options. Grandma Dot had been married forever to Grandpa, and all that did was ensure her a life of cooking, cleaning, and serving. Grandma Dot, while ironing one of Grandpa’s shirts, had even said, “Don’t ever become like me.”
Her father extracted a cracker package from the side pocket of his Members Only jacket. He fiddled with the wrapper, breaking a saltine and throwing the pieces on the grass near his feet. “Why does everything have to change,” he said in an uncharacteristic flare of self-pity, shaking his head, “when all I want is for things to stay the same?”
A wave of tenderness swept over her: he would often tell her nostalgic stories about the fifties, and she knew that what he craved was simplicity, clear answers, what she imagined as men coming home from work wearing pressed slacks and ties, briefcases at their sides, their wives in flowered dresses with aprons, cocktails in their hands, waiting by the front doors. Qualities that he had successfully spent his life burying were already beginning to bloom in her, namely defiance.
“It’s okay,” she said.
The ducks approached cautiously, waddling in a roundabout way to the cracker pieces, eyeing them, making grunting noises—not quack quack—more like unngh unngh. In the distance, people walked dogs and rode bicycles. There was the pong sound of tennis balls from nearby courts.
She saw an old wisp of a man stooped in a wheelchair, blanket across his lap. A brown-skinned woman stood behind him with her hands at the wheelchair. They were on the other side of the pond, but she could see the man was smoking a fat cigar—puffs of hazy smoke.
“What a shame,” her father said, squinting in the same direction. “He shouldn’t be smoking.” He looked at Rosie for confirmation, but she imagined the caretaker allowing the man this final indulgence, and her father stared down at his loafers.
She had a sinking feeling. If only she could be like Kristen Johnson. It was a recurring yearning, but a fundamental impossibility. And besides, she didn’t really want to be Kristen Johnson; she just longed to please her father. The Johnsons were her father’s friends. Kristen Johnson was demure with blond hair and blue eyes, near Rosie’s age, and her father always compared Kristen to her—i.e., Kristen Johnson is a cheerleader. Kristen Johnson is in the church choir. Kristen Johnson is saving herself for marriage. Kristen Johnson is the leader of her Bible study group. Her father would point Kristen out in the choir. “There’s Kristen. Do you see her?” “I see her,” she would reply, watching Kristen’s pink mouth open in song, hands crossed modestly at her front, and she would hate Kristen for being the daughter her father would never have.
Rosie had once been Daddy’s little princess. Before the divorce, her father had slept in the guest room on the foldout sofa bed. Above the sofa was a crudely drawn picture of ice skaters. Her room was next to this room, and often her father would climb into her bed, on top of her beige silk comforter.
He would fall asleep easily. She never got accustomed to having her father’s adult-sized body in her bed, and she would not sleep. It made her feel weird, as if she was the wife and not the daughter, but she would let him stay because she knew he was desperately lonely.
She would become hyperaware of his breathing, the way it would develop into a snore, counting the seconds between her breaths and his long breaths. She would try to time her breaths to his, but she could not.
He had hair on his arms; his lips parted when he fell asleep; a scar divided his left eyebrow; his mustache brushed against his top lip; his face relaxed. Eventually, he would stir and turn, curling into a fetal position. She would move her body if his arm or leg touched.
Always, he would wake, startled by one of his more resonant snores, or for no predictable reason. She would pretend to be asleep. She didn’t want him to feel guilty about keeping her awake.
Sometimes, smelling of moist sleep, his lips would touch her cheek, his mustache brushing against her skin. He always returned to the sofa bed. She would feel relief when he left, although she would curl into the warm spot his body had created on her bed, and finally drift to sleep.
The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” played at low volume on the car stereo, and Rosie knew that her father wasn’t changing the station because she liked the song. The first time he’d heard it, he’d said to the radio, “You should go!,” and she half expected him to repeat this, because he’d made her laugh; but he was silent, their goodbye tinged with resignation and sorrow. When they arrived at her house, he got out of his Buick to come around and hug her. She knew he was anxious, hoping not to see B and Will, since Will was the man B had The Affair with and he hated them both.
“I still have to pack,” she said, to distract him.
“How do you pack for a yacht?” he said, with his fake British accent. Rosie had been invited for a weekend trip to Catalina Island with her friend Isabella and Isabella’s parents on their yacht, The Golden Eagle.
When they hugged, they were conscious of her breasts. It was difficult to hug without letting her breasts touch him. She arched her upper back so that her breasts caved inward. She noticed that he hunched his back as well.
While her father pretended her breasts did not exist, when she and her friend Chris hung out at the Peninsula or at the beach, other men offered vocal confirmation of their existence—whistles and hoots and pleas to just let them see. Recently, a marine had bought them a twelve-pack of Michelob—all they had to do was lift their tops; she’d followed Chris’s lead, but hadn’t ventured further the way Chris had, by pulling up her bra as well. Breasts, she believed, were powerful tools.
She stopped hugging her father first, hands dropping to her sides. His cheerfulness was usually tinged with hostility, but this time his smile was covered in grief, and she smiled back, exactly the same.
“Come on,” Isabella said, when Rosie arrived. “I made chocolate chip cookies.” Rosie followed her to the kitchen, where Isabella held a cookie to her own nostrils and inhaled noisily. Isabella was pretty—long brown hair, round face, moon eyes, and gentle features—but in a way not recognized by Newport standards. Her body was naturally inclined toward softness and curves, and she was at war with it. Rosie was used to Isabella denying herself
the satisfaction of consumption, instead cooking and smelling forbidden food products: brownies, cakes, cookies, fudge.
Whenever Rosie came over, she rode the elevator because Isabella had an elevator in her house. There were antique vases, chandeliers, and Isabella’s mom, Mrs. Leer, lurked about, noticing lint on the carpet, a lamp not in place, a painting improperly slanted. Rosie pressed a button, and they rode to the third floor. The doors opened—she pressed another button, the doors closed, and they descended.
Mrs. Leer waited at the bottom floor so that when the mirrored doors opened, she said, “That’s enough,” in her French accent, her foot against the door. When any type of heightened emotion engaged Mrs. Leer, she spoke French. “Allons-y,” she said.
Isabella apologized. She was keen on pleasing her mother, and Rosie was sorry for her: pleasing Mrs. Leer was on par with walking on the moon. Mr. Leer—a squat man who didn’t talk much—walked past them toward the sliding glass doors, Rosie’s suitcase tucked under his arm.
Just once, accidentally, Isabella had seen her younger half brother and half sister. Mr. Leer gave money to keep the children away. She had told Rosie about it in a hushed voice, even though they were the only ones in Isabella’s bedroom: “They were waiting in a car, I saw them from my window . . . a little girl and a little boy . . . so cute. Daddy wrote a check to a woman . . .”
Isabella’s willingness to toe the line came from her understanding that her legitimacy was a matter of luck; she didn’t want to fuck up her good fortune and be Daddy-less; although Rosie’s secret belief was that it wasn’t purely luck: Mr. Leer was afraid of Mrs. Leer—he watched his wife closely, taking his cues from her.
The motor of The Golden Eagle rumbled and the air smelled of gasoline. Mr. Leer untied the ropes from the dock outside their house and then jumped on to the boat. Mrs. Leer had set out wooden bowls of pretzels and mixed nuts on the yacht’s dining table. Mr. Leer wore a captain’s hat, his hands on the spokes of a large steering wheel, guiding the boat out of the dock. Isabella sniffed a pretzel, then inserted it in her mouth and chewed. When Mrs. Leer was looking out the window, Rosie saw Isabella spit the gooey mass into a star-spangled bar napkin and throw it away.
Rosie and Isabella changed into their bathing suits in the master bedroom. They climbed steps that went to the top of the boat, Isabella wearing a blue one-piece. She had a pear-shaped body and wore a towel around her hips when ambulatory, to keep her lower half hidden. Rosie wore her new red bikini; she enjoyed the way she looked when she wore it, the bottom half tied at her hips. She liked her stomach when she sucked it in.
They lay on their towels and watched The Golden Eagle’s wake slicing through the ocean. Seagulls and pelicans swooped and glided with the wind; the ocean looked like brushed dark velvet. They played checkers, read magazines—pages flapping in the wind—and talked about boys. They had a heated argument over debutante balls and the charity league. Most of the tension revolved around Rosie’s ambivalence about attending Isabella’s upcoming debutante ball, Isabella claiming that Chris had unduly influenced Rosie. Isabella and Chris hated each other, and Rosie’s friendship with Chris was a tender subject.
After two hours, Catalina came into focus: they could see individual bushes and trees. The water was aqua colored and the island was hilly and rock laden. Mr. Leer drove past Avalon Bay and anchored The Golden Eagle among the other yachts, near an unpopulated portion of the island. The people on the yachts knew one another; there were welcoming hand waves and hollering hellos. Most came from Newport Beach or Santa Barbara, the cities etched underneath the boats’ names. One yacht was larger than the others and it was anchored near The Golden Eagle: Big Orange. Men wearing T-shirts, with the yacht’s name across the back, polished wood and hosed the deck.
Rosie and Isabella dove into the water from the deck of The Golden Eagle. They jumped; they cannon-balled; they made crazy gestures—this is a crazy person running—midair. After some time had passed, Rosie noticed a man reclined on a lounge chair on the deck of Big Orange, one knee up, wearing blue swim trunks, and watching her with binoculars, an empty drink on the table next to him with what appeared to be a celery stalk in the glass.
He saw that she was looking at him, and he set the binoculars down so that they rested on his chest from a band around his neck. His legs swung to the side, in a sitting position. He waved, although she could see that he was not smiling.
“Who is that?” she asked.
Isabella put both her hands to her forehead, shielding her face from the sun. “Rod likes you,” she said.
They were quiet, staring at Rod while he stared back.
“He’s old,” Isabella said, but she said it like it was a good thing. “His mom and dad let him take the yacht.”
Rod continued to watch them, although Rosie knew that he was really looking at her.
“Do something,” Isabella said.
Rosie stood in her bikini. She did a mock hula dance: hands gesturing, hips swinging. Isabella’s hand was at her mouth, laughing.
“Watch,” Rosie said. She walked to the edge of the deck, toes tipping over. She sucked in her stomach, and her hands went above her head, fingers together—an upside-down V.
She dove—a rush of air—body alert and toes pointed. She caught glimpses: blue sky, the hull of the boat. The salt water stung her eyes, but she opened them anyway, hull bobbing in the water, dreamlike. She went deeper, the water progressively cooler and darker. Her lungs hurt from holding her breath. She somersaulted, kicking her legs so that she was pointed the other direction. She swam toward the surface and the sun made wavy white lines through the water.
She liked the sensation of her head breaking through ocean and coming into air. The water looked bright and sparkly, and she took a deep, appreciative breath, her hair slicked back. She dog-paddled to stay afloat and turned in the direction of Big Orange: Rod was standing near the edge of the deck, as she had hoped, his binoculars right on her.
The Leers were invited to a party/barbecue on the shore, close to the beach, a location with two outdoor barbecue pits and six picnic tables. All the yacht owners and their guests were invited. It was to last all day into the late evening. People drove their small motorboats to the pier and unloaded. Other dinghies docked along the sand.
Rosie and Isabella sneaked Coronas from a cooler, hiding them in their shorts’ pockets, T-shirts untucked and covering the bottles, and found a shaded place to drink, underneath a pier that no one used—white paint peeling off the wood, cracked and falling apart; not too far from the picnic tables, but far enough so that they wouldn’t get caught. But they couldn’t figure out how to get the bottles open. “I thought these twisted off,” Rosie said.
“Oh my God,” Isabella whispered.
Rod approached, two fingers hooked under the plastic of a six-pack of Budweiser. He stooped under the pier. “Thought I might find you,” he said. He wore his blue swim trunks, the ends reached past his knees. A circle of dark hair ringed each nipple, a diamond of hair was at the center of his chest, and he had a slight paunch. He folded his legs to sit with them on the ocean-hardened sand. Attached to his swim trunks was a key ring with a bottle opener. “La cerveza más fina,” he said, opening the Corona bottles and passing them over. Rosie thought he was handsome: a man, not a teenager. His forehead, cheeks, and nose were sunburned, and because he’d been wearing sunglasses, the paler skin around his eyes gave him a startled look. He ignored Isabella, but she didn’t mind. “What’s your name?” he asked.
She told him.
“Rosie, Rosie, Rosie,” he said. She lit up with the sound of her name in his voice. He asked questions—Where do you live? What classes do you like? How old are you? And she answered as cleverly as possible: I don’t like school and I’d quit if I could. How old do you think I am? She showed him her sunburn and he peeled skin from her shoulder.
Twenty minutes later, Rod walked with them to the picnic tables from the pier because Isabella didn’t want her par
ents to worry about her. Everything was arranged buffet-style on two picnic tables underneath an awning: plastic bowls of potato chips and tortilla chips; a stainless-steel bowl filled with strawberries and another with pineapple slices; plastic trays with cupcakes and cookies. The barbecues were large and made of stone, and the men took their grilling duties seriously. Folding chairs stuck out from the sand at the beach. Somebody’s golden retriever fetched a tennis ball from the water: back and forth, back and forth, tail wagging. The tide was low, small waves lapping the sand.
When Rosie had to go to the bathroom, Rod said he would take her. “That’s what happens when you drink beer, young lady,” he said in a mock stern tone. She ran ahead, kicking water at him, and he laughed. “You’re so cute,” he said. Her face warmed even though she wasn’t facing him. The bathrooms were a concrete affair, steel toilet rims, flies circling, and no mirrors. He waited outside. As they walked back, he held her hand briefly and she was awed.
Mr. Leer sat with the others, eating a hot dog. He wore a ridiculous straw hat with a wide brim and it made Rosie fond of him. Isabella was next to her father, glowing with belonging. Rosie would have felt left out, but she didn’t mind because of Rod. He sat next to her, his arm touching hers, and she felt like her throat was being tickled.
The sun was sinking, shadows and coolness, and the sand on the beach looked silvery gray. People pulled on windbreakers and sweatshirts. It smelled like campfire, ocean, and burnt hamburger. Rod poured Heineken into a plastic cup for her, and no one asked what she was drinking. Conversations revolved around real estate, golf, and yacht maintenance, and Isabella played cards with her father. Mrs. Leer drank red wine from a plastic cup, making hand gestures when she spoke. “We plan on visiting Europe this summer for a month or two, with a week in Venice,” she said. “No one should stay long in Venice.”
Drift Page 14
