The Summer of Naked Swim Parties (10 page)

She wondered if she were downright prudish, like Tammy’s mother or the women who served coffee at Tammy’s church, for not wanting to try it. But how could she? How could she ever do it without hearing her mother’s voice or feeling her mother’s warm damp rump stuck against her own?

On the third of July, the day before a planned camping trip at El Capitán Beach, Debbie organized a bus trip to Planned Parenthood, where the three girls watched a movie about pregnancy and venereal diseases before being fitted with diaphragms. Tammy had been convinced that the diaphragm wasn’t forbidden by the Bible when Debbie informed her that Lisa Blair, who lately had been trying to recruit Tammy and Debbie for the Christian Fellowship Club, used a diaphragm. Debbie knew this from Jimmy, who had had sex with Lisa several times the previous summer. Tammy begged Debbie and Jamie to choose the diaphragm, too, as she didn’t want to feel like she was the only teenager in Santa Barbara (besides Lisa Blair) who was using one, and they obliged.

The nurse at Planned Parenthood had seemed surprised when Jamie admitted to her that, unlike her friends, she had yet to have intercourse. She instructed Jamie that just because she had the diaphragm didn’t mean she had to start having sex.

“Maybe I’ll put it off until school starts,” Jamie had 
said confidently. “My boyfriend said he’d wait until I was ready.”

What Jamie didn’t tell the nurse was that her two best friends put far more pressure on her than her boyfriend ever did. Debbie and Tammy agreed that if Jamie didn’t have sex with Flip soon, he would go looking for it elsewhere. There were too many girls in town who were ripe and willing, they claimed, so how long, really, would he wait? ( Jamie wondered if Flip had a selfish penis. And then she wondered how she could possibly have sex with someone whose penis aura was similar to, or the same as, her father’s.) Additionally, Tammy and Debbie insisted that by not having sex Jamie was missing out on something as electrifying and intense as love itself.

Flip’s VW bus raised and lowered like a camel as they cruised over speed bumps leading into the beach park. It was while they were going over a bump like that when Jamie said it.

“I’m ready to go all the way.”

“Really?” Flip smiled.

“Definitely. I think.” Yes, yes, yes, Jamie repeated in her head. She was trying to convince herself that if she were to have sex it would be like doubling up the love—folding over the emotion so that it was sandwiched into a more pure and tangy passion.

“On our nation’s two hundredth birthday.”

“Yeah, how cool is that?” Jamie smiled because she read once that if you smile even when you don’t feel it, the feeling will come. And it wasn’t that she was particularly unhappy just then. She was just uncomfortable and afraid of  
the finality of the act. Once her virginity was gone, it would be gone forever. A death of a sort.

“So tonight’s the night.” Flip put his hand on Jamie’s leg and clamped down. “And I’m glad we’re going to do it before I leave for Hawaii. I mean, you totally wouldn’t want me wandering around the big island all horny and shit.”

“No,” Jamie said, and then she felt as though it had been confirmed: Flip, too, had a selfish penis. “And I think it’s better to get it over with before my sister gets home. I don’t want to do it for the first time when she’s around.” This occurred to Jamie only as she said it.

“God, I just wish I could remember your sister. It would make it so much easier when I first see her at the house and all.”

“I’ve shown you pictures.” Jamie focused on the photo album she had shown Flip in an effort to distract herself from her worries. She tried to remember the pictures in the order they appeared, the captions Betty had written beneath them in slanted block print.

“Yeah, but I don’t remember ever seeing her at school. I mean, like, I only know her from those pictures and I can’t even remember them now. She has blond hair, right?”

“Black,” Jamie said.

“Right, that’s what I meant. Black.”

“So what should we do about birth control?” Jamie had left the diaphragm at home in a fit of anxious indecision.

“I’ll pull out,” Flip said.

“Okay, but don’t forget.” Jamie imagined herself pregnant, then blinked hard and tried to refocus on the photo album.

“This is so totally cool.” Flip reached up and squeezed Jamie’s left breast as if he were pumping a turkey baster. “A cherry-popping on the Fourth of July!”

“Yeah, sounds cool.” April is the cruellest month, Jamie saw in her head, under a photo of herself and Renee standing in the rain with mud splattered up their bare legs.

Flip smiled, moved his hand to her thigh, and said, “You’ll love it, I swear.”

Tammy, Debbie, and Jamie lay close together on the crowded beach. There were more than three times the usual number of people there, as everyone was waiting for the Fourth of July fireworks. The girls were eating with their hands from a carton of melted butter pecan ice cream.

Jamie had taken the carton from her house along with a rectangle of Cheddar cheese, a box of Wheat Thins, and two bananas her mother handed her as she walked out the door. Debbie’s and Tammy’s mothers had been told their daughters were sleeping at Jamie’s house. Jamie had to reassure Betty that she wouldn’t have to lie on their behalf by pointing out that Tammy’s and Debbie’s mothers had each called the house only once all summer, even though they both spent hours on the phone each day.

Jamie passed the ice cream carton to Tammy and said, 
“I’m going to go all the way tonight.” Tammy gasped with her fingers in her mouth.

“Really?” Debbie asked.

“Yeah. I mean, you both have been saying that it’s time for me catch up, grow up a little, right?”

“Well, you’ve got to keep up with Flip,” Tammy said, and she patted Jamie’s hand like a mother, which, in fact, made Jamie feel like a child.

“It was kinda scary at first but, I swear, it’s totally fun now,” Debbie said.

“I’m worried that it’s going to ruin something,” Jamie said. 
“I don’t want anything to change. I don’t want to change.”

“You won’t change,” Tammy said. “I mean, like, do we seem any different to you?”

“Not really,” Jamie said, although they both had seemed different to her since they started having sex. Cooler. 
Slower, in a way.

Tammy leaned in and hugged Jamie. “I’m so happy I’m going to be with you on this important night!” Jamie walked out to the water to rinse the ice cream off her hands, wrists, and chest. Flip was out past the breaking waves, sitting up on his surfboard, bobbing like a duck.

How odd, she thought, that within hours, his penis is going to be in my vagina. And then she thought, What’s the big deal with that?

The beach grew even more crowded as the sun went down. Families gathered with blankets, pillows, children in pyjamas, and picnic dinners, everyone preparing to watch the bigger-than-ever bicentennial fireworks. Many people brought shovels to dig sitting holes in the sand, just as they did during grunion hunting. Jamie and her pals were too cool for fireworks on the beach. They decided they’d watch them from the campsite, a club of six with enough beer for a club of sixty. The girls collected the towels, magazines, and empty ice cream carton and walked up to the campsite, which was buried in the trees on the cliff that met the water. They had sleeping bags but no tents. Brett’s truck and Flip’s bus were backed into the dirt parking spot beside the campsite. The surfboards were piled into the back of the truck and the food was on the backseat of the bus, making the cars home base. There were many other people camping out that night; they were hidden behind the brushy tree  
barriers, making themselves known by their portable radios and the smell of their fires burning in the cement block grills that marked each site like a giant tombstone.

The boys built a fire and the girls prepared dinner. Debbie handled the steaks while Jamie broke Cheddar cheese into golf-ball-sized hunks that she stuck on American flag paper plates (Tammy had stolen the plates from the cupboard where her mother hoarded her holiday party supplies) with a stack of Wheat Thins. Tammy opened beers and passed out flag napkins (also stolen from her mother) all the while balancing a burning cigarette in her right hand.

“No fork?” Flip asked, staring at his plate with the slab of meat Debbie had just slapped down on it.

“We didn’t bring any,” Jamie said.

“I’m cooking these with my hands!” Debbie said. “Have you ever turned a steak over with your hands?!”

“If she can cook it with her hands, you can eat it with your hands,” Jimmy said, and he lifted up his wedge of steak, dangled it over his mouth, and gnawed off a bite.

By the time the fireworks erupted, Jamie had consumed so much meat, cheese, and beer that the falling explosions made her dizzy. Debbie unzipped her sleeping bag and laid it on the ground so they could lie down and look up at the brilliant sky. In spite of her vertigo, Jamie thought the fireworks were more brilliant than any she’d seen before—
bigger, louder; they filled the sky like a million colored beads being dropped from a star.

The boys didn’t lie down. They threw rocks at empty beer bottles they had lined up on the edge of the grill—
moving farther and farther back to make the game more complicated until they were obscured behind the bushes that separated their campsite from the one beside them.

All the girls could see of them were the colorless stones that whizzed over their heads and plinked against the green Heineken bottles.

When the fireworks were long over and the boys had settled onto the quilt of sleeping bags with the girls, Jamie decided that it was time.

“I’m ready,” she said to Flip, stifling a burp. He stood so quickly he almost stumbled backward. Then he grabbed a blanket from the back of the bus, took Jamie’s hand, and they walked down to the beach.

There were small piles of people hanging around here and there, but most of the sand pits were empty, making the beach look like the pock-marked moon.

“I don’t want anyone to see us,” Jamie said. “I mean, what if some pervert starts watching us?” They walked to where the rocks jutted out from the cliff, almost, but not quite, meeting the pounding waves. There was no one there, and the closest people were so far away that they could barely make out their murky forms in the dark.

Flip led Jamie into a niche between two giant rocks. Jamie held on to the back of Flip’s shirt as she followed behind; she felt as if she were walking into a crack in the earth that was sure to swallow her up. Flip flapped the blanket in the air, like he was airing it out, then gently laid it on the sand.

It didn’t seem to come out straight, so he picked up the blanket and flapped it again, and again, until three corners lay flat. He pushed the forth down with his foot.

It had been scorching hot all day, with the bright sun bleaching everything so that the whole world appeared to 
be a washed blue; but by sunset it had grown cool, as if the thick ocean fog had swallowed the heat. Flip lay down on the blanket and waited. Jamie stood over him, surveying the scene as her eyes adjusted. In uncontrollable exaggeration, Jamie’s teeth clattered and she shivered.

“There were so many people partying tonight, there’s probably broken glass down here,” she said.

“Don’t worry, we’re on the blanket,” Flip said. “Just don’t roll off the blanket.”

“What if you put the blanket down on a jagged piece of glass and it breaks through while we’re doing it and stabs me in the back and kills me, and you don’t even realize it because you’re so caught up in the moment?”

“Then I guess I’d be a necrophiliac,” Flip said, and then he started to sing a little song that Jamie had been hearing boys sing since around sixth grade. My name is Jack, Jack, Jack. I’m a necrophiliac, ac, ac. I love them dead, dead, dead. . . .

Jamie stood there, each of her hands holding the opposite arm. She looked around and studied the crumbling sides of the rocks and the bumpy sand, littered with leafy orange strands of kelp that reminded her of hair off a giant mermaid.

“What if there’s an earthquake? What if there’s an earthquake and the whole side of this cliff collapses on top of us and we’re smashed under these rocks, but we don’t die. We just lie there stranded and stuck, unable to wedge ourselves out while sand crabs creep into our butt cracks and we bleed to death from our dented, ravaged heads.”

“There won’t be an earthquake.” Flip grunted in a voice of impatience. “There hasn’t been an earthquake in, like, months.”

“All the more reason there’d be one now,” Jamie said, 
and she turned to run out from the rocks when Flip stood, grabbed her arms, and kissed her hard, like he was drilling for oil with his tongue.

They lay on the blanket and took off their clothes. Jamie gave herself a pep talk as she tried to think thoughts like, I’m on a beautiful beach on the bicentennial Fourth of July with a gorgeous, popular guy who loves me, and this is the most beautiful night of my life. She could barely complete a single thought, however, without her focus switching to her stomach, which suddenly felt like an overinflated tire. Jamie wished Flip would leave long enough for her to burp. Then she realized she would rather have left herself, as she still wasn’t convinced that there weren’t deadly shards of glass under the blanket or that the cliff wasn’t waiting to unglue itself in order to crush them.

Flip positioned himself on top of Jamie and said, “Okay, I’m totally going to do it now, I love you.” 

Jamie said, “I love you too.”

Flip pushed, and he pushed, and he banged himself against her. It was like trying to pop a balloon with a spoon.

And then his penis was a little ways in, not halfway, maybe a third, or a quarter even. As he pushed Jamie could tell it wasn’t working; it felt as if his penis were bending back and forth while Flip went up and down.

Flip’s mouth was on Jamie’s, pretending to kiss, in what Jamie guessed was an obligatory way to let a girl know that you don’t like her just for the sex. Her gums became sore from the pressure; she felt like he was pinning her down with his mouth. Flip was grunting, sweating, and squinting as if he were trying to read an eye chart. Jamie worried about the burp in her stomach; she wondered if Flip’s penis hurt when it bent like that; she wondered how old her  
mother was the first time she had sex. She also wondered about the building discomfort in her stomach—was it from the weight of Flip, or was she truly getting nauseous?