The Summer of Naked Swim Parties (2 page)

“Didn’t your mother buy any frozen pizza?”

“I dunno. She bought whatever’s in there,” Jamie said.

“I don’t even know what this stuff is.” Debbie pulled out a box, rotated it and examined it. “What is kasha and bowties?”

“Just order pizza,” Jamie said. “My mom left me money in the cookie jar.”

Debbie, who knew her way around the kitchen, left the freezer and went to a cupboard drawer, where she pulled out the phone book. She picked up the receiver on the white wall phone and dialed. Tammy and Jamie pulled themselves up and sat properly on the stools.

“Can you deliver a pizza?” Debbie said.

“Get pepperoni!” Tammy said.

“He said they don’t deliver,” Debbie said.

“Let me talk.” Tammy went to Debbie and took the phone. “Hey, what’s your name?”

This question alone caused Debbie and Jamie to hunch up in silent laughter. Although this was the first summer where boys and men had paid attention to them, they understood the rules of fourteen years old, one of which was to not take the initiative with someone older than you, especially if you wanted that someone to be interested in you.

“I’m Tammy,” Tammy said, and she twirled a blond rope of hair with one finger, as if the voice on the phone could see her. “Uh huh . . . uh huh . . . uh huh.” Tammy’s chin tapped down each time she responded to whatever the 
pizza guy had said. She smiled. With words alone, Tammy seemed to have reeled in someone old enough to work in a pizza parlor.

“We’re at my friend’s house. Her parents are camping in Death Valley and so it’s just us three girls alone.” Jamie’s mouth gaped wide as she mimed a silent scream.

What if this guy was a pervert, like the man two doors down who watered his front garden in his bathrobe, which always seemed to accidentally flap open when Jamie and her sister rode by on their bikes? What if he was a serial killer?

“Uh huh . . . Me, Jamie, and Debbie. We’re sixteen, but we don’t have a car.”

Debbie and Jamie gave each other open-mouthed stares.

The girls often exaggerated their expressions, as if they were actresses on a daytime soap opera; they thrilled in experiencing everything beyond routine with self-aware hyperbole. But this, their names and false ages being given to the anonymous pizza guy, was even more huge than their usual excitement.

“2703 Garden Street,” Tammy said.

Debbie and Jamie jumped off the stools, went to the phone, and leaned their heads into the earpiece so they could hear.

“So, someone will be there in about twenty minutes.” Tammy’s boy had a surfer’s drawl: low, slow, mellow.

“Great,” Tammy said.

“Cool,” he said.

“Cool,” Tammy said.

“Later,” he said.

“Later.” Tammy rushed the phone into its cradle before bending over and screaming the way girls scream when 
they win things at school: first cut for cheerleading tryouts, last cut for drill team, a solo in My Fair Lady.

“Oh my god.” Debbie was breathless.

“He’s sending a friend over to pick us up,” Tammy said.

“His friend is going to bring us back to Pizza Rhea so we can have a pizza.”

“How will we get home?” Jamie asked, imagining the three of them standing on the windy freeway entrance, thumbs out as an invitation to rapists. Imagination, at the time, was Jamie’s greatest problem—her parents had taken to hiding the Los Angeles Times so as not to feed her the fuel on which her neurosis ran. The local paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press, however, with its front-page articles on the shifting sand at the breakwater, the drought, seagulls with tar glued to their greasy feathers, was never off-limits.

The in-town news, Allen and Betty knew, did not carry the same perceived threats as the dramas that played throughout the frayed web of L.A.

“He’ll drive us home when he gets off work at eleven.”

“Are you sure?” Jamie asked.

“Yeah, of course! He is such a nice guy, a total sweetheart!” Tammy spoke as if he were an intimate friend. Her absolute confidence was all Jamie needed to reformulate logic, like when her mother insisted that there wasn’t a building high enough in Santa Barbara to topple in an earthquake; Jamie was always happy to give up her fears to a voice of authority.

The girls rushed up to Jamie’s bedroom to change their clothes.

Each outfit they tried on was neither better nor worse than the one they had previously been wearing; the act of chang
ing was simply an act of momentum. (Although the girls did believe that clothes had more influence on the events to which they were worn than did the person who wore them.) Tammy put on a cap-sleeved, striped T-shirt. Her arms hung out the sleeve holes like straight, hollow plumbing.

She pressed her white hair with a curling iron, framing her face with perfect, toilet-paper-roll-sized cylinders. With a blue makeup pencil she underlined each eye: facial italics. Debbie combed her hair down, a thick black waterfall that tumbled over her shoulders. Then she leaned over the sink, mouth hanging open as if she were getting her teeth checked, and brushed black mascara onto her thick lashes, which looked like tarantula legs stuck to her face. She held the mascara wand out toward Jamie, who waved it away.

To Jamie, there was an edge to mascara, like smoking, that didn’t match her good-girl persona—as if suddenly wearing it would put her into a level of maturity for which she wasn’t prepared, the way losing one’s virginity pushes you around a bend from which you just can’t return. She did, however, slather her lips with bubble-gum lip gloss, which was oily and tacky and caused her hair to stick to her mouth when she shook her head. She combed her thin hair flat against her head, then changed her shirt several times so that her hair was tangled again and the lip gloss had rubbed off, finally settling on a red T-shirt that belonged to Debbie and said MAIDEN FRANCE across the breast line. Debbie’s maternal grandmother was from France, so she considered herself more French then American. Before Jamie could recomb her hair and regloss her lips there was a knock at the front door. The girls froze, looking toward the bedroom door, like dogs pointing, then collapsed over their knees in silent, restrained laughter.

Duckishly, they descended the stairs in a row. Jamie opened the front door and immediately started laughing, although there was nothing funny before her. Standing on the porch were two beach-haired, college-aged boys. These were the kind of boys who grow only in Southern California. Girls in Minnesota dream of boys like this. Certain men in New York and San Francisco dream of boys like this, too.

“Hey,” the taller of the two said. His eyes were sea green.

He was swinging a single key on a dirty string around his finger.

“Hey,” Jamie said, and then uncontrollable laughter over-came the three girls. They hunched over their knees, holding their stomachs, until finally—after clasping hands and taking deep, stuttering breaths—the laughing stopped. The guys stood there, both of them open-mouthed breathers, staring with dazed, patient smiles.

“You’re the girls who wanted the pizza, right?” the other guy said. His hair was dark brown at the center part and yellow-blond on the ends. His skin and eyes were identical in color: the brown of a buckskin shoe. He wore a Mr. 
Zogs Sex Wax T-shirt, which was practically a uniform for surfers that year. Jamie couldn’t speak when she looked at him; it was as if she were suddenly asthmatic and couldn’t get enough air.

“Well,” Sea-Eyes said, “let’s go.” The boys sat in the front and the girls sat in the back of the gasoline-smelling Dodge Dart. Debbie, Tammy, and Jamie smiled the entire ride, their shoulders pressed together, digging their nails into one another’s knees and giggling at anything the boys said. The driver, sea-eyed Mike, was going to be a junior at the university, studying marine 
biology. The other guy, Joseph, had graduated over a year ago. He was hanging out in town, he told the girls, working at the pizza parlor at night, surfing in the day, and waiting for his friends to graduate so they’d have more time to hang out with him.

“College must be fun,” Jamie said. Debbie widened her eyes and nudged Jamie with her elbow as if to say, Good one!

“Yeah,” Joseph said, “it’s a fuck of a lot better than junior high.”

This, of course, sent fingers flying into nervous, clandestine pinches as the girls wondered if the boys had somehow figured their true age not to be sixteen.

Bill, the pizza boy Tammy had spoken with on the phone, was cute, too. He had bunny-white hair, white eyebrows, and a golden-pink tan. His T-shirt had a saucer-sized hole under the breast pocket, revealing taut, smooth skin. When the girls walked in, he gave a coolheaded jut of his chin as a greeting. Then, like a gymnast on a pommel horse, he pressed his hands onto the bar counter and propelled his body up and over to the other side. The girls stood motionless, watching and waiting, as the pizza boy walked to the door, flipped over the “open” sign, and turned the key in the lock.

“Beer?” Joseph asked. He had poured one for himself and was carrying the mug with him as he cleared tables with his free hand.

“No-o,” the girls sang.

“Coke?” he asked.

“I made you pepperoni,” Bill said.

“Beer?” Mike asked. He stood at the tap, pouring one for himself.

“They want Coke.” Joseph winked at Jamie and she stiffened up as if they were playing freeze tag.

Mike poured three Cokes into bumpy, opaque plastic cups, then carried them to a booth where Bill had set down a large pepperoni pizza. The girls rushed to the booth; Tammy and Jamie began eating immediately. Debbie removed her retainer and gingerly placed it underneath a napkin.

“Don’t let me forget that,” she said. “My mom will kill me.” Somebody turned up the stereo and a Hall & Oates song reverberated out of hidden speakers. The boys went about their business, closing out the cash register, wiping down the tables with a scrunched-up grayed rag, and covering giant silver tubs of grated cheese and sliced pepperoni with Saran Wrap. They drank beer as they worked, and shouted a conversation that had something to do with the size of the waves at various beaches that day. Occasionally one or the other of them looked over at the girls and smiled; in response, the girls giggled and dropped their heads, reached for a new piece of pizza, or took a sip of Coke.

They ate more than three quarters of the large pizza.

Debbie’s chin was slick and shiny and Tammy had a piece of pepperoni caught in a square of her braces. Debbie picked the food from Tammy’s braces, then dipped a corner of a paper napkin into her Coke and worked a smear of tomato sauce off Jamie’s face. Jamie sat still and quiet as Debbie groomed her. She remembered when her sister used to make her ponytail in the morning and how good it felt to have her sister’s tiny hands running against her neck as she picked up the scrawny clods of Jamie’s hair.

Mike tossed the leftover pizza into the trash, then flung the silver platter, Frisbee-style, over the counter and into the sink, where it made a hollow, clanking ruckus.

“You girls ready to get outta here?” Mike said, dangling the stringed key from his index finger.

Mike drove, Bill sat up front, Jamie sat on Debbie’s lap in the backseat, and Joseph sat in between Debbie and Tammy.

“You’re not really sixteen, are you?” Bill asked.

“No-o.” They giggled.

“They turned fourteen last month and I turned fourteen in February,” Tammy said. “Two Geminis and a Pisces.”

“That’s cool,” Bill said.

“They’re as cute as any sixteen-year-olds I’ve ever seen,” Joseph said, looking at Jamie. She met his stare for a moment, then dropped her head, terrified.

“So your parents are at Joshua Tree?” Mike pulled the car into the driveway.

“Death Valley,” Jamie barely whispered.

“Oh yeah, Death Valley,” Mike said. He turned off the ignition.

They all climbed out and stood in a circle with the boys on one side and the girls on the other. Joseph looked at Jamie and she looked away at his friends. Bill was eyeing the house up and down, the way men in movies ogle pretty women.

“Rich girls,” he said.

“Her dad hardly works,” Tammy said, and she pulled out two cigarettes and passed one to Debbie. “My dad’s always saying he must be a spy or something, ’cause they have this gnarly house and her dad never even wears a tie.”

“Whose house is it?” Bill asked.

“Mine.” Jamie flushed as she spoke. “And my dad’s not a spy, even though everyone thinks he is!”

“Well, what does he do?” Bill asked.

“What difference does it make?” Joseph said. “She’s the one who’s interesting.”

Jamie looked toward the house because she could not bring herself to look at this college-aged boy who had just said she was interesting.

“He, like, tells businesses how to make money, right?” Smoke puffed out of Debbie’s mouth as she spoke.

“Her dad’s home all the time,” Tammy said. “My mom said if my dad was home that much she’d have to divorce him.”

“Maybe I should tell businesses how to make money,” Bill said.

“Oh my god,” Debbie said. “That would be so cool if you did exactly what Jamie’s dad does!”

“So, can we come in?” Bill asked. He stood in the center of the group. All faces were turned toward Jamie, who felt like a helium balloon bobbing above everyone—remote and out of reach.

“Uh . . . sure,” she said, and she rushed to the front door and waited for everyone to catch up.

Once inside, the girls headed for the kitchen.

“Let’s make brownies,” Debbie said.

The boys filed into the kitchen behind them. Bill went to the French doors, opened them, and spread his arms as if he were presenting the backyard to the group.

“Pool,” he said.

“Pool.” Mike stood behind Bill and looked out.

“We need music,” Joseph said. “Do you have any music?”

“They have speakers all over the house, and you can turn a knob and the music comes out by the pool!” Tammy said.

Jamie had always felt that her life and her friends’ lives were equal—they all had nice houses, pools, parents who weren’t troubled with money. But Tammy’s enthusiasm for the things Jamie barely noticed—a father who is home, speakers by the pool—startled her and she saw, not uncomfortably, how padded her life was.