The Summer of Naked Swim Parties (20 page)

The next day Flip broke up with Jamie.

Over the phone.

While his friends were in the room waiting for him to drive them to the beach.

“Can’t we work this out?” Jamie said, and she covered the mouthpiece with her hand so he couldn’t hear her cry.

“Things are so heavy at your house right now,” Flip said. 
“I’m just going to stay away for a while and let you work it all out, cool? I mean, shit, you don’t want me around anyway.”

“But I do.” Jamie let the snot drip down to her upper lip. 
She didn’t want him to hear even a sniff.

“No way, man. You don’t. I know about these things. 
That was some gnarly, heavy shit that went down yesterday. I mean, a baby fucking died. Totally died. Doesn’t even exist anymore. Is not part of this planet, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s just no way we can stay together after that. At least not for a few months. I mean—” And then Flip yelled to his friends, “HOLD THE FUCK ON, I’LL BE OFF IN 
A MINUTE! So what was I saying?”

“Uh,” Jamie choked. She knew Flip was dumping her but she truly could not recall what he had just said.

“Okay. So. Later. Right?” Flip said.

“Yeah. Later.”

Jamie hung up the phone, went to the freezer, and pulled out a carton of butter pecan ice cream. She would never have ordered butter pecan at Baskin-Robbins or at Thrifty’s Drug Store, where you could get a single cone for a nickel and a triple for fifteen cents, but it was Allen’s favorite, the only flavor Betty ever thought to buy. Jamie was glad no one was in the kitchen. She wasn’t ready to repeat the news she had just heard on the phone. She didn’t want to see her mother’s face as she looked at her, knowing that her daughter’s heart was broken. And she was glad she hadn’t made plans with Tammy and Debbie that day because she particularly didn’t want to hear what they had to say—that of course Flip wouldn’t want to date a girl whose parents were so into naked swimming and smoking pot and not being Christian that a baby actually died in their pool.

Several minutes later Jamie was still standing at the open freezer, eating the butter pecan with her fingers wedged together like short, thick chopsticks. She couldn’t recall what she had been thinking the previous minutes; she knew only she hadn’t been crying about Lacey or fretting about Flip. It was as if the chill from the ice cream were a shot of novocaine to her heart. She was temporarily numb to the drilling pain she knew was hovering somewhere nearby.

Allen walked in carrying three giant plastic bags from Kennedy’s Marine World. He put the bags down and looked at his daughter.

“Why don’t you use a spoon?”

“I don’t really want any,” Jamie said. “I was just tasting it.”

“So taste it with a spoon.”

“A spoon’s not worth the time.”

“Not worth the time? Of course it’s worth the time. 
Utensils are always worth the time.” 

Jamie closed up the ice cream, put it back in the freezer, and took out a handful of quarter-sized peanut butter cups that her father always kept in the freezer. Allen brought home a white string-tied box of them every week after his visit to the shrink, whose office was next door to a gourmet market. Allen was often the only one who ate the peanut butter cups; the boxes frequently piled up until Betty would send them home with Rosa and Jesus.

“Peanut butter cup?” Jamie held her hand out to her father, who plucked two, peeled off the brown paper wrappers, and popped them in his mouth. Jamie dumped her handful on the counter, unpeeled them all, then ate them one by one—dropping each, whole, into her mouth. Again, she felt comfortably numb.

“Where’s your mom?”

“Don’t know.”

“Where’s your sister?”

“TV room. Watching The Newlywed Game.”

“Help me with these bags.”

Jamie picked up a bag and followed Allen to the pool-
room. On one wall were shelves with towels, pool toys, deflated rafts. On the other wall was a bar that hung the long way across the room. The bar had a couple of wetsuits from the summer Renee and Jamie took surfing lessons and all the wire hangers from the dry cleaners that Betty did not want in the closets but that Allen refused to let her throw out. Allen opened a plastic bag and handed Jamie an orange life jacket.

“Hang them in order,” he said. “Smallest to largest.” Jamie hung the life jacket that was in her hands, then the next one and the next one and the next one. Allen stood and watched as if he were a supervisor on a factory shift.

When they were all hanging in order, Jamie counted them. 
“Nine,” she said.

“You never know,” Allen said. “There might be nine young kids here one day.”

“I don’t think anyone who would fit these larger ones would need a life jacket.”

“You can’t say that for sure,” Allen said. “The Vorstangs have a retarded boy. He’d need a big one.”

“Who are the Vorstangs?”

“We’ve never had them over, but we might one day.” 

Renee walked into the poolroom from the house. 
“What are you doing in here?”

“We’re hanging life jackets,” Jamie said.

Renee stood beside her sister and stared at the life jackets as if they were a row of dead bodies.

“Pool rule,” Allen said. “Everyone under fourteen must be in a life jacket.”

“We have a pool rule now?” Jamie said.

“Rule number one,” Allen said.

Renee plucked the smallest life jacket off the bar and held it by the hanger a few inches from the floor. She teetered it back and forth and moved it along the ground as if there were a child in it. Jamie thought she could almost see Lacey’s face peaking out from the round neckline, or her fat leg-wedges ending in tiny, square feet.

Renee hung up the life jacket and Allen started to cry. 
Jamie and Renee looked at him, at each other, at their father again.

“Flip broke up with me,” Jamie said.

“Flip’s an imbecile,” Renee said.

“Oh sweetheart.” Allen pulled Jamie to his chest. “Let’s hope you’re never dealt a blow more painful than that.” At her father’s words, a shock of grief surged through Jamie’s body with such force that she found herself gasping to breathe as she cried with jagged, choking spasms. A few moments later, when Renee reached up and rubbed her sister’s back, Jamie was so startled that she almost stopped crying.

Instead, Jamie coughed up some tears and forced herself to continue, just so she could feel her sister’s hand.

In the middle of the week, Allen and Betty went to Los Angeles to see the King Tut exhibit for the second time.

That same day, Renee took off in the mobile home with the Nambine family for another trip to Lake Naciemiento.

Renee frequently talked about the Nambine’s mobile home as if it were the inside of King Tut’s tomb. At breakfast that morning, before everyone had left, Renee suggested to Allen that they get a mobile home. Allen snorted in the back of his throat and laughed. Renee was so angry about the snort-laugh that she barely spoke to Allen and Betty for the rest of the morning. When the mobile home pulled away from the house, Jamie and her parents ran to the curb and waved good-bye to Renee, who hid below the window line refusing to acknowledge them. This, naturally, threw Betty, Allen, and Jamie into fits of laughter witnessed only by Mrs. Nambine who, with a nervous smile on her face, leaned her head out the window like someone who was carsick and waved back until they had turned the corner onto the next street. Jamie wished right then that her parents would stay home and hang out with her. She could help 
her mother cook, and she’d be willing to talk to her about sex or masturbation if that’s what Betty wanted. Jamie had even volunteered to accompany her parents to the King Tut exhibit—although she had seen it once before and found the crush of the whispering crowd so overwhelming that she was unable to focus on the glittery objects before her. She would enjoy the two-hour trip to L.A., she thought, being ensconced in the car, safe from Flip, her friends, and the social mirror that would only show the fetid pile of sludge that Jamie felt she had become.

“We have only two tickets,” Betty had said, before following Allen out the kitchen door, “and you hated the show last time.”

Alone in the empty house Jamie felt spooked. She had visions of fat little Lacey floating in the corners of rooms watching her, her face red and shiny with tears. In the days following her death, no one went in the pool except Leon one night when it was ninety degrees and the Santa Ana winds were blowing like the hot breath of a giant. Allen and Betty sat on a boulder talking to him while Renee and Jamie looked out from the kitchen doors. Lois didn’t come with him. When Betty came in the kitchen for a bottle of wine, she whispered to Renee and Jamie that Lois was mad at them because of Lacey.

Jamie thought that being mad at her parents was absurd—Lois should have been mad at Bridget and Rod for not watching Lacey; or at Franny, who had been babysitting; or at Renee for being the oldest one at the pool; or at Jamie herself—actually, mostly at Jamie. Clearly, Jamie thought, it was her fault for not being as vigilant in pre
venting death as she usually was. If she hadn’t had sex by the eucalyptus trees, or even if she simply hadn’t enjoyed the sex, her mind would have been more alert and focused.

In spite of the fact that she assumed responsibility for Lacey’s death, Jamie repeatedly counted and recounted the number of capable swimmers at the party. It became an obsession that grew with each counting. After she had counted once, she would count again to confirm the first count. If the second count came out differently, she’d start the process again. If the second count confirmed the first count, she’d force herself to do a third count to reconfirm.

Jamie couldn’t stop until she had reached an identical count three times in a row. Once the count was completed, she would picture all those people in a pyramid (Flip’s face blurred as if he’d been moving while the “picture” was taken in Jamie’s head) stacked at one end of the pool while Lacey sat at the edge of the other end of the pool. How could it be, Jamie wondered, with all those people present, not a single person saw Lacey fall into the water?

After finishing her fourth triple count of the day, Jamie picked up the phone and called Tammy—a conversation, even with Tammy, whom she’d been avoiding, would force her to stop counting.

“It’s hot,” Tammy said. “We’re going to the beach.”

“Why don’t we swim at your house?” Jamie said.

“My parents are home and my dad doesn’t like having Jimmy and Brett hanging around.”

“Why don’t just me and you and Debbie hang out at your pool?”

“What, and, like, tell Jimmy and Brett they’re on their own today?”

“Get out of your creepy house and come to the beach!” Debbie had grabbed the phone from Tammy.

“What do you mean creepy house?” Jamie said.

“You’ve been in the house since that baby died and, well, I think it’s time you went out.”

“I want to go out,” Jamie said. “I just don’t want to go to the beach. I mean, Flip will be there and I don’t want to see him.” Jamie’s heart did a drumroll at the thought of Flip. She had been so busy counting lately that she had successfully quelled the throbbing of her scraped and battered heart.

“There’re so many people hanging around it will be easy to avoid him,” Debbie said.

And then Jamie heard Tammy in the background say,

“Tell her!”

“Tell me what?”

“Nothing.”

“What? Tell me!”

“Flip’s with Terry.”

“Terry who?”

Tammy grabbed the phone again and said, “How many Terrys hang out with the surfers?”

“Terry Watson?”

“Yeah.”

“Since when?”

“Since, like, the day after that baby died.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Unfortunately not.”

“And you expect me to go to the beach with you and watch Flip with Terry Watson?” Jamie felt a claw in her chest, scratching off the still-soft scabs that had started to form on her psyche.

“She’s nice. Don’t worry about it.” 

“She’s nice?! She’s your friend?!” Debbie grabbed the phone back. “She’s really nice when you get to know her. I don’t know why we’ve hated her all summer.”

“We’ve hated her because she’s, like, way too tan for someone with blond hair and her teeth are way too square for a human and way too white and she must weigh, what, ninety pounds? And she snubbed us all summer, getting up and moving her towel every time we tried to sit near her at the beach! Additionally, what kind of person would start dating a guy the second he broke up with his girlfriend?” 

Debbie sighed. “Listen, if you can get past the fact that she’s with Flip you’d really like her. I mean, Tammy and I have been sitting with her while the boys surf and I swear, she just cracks us up.”

“Yeah, she sounds hysterical.” Jamie imagined her internal wounds glistening wet, weeping with shiny viscous tails.

Tammy took the phone again: “Do you want to come to the beach with us, or do you want to wallow at home?”

“I’ll wallow, thanks.”

“Jamie!” Tammy said. “Don’t be so sensitive!”

“My mom needs me,” Jamie said. “I gotta go.” Jamie went to the freezer and pulled out the butter pecan ice cream and an already-opened box of peanut butter cups.

She unwrapped nine peanut butter cups and dropped them into the butter pecan carton. Jamie ate the peanut-butter-cup ice cream with her achy, cold fingers. It took only a moment to regain the chilly numbing in her heart. When the peanut butter cups were gone, she unwrapped nine more and dropped them into the carton. When the ice 
cream was gone, she unwrapped the remaining six peanut butter cups and ate them, two at a time, one crammed into each cheek. Jamie collapsed the ice cream carton and the peanut butter cup box and hid them in the bottom of the trash, underneath that morning’s soggy cereal and an empty carton of orange juice.

Jamie’s stomach was stiff, edgy. She walked into the pantry, opened a box of Triscuits and forced some into her mouth. The salty needles of cracker scratched against the edges of her tongue. Jamie began a count of the people at the pool party, naming a person in her head each time her jaw flapped open. When she’d finished the box of crackers, the tip of her tongue felt inflamed—she imagined taste buds popping out like mini heads of cauliflower. But she had yet to obtain an identical count three times in a row and she needed something else to chew as she counted. So she took the Nutter Butter peanut butter sandwich cookies from a drawer and retrieved the milk from the refrigerator. Jamie drank the milk straight from the carton, holding a mouthful while she popped in half a Nutter Butter and chewed in time to the litany of names. The cookie didn’t taste as good as usual, so she tilted the carton, bringing the milk into the triangle wedge of the pour-spout where she dipped the cookie before biting in. Each Nutter Butter was the shape of a giant peanut, each bite lopped the nut in two.