The Summer of Naked Swim Parties (4 page)

Jamie looked over at Joseph, floating on his back, his head cocked in her direction. She wished she could break the spell and crawl out from beneath his gaze so she could do the bump and sing loudly and put on a swimsuit and eat more wet brownies off her fingers. And not worry about swallowing them down.

At two in the morning the boys loaded into the Dodge Dart and drove away. Tammy, Debbie, and Jamie each threw on oversized T-shirts and climbed into Allen and Betty’s king-sized bed, Jamie in the middle. Tammy and Debbie fell asleep instantly, as if each had an Off switch in her head that had just been flicked down. Jamie lay still between them, careful not to breathe too loudly or shift and jostle them. Her heart fluttered as she feared she’d never fall asleep, that she’d be struck with a years-long case of insomnia, a world-record-worthy feat, like the man in the Guinness book who had been hiccupping since 1922. Tammy rolled to her side and tossed a bony leg over 
Jamie’s knee. Her friend’s flesh against her own made Jamie tingle, made her forget about interminable insomnia. She shut her eyes and she could feel it all over again: the buzzing down deep, the stirring of newly discovered pockets of sensation.

The encounter with the pizza boys came at a time before Jamie, Debbie, or Tammy had developed the sense of entitlement that usually accompanies lust (or love) and always gives way to demands. And so the girls neither expected to hear, nor heard, from the boys again. It didn’t even occur to them to feel slighted or disappointed. Yet something inside Jamie changed after that encounter.

The pool didn’t look the same after the pizza boys had swum in it. It wasn’t that it was bigger or smaller; the embedded boulders still looked like dead, limbless elephants; the thatched-roof bar still had a strange stage-set feel to it; and the red phone hidden under the weightless, fake rock still seemed funny to Jamie, as if Maxwell Smart would show up any minute and use the phone to call Agent 99.

What was different was the water and air. Before it had just been water and air. But now it was imbued with something slippery, something pungent, something that snaked up and down her legs like an invisible finger. The pool was now, Jamie finally decided, sexy.

So when Allen and Betty threw a party in the end of June 
to celebrate the opening of the bicentennial summer (the only bicentennial summer they’d all be alive for, Allen pointed out to his daughters), Jamie couldn’t witness it with same detached obliviousness as she had witnessed her parents’ past parties.

Jamie sat on the steps of the pool. Her sister, Renee, sat beside her. Jamie was staring up, her flat hand making an awning over her eyes, watching Leon, their neighbor, naked on the diving board. His hairy grown-up body looked slightly melted as he jumped: up and down, up and down.

His penis and balls flew in the air in unison like a long bird attached to its eggs. Was this what Joseph’s penis would look like? Jamie studied the flying penis, wondered how it happened that people actually wanted to touch penises, put them in their mouths, put them in their bodies.

Renee elbowed Jamie to look away. Jamie elbowed her back and continued to stare at Leon’s penis.

There were twelve adults and eight kids at the party. The children clumped together in an approximation of their parents’ friendship; theirs was an intimacy borne of the shared experience of witnessing the grown-ups’ revelries.

All of the adults were naked. All of the kids were in swimsuits, even the one-year-old girl, Lacey, who wore a bandana-print suit.

Lacey waddled to the edge of the pool. Jamie turned toward her, pleased to have the distraction. Lacey’s father, Rod, sat on one of the boulders. On his lap, covering his penis, was a paper plate piled with garbanzo bean salad, which Betty had made.

Jamie pushed off from the steps and swam to the baby at the edge of the pool.

“What are you doing?” Renee was always bossy, sharp. 
She followed Jamie.

“I’m just making sure the baby won’t drown,” Jamie said.

Renee rolled her eyes. This was the difference between Renee and Jamie: Everywhere Jamie went, she imagined death first and humiliation second. Everywhere Renee went, she imagined humiliation first and greater humiliation second.

“If her parents weren’t so stoned,” Renee whispered, 
“you wouldn’t have to be watching her.”

“Do you think we’re getting lung cancer from all the smoke in the air?” Jamie flicked her eyes back and forth, tennis-match style, between the precariously perched baby and her black-eyed sister.

“We’re probably just getting stoned,” Renee said. “I’m going inside. If the police come I don’t wanna be here.” Renee hoisted herself out of the pool. She was as lean and shapeless as a twelve-year-old, a body without the necessary fat pad, the doctor had explained, to induce a regular period.

Lacey dipped a curled white hand into the water. She teetered forward, then back, and landed on her fat, diapered bottom. Jamie was about to reach up and collect her into her arms when Rod approached and stood right behind her. Foot level is a bad place to be when viewing a naked, grown man. His cactus-pear-looking testicles sagged toward Jamie’s face; she could see pimples on the inside of his upper thighs. She wondered, Do boys who have pimples on their faces have them on their thighs, too?

“They say if you throw a baby into water it will just know how to swim,” Rod said.

“Oh yeah?” Jamie squinted as she aimed her gaze toward his pointed face. She wondered who they were.

“How ’bout I toss her in and you just stay there to get her if she needs help.”

“You haven’t tried it before?” Jamie asked.

“We don’t have a pool,” Rod said. “And the ocean’s too cold for a little kid.”

“Okay,” Jamie said.

Rod lifted his doughy child and in one swift motion swung her out over the pool and dropped her. His face was blank, bored almost, like a man tossing a bag of dog food into the corner of the garage. Lacey plunged down then surged up, but not all the way to air. The top of her head skimmed the surface of the water, her silky hair floated in a little swirling pile, a sea anemone in a tide pool.

Jamie reached down, wrapped an arm around her belly, and heaved her up, head above the water. Lacey’s fat legs clamped around Jamie’s waist as Jamie held onto the edge of the pool with one hand. The baby gasped in a burping sort of way, a croak really. Then she let out a scream that instantly dappled her face with pink. Her fists were in the air: angry white, flower buds.

“You should have given her another couple seconds.” Rod was unmoved by the crying; he pulled the baby from Jamie’s arms and returned to his rock. Jamie wanted to take Lacey back from him, kiss her and press her against her chest until the baby was sure that the ground below her was solid.

Jamie turned away from Rod and joined the kids who were drifting in the shallow end, an amorphous circle of heads and half bodies. There was Paul, a year older than Renee, stocky and built like a miniature man; his younger brother, Mitch, who was almost Jamie’s age; and the furry white-haired, preteen Olsen boy. The Layman twins were there, too; they were a year younger than Jamie but seemed far more sophisticated in their stringy, spare bikinis. The Layman girls were dark and looked like they smelled of 
spice; they flirted with the boys so extensively that Jamie often felt jealous for their attention.

Paul was organizing a game of wink-murder, but before they could get started someone turned the music up so loud that Jamie thought she could see sound waves bouncing from the tiles to the rocks to the trees. Everyone watched as naked Betty stepped onto the diving board, dancing to 
“Fifty-Two-Card Pick Up.” There was hooting and applause as naked Leon got on the board with her. Betty was singing along, almost shouting the words to the song, her eyes shut, head swinging from side to side: 
. . . and then she said pick me up, take me home, tell me how you like it then fetch me a bone. . . .

Leon lifted Betty’s hand and they did a partner dance but as if on a gangplank since they could only move up and down the board. With his hand extended toward Betty’s, Jamie thought Leon looked a bit like Captain Hook forcing Peter Pan into the ocean with his rapier. Allen was dancing, too, but from behind the bar. Jamie was glad that if the police walked in, they wouldn’t be able to see her father’s penis. And then all the adults were dancing, even Lois, Leon’s bony blond wife, who reminded Jamie of reedy sun-bleached grass. Even Rod, who had left his perch on the rock. He was holding sleeping Lacey in his arms. After a couple of stiff pointed steps, he took the towel-bundled child and laid her under a spiky bush that grew where the grass met the tile.

Here’s the thing adults should know when they choose to dance naked, Jamie thought: Everything bounces. And the bouncing isn’t necessarily on beat with the music. So watching a naked adult dance is like watching a 3-D movie without the glasses; a shadow image moves beside the real 
one. Women’s butts shift up and down, a cover sliding over a pillow. Penises flip-flop in all directions, testicles tagging along. Breasts move more or less, not depending on size, but depending on a certain amount of stringiness of the skin. And men’s breasts bounce too. Chubby Frank’s pubescent fat-girl wedges shook and the aged Daniel had a bounce in his chest where a sheet of skin shifted over the muscle beneath it.

At the end of the song, Betty and Leon held hands and leaped off the board together. Betty was laughing, a long, honking, donkey bray that always made her easy to find in crowds. When they hit the water, the splash was so big it sprayed all the way to the shallow end. Jamie turned her back to the adults, shut her eyes, and let herself sink into the hollow echo underwater. When she popped her eyes open, she was startled to see the magnified legs of the boys in front of her, their loose-legged bathing suits flapping like the wings of a stingray.

Everyone in the family knew that Renee was angry for the following reasons: (1) Renee’s breasts had just started to develop whereas Jamie was pushing out of a B-cup bra.

(2) Jamie’s period came with the certainty of a full moon while Renee’s periods showed up with the spotty irregularity of a distant (usually alcoholic) relative. And, (3) Jamie would not join Renee in her crusade against nakedness and marijuana smoking.

Renee, if she could have chosen, would have preferred to have belonged to the family of her best and only friend, Lori Nambine. The Nambines had professional family portraits hanging on their walls—portraits taken with the dog, under an oak tree, with each blond, ovine-faced Nambine wearing a red pullover sweater. The Nambines stored presliced cheeses and lunch meats in actual Tupperware-brand containers. The Nambines went to the Smorgasborg Restaurant for all-you-can-eat dinner every Sunday, and they drove their mobile home to their cabin at Lake Nacimiento on long weekends.

Whenever Renee could accompany them, she did, for time with the Nambines was real time, real life, Renee once said.

Renee let the family know that when she was home she was simply tolerating them, biding time before her scheduled six-week trek in Colorado with Outward Bound.

Sometime after the last pool party, Renee had stopped using Jamie’s proper name and now referred to her only as Farrah, as Jamie had begun to curl the front of her hair into wings, which she flipped down the sides of her face, Farrah Fawcett style. The new name, always said with a thorny lilt, led Jamie to erroneously believe that she had succeeded into shaping her flat, thin hair into a mane that resembled Farrah’s. Jamie noticed that the happier she was with her hair, the more infuriated Renee became.

It was not Jamie’s intention to anger her sister; in truth, she would have liked nothing more than to have her sister by her side again, to feel the soft coziness of when they were the same size and strangers asked if they were twins. They had often said yes, and when they played Barbies together (eleven-year-old Jamie solemnly swearing to her thirteen-year-old sister that she would reveal to no one that Renee still played Barbies) they would make blond Barbie and brunette Barbie twins who would date only identical twin Ken dolls. But at twelve, when Jamie had placed Renee’s hand on her, Jamie’s, chest and asked her about the achy garbanzo-sized lumps under her skin, the twinship pulled apart like a seam with loose and broken threads. By the time Jamie was thirteen Renee had begun hating her for reasons Jamie could no more control than change. Instead of hating her sister back, Jamie grew indifferent, detached, as if this phase in their sisterhood were just something she’d have to endure in the same way she endured the hour-long wait for the State Street bus, or the theater arts teacher who insisted that Jamie’s stage fright was a form of stupidity.

By the summer of 1976, Renee’s anger seemed to have swirled into a solid mass, a throwing stone with a single target: Jamie herself, the inexorable fact that she existed.

So, when seventeen-year-old Flip Jenkins called to ask Jamie on a date (Flip Jenkins, who was in high school with Renee; Flip Jenkins, whose yearbook picture Renee circled with a red ink heart; Flip Jenkins, who was voted Luscious Lester the previous year; Flip Jenkins, who drove a red VW 
bus with at least two surfboards in the back at all times; Flip Jenkins, who even the boys thought was the coolest guy around), Jamie didn’t dare tell Renee about it. In the matter of boys they were fairly even at that point, as neither Jamie nor Renee had ever been on a real date, the kind in which a boy picks you up at the house, takes you somewhere, and pays for it the way one’s father might. Jamie knew that once she went out with Flip she would be miles beyond Renee—it would be a chasm that could never be closed, for even if Renee went on a date that very same night, Jamie would still have dated two years before her sister in age.

Jamie told Flip that she couldn’t go out with him until Wednesday, the day after Renee was to leave for Outward Bound. Betty praised her daughter for sparing Renee the indignity of witnessing her younger sister go on a date, but, really, Jamie was sparing herself the torment that would have been inflicted upon her by Renee, and, additionally, she wanted access to Renee’s undulating rubber-heeled Famolare shoes.