The Tribes of Palos Verdes (2 page)

My mother looks out the window toward Michigan, ignoring my father's cheerful banter. After a few minutes, she flags down the stewardess.

“My husband would like to meet you,” she says.

*   *   *

In Palos Verdes, if you are close enough to the shore that the waves keep you awake at night, you are admitted to the tennis club, where you can play a set with the Mad Servers and complain about the water.

“It's just so loud. So incessant. I can't sleep.”

My mother has plenty to say to the ladies of the Mad Servers.

“The surfers. They destroy all the ice plant. They drag their boards across the ice plant and ruin everything.”

The Mad Servers look at each other. A few nod their heads politely. Until she continues.

“What's wrong with this place? How come the children roam around in packs? Why do they gather like mantises on the cliffs?”

This is my mother's first faux pas. The ladies of P.V. don't want to hear complaints about their children. The drinking, the smoking, the violence. No one wants to think about
that.
A kiss on both cheeks, a bibb lettuce luncheon: that is friendship.

*   *   *

Jim and I have lessons after school. All children are supposed to have lessons in Palos Verdes. There are tennis lessons, drama, and French. Voice, flute, and piano instruction. Lessons for ballroom dancing called cotillion, which surfers attend once a month in full formal dress. They learn how to cha-cha and waltz, so stoned they can barely lead their partners around the floor. Primly dressed girls apply red lipstick in the auditorium bathroom and hike up their long gowns until you see the curve of tanned calf.

There are Hebrew schools for the Jews, catechism for the Catholics. There are Girl Scouts and horse-riding lessons. Even polo.

Jim and I protest. We say we don't want so many lessons, because there's no time for fun things. I hear my parents talking it over in the kitchen.

“Maybe we should let them play with the other kids, maybe children shouldn't have so many things to do,” my father says.

“Who could they play with, Phil? All the other kids have lessons, too.”

*   *   *

The Palos Verdes mothers drive their children to these lessons between their facials and analysis. Or if they have housekeepers who drive, the maids do the chauffeuring. In return, the housekeepers get two hundred dollars a week and first pick of the Goodwill piles.

“We're so happy to help your family in Mexico,”
the ladies say.
“Take anything in that pile right over there, anything you want.”

*   *   *

“I know you want it,” my neighbor Danny says.

He is fifteen and superweird. He says he'll give me a surprise if I lift up my shirt, let him see. We're sitting in his tree house above the eucalyptus grove in his backyard. Pot is puffing out the sides of his mouth, choking him like an amateur. He stares at my flat chest, choking.

His eyes are red and filmy, his hands tightly clenched over the nose of the vanilla surfboard he offers. The board is smooth and pale white, with a single flame of orange down the left side. It has two fins. Two. Danny strokes the board cockily and tells me I have to hold up my shirt for ten seconds if I want it—he'll count.

I think about the ocean outside my window, how I see the guys glide on it. I imagine myself free.

“That's all,” I tell Danny. “One–one thousand, two–one thousand, like that. And you have to stay over there.”

He eyes the board, then my shirt, squeezing his palms together, stoned, fanning his ugly face in the warm air. He nods, he gestures for me to lift it up.

“First put that board over here,” I say.

I watch him put the board in the crook of his arm, carrying it to the place I decree. A place just beneath my feet.

“Now go back there, to where you were.”

The whole ten seconds, I look at his eyes, at his dull expression. He stares at my bare, flat chest, saying nothing, blowing air on the inside of his cheeks like a stupid puffer fish.

When it's done, he doesn't look at me. He lies down on the wooden floor, breathing hard, dizzy. He motions for me to come to him, but I run, putting the vanilla board in the crook of my arm, dragging it down the rope ladder, smelling its coating of coconut wax and resin. All night I think about it, sitting in the garage, waiting for me to hold it.

After breakfast the next day, I avoid my mother and her dark sunglasses and heavy silences, but I sneak my brother out to the garage and show him the vanilla board. I run my fingers over its nose, talking about water. I promise I can get him one. I cross my heart.

Then I go to Danny in his tree house, climb right up the ladder as if it's mine.

“I want another,” I insist. “I want another board.”

He doesn't look at me, but he says he will talk to his friend.

The next day I go to Adam Frankel's house. Adam Frankel is sweaty, nervous, clammy. He tells me three times that his mother is coming home soon. His giant Adam's apple strikes me as funny, so I laugh and laugh. Then lift up my shirt, still laughing.

My brother's new board is green like his eyes.

*   *   *

The next day is free-dress day. The popular girls are all comparing their pretty outfits, doing a mock fashion show under the awning. I smile secretly, thinking of my surfboard as I sneak past them in the concrete hallway. But the girls come to hover around me, laughing, trying to trip me with their feet. I walk past, float even, as Cami Miller shouts out, “Five dollars!” eyeing my favorite brown pants.

Adelle Braverman follows suit, yelling, “Six ninety-nine!” and spitting at my pretty leatherette thongs.

I flinch only when Cami almost hits me with a heavy science book. As I jump back, Cami says, “Don't worry, we aren't gonna hit you. We wouldn't touch such a dirty girl.”

*   *   *

I feel clean later, lying in the pool on my board for the first time. Cami is on the beach, a million miles away. I curse her as I float through the deep end, scanning the stairs for Jim, so he can hold my ankles if I try to stand up.

As I wait, I paddle slowly, back and forth in a line, maneuvering through the flat water on my belly, humming to myself.

I'm going to be the only girl to surf Palos Verdes.

Sometimes I dream I'm a boy.

*   *   *

The next day I carry my board, balancing it on my head down the cliff stairs to the bay. Jim follows, embarrassed, dragging his board under his arm like a suitcase. The water is calm and flat like the circle in a turquoise ring, but Jim bites his lip, scanning the horizon.

“People will laugh, maybe we should learn somewhere else.”

“Oh Jim, don't be such a pussy, just close your eyes and go in.”

For a minute I think he is going to punch me, but instead he smiles.

“You're insane, you crazy girl.”

He slaps me hard with a frond of seaweed. Together we fight, kicking water into each other's nostrils, struggling to push each other into the whitewash. I jump in and climb on the board, holding its rail down with one hand the way pro surfers do. Jim jumps in, too, and pushes me off. I flounder in the water angrily, spinning and defeated.

“You surf like a girl,” he says.

“You suck,” I say, “like a troll.”

He puts his right foot forward, and then his left, and says, “Which way are you supposed to stand?”

As I think about this, I forget how mad I am.

“Whichever way feels better,” I tell him.

*   *   *

“Do you have the face you deserve after thirty?”

My mother cuts this quote out of a magazine and pastes it to the refrigerator. My mother is thirty-four. My father is forty-one.

My father looks at the quote and laughs, gathering my mother in his arms.

“You don't have to worry about that,” he says. “When the times comes, I know doctors who can make you look twenty again.”

“Maybe they can just replace my head,” she says, pushing my father away. “Or maybe they'll just replace me when no one's looking.”

*   *   *

My mother was a model at Bluff's Department Store in Michigan when she met my father. She had what her agency called “the look of the moment.”

Like Jackie Kennedy, my mother kept her eyes shrouded in huge, black, oval sunglasses all day. She hated the agency's endless nagging about her waistline, the exercise classes they sent her to, and the diet pills they gave her. But it's easy to see she loved the attention.

Here's a picture of my mother when she was skinny. Jim keeps it in his room, in a white frame on his desk. My mother's sitting on a knoll in a park, her legs demurely crossed, hands on her cheeks. She wears a white French suit, rosette beaded pumps, and a slender gold watch. She is surrounded by cute male models, each holding out a long-stemmed rose for her. She smiles giddily; there are so many flowers, she cannot choose among them.

It is an advertisement for the spring suits of 1964.

Today her hair is still styled like Jackie Kennedy's was in 1964.

*   *   *

My mother eats in secret while my father is at the hospital. First she only eats salty things that come in bags or plastic boxes. The sweet things come later.

After school and my lessons, I come home to the smell of plastic bags, salsa, and American cheese, all melting in the double oven. Torn tendrils of Dorito packs litter the stovetop, stinking like crossed wires as they melt on the coils.

My mother comes from her room only to get more bags, smiling blandly at me and Jim. Through the walls, we hear the sound of bags being popped open.

She puts an unopened bag of chips in her lap and claps her hands over the mouth of the bag so that it explodes open jauntily. Then it is quiet, until enough time has passed, and then there is another clapping sound, and then more quiet.

Puggles the dog stays in my mother's room, eating the crumbs that explode from the top of the bag. Puggles likes chips very much and wags his tail at the sound of any ripping plastic, even if it is only Dr. Phil Mason, our father, unwrapping a fresh batch of dry cleaning.

My mother gains weight quickly. Her Swedish cheekbones completely dissolve as her waistline expands.

“Don't hurt her feelings,” Jim says when I stare.

*   *   *

My mother met my father when she was eighteen. She was a model, and my father was in medical school. Their parents said they were too young to get married, but they eloped to Chicago and called from a pay phone outside the county courthouse. My mother said she didn't want to get married, but my father says it was like this: When he found out she wasn't really pregnant, it was too late, they were married already.

When I ask why they didn't get a divorce right away, my father sighs. Then he tells me love is like the ocean. It goes far deeper than people understand.

*   *   *

Nobody likes a new girl. When we first came here from Michigan, everyone laughed at my fancy white boots. When the girls tried to trip me, rolling their eyes, I knew it would be the same as it was in Michigan, even though my father said California would be different. The girls would never accept me, and I'd eat lunch alone again.

I knew Jim would be popular though, and the pretty girls would try to steal him. When I ask him to prick his finger, become my blood brother, he tells me I'm getting fruity.

“We already have the same blood, stupid. We're stuck with each other.”

*   *   *

Today there's a new girl at my school from Vermont. She's very pale, with a delicate face and wavy brown hair. She smiles shyly at me as we each eat our lunches alone on the grass. I don't smile back at her, but she introduces herself anyway, telling me her name is Laura. I chew and nod silently, not giving my name. Then I notice her arms are turning pink in the sun.

“Maybe you should move to the shade,” I say, finally.

“I wish I wasn't so pale. The girls are all calling me Casper behind my back,” she confides.

“Isn't there any sun in Vermont?” I say. When she flushes, I amend myself quickly. “When we moved here I was superwhite, too.”

As she smiles again, I look her up and down, appraising.

I say, “No offense, but no one wears a blouse. The teachers don't care if you wear a white T-shirt under your uniform.”

“Oh,” she says, blushing.

“It's no big deal, just F.Y.I.”

When the end-of-lunch bell rings, she puts out her hand for me to shake. “We could meet at snack period,” she says, hesitating, “or would you rather eat alone?”

When we meet at snack period, I tell her about the Bayboys. “They're the best surfers at Lunada Bay. I'm gonna surf with them, even though I'm a girl.”

She nods her head and starts to tell me all about her horse. But I interrupt. “Riding waves is way better than riding horses.”

Then I demonstrate, imitating the Bayboys, standing up on the rickety bench. “See, the water tries to push them sideways, but they lean back and put their arms out, like this,” I say.

When the bell rings, I say, “I'd invite you over after school, but my mom's sick.” Then I invite her to the beach, after my piano lesson.

“Okay,” she says, wrinkling up her nose like a baby rabbit.

The rest of the day I make big plans. Maybe we'll have sleepovers at her house, with popcorn and movies. We'll rent
Endless Summer,
the best surf movie of all time. By the time school's over, my stomach is twisted into happy knots. But as we walk through the gate, Cami Miller walks up behind us, leading a small group of girls, flipping her blond hair.

“You don't want to go with her,” Cami whispers. “Medina Mason is the weirdest girl in the whole school. No one likes her.”

Laura hesitates, looking at me and then at the other girls.