Thrill-Bent (11 page)

As I got nearer, I heard the lifeguard’s scratchy voice over the megaphone. I couldn’t make out the words, but the cadences were so familiar I could imagine what he was saying. These announcements were usually safety alerts about riptides, or warnings to swimmers who had crept over into the surfing-only section next to the reef. Sometimes the lifeguard used details to describe the offender—“Will the girl in the red bathing suit please swim north, you’re inside of the surfing area!”—which was so potentially embarrassing that even the sunbathers looked down at their own color combinations just to make sure. But there seemed to be some commotion in the water up ahead, out by the breakers where we’d been swimming. Several people were waving their arms high and wide in the air, clearly signaling for help. I heard distant shouting, and I detected panic in the voices, but they got swept away by the ocean’s booming. Everything seemed dramatic and intensified. The thundering crash of the waves was haunting and perilous, and the various transistor radios blasting news talk and Top 40 up and down the beach sounded sinister, earmarking for history the exact position of a tragedy. I began walking faster, then trotted over the harder sand toward the lifeguard station.

A hundred yards down the beach, a red Jeep had peeled out and was cutting between the family picnics and teenage Frisbee games along the ruffled edge of shore. Saltwater sprayed in spirograph symmetry from its tires, and parents pulled their kids roughly away from the Jeep’s path. Behind the wheel, the beefy older lifeguard with his red trunks and handlebar mustache kept yelling into his megaphone, “People, clear away, clear away from the Jeep! Coming through!” His voice was firm and professional, somehow more ominous than a screaming woman’s would have been. Along the upper reaches of the shore, people stood up from their towels and folding beach chairs, hands on hips, shielding sun from their eyes.

I had a bad feeling about this. I scanned the area for my father, looking left and right as I ran full-throttle after the lifeguard. Our towels were still there, empty and sand-strewn, his sandals childishly askew in their little pile. The Jeep stopped on the shoreline in front of the waving swimmers, whose features I still couldn’t quite make out, blinded by the sun’s glare on the water. The lifeguard leapt out over the Jeep’s door and into the surf. I dove in too, and swam with all my might out toward the breakers.

Keep your hips up, don’t let your lower body sink more than thirty degrees. Keep oscillating your arms like a fan. Scoop out the water like it’s Jell-O. Don’t dip from the shoulders. Don’t pause. Breathe only every other stroke by barely swivelingyour head to the side. Dive down deep under the waves, and keep swimming when you come up. Look out toward the horizon to make sure there are no surprises. Kick from your hips, not from your knees. Don’t panic. Keep breathing. Don’t think. Don’t cry.

When I finally slowed down and shook the wet hair out of my eyes, I had to blink a few times to see what I saw. The hulking lifeguard, his mustache streaming like a double waterfall, was clutching my dwarfed, brown father in what appeared to be a wrestling hold, both of them bobbing up and down in the coiling skein of water. A leathery middle-aged couple were treading water a few feet behind them, looking concerned, eyes wide.

“Sir! Sir!” the lifeguard barked, in his best boot camp voice. “Please stop resisting. I’m going to swim you in to shore, and then we can discuss what happened. Just breathe normally, and let me do the work here.”

“Screw you!” shouted my father. I could tell he meant it; this was different from his automatic cursing. It was pointed and angry, its tone directed at the man’s log of arm across his chest. “Nothing happened! I was fine. These were the idiots who started waving and shouting! Why don’t you fucking swim
them
in to shore?”

“Sir, apparently you were experiencing a problem out here. These folks were concerned about your safety. We can discuss it further once we get you in to shore, like I said.”

My dad tried to jab him in the ribs with his elbow, succeeding only in making a sort of squishy fart noise as the saltwater rushed up under his arm.

“Dad,” I started. All four heads spun toward me, as though a great white shark had just sprung out of the depths into their midst.

“Hi,” I said shyly, and gave a little wave. “This is my dad.” I foraged for words. “He was teaching me how to bodysurf.”

I could tell right away that my explanation was not the magic wand that was going to clear up the situation with one lissome flourish. Everyone waited a beat after I finished speaking, and then turned back to what they were doing. The lifeguard commenced swimming westward with my father grasped helpless and wriggling, like a good-sized tuna, across his side. Cries of “Goddamn it, let go of me! Who do you think you are, Mark motherfucking Spitz?” got fainter and weaker as the tandem struggle of rescued and rescuing bodies waggled in, reeling and strutting, toward dry land.

The leathery couple, still treading water, immediately began to talk about my father as though I wasn’t there.

“Maybe he needed a psychiatrist instead of a lifeguard,” the lady said, watching the reluctant deliverance, her pageboy haircut plastered to her cheeks and forehead like a tight swim cap. “Seems to me somebody might be a little grateful that people took an interest in his suffering. Seems to me someone might say ‘Thank you for saving my life’ instead of cursing a blue streak in front of a child.”

“Seems to me we ought to butt out next time, like I suggested,” said the man, squinting out at the fuzzy horizon.

On our way home from the beach, my father always stopped at 7-11 and bought me a Slurpee. That was our ritual. We had been doing it this way for years. But today my father passed by the 7-11 without stopping, his expression brow-heavy and dark, focused on the road.

“Hey!” I cried, trying to sound playfully outraged. “What about my Slurpee?”

He looked over at me blankly for a second, then popped a U-turn in the middle of Lomas Santa Fe Drive. He didn’t smile or wink or make any apology for forgetting. He just lapsed into a complicated drum solo on the window visor, slapping and sputtering with both hands while his knees steered us into the 7-11 parking lot. He peeled a dollar out of the roll of bills in the ashtray and handed it to me wordlessly. When I got back into the car with my bright blue Slurpee, we sat silently for a few minutes while he let the engine idle. I kept my mouth on my red-and-white spoon-straw, chewing even when I’d finished the drink, poking at the small pellets of inadequately frapped ice that clogged the straw’s path. I saw some older girls from my junior high school, eighth graders with breasts and underarm stubble, wearing macrame bikinis and velvet flip-flops, go into the 7-11 to peruse the candy aisle. Once in a while my dad slapped his crotch or batted at the dashboard. He made no motion to turn on the car radio. I stuck out my tongue as far as I could to see that its pointy tip was stained a disturbing shade of artificial aquamarine.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?” His face was still stony and unreadable. His expression hadn’t changed since I’d swum in from the deep and saw him already stomping toward the car with our towels clutched in his fist.

“Did you happen to see me catch my perfect wave? I
knew
it was leaning north, and I dropped my shoulders and turned my head and rode it all the way in to the beach!” I couldn’t help bragging a little, since I’d failed so often to have anything to gloat about. Also, I hoped to deflect my father’s bad mood, to soften the creases that traveled from the sides of his nose down to the ends of his hard mouth. I wanted to make him forget about the lifeguard’s biceps and the leathery couple’s concern. Nothing could put my dad in a foul mood like someone else’s concern.

“Good for you,” he said flatly, watching Megan Johnson intently as she bent over to finger the penny candy on the bottom shelf.

When we arrived home, he vacuumed the sand out of the car (he kept a daschund-like vacuum cleaner, with its myriad attachments, in the garage for these Saturday occasions), and I grabbed the turpentine from its shelf by the dryer and headed out to the backyard. By the time I finished de-tarring my feet, my father would be ready to spray me down with the backyard hose.

Hanging onto the trunk of the backyard jacaran-da tree with one hand, naked, a large can of turpentine and an old, grimy hand towel in the other, I attempted to dissolve the dime-sized spots of beach tar arrayed like moles over the soles of my feet. If I soaked the towel in turpentine, then pressed it hard on the offending spot for a count of ten, that helped to soften the embedded tar. Then I just had to rub briskly like I was buffing a shoe until the black turned to brown then to tawny beige and then finally to a curdled, french-vanilla-colored stain. The stain couldn’t be disappeared in one go-round; tiny veins of pigment remained, miniature roads sunk into the complicated landscape of my skin.

I put down the rag and screwed the rusted lid back on to the turpentine can, as tight as my bicep would allow. My bathing suit lay in a wet puddle on the terra cotta patio among purple trumpet blossoms that had drifted down from the tree, their overcooked edges crispy and wilted. I picked the suit up and shook it off, laid it neatly across the back of a lawn chair, threading the top’s stretchy straps through the weave of the fibrous slats to make sure it didn’t blow away during the night. The lime green suit looked ridiculous against the plaid wheat-colored chair, like a lollipop on toast.

The sun was just beginning to go down, and the heat of the day lifted off through the atmosphere. I shivered a little from the slight breeze against my sun-stained body. The backyard sat on the edge of a deeply forested canyon populated by coyotes and raccoons, blue jays and bumblebees. The nearest human neighbors were far from shouting distance across the piney divide. My mother, who complained that the beach was “too grainy” for her, was probably stretched out on the living room couch reading
Sunset
magazine. I looked down at my nude body, glanced around the yard once to make sure I was alone, and leaned delicately back against the rough bark of the tree. The skin where my swimsuit had covered was as white as a picket fence. But the rest of me was pinky tan, freckled like a sidewalk spattered with rain. The smooth, golden-brown limbs of girls in my sixth-grade class, girls who wore short sleeveless dresses to school with slim white bra straps peeking out sexily on their rangy shoulders—those limbs were not my limbs. Every summer I burned and peeled, burned and peeled, until the third or fourth taut and shiny layer of skin on my body finally succumbed to my real destiny: I was a variegated, plump, pink girl whose training bra straps stayed fixed like masking tape firmly out of sight under her Sears cap-sleeved blouses. I raised my arm to examine the tiny red bumps on the backs of my triceps, a rash of mini-pimples that never healed. I scratched at them with the stumps of my bitten-down fingernails, hoping they would miraculously break off and flake away, fluttering down to disappear between the patio tiles like jacaranda blossoms. But scratching only exacerbated the situation, and now my arm skin looked like a cluster of tiny taillights. It occurred to me to try to scour them off with turpentine, but somehow I knew that was one of those bad ideas, like the time I filed down my front teeth with a metal fingernail file and accidentally scraped off a half-inch patch of my tongue. I secretly spat blood for three days.

My hair was stiff, like the brittle tresses of a doll. I pulled a thick hunk of it into the corner of my mouth to taste its heavy coating of salt and Coppertone. I leaned my whole weight back against the tree trunk, feeling its burled, rutted bark on the flesh of my bare butt cheeks. It felt good. I could imagine the imprint it would leave—a whorled paisley pattern that charted a path across the whitest part of me, a sort of texture-tattoo in the shape of a bikini bottom. I threw my head back and closed my eyes. My shoulder blades felt like they were being pricked with pins, but my nest of matted hair cushioned my scalp from the rough tree, and I fluttered my eyelids to let in a tiny bit of light from the setting sun. The resultant jangle of glow and shade—what I imagined blind people must see all the time—was beautiful, like a loop of broken celluloid going around and around in the brain of the projector, flapping its dark tail against the bright, dusty bulb. I tried to predict what I might see from this vantage point with my eyes open: the leaves and blossoms of the jacaranda bobbling in the breeze, or spangles of orangey light visible in brief snaps between the dancing foliage. I felt sort of dizzy, but also perfectly secure, my body pressed into the sturdy torso of the big tree. I leaned back even harder, trying to dissolve into the bark, to add my small weight to its structure. It would be nice, I decided, to be a tree, to grip the earth with such force, to vault steadily into the sky like a beam. I held out my hands, eyes still closed, and waited patiently to catch any floating blossoms that might fall my way. I stretched out my fingers as wide as they would splay, upping the chance for a hit. But those lilac blooms were so tiny and light, I wondered if I could even feel one on my palm if it did happen to drift down and ...

Suddenly, I sensed a presence in the corner of the patio and opened my eyes, but before I could spin my head around toward the hot spot, a powerful blast of cold water slammed me in the right hipbone, sending a spray of droplets out around my legs, sprinkling the base of the tree. I screamed, half in surprise, half in real pain. Then I saw him, crouching in the flowerbed between the bougainvillea and the overgrown bottlebrush.

I could hear the fat bush buzzing, even from here—underneath the opaque surface, with its waxy flat leaves and red spiny flowers, I knew there resided a hive of angry bees, hiding crowded as thieves in the sweet-smelling inner chambers of the bush’s scarlet bottles. I’d seen them dive-bomb the cat when he passed by unknowingly; I’d heard their insidious rumble as I bent down to reach for a drink from the hose. As I looked at the Condor’s implacable face, I directed all the force of my psychic will toward the collection of stingers to try to influence them to surprise-attack my father.
There he is! Right there, next to you. See the hairy leg squatting about a foot from your branches? All you have to do is organize a quick air strike, divert his attention and then ...