Like Family (31 page)

O
NE
AFTERNOON DURING MY
senior year, Jacy walked right into the Swensons’ bathroom as I was using it and began pacing in front of the long mirror,
considering her javeline. Even on the avocado shag, she walked from her hips, like a dancer. I tried to pee quietly, gracefully.

“Travis is
cute,”
she said to her reflection. “Sure. But he’s too inexperienced. The one time we did it, he orgasmed in, like, two minutes.
And I wasn’t even
moving.”

This ticking off of her meager choices is what Jacy seemed to do best, cataloging, adding or subtracting penciled stars for
tropical-colored condoms or Old Spice deodorant. She kept a neat record of her conquests in a green spiral notebook: first
name, last name — if available — date, location, merit. That summer at the Swensons’, she was on line fifty-nine, the Australian
foreign-exchange student she followed to the bathroom at Rhonda Snelling’s yard party. The bathroom was so tiny she had to
stand up, her rear pressed to cold porcelain, left knee pinched against the wall.

I was seventeen and not a virgin, having “done it” precisely five times, always with the same boy. I didn’t need a spiral
notebook. Mark was fervently Presbyterian, complete with an enormous colored poster of John 3:16 on the closet door opposite
his bed.
For God so loved the world.
We started dating in March of my junior year. The first three months were sweetly repressed: sweaty hand-holding and near-miss
kissing. We’d lean into each other at the movies, our breath bitter with Raisinettes. We nuzzled like nervous pigeons until
the first full kiss, which was like a revelation.
That he gave his only begotten Son.
Then we couldn’t stop kissing. We were inventing it.

We squirmed and panted, fully clothed, in the furrows of the orchard near my house. I’d come home smelling of almonds, soft
earth burned into the back of my skirt. This went on and on. When we finally did it on the sofa in his family’s living room,
I was so surprised to actually find him between my legs, I couldn’t muster the sense not to scream. He pressed a cushion against
my mouth, stopping it like a bottle.

From that time on, Mark and I were a sexual catastrophe. If he was ready, I was crying; if I was ready, he was feeling guilty
and ashamed, saying, “No, we shouldn’t. It’s not right.”

I knew it happened other ways for other girls. There was a whole continuum, from Amber guarding her cherry like it was gold-plated
to Jacy throwing it at anyone in pants, to Tina, who had been trying to woo a boyfriend with sex since eighth grade. There
was a lean black boy in Tina’s class at Clark named Stanley Vargas. Stanley had a fantastic orange-tipped Afro that he liked
to comb with a giant pick while leaning against the lockers watching the “talent” walk by. He whistled at Tina one day as
she headed to our bus, and that was it; she would have Stanley if she had to tackle him first. They were a hot item for exactly
four days, wearing each other’s dark hickies like badges, and then Stanley had to be moving on. Nothing Tina could do could
change his mind, not wearing a sequined tube top and short shorts, not flirting loudly with his friends, not offering to go
“behind the bleachers” with him, which meant various kinds of wrestling on the big blue mats that were stored there, at the
back of the gym.

Tina’s virginity seemed not to carry any significance for her. She dispensed with it as quickly as possible and with as little
ceremony as possible when she was fourteen, with Pete Berringer, who was twelve at the time. This happened in the back of
our camper, headed toward some sailing event while both sets of parents sat up in the cab, singing cheerfully along to Kenny
Rogers:
Oh, Ru-u-by, don’t take your love to town.
Tina didn’t even have a crush on Pete; she just wanted to know what it felt like. And once she knew, she wanted to feel it
again, with boys who mattered. This only became difficult when Tina wanted the boys who were beautiful. She was just average,
like the rest of us. Thick through the neck and arms, Tina could bench-press a hundred pounds, which impressed the boys in
the weight room, but not the way she wanted. Her hair was never right (probably because she let Hilde and Noreen cut and perm
it), her eyes were small and squinty, and her lips were so thin she couldn’t wear lip gloss without it crawling toward her
nose. I would have been terrified to chase the boys she chased — the pole vaulters and water polo players and defensive linemen
— but she wasn’t me.

After Stanley, there was Carlos; after Carlos there was Alan, a diver who wore tight red Speedo swim trunks. Alan had big
shoulders, a narrow waist and hips, and was so good-looking he could have had any girl in school, and did, the cheerleaders
and pep-squad girls and gymnasts with their pert ponytails. Tina seemed not to know Alan was out of her league and chased
and chased him, handing him thick love letters in pink envelopes through the Cyclone fence by the pool — and finally they
had a “date,” in someone’s garage during a keg party, which was about as subtle as behind the bleachers. After that, she thought
they were steady; he thought nothing at all.

Still, Tina wasn’t giving up, no matter how pointedly Alan ignored her. Once I watched her trail him all the way from the
door of the boys’ locker room to the buses. She called his name and said, “Wait up,” but he wouldn’t even turn around. She
was like a puppy at his heels, and it reminded me of the way Penny used to fawn over her second-grade teacher, Mrs. Munoz,
desperate for one specific smile. They were either very brave or very stupid, I didn’t know which.

Tina climbed onto the bus, spotted me and came to sit down. “Do you think Alan likes me?” she said. “I mean, really
likes
me?”

T
HE FOLLOWING SUMMER,
I was back in the Swensons’ bathroom with Jacy. Like the year before, she stalked the mirror and sighed — but now she had
something to sigh about. Jacy was pregnant, though she preferred the term
infected.
She placed her hand — nails perfectly buffed and lacquered — on her flat abdomen. “Parasite,” she huffed, turning profile,
a police lineup of one. She thought the infector might be her friend Russell, whom she had gift-screwed on his birthday, but
this seemed incidental. At Planned Parenthood they told her to wait three weeks before the procedure, to make sure the embryo
wasn’t too small and therefore missable. In the meantime, she lolled from plaid sofa to patio to beanbag chair with nineteenth-century
paleness and melodrama. She threw a hand up, dismissing dinner, and slunk off for a bath.

When the time came, Penny went to the clinic with Jacy for moral support. She waited with a stack of
Reader’s Digests,
increasing her word power while Jacy was off behind a curtain, extracting herself from the parasite, growing more separate
from us than ever. Three hours later, Jacy left the clinic with a paper packet of tetracycline in one hand, a wad of Trojans
in the other. Back at the Swensons’, she led us into the bathroom, shucked her shorts and sat down on the toilet. Pressed
to her underwear was the biggest maxipad I’d ever seen, soaked through with Jacy’s blood.
Oxygenated, I
remembered from biology. Blood was never that bright inside the body.

“I’m cured,” Jacy said, smiling.

S
OON
AFTER
J
ACY
WAS
parasite-free, our neighbor, Kevin Stringer, had a pool party. A Santa Ana wind blew that day, hot as a furnace, singed with
chlorine and briquettes. I was trying to nap on the diving board but couldn’t get comfortable. My suit had dried to my body,
pinching under my arms and at my hipbones, and the board felt like a stucco crucifix. Someone to my left whooped out “Marco!”
but the voices answering “Polo!” were as muffled and distant as pings in a pop can. I hadn’t eaten all day, and my head buzzed,
a hive. I was enjoying this feeling of hollowness; my bones felt closer to themselves, more private somehow.

Just as I started to twitch into a sweaty sleep, someone found the stereo. Supertramp began to pulse from Kevin’s bedroom
window:
Good-bye, stranger, it’s been nice. Hope you find your paradise.
We had this album memorized. When Valerie processed the lyrics of this song in particular, she worried that, in the singing,
Amber was mourning her lost innocence. She needn’t have. Amber’s innocence was firmly intact. Like her breasts, Amber’s virginity
preceded her into a room, a pink flag with its own gravity. She’d give it up for love, she insisted, but since none of us
knew what that was, she might as well have been saying she’d give it up for Jesus or space aliens.

Jacy thought Amber
was
a space alien. “What’s so
precious
about your pussy?” she challenged. “Do you want to
die
a nun or something?”

I looked up from the board, blinking against a red, red sun, to see Jacy straddling Kevin’s shoulders. They were playing chicken
with Amber and her brother Bo, but Amber’s weight kept Bo toppling over backward, water flooding his nose. Jacy did a victory
wiggle, shaking her bikinied butt. She hadn’t slept with Kevin yet and was clearly working it. I was more worried about Rhonda
Snelling, who had slipped out the side gate, some twenty minutes before, with Teresa’s boyfriend. Although Brian was relatively
new on the scene — they’d been dating a few months — I knew Teresa really liked him. When she brought him around for the
Caligula
party, her hair was in sausage curls and she was laughing with one hand over her chipped tooth, the way she did when she
wanted to be pretty. Now Rhonda was likely to ruin everything. Her predatory interest in other people’s boyfriends was legendary.
When Wendy Prather confessed her crush on a boy she worked with at Foster’s Freeze, it wasn’t a week before Rhonda was in
the shop in red pedal pushers and a tank top, licking her strawberry cone obscenely.

The sun moved through its stations, and finally it was five o’clock. I tucked my towel saronglike and left the swim party
without saying anything because I didn’t want anyone to tease me about my date. Then, walking the half a mile of hot asphalt
between the Stringers’ house and ours, it occurred to me that this wasn’t a date at a11, but its opposite. With Bub, Hilde
and Tina in Dos Palos for the weekend and Penny still at the Stringers’, the place was temporarily all mine. Mark would come
to my door. I’d put on a sundress and set the table with three sizes of forks, grilled steak, scalloped potatoes, a green
salad. I knew I was playing house, but how often did I feel I really
had
a house? Bub and Hilde took up all the space when they were around, all the oxygen; they filled the furniture like rising
dough. Nothing was mine except my clothes. Although we’d lived with the Lindberghs for nine years, I didn’t own anything that
wouldn’t fit in a Hefty bag. For one night, though, I could act otherwise. “This is my table,” I said out loud to the kitchen
rinsed with evening light. “My napkin, my knee, my sunburn, my salt, my spoon.”