The Summer of Naked Swim Parties

After all, it was the seventies, so Allen and Betty thought nothing of leaving their younger daughter, Jamie, home alone for three nights while they went camping in Death Valley.

And although most girls who had just turned fourteen would love a rambling Spanish-style house (with a rock formation pool, of course) to themselves for four days, Jamie, who erupted with bouts of fear with the here-now/gone-now pattern of a recurring nightmare, found the idea of her parents spending three nights in Death Valley terrifying. Jamie was not afraid for Allen and Betty—she did not fear their death by heat stroke, or scorpion sting, or dehydration (although each of these occurred to her in the days preceding their depar-ture). She feared her own death—being murdered by one of the homeless men who slept between the roots of the giant fig tree near the train station or being trapped on the first floor of the house, the second floor sitting on her like a fat giant, after having fallen in an earthquake.

Jamie’s older sister, Renee, was also away that weekend, at a lake with the family of her best and only friend. But even if she had been home, Renee would have provided little com
fort for Jamie, as her tolerance for the whims of her younger sister seemed to have vanished around the time Jamie began menstruating while Renee still hadn’t grown hips.

“I invited Debbie and Tammy to stay with me while you’re gone,” Jamie told her mother.

They were in the kitchen. Betty wore only cutoff shorts and an apron (no shoes, no shirt, no bra); it was her standard uniform while cooking. Betty’s large, buoyant breasts sat on either side of the bib—her long, gummy nipples matched the polka dots on the apron.

“I know,” Betty said. “Their mothers called.” Jamie’s stomach thumped. Of course their mothers called.

They each had a mother who considered her daughter the central showpiece of her life. “So what’d you say?” Jamie prayed that her mother had said nothing that would cause Tammy’s and Debbie’s mothers to keep them home.

“I told them that I had left about a hundred dollars’ worth of TV dinners in the freezer, that there was spending money in the cookie jar, and that there was nothing to worry about.”

“What’d they say?”

“Tammy’s mother wanted to know what the house rules were.”

“What’d you say?”

“I told her there were no rules. We trust you.” Jamie knew her parents trusted her, and she knew they were right to do so—she couldn’t imagine herself doing something they would disapprove of. The problem, as she saw it, was that she didn’t trust them not to do something that she disapproved of. She had already prepared herself for the possibility that her parents would not return at the time they had promised, for anything—an artichoke festival, a nudists’ rights parade—could detain them for hours or even days. There 
was nothing internal in either of her parents, no alarms or bells or buzzing, that alerted them to the panic their younger daughter felt periodically, like she was an astronaut unteth-ered from the mother ship—floating without any boundaries against which she could bounce back to home.

Allen walked into the kitchen. He’d been going in and out of the house, loading the Volvo with sleeping bags, a tent, lanterns, flashlights, food.

“You know Debbie and Tammy are staying here with Jamie,” Betty said, and she flipped an omelet over—it was a perfect half-moon, and she, for a second, was like a perfect mother.

“Why do all your friend’s names end in y?” Allen asked.

“Tammy,” Jamie recited, “Debbie . . . Debbie’s i e.”

“But it sounds like a y.”

“So does my name.”

“You’re i e,” Betty said, “You’ve been i e since you were born.”

“Yeah, but Jamie sounds like Jamey with a y.”

“There’s no such thing as Jamie with a y,” Allen said. “But there is Debby with a y.”

“Well Mom’s a y—Betty!”

“I’m a different generation,” Betty said, “I don’t count.”

“And she’s not your friend, she’s your mother,” Allen said.

“Oh, there’s also Kathy and Suzy and Pammy,” Betty said.

“No one calls her Pammy except you,” Jamie said.

“Too many y’s,” Allen said. “You need friends with more solid names. Carol or Ann.”

“No way I’m hanging out with Carol or Ann.”

“They’ve got good names.” Allen sat on a stool at the counter, picked up his fork and knife, and held each in a fist on either side of his plate.

“They’re dorks,” Jamie said.

Betty slid the omelet off the pan and onto Allen’s plate just as their neighbor, Leon, walked in.

“Betty,” he said, and he kissed Jamie’s mother on the cheek. His right hand grazed one breast as they pulled away from the kiss.

“Allen,” Leon stuck out the hand that had just touched Betty’s breast toward Allen, who was hovered over his omelet, oblivious.

“Did you find some?” Allen asked.

“I stuck it in your trunk,” Leon said.

“What?” Jamie asked.

“Nothing,” Allen said, although he must have known that Jamie knew they were talking about marijuana. They rolled it in front of their daughters, they smoked it in front of them, they left abalone ashtrays full of Chiclet-sized butts all over the house. Yet the actual purchasing of it was treated like a secret—as if the girls were supposed to think that although their parents would smoke an illegal sub-stance, they’d never be so profligate as to buy one.

“So what are you going to do in Death Valley?” Leon asked.

Allen lifted his left hand and made an O. He stuck the extended middle finger of his right hand in and out of the O. The three of them laughed. Jamie turned her head so she could pretend to not have seen. Unlike her sister, Jamie was successfully able to block herself from her parents’ overwhelming sexuality, which often filled the room they were in, in the same way that air fills whatever space contains it.

“And what are you doing home alone?” Leon winked at Jamie.

“Debbie and Tammy are staying with me,” she said. “I guess we’ll watch TV and eat TV dinners.” 

“You want an omelet?” Betty asked Leon, and her voice was so cheerful, her cheeks so rouged and smooth, that it just didn’t seem right that she should walk around half-naked all the time.

“Sure,” Leon said, and he slid onto the stool next to Allen as Betty prepared another omelet.

Jamie looked back at the three of them as she left the kitchen. Allen and Leon were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, being served food by chatty, cheerful Betty. Wide bands of light shafted into the room and highlighted them as if they were on a stage. It was a scene from a sitcom gone wrong.

There was the friendly neighbor guy, the slightly grumpy father, the mother with perfectly coiffed short brown hair that sat on her head like a wig. But when the mother bent down to pick up an eggshell that had dropped, the friendly neighbor leaned forward on his stool so he could catch a glimpse of the smooth orbs of his friend’s wife’s ass peeking out from the fringe of her too-short shorts.

Jamie wished her life were as simple as playing Color-forms; she would love to stick a plastic dress over her shiny cardboard mother. If it didn’t stick, she’d lick the dress and hold it down with her thumb until it stayed.

Debbie and Tammy were dropped off together by Tammy’s father, who got out of the car and walked into the house with them.

“Did your parents leave already?” he asked.

“Yes, Mr. Hopkins,” Jamie said.

Mr. Hopkins looked around the kitchen, toward the dining room, then out the French doors toward the pool, which had an open-air thatched bar in the shape of a squat 
British telephone booth, and boulders like stone club chairs embedded in the surrounding tile.

“What are the pool rules?” he asked, his belly pointing in the direction of his gaze as if it, too, were scrutinizing the situation.

“No one is allowed to swim alone.” Jamie recited the rules from Debbie’s house: “No glass or other breakable items by the pool, no food by the pool, no running by the pool, no skinny-dipping, no friends over unless my parents are informed ahead of time . . . Uh . . .”

“No swimming after dark,” Debbie said.

“Right. No swimming after dark.”

“What are the house rules?” Mr. Hopkins asked.

Jamie was stumped. She had heard house rules at other people’s houses during sleepovers but couldn’t recall a single one.

“Um.” She yawned once, and then yawned again. “We have to behave like ladies.” She had little faith that that would go over, but it did. Mr. Hopkins nodded and smiled, the corners of his mouth folding into his cheeks like cake batter.

“Well then,” he said, “you girls have fun. And call us if you need anything.”

When his car had pulled out of the driveway, the girls tumbled into one another, laughing.

“House rules?!” Debbie said. “He’s got the wrong house!”

Tammy burrowed into her pressed-leather purse and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Light 100’s. “He’s got the wrong century,” she said, lighting her cigarette, and then Debbie’s, with a yellow Bic.

Tammy was wiry and small with bony knees and elbows, 
big floppy feet, knobby breasts, and shiny dangerous-looking braces on her upper teeth. Somehow, the cigarette made her look more pointed than she already was. Even her hair appeared sharp, hanging down her back in white clumpy daggers.

Debbie was round and smooth. She had black, shiny hair, thick black eyebrows, and lashes that made it look as if her eyes had been painted with liquid velvet. Her skin was white in the winter, golden in the summer, and always a contrast to her deep eyes and red mouth, which at that moment was smacking against a Marlboro.

Tammy offered Jamie a cigarette because Jamie had smoked one with her once and Tammy couldn’t believe that she didn’t plan on smoking another in her lifetime. The problem with smoking, Jamie had decided, was that it didn’t look right on her. She had straight, matter-of-fact brown hair that hung to just past her shoulders. There were freckles running across her nose and cheeks. Her eyes were round, brown dots.

Her nose was a third dot on her face. If you were to draw a caricature of her, she would be mostly mouth: soft pink lips, straight wide teeth; she smiled when she talked, a broad smile that glinted on her face. In her most self-flattering moments she thought of herself as Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island; she knew she could never be Ginger.

By seven o’clock, the thrill of having the house to themselves had dampened. Tammy played Frampton Comes Alive!

so loudly that the windows vibrated; they ate ice cream out of the carton using their bent first two fingers as a spoon; they perused the deeply unsexy drawings in The Joy of Sex, which sat beside the toilet in Allen and Betty’s bathroom; 
and they squeezed into and modeled sixteen-year-old Renee’s child-sized clothes. Eventually the three girls ended up back in the kitchen, where Tammy and Jamie leaned their flat bellies across the stools while Debbie stood at the open freezer door looking for dinner.