The Summer of Naked Swim Parties (12 page)

“Well, what have you noticed about him?” Betty took a sip of wine as if to cover for her abruptness.

“I don’t know,” Jan said.

“Anything you can tell us about your brother?” Allen asked.

“Donny’s got a big truck. And it bumps a lot.”

“Probably got a gun rack on the back, right?” Allen said.

“Probably,” Jan said. “But I don’t remember.”

“Now that he’s seventeen, I bet he’s never around,” Betty said.

“No, he’s around all the time,” Jan said. “Mom always tells him he should leave the house for some air every now and then.”

“Did Jamie tell you she has a boyfriend?” Betty asked. “I think he’s seventeen, too.”

“He is,” Jamie said.

“Cool,” Jan said.

“He’s in Hawaii with his family for two weeks,” Jamie said, “so you won’t get to meet him.”

“Flip’s seventeen?” Allen asked.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“No one told me he’s seventeen. How old are you?” Allen was hunched over his plate, holding a forkful of mashed potatoes midair.

“She’s fourteen,” Betty said.

“And you have a seventeen-year-old boyfriend!” Jan said.

“How come no one told me he’s seventeen?” Allen asked.

“Well, he drives, Dad,” Jamie said. “So you’d have to know that he was at least sixteen.”

“He’s very cute,” Betty said. “He doesn’t wear underwear.” Jamie and Jan both turned their heads and stared at Betty.

Betty delicately forked a bite of steak into her mouth.

“How do you know he doesn’t wear underwear?” Jamie asked.

“You can tell,” Betty said. “His shorts are always sagging down and you can see that he’s not wearing underwear. 
Sweetheart, I don’t care that he doesn’t wear underwear.”

“I know you don’t care,” Jamie said. “I just think it’s weird that you’d notice.”

“Your mother’s a noticer,” Allen shrugged. “She notices things.”

Jamie wondered if her mother had noticed that she’d started having sex. She had certainly noticed when Jamie sprouted breast buds; she had pointed it out to Allen, the last to know, at the dinner table one night. And once, around the time Jamie was thirteen, she came into the bathroom while Jamie was in the tub and noticed that Jamie had started to grow pubic hair. When Jamie’s hips widened and her belly flattened, Betty noticed and bought her new bathing suits. Her father was right. There were few things Betty didn’t notice.

“So, does Donny have lots of friends?” Betty asked Jan.

“I’m his friend, I guess,” Jan said.

“What do you do together?” Betty asked.

“Last night we went to the movies.”

“In the truck that may or may not have a gun rack?” Allen asked.

“Yeah,” Jan said.

“What did you see?” Posing this question, Jamie later realized, was like opening the hatch in a submerged sub-marine. Jan took the family through the remainder of the meal with the first half of Logan’s Run. She was still not near the end when Betty served pound cake and vanilla ice cream for dessert. The final scene approached as Betty cleared the table and started the dishes. Just as Jan reached the end of the film, Allen pushed back his chair and an-nounced that he had to retire to the record room to file some new albums.

So there Jamie sat, feeling like Edith Ann in a dramatic 
high-backed chair, alone with her cousin, whose mouth flapped open and shut, open and shut. Jamie ran her finger along the scars in the table to the rhythm of Jan’s voice (the table that she had always thought looked like a charred picnic table and that her father, in a fit over the charred picnic table observation, claimed, “cost as much as a god-damned hillbilly house in Mississippi and if your mother weren’t so hell-bent on donating my earnings to what she considers the artisans of the world, we’d be sitting at a decent fucking table with turned out legs and not this slab of cinders she calls a table”). Jamie’s finger stopped moving when Jan’s voice shut down.

“Wanna go for a swim?” Jamie asked.

“Wait, I’ve gotta tell you the end,” Jan said. “You’ll love it.” Twenty minutes later, Jan was in the guest room putting on her suit. Betty, Allen, and Jamie congregated in the kitchen.

“But your dad and I are going swimming with Leon and Lois.” Betty had the same tone as Renee when she and Jamie fought over what to watch on TV.

“So you tell her we can’t go swimming,” Jamie said.

“Why can’t they swim with us?” Allen asked. “The kids always swim with us.”

“You can’t go naked in front of her,” Betty said. “She’ll tell everyone in town.”

“What do you care, you’re never there!”

“Please, Allen,” Betty said. “People don’t show skin in New Hampshire, even in the summer.”

“And you’re going to tell Leon he can’t swim naked? The schmuck doesn’t even own a suit. He doesn’t even own underwear.”

“Just like Flip,” Betty said.

“Flip probably owns underwear,” Jamie said. “And, really, I don’t know if he wears it or not.”

“He doesn’t wear it,” Betty said. “Which is fine with me. 
I mean, most people didn’t wear underwear until sometime around the First World War.”

“No way,” Jamie said.

“If Leon swims naked, then I’m swimming naked,” Allen said. “I mean, if she sees one schlong, what difference does it make if she sees another?”

“Allen,” Betty said. “She’s been in Swiftwater since birth. She might go her whole life without ever seeing a penis.”

Jan waited on Jamie’s bed while Jamie put on her suit. She didn’t pretend to look elsewhere; she just stared at Jamie.

Jan was already in her suit, which made her look like a giant, blue egg. Jamie couldn’t recall seeing anyone her age in a one-piece suit. She knew that girls wore them for swim team, but she had never been on a swim team, nor had she ever gone to a meet.

“So I guess your stomach doesn’t get tan,” Jamie said.

“I don’t tan anyway,” Jan said. “But maybe I can borrow one of your suits later and try to tan.” Jamie could not stop herself from imagining the inner-suit view of Jan’s massive white and pimply butt folded into her bathing suit and filling it like pancake batter. Her fat crotch would be wedged apart, a spandex taco, as she pulled the waist up.

“I don’t think my suits will fit you,” Jamie said. “Maybe you can borrow one of Mom’s.”

* * *

Jamie paused at the French doors leading out to the pool.

The sticky, arm-pit smell of marijuana puffed up the air. She wasn’t sure if Betty cared if Jan saw her smoking or not, so she blocked the doorway as best she could and shouted a warning.

“We’re coming out!”

“Well, come on, then!” Betty yelled, as she handed a roach to Lois, who smashed it into a rock.

Betty was splayed against the boulder, butt folded up, creating a gap at the small of her back, breasts flung to either side like fighting kids who had been separated. Lois sat cross-legged at Betty’s feet. She looked like a scarecrow closed up to be put into storage.

“So this is Jan,” Lois said softly.

“Jan,” Betty said. “People in California don’t wear bathing suits when they swim in their private pools. So don’t be shocked, okay?”

“Uh . . . ” Jan pulled her chin in. She turned her head toward the bushes on her left, her eyes flitting to and from Betty’s breasts.

“If you want to swim naked, you’re welcome to do so. No one will judge you here. All bodies are beautiful bodies.”

“Except the ugly ones,” Jamie said. “Like Johnathan, the man who looks like Moses in The Ten Commandments, or Judith Tisch, whose body looks like the Grinch’s without the green hair—”

“Jamie!”

“It’s true.”

Lois sat up tall and sucked in her already hollow stomach. Her mouth was a straight line across her face.

“It’s not true,” Betty said. “Everyone is beautiful.” 

Music popped into the air, and ten beats later, Allen and Leon wandered out of the house. They were each in rib-knit jock straps. Leon’s jock was yellowed like the walls in a smoker’s house and Allen’s was a purply-gray; it was clear that both jocks had originally been white. Jan turned to them, then turned away, her face searching the bushes, the lawn, the blue and red skyline. Jamie could not help but stare at the abstract form made by the jock straps on their crotches. They were twin white elephants, albino armadillos, the letter T beside another T: TT? They were anything but two, hairy, grown men wearing worn-handkerchief-colored jock straps.

“Sweetheart,” Allen said, and Jamie looked up at his face, surprised to find him there. “Run to the poolroom and get us some towels. I forgot to get towels.” Jan was so close behind Jamie, Jamie could hear her breathing as they walked into the poolroom, a closet-sized room with no windows and two doors: one that went out to the backyard and one that went into the house. Jamie pulled four towels off a shelf and turned to leave. Jan was in the doorway.

“It’s okay,” Jamie said. “It’s just bodies. They’re just naked.”

“But your dad and his friend aren’t naked.”

“That’s so you wouldn’t see their penises, okay? They did that for you so you wouldn’t be embarrassed, being from New Hampshire and all.”

Jan looked at Jamie like she was drowning. But how could she be drowning? Jamie thought. This wasn’t her dad, this wasn’t her family, how dare she drown when Jamie herself didn’t have the luxury to do so.

“Just get over it. I mean Get. Over. It.” Jamie squeezed 
past her and headed toward the pool. By the time Jamie reached the water she was almost running. She dropped the towels on a rock, relay style, then kept going until she hit the diving board. Once on the board she was truly running until her feet were bicycling in the air like Wile E. Coyote in The Road Runner when he doesn’t realize the road has ended and he’s suddenly run himself off the edge of a cliff.

Halfway through Jan’s visit, Betty and Allen went to Ojai for the day, leaving Jamie to tend to Jan on her own.

Jamie invited Debbie and Tammy over to help. They were hesitant, as neither wanted to give up her time with Jimmy or Brett. Jamie argued that if she could go without Flip for fourteen days, surely they could spend a day or two without their boyfriends. Finally they agreed, and when Jamie hung up the phone she was no longer sure that she wanted them to come after all; friendship, Jamie thought, shouldn’t have to be operated with guile.

Immediately after meeting her, Tammy declared that she wanted to try on Jan’s clothes. Jamie decided that if Jan was stupid enough to let her, then she deserved whatever followed. Tammy knocked on the outside of the suitcase.

“This thing is like a rock,” she said.

“I think they put elephants on them,” Jan said, “to make sure they’re sturdy.”

“When would you ever have to worry about an elephant stepping on your suitcase?” Tammy asked.

“I dunno.”

“Is this how they dress in New Hampshire?” Tammy held out a turtleneck shirt with acorns printed on it.

Debbie pulled out a pair of pants that appeared to have been made out of burlap, or the wiry straw stuffing from an old chair.

“Do these itch?”

“You wear long underwear under them in the winter,” Jan said.

“But it’s summer,” Debbie said.

“Yeah,” Jan said. “I packed them just in case there was a cold spell.”

“Don’t light a cigarette around those pants,” Jamie said. 
“They’re probably flammable.”

Debbie and Tammy collapsed on the bed in laughter. Jan stood beside the suitcase and sort of hee hawed.

“I’m putting those on,” Tammy said, and she grabbed the pants from Debbie.

Jan grinned as Tammy pulled on her clothes. Scrawny, blond Tammy looked clownish, mean, in the huge, stiff pants. She rolled up the hem so the pants wouldn’t drag on the floor and slipped on her pink Candie’s mules.

“You look ridiculous,” Jamie said.

“I think you need a smaller size,” Jan said.

“I need a cigarette.” Tammy pawed through her purse and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Light 100’s. “Want one?” she asked Jan.

Jan looked to Jamie as if Jamie could give her the answer.

Jamie looked away. She hated the flightless dodo bird feeling she had when presented with the onus of Jan.

“Are you going to smoke?” Jan asked Jamie.

“What?”

“Are you going to smoke?”

“Not those gross things.” Jamie waved her hand. “But you can smoke if you want. I won’t tell.” 

“Do you smoke other stuff ?” Jan asked.

“All the time.”

Tammy and Debbie pursed their lips so as not to laugh.

Jamie still hadn’t tried pot, even though it crowded the sea-shell ashtrays that were scattered around the house and by the pool; even though Tammy and Debbie had taken to smoking it every now and then with Brett and Jimmy.

“Yeah,” Tammy said, “Jamie smokes pot all the time.”

“Whoa,” Jan said.

“Wanna try some?” Debbie asked.

“I dunno.”

“I’ll smoke some now to show you how,” Tammy said.

“I’ll do it, too,” Debbie said, jumping off the bed and hopping from one foot to the other in a spastic dance of anticipation.

“But aren’t you tired of smoking pot?” Jamie said. “Don’t you think it’s getting old?”

“No,” Tammy said. “Let’s smoke pot, again.” Jamie felt dirty as she dug through the ashtray on the night table next to her parents’ bed. Pulling out a half-smoked joint seemed just as invasive as peering at the vibrator she accidentally found one day in the back of her mother’s underwear drawer. But her need to be bolder, braver, bawdier than Jan pushed her ahead. Jamie took the joint and a pack of matches to the pool, where Tammy, Debbie, and Jan were waiting. Tammy had let Jan’s pants fall to her ankles; she sat against a rock in her underwear.

“I got tired of holding them up,” she said.

“Here.” Jamie handed her the joint and the matches.

Tammy put the half cigarette in her mouth, lit it, and took a pittering puff that barely inflamed the tip. She handed the joint to Debbie, who pulled a little harder but didn’t get enough smoke to exhale. Debbie passed it to Jamie, who pursed her lips as if she were smoking but was really holding her breath. Jan took the joint from Jamie, wrapped her wet lips around it, and pulled so hard that it burned halfway down. She was like a soft dragon as she hissed out the smoke. Tammy grabbed the joint from Jan and pulled on it just as Jan had. She was seized with a coughing fit that turned her face red and teared up her eyes. Debbie took another hit, which she coolly held in before slowly exhaling. Then Jamie really inhaled, sucking it in fast and hard, until her lungs felt like they were being scraped with a nail file, and she coughed. They passed the joint until it was the size of a child’s tooth. Tammy and Jamie coughed at each round. Jan was still and mighty like a rock.