The Summer of Naked Swim Parties (18 page)

When the men left, Allen climbed on and the family jumped together. Betty’s short hair flipped up and down like a darting bird. Renee smiled for what seemed like the first time since she’d been home from Outward Bound.

Allen took Betty’s hands and the two of them jumped together, laughing and hooting. And then Renee took Jamie’s hand and broke into Betty and Allen’s grip and suddenly they were all connected in a bouncing, grinning circle. Jamie thought it was a perfect moment; painful almost, in the realization of its perfection. Her sister was happy to be among them (sweetly holding Jamie’s hand like she had when they played twins), her parents were happy with each other, everyone had their clothes on, and no one was high. Jamie shut her eyes for a second and made a wish that the party w
ould be canceled and they would spend the rest of the day, and even into the night, jumping. The trampoline was long and flat and seemed like a perfect place for a picnic dinner. And why not sleep on a trampoline, Jamie wondered, four in a row tucked into sleeping bags on the elastic platform, hovering over the biting, multilegged things that lurked in the grass.

The jump-party ended when Rosa (who cleaned the house on Wednesdays) and her husband, Jesus (who took care of the pool and gardens and whose name everyone except Betty pronounced Hey-soos), came out to the backyard. Betty had hired Rosa and Jesus to help serve food and clean up after the party. Rosa and Jesus were probably the same age as Betty and Allen, but they had a smiling, deferential manner that made them seem much younger.

And they dressed younger, too, Rosa in clothes from JC 
Penney that were always a season behind whatever was in fashion—all of it from the Juniors department, as nothing from the women’s department would have fit. Her hair fell to the top of her behind when it was out of a braid, which was rare. Jesus dressed like a surfer in ripped jeans, T-shirts, and shorts. That night he wore a clean, ironed, button-down shirt tucked into his jeans. Jamie imagined Rosa looking at him in their bedroom (a bedroom that she always thought would have a gilt-and-white bedroom set, like those she had seen in the windows of cheap furniture stores in Los Angeles) and telling him that he had to look nice for the party: no holes, nothing untucked, and no legs showing. Rosa spoke English and Jesus didn’t, so she did all the talking.

“Miss Betty,” Rosa said, “where do you want us to start?” For several seconds the family remained connected in the circle. Then Betty dropped her hands, Allen followed, and 
they both climbed down from the trampoline. Betty took Rosa and Jesus inside, while Allen went to the bar at the pool. Because of the shrubs that surrounded the pool area and the fact that the lawn was downhill from the pool, Jamie could only see her father when she jumped up. She and Renee watched him at the bar, setting up glasses and pitchers, slicing lemons and limes. It was like watching an old-fashioned movie; his movements seemed jerky from the missed beat of the down jump that put him out of sight.

About five minutes before the guests were scheduled to arrive, Flip phoned Jamie.

“Put your diaphragm in,” Flip said.

“But we’re having a party.” Jamie was in her father’s study, whispering into the phone. She looked down at the folders arranged in a fan on her father’s desk and read his block print on the tabs: MCMAHON FURNITURE, WILSON  
LEATHER AND FUR, CAL WORTHINGTON.

“We’ll totally sneak off,” Flip said. “I mean, shit, we’ve done it only three times since I’ve been home and I’m starting to get a little edgy, you know.” His words felt like a threat. The image of Flip with older, prettier, tanner girls clunked around Jamie’s brain like a stone in an empty soup can.

“Okay, I’ll put it in,” she said.

Upstairs in the bathroom, with the diaphragm sliding out of her hand like an oiled rodent, Jamie wondered how she would feel about Flip if they were alone on an island. Would the thrill of being with him still shiver across her skin if no one else knew they were together—if there weren’t an entire society of teenage girls who envied her position? Would she 
love Flip if she didn’t know that her sister had once had a Tiger Beat–style crush on him—a crush that never even pretended to hold the expectation of reciprocity? Would she love him if she didn’t have the constant emotional cushion of Tammy and Debbie on the other side of her soiled sheets?

Her deflated, orgasmless sex with Flip had become a joke with the girls, a source of such great fits of laughter that Jamie often found herself wishing things were worse than they actually were just for the hysterics it would bring to her girlfriends. Jamie found she couldn’t separate the experience of Flip’s popularity from the experience of loving Flip. It was like falling in love with a billionaire—would he be the same man, the type of man you’d fall in love with, if he didn’t have his money?

The adults congregated at the shallow end of the pool, near the bar. The kids crammed around the table of food that had been set up near the deep end. It was so crowded that from the kitchen the pool was invisible; all one could see was bodies, many naked, some half-naked, and a few clothed. Renee took Paul and Mitch to the trampoline.

Flip and Jamie followed. Renee was far more bold than she had been the last time they had seen these boys, at the pool party that kicked off the bicentennial summer.

“You’re different,” Paul said, tilting his head and smiling at Renee.

“I went to Outward Bound,” Renee said, as if that were an answer everyone should have understood.

“She’s a mountain mama,” Flip said. Jamie cringed as she anticipated Renee’s knifed tongue working over that phrase as soon as Flip went home.

Eventually, most of the kids were on the trampoline.

Jamie felt carsick as she watched the near-collisions and the near-ejections off the trampoline. She was certain that someone would land headfirst on the ground and be killed, or worse, paralyzed. The previous summer, a boy at school had dove headfirst off the downtown pier; he hit an old pylon that had been burned to a stub in the pier fire two years earlier and was paralyzed from the neck down. Everyone who knew him well said he’d be better off dead, and Jamie believed them.

“Renee!” Jamie stood on the ground, waiting to catch anyone who might fall. She reached up and tried to grab her sister’s ankle as Renee jumped face-to-face with Paul.

Renee kicked Jamie’s hand off.

“Renee,” Jamie said, “we’ve got to come up with some rules here or someone’s going to get killed.” Renee stopped jumping and looked down at Jamie. Her body bounced and rocked as if she were on a boat as everyone around her jumped.

“Why don’t we say only three people on the trampoline at once. I mean, there are . . .” Jamie counted, “eight kids on there now. That’s insane.”

Renee trained her eyes on her sister to tell her that she was ruining her good time. Paul was listening. He stopped jumping.

“She’s right,” he said. “It’d be more fun if there were fewer people because then we could do tricks, you know, flips and stuff like that.”

“Flips!” Flip said, leaping open-mouthed up in the air.

“Yeah,” Renee said. “Let’s say only three people at a time, so there’s room to flip.”

“Fliiiip!” Flip raised a fist in the air as he jumped.

“Cool,” Paul said.

For a second Jamie was disappointed that she wasn’t getting credit for the call for safety. Then she decided she didn’t care; she didn’t need credit, as long as there would be no death or paralysis.

“Well?” Jamie said.

“Well what?” Renee said.

“Tell everyone to get off and set up the three-person rule or something.”

Paul stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled the way men whistle for New York City cabs in movies. Everyone stopped talking, but no one stopped jumping.

“Only three on at a time!” he yelled.

“THREE AT A TIME!” Renee added.

Flip jumped off and stood beside Jamie.

“I wish Dog Feather were still here,” he said. “He was the coolest Indian dude ever. And he had way better doobage than your parents.”

“He wasn’t really an Indian,” Jamie said. “I already told you that.”

“Let’s eat,” Flip said. He took Jamie’s hand and pulled her away from the trampoline toward the pool.

At the food table, they dipped tortilla chips into Rosa’s homemade salsa. The salsa was so good and crisp that Jamie imagined picking up the bowl and drinking it down like Chunky Soup. Flip stared at the naked women, smiling.

“Your mom has the best tits of the party,” he said.

“Don’t start that again!” Jamie picked up another chip.

“That lady over there looks like she’s from National Geographic or something. I mean, her tits are like empty wet plastic bags.”

Jamie looked over. He was right, but she didn’t want to discuss that woman’s breasts or anyone else’s with him. She 
didn’t want to be forced to think about her naked parents and their naked friends on Flip’s terms, which were, as she understood them, solidly sexual.

“I’m gettin’ kinda horny looking at all these naked old ladies.”

“They’re not that old,” Jamie said. “And please don’t get another erection for my mom.”

“Some of them are totally foxy. I mean, none of them are as foxy as you, but they are still foxy, you know, like the way they’re just walking around and shit. Why don’t you go naked?”

“No way.”

“All these old men would be looking at you and I’d be, like, Yeah, she’s totally with me, man.”

“I don’t think anyone would notice me.” Jamie’s experience of life with her mother was that if Betty was in the room, that’s where people looked.

“Your dad’s got a hella long dick, man.” Flip nodded in the direction of Allen.

“Flip! Please! I don’t want to look at my dad’s dick!”

“But it’s right there! I can’t help but look at it!”

“Look at something else.”

“What?”

“See that baby.” Jamie pointed to Lacey, who was wearing her red bandana-print swimsuit and sitting on her naked father’s lap. She was trying to suck on a slice of orange, which kept turning in her hand so that she had more peel in her mouth than fruit.

“What about her?”

“Last time they were here, at the beginning of the summer before we were going out—”

“Yeah?”

“Her dad just threw her off the edge of the pool into the water ’cause he thought she could swim.”

“No way.”

“I swear. I caught her and pulled her out. It was freaky.”

“Totally.”

“Wanna swim?”

“Let’s go hide out somewhere and have sex first.”

“Uh . . . ”

“We can go to the far end of the yard. No one will see us. Everyone’s here or at the trampoline. No one’s going to walk all the way back there.”

“Why don’t we go to my room and lock the door?”

“It’s so much more cool outdoors. I mean, it’s like real. 
Natural.”

Flip took Jamie’s hand and led her away from the pool.

She grabbed a handful of chips and ate them while they walked out of the pool area, past the trampoline, past a row of hedges that outlined the grass, through a stand of fragrant eucalyptus trees, to the wooden fence that was so far back and so hidden from the house that the only way to see it was to walk all the way to it.

“Koala bears eat only eucalyptus,” Flip said.

“They explode in fires,” Jamie said.

“Koalas explode in fires?”

“No!” Jamie couldn’t stop laughing. Flip laughed too. “Eu
calyptus! Remember the Banana Road fire?”

“Yeah.” Flip was still giggling.

“Dad drove us to the top of East Camino Cielo that night and we parked the car up there and watched the eucalyptus exploding.”

“That must have been way cool.”

“It was beautiful,” Jamie said, and she popped her last chip into her mouth just as Flip leaned in for a kiss.

“Wait!” Jamie chewed fast and swallowed. “Okay. 
Now.”

Jamie’s back was flat against the fence slats. Flip leaned into her, hard and deep as if he were going to iron her with his chest and crotch while he kissed her. Jamie imagined splinters in her back and how that detail would add to the story she would later tell Tammy and Debbie. In her head she narrated each move Flip made, edited it, and rewrote it if it didn’t sound interesting or funny enough.

And just as Jamie was noting the repetitive drumbeat that Flip used when fluttering his hand in her crotch, she unexpectedly felt as if she were burning like a eucalyptus fire. A spectacular, beautiful eucalyptus fire. A fire so rich with heat and flames that Jamie couldn’t escape into the running narrative in her head—she was suddenly centered in her own body, like a stacking cup that fit perfectly into the cup outside it.

Flip lifted Jamie’s right leg, put himself inside her, and the fire spread, exploding like ignited oil.

And then, in an instant, Jamie understood why sex was such a big deal; why it made marriages and broke them up again; why most graffiti in public bathrooms was about sex; why Dog Feather read Knockers and loved Betty’s breasts; why Allen loved Betty; why Leon hung around the house like a mosquito you couldn’t pin down long enough to catch; why Tammy and Debbie thought they were in love; why Flip wanted to do it right then and right there.

A plunging shudder ran through Jamie; she lost vision and her knees buckled. She feared she might gasp, or weep, 
or laugh. But she didn’t. She went limp in Flip’s arms. Flip kissed Jamie’s forehead, which was covered in dewy sweat, like a layer of velvet. He told Jamie he loved her. She said she loved him too. And she knew, right then, that she’d be happy to be alone on an island with Flip, with no audience to help discern her feelings. He alone could sustain her. The orgasms would sustain her. Sex like this was better than having colorless sex that led to neon stories. It was better than cracking up with her friends.

They stood there, bodies suctioned together, as still as the air. Flip’s skin smelled musky, like sun-induced sweat, and astringent, like the eucalyptus. The music from the party sounded far away, as if it were music from another town, another era.