The Summer of Naked Swim Parties (9 page)

“Mom okay?” Jamie asked. Now that he was no longer naked, Jamie was relieved by her father’s presence—it created a padding between herself and Flip.

Allen sat down and crossed his legs. Jamie and Flip sat up.

They were in a circle, facing each other, like the kids who sat way out on the field at Jamie’s school and smoked pot. The stoners.

“That Nazi in there said I had a selfish, yellow aura . . .
anti-Semitic bitch!”

“Whoa, is she a Nazi?” Flip asked.

Allen looked over at him, then back at Jamie.

“Now your mother thinks I’m fooling around. She believes the fräulein.”

“What’s a fräulein?” Jamie asked.

“Wait, is she a Nazi aura reader?” Flip asked.

“A fräulein is a young woman, in German.”

“Is she a Nazi or not?” Flip said.

“No, she’s too young to be a real Nazi,” Allen said. “But she might be anti-Semitic.”

“What’s that?” Jamie asked.

“Jesus Christ . . .” Allen slapped his hand on his forehead. 
“How can you be my child? How can you have grown up in this house and not know what an anti-Semite is? Where did we go wrong?”

“Sorry, Dad.” Jamie wondered if her father sometimes felt about her the way she currently felt about Flip: a startling disappointment.

“Have you ever heard me say those words before? Have 
you ever heard the term? What about history class? Don’t you get history class at school?”

“Last year we studied the California missions. And the Chumash.”

“We studied the gold rush,” Flip said.

“An anti-Semite is someone who hates Jews,” Allen said.

“Are there Jews in there?” Flip asked.

“I’m a Jew!” Allen said. “Jamie’s a Jew!”

“Whoa, is that why you guys have bagels in your house?” Bagels were so foreign to Flip that he pronounced the word with a soft a.

“We have bagels because I bring them back from Los Angeles, where you can actually buy bagels. I mean, can you believe a town like this, all these fancy people, all this money, and you can’t even buy a bagel here?”

“Dad, I’m only a half Jew. Mom’s an atheist.”

“If the Nazis started exterminating again, you’d be dead. 
That’s all you need to know.”

“So you think the German gave you a bad aura reading because you’re a Jew?” Flip asked.

“Eh . . .” Allen didn’t seem angry anymore. “She probably just thought she had to pick someone from the crowd to have a bad aura and she randomly picked me.”

“You think she’s making it up?” Jamie asked.

“Sweetheart,” Allen said, “your mother’s probably the only person in that room who thinks the German can really see auras.”

“I bet Leon and Lois believe it.”

“I believe it,” Flip said.

“Yeah, you’d believe it until she told you that you had a selfish penis and that your selfish penis was carrying 
shadows from the auras of many other people, from all the people your penis had encountered.”

“Whoa,” Flip said, “you mean she could see all the women you’d been with?”

“But I haven’t been with anyone but Betty!” Allen was angry again.

“You mean she was your first?” Flip asked.

“Flip! Dad! I don’t want to hear this!”

“Why are you acting like your sister?”

“Dad, please, I really don’t want to know how many people you’ve been with.”

“But it isn’t that many. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.” Allen reached out and gently patted Jamie’s knee.

“Dad, I just—”

“I could see being embarrassed if I were someone like Leon. I mean he’s been with hundreds of women, women from all over the world!”

“Has he ever been with a lady of the night?” Flip asked, and he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“Oh, yeah.” Allen shook his head and smiled.

“How does that work?” Flip asked. “Like, do you pay ahead of time? And where do you find someone like that here, in Santa Barbara?”

“I’m going inside.” Jamie stood and walked toward the house. She couldn’t believe she was actually walking away from Flip Jenkins, walking away from the boy every girl she knew would be happy to lose her virginity to, even Lisa Blair, the most devout member of the Christian Fellowship Club, who told Jamie at the beach one day that she would give up her love of Christ if she could be as lucky as Jamie and have the love of Flip Jenkins. Jamie looked back over 
her shoulder and watched her father and Flip together. Flip was nodding, seemingly interested in whatever her dad was saying. The moon lit the top of Flip’s head so that he appeared to be glowing. He smiled and his teeth flashed like lightning in a dark sky. Jamie imagined Lisa Blair, with her thick hair that hung like a groomed horse tail, tossing her Bible and a bikini into the ocean so she could press her naked body against Flip. Jamie changed the channel in her head, put her own naked body in Flip’s arms, and then, just like that, her love was back. She ran into the house before it had time to wane again, before she could let herself imagine Flip in the arms of whoever might be next in line.

Late that night, after Flip and Allen went skinny-dipping together, after Jamie ate two more bowls of pine-needle soup with hard flat bread in the kitchen while talking to the Chumash and his Mexican girlfriend, after Flip gave Jamie a tender, chaste kiss good night, she went to bed and fell asleep to the melodic sounds of the few remaining people at the party. Sometime later, in the middle of a dream, Betty floated into Jamie’s room. She stood naked beside the bed, peering down at her daughter.

“Hey Mom,” Jamie said.

“Scoot in,” Betty said.

Jamie scooted toward the wall. Betty slipped under the covers.

“Your dad and I had a fight,” she said.

“You sleeping with me?” Jamie asked. As a young girl, Jamie had loved to sleep with her parents. From around the age of twelve, however, she had begun to dread the uninvited physical intimacy.

“Uh-huh.” Betty rolled to her side, pushed her rump out toward her daughter, and yanked the covers over her shoulder. Jamie yanked the covers back and crossed her arms over her chest as if she were cold.

“Why don’t you sleep in the guest room, or in Renee’s bed?”

“You know I hate to sleep alone. It’s unnatural. We’re animals, we need to sleep in packs, in litters.” Jamie sighed and shifted closer to the wall. “So how was your aura reading?”

“Great. My aura is loving and generous, all deep oranges and whites—good energy.” Betty flipped onto her back and pushed her leg out until her foot rested on Jamie’s.

“Dad’s wasn’t so good, right?”

“He’s got some things to work out.”

“What exactly did she say?” Jamie pulled her foot out from under her mother’s foot and crossed her ankles. She wished there were such thing as a bed divider: a metal plank that would cut the bed in two, creating a small wall through which her mother’s naked body could not pass.

“Your father has a selfish penis, dear.” Betty scooted closer to Jamie so their thighs were aligned, touching. Thin snakes of nausea ran from Jamie’s legs to her gut.

“You mean separate from him? So, it’s not like he’s selfish, it’s just that his penis is selfish?”

“Yes.”

“So it does think on its own!” Jamie started giggling.

“It’s not funny. He listens to his penis. The penis wants certain things and he listens to it.”

“Mom, can you please scoot over? I’m getting claustrophobia.”

“Are you naked?” Betty turned her head and looked at Jamie without scooting away.

“No! I’m in a T-shirt and underwear.”

“You should sleep naked. Or at least without underwear. 
You know, give your vagina some air every now and then.” 

Jamie didn’t want her mother to be the person Renee wanted her to be, but she often wished that Betty wasn’t so comfortable discussing Jamie’s anatomy. A couple years back, when Jamie had first indicated that she was ready to try a tampon, Betty burst into Jamie’s bathroom one day, holding an open Tampax that she, herself, wanted to insert into her daughter to free her from the bonds of the belted pad. Jamie had snatched the tampon from her mother and violently shoved it in herself, lest her mother get there first.

She quickly pulled up her underpants and refused to let Betty look to make sure it was in properly. It wasn’t. Five minutes later Jamie snuck into Renee’s bathroom, where she removed the dangling, dry tampon and put on her elastic bra strap–like waist belt that held up the brick-shaped pad.

“Mom, back to what you were saying before—are you thinking that Dad’s having an affair?” Although the subject matter was, Jamie thought, overly intimate, she preferred talk of her father’s selfish penis to matters of her own body.

“I don’t really know. Maybe he is. Or maybe it’s just that he might have an affair in the future. Or maybe it’s the fact that he could have an affair. He has a penis that would lead him to an affair.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Why not?”

“Who would want to sleep with him? He’s so skinny and white.”

“Your father is a very handsome man!” 

“To you, maybe. But Mom, face it, it’s not like girls are lining up to be with Dad.”

“You’ve got it all wrong. Women my age think your father is very attractive.”

“Dad is not attractive. Flip is attractive.” Jamie pulled her leg away from her mother’s and bent it at the knee, making a small triangular barrier between herself and her mother.

“Flip’s okay,” Betty said.

“Okay? He was Luscious Lester, Mom. He was voted the most luscious guy in school.”

“I think his friend Jimmy is cuter.”

“You think Jimmy’s cuter than Flip?”

“Jimmy’s sexy. He’s sensuous. Jimmy’s . . . ah, god, to be in high school again.”

The idea that her mother might actually fantasize about Flip’s friends made Jamie’s stomach lurch. She was glad she couldn’t read minds—she didn’t want to know what images were pooling in the nooks and recesses of her mother’s brain. It seemed much better just to skim across the surface of Betty’s thoughts, move quickly enough not to pick up too much of the stuff that was seeping out from her inner life.

“Mom, please. Please don’t talk about Flip’s friends like you really want to be with them.”

“I’m human, Jamie. I’m alive.”

“You know, Dad, who has the allegedly selfish penis, would never say something like that. Maybe the aura reader got it all wrong.”

“She was trained at a prestigious school in Vienna. She sees things you and I can’t see.”

“Just like you see things in Flip’s friends.”

“Jamie, everyone can see how sexy Jimmy is.” 

“Mom. You’re married. And you’re old.” Why was her mother still even thinking about sex? Jamie wondered.

Didn’t the urge die down after a couple of kids, wither up the way lips and breasts eventually did? Or were her mother’s plump, unwithered parts proof that Betty had years to go before she dried up?

“I’m not old, for godsakes. And I’m married to a man with a selfish penis.”

“Okay. Whatever.”

“Are you having sex?”

“Me? Mom!” Jamie rushed her hands to her cheeks as if to protect herself.

“I just want to check. You don’t have to be ashamed.”

“NO! There’s nothing to check!” Jamie prayed that by 
“check” her mother did not mean that she intended to examine her hymen. “God! I’m going to sleep. Good night.”

“I don’t see why you’re upset, sweetheart. Listen, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you since puberty.”

“I know how babies are made, I’ve already got my period, and I know how to use a tampon.” Jamie squeezed her eyes shut as if that would convince her mother that she was sleeping.

“Of course you know how to use a tampon, I was the one who taught you!”

Jamie shook herself in a deliberate shudder as she tried to repel the memory.

“So I know all, Mom,” Jamie said.

“Sweetheart.” Betty turned to her side, facing Jamie. 
With her left hand, she pulled Jamie’s arm so it was straight and stroked the inside, up and down, just the way Joseph from the pizza parlor had done. Jamie yanked her arm away and crossed it over her chest.

“What do you want to tell me?” She hoped that directly asking her mother would get the conversation over quickly.

“I just want to say that I hope you know, I mean really know and understand, that’s it’s okay to please yourself.”

“Please myself ? Mom, I’m happy. I’m plenty pleased.”

“No, I mean please yourself sensuously. Sexually.” Jamie could feel her body contracting, everything pulling in toward her core, like a sea anemone shutting itself closed to intruders. “Okay Mom, I don’t want to talk about this. 
Let’s go to sleep.”

“Jamie, it’s important to me that you feel free to masturbate.”

“Gotcha. Good night.” Jamie wondered if her mother would ever lose interest in the discreet workings of Jamie’s body. Would Betty be there at the birth of Jamie’s first child, shoving her mothering hands into Jamie’s vaginal canal and yanking out her grandchild? And would that grandchild be another body to probe and examine as if it were a curious mole on Betty’s own flesh?

“It’s an important part of developing your sexuality, figuring out who you are, what you like. I mean, it would be a shame if you didn’t do it.”

“Mom, I do not want to tell you whether I do it or not. 
I’m glad you want me to be happy, but I really don’t want to talk about this. And I want to go to sleep.” Jamie considered climbing out of bed and moving into the guest bedroom but she figured her mother would follow her.

“Jesus. You sound like your sister.”

“Maybe when my sister’s not around to say these things, I have to say them.” Jamie really was starting to sound like her sister and she didn’t like it. But there seemed to be no other way out of the conversation.

“Oh for chrissakes. I’m trying to help you out here and you start acting like Renee. Good night.” Betty rolled to her side again and pushed her butt up against Jamie’s thigh. Jamie rolled over while trying to pull in her behind so that it wouldn’t touch her mother’s. Betty scooted back more, almost pinning her daughter against the wall. Jamie gave up and lay there, wide awake, listening to the soft ocean sounds of Betty sleeping. She had recently given up her fear of becoming Taffy Longue, the Blowjob Queen, and now she had masturbation to fret about instead.