The Tribes of Palos Verdes (11 page)

Their picture appeared a week ago in the Social Climber column in the
Palos Verdes Gazette.
My father stands with her. She hangs on his arm, all teeth and eyes and hair. The caption under the photograph says, “Phil Mason and Ava Adare … A Match Made in Tennis Heaven!”

Even though my father lies, I still miss him. I cut all the pictures of him from the society page of the newspaper and paste them inside a scrapbook. My father wears the same beautiful smile in every one. I cut carefully, the way my father cuts fat from people's hearts. I hide my scrapbook from Jim so he won't tear it to shreds.

When I ask my father when me and Jim can come see his new house, he corrects me gently. “Jim and I, Medina, say it properly—Jim and I.”

Then he tells me it will be soon, it's always
soon.
I try to believe him and imagine myself living in the great house, with the beautiful woman and the rugs.

There's a way to tell when my father's lying. He clears his throat first.

After the article comes out, tennis wives jog past our house, looking at each other's thighs and butts and whispering, “Sandy must be going off the deep end. Have you seen her lately?”

Nobody has seen my mother lately, except in the checkout counter at Ralph's or as a bright yellow shape through our enormous bay window, visible from the beach. They tell each other gravely that my mother needs help.

“Poor Phil tried everything,” they assure one another.

“Just think about Sandy, and say
no
to dessert,” Mrs. Anderson says, rubbing her tummy.

“There but for the grace of God go I,” Mrs. Doty says, running faster.

*   *   *

My mother is shaking her head. Jim sweetens his voice.

“I promise I'll come back at five. Please let me surf a little, Mom.”

“Sorry, Jimmy,” she answers. “Today I need you to help me write a letter to my lawyer. I'm too angry to hold a pen.” She stamps her feet. “He was planning this for a year at least! He bought that house six months ago; we have excellent grounds for a lawsuit.”

She turns to Jim, who's quiet in the corner.

“You and I will take the bastard to the cleaners.”

*   *   *

Later Jim is stoned on the couch. My mother sleeps next to him. I've just come back from shopping with my father. I hold up a box for Jim to see. Inside is a brand-new pair of surf trunks, one size too big, just the way Jim likes them.

“Dad got this for you,” I whisper, beckoning him.

He follows me into the hall and takes the box. He shakes it gingerly like a box of salt. Then he puts it down, punts it across the room.

“He just feels guilty,” Jim says.

“No, he feels sad. He wishes you would see him.”

“Mom says not to talk to him.”

“Of course,” I say. “She wants you to hate him.”

“Don't talk about her like she's evil,” Jim warns. “She thinks you're on Dad's side. She doesn't trust you.”

“I'm not on anyone's side.”

“It would be great if all three of us were on the same side,” Jim says. Then he points out all the nice things she does for me. “She does your laundry. And she makes dinner.”

I try to steer the conversation back to our father's gift. Jim ignores me. He starts to walk out of the room, then flashes me a smile, smoothing things out.

“Guess who I talked to at the cliffs,” he says. “Heather.” He strikes a muscleman pose. “She says I'm a total babe.”

“Gross,” I say to him, laughing, punching his arm.

*   *   *

Heather has black hair like Ava Adare. Black hair is Jim's favorite. When we first came to Palos Verdes, he had a crush on our babysitter. Marnie always let us stay up late and snuck her boyfriend over. She had dark, wavy hair to her shoulders and laughed like a big horse, showing all her teeth, neighing.

Once when my parents were out to dinner, Marnie lit a joint in the backyard, smoking it with her boyfriend Dave by the pool. When they came back upstairs, she cooked a pan full of refried beans. Jim, reeking of my father's aftershave, stayed in the corner, glaring at Dave.

“Aren't the beans done yet?” Dave called out from the TV room, his feet up on the teak coffee table. “I've got the munchies so bad.”

Laughing, Marnie stuck her finger in the pan to test the beans. But the hot fat burned and she ran zigzag through the hall, trying to shake off sticky, molten beans that adhered to her finger.

Jim made Marnie an ice pack, elbowing Dave out of the way, telling him to go home. He promised not to tell my parents on her, and made me swear not to either.

My father teased Jim about Marnie later.

“She sure is a knockout,” he said. “She looks just like your mother did when she was Marnie's age.”

*   *   *

Adrian Adare lives at my father's new house. He's Ava's son, just turned seventeen, drives a Mustang. This is all I know about him.

My father says he's a nice boy, someone I will like. He explains that Ava and Adrian aren't ready to meet us yet. He explains that this will happen soon, when Ava feels more secure in the relationship, not too far off, he says, as if he were speaking about a ship in the ocean.

“If that guy ever comes near the bay, he's gonna get it really bad,” Jim says.

*   *   *

But it's Jim who's getting it really bad.

That week he gets sick. There's a weird smell in his bedroom. I bring in the small portable television, turn it on to the cartoons, and talk to him.

“Look, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superman,” I say, trying to make Jim laugh. I talk like Elmer Fudd, or Bugs Bunny, and give him a running commentary about what's happening on TV.

“Now Bugs is putting a bomb shaped like a hat onto Elmer's head.… Now Elmer is shooting Bugs with a giant cannon.…”

I get good at keeping up with the sequences. “Bugs is shaking, little beads of sweat are rolling. Elmer has a mallet; he swings—once, twice—Bugs pulls out a big gun and shoots.…”

After a few days, Jim's breath is really terrible. He has canker sores under his nose and lips. We take him to the hospital but the doctors can't find anything wrong with him. When he comes back, he is skinnier, and weak. I don't punch him in the arm, even as a joke. I only sit with him. I describe the ocean and give him water. My mother cries. In a few weeks Jim goes surfing again. He falls sometimes now.

As I spy from my surfboard, I see Adrian smoking, reading a book, flicking out ash in my father's white gazebo. He lights one cigarette from the ash of the other. I am impressed.

Adrian is much cuter than you'd think. His hand is moving back and forth, maneuvering the cigarette from his lips to the ground. He looks small and tense. All his clothes are black. My father hates black.

“You look like you're going to a funeral,” my father says to me when I wear my favorite black cashmere sweater, even though it used to be his.

*   *   *

My brother's begun to dress very carefully. He sells his old guitar and amplifier and takes the money to the mall to go shopping. He gets two bags full of new clothes, muted polo shirts and pressed chinos. He takes his time in the bathroom, too, washing his face until it's red and shiny.

The clothes bother my mother. She doesn't like his new buzzcut either.

“Oh,” she says, teasing him, “do you have a new girlfriend?”

“No,” Jim says. “I just don't want everyone to say we're poor.”

“Oh, come on, what's her name?” my mother presses. “Or is there more than one?”

“I'm not Dad,” Jim says, balling tissue wrap up and angrily tossing it.

“I know you're not, sweetie,” my mother counters quickly.

“You have to look good here,” Jim says, “if you don't want people to talk.”

*   *   *

“Change places,” my mother says as my brother and I wrestle with the ring on her finger.

We've tried soap, then water, then grease from the chicken dinner. I pull on one end against my brother on the other, but the bulge of my mother's knuckle impedes us.

My brother refuses to pull any harder.

“Let's go to the doctor, they can get it off,” he says. “They even take off tumors and moles.”

The ring is big. It is perfect, square cut, three carats, nice. We go to the emergency doctor's office. He refers her to a specialist. The specialist gives her finger an injection of lidocaine, right between the V of her fourth finger and pinkie. Then he cuts the ring off with a tiny diamond saw.

She sends the ring to my father, after Jim removes the diamond with a butter knife. The empty band is secured with Scotch tape to the face of the doctor's bill.

“I'm keeping the diamond,” she tells us. “We might have to sell it for cash.”

“If we run out of money we can pawn it,” my brother says.

“Better yet, we can have it insured and
lose
it,” my mother answers, looking Jim in the eye.

“Lie?” Jim asks. “Face to face?”

“A little fib,” she answers. “You and I'll go fifty-fifty. Then we'll have lots of money. You could get more new clothes and the best winter wet suit.”

*   *   *

At home we eat fish sticks with mayonnaise and Oreo cookies. My mother says Jim deserves lobster, steak, and chocolate mousse pie, and he'll get it after he helps her get the insurance money. But I tell Jim he might get in trouble. My mother interrupts.

“Do you think money grows on trees?” She points at me, forking a mouthful of halibut, chewing it quickly. “Do you think it comes falling from the sky?”

She wiggles her fingers in a graceful waterfall of imaginary money.

“Money is what buys nice things,” she says.

“Dad gives us nice things,” I answer.

“No catfights tonight, ladies,” my brother says, stepping between us.

“This isn't a catfight, Jim,” my mother answers icily. “It's fair for a mother to want the best for her family.”

Then she turns to me. She asks me if I have a better plan to get money.

I admit that I don't.

She frowns, looking at a point just above my breasts.

*   *   *

It's hazy and yellow the next day. There are a lot of bystanders on the cliff, people from all sides of the hill, because of the Lunada Bay Whale Watching Festival.

I'm in the furrow of the cliffs at Helsa Cove, smoking pot with two Eastside guys, lying lazily against gray rocks. They're both pretty cute, and I'm flirting with them, basking in their attention. They talk about different kinds of pot, all with funny names: space weed, wicked red, Maui gold. I tell them I've never seen colored pot, but I have smoked Thai stick once. They're impressed. Thai stick is the strongest pot there is, and the hardest to find.

“Maybe I could get you some,” I say. There's smoke coming from my lips as I laugh, covering the boys' faces in a maze of mist.

After a while, the bigger guy tells the other one to split. The smaller of the boys walks away, looking back sadly at us, coughing. The haze envelops the other boy as he moves toward me, gathering me in his arms, pressing his insistent mouth on mine. Wet, smacking sounds ensue.

“So you think I'm cute?” I ask him, laughing. “You really do?”

I let him put his mouth over mine, tasting the dark beer on his tongue. I feel very sophisticated, as if I'm in a movie, kissing a stranger in the daylight.

He falls into the sand, pulling me down with him, hitting my head on a jutting rock, pulling at my shirt like an insistent child. I tell him to go slower, sick all of a sudden, remembering Dan. But he runs his hand over the front of my shirt, grabbing.

“Get off me before I kick your stupid ass,” I say, jumping up, aiming my surf bootie square at his groin. I'm still staggering, stoned when I get in the water.

My brother is already in the water. He will not speak to me. Even when I smash the nose of my board into his legs.

“Why can't you ever be normal?” he finally spits out. “Everyone saw you with those stoner guys. Everyone.” He strikes the water with his fist, telling me what he thinks I am, tears coming and falling into the water.

“What's so bad about kissing?” I say. “You should try it sometime, if Mom'll let you.”

He gives my board a shove, sending it toward the rocks.

“I hate you,” he says.

That night Jim stays in his room, away from me. He makes strange noises in the dark. He smokes the pot I slip under his door, but it doesn't make him mellow. When I try to apologize to him, he sings very loud to Aerosmith and rips a newspaper into a thousand shreds.

“I don't talk to sluts,” he says.

*   *   *

All the girls love Jim. They call our house late at night and giggle into the phone, asking for him, not giving their name. I feel sick to my stomach when they giggle, but I say, very nicely, “I'm sorry, but you must have the wrong number, there is no Jill here.”

Then I hang up the phone and answer it when it rings again. I hear the girl on the line say, “Medina Mason is the grossest, ugliest slut alive.”

I say, “What number are you calling, please?”

He shakes his head sadly when I hang up, biting his lip, not moving. He slumps low in the seat, staring at his bitten nails.

When Heather calls, I feel guilty. Reluctantly I give him the phone. His eyes are bright, alert now, but he doesn't say much. His voice is very low. He covers the receiver with his hand, curling up. He doesn't look at my mother.

*   *   *

On Friday night he comes out of the bathroom wearing his best chinos and a tan and blue polo shirt. He looks very handsome, his hair brushed to the side, then slicked back a little with styling mousse. His eyes are bloodshot, even though he used half a bottle of my Visine.

He tries to act like it's no big deal, but my mother gets up immediately. She circles him slowly, her face dark and impassive. She doesn't say anything.