The Tribes of Palos Verdes (3 page)

“I don't care what you do,” I say softly, closing my eyes, praying.

When I open them again, she's walking off with Cami's group. She's laughing, wrinkling her ugly nose.

In between periods the girls corner me as I do my homework in the bathroom. Big Annie holds me down while Cami hands Laura a bottle of glue.

“Do it,” Cami says, eyes shining.

Laura takes the bottle, trembling. She starts to squirt glue into my hair, but her hand shakes so hard she drops it on the cement floor. When Big Annie bends over to pick the bottle up, I kick her in the ass, knocking her flat. I lock eyes with Laura, raising my hand high over her head, fist wavering, tears in my eyes. Then I stab Cami with a No. 2 pencil. I jab it so hard the lead breaks off in her arm.

Instead of giving me detention, the principal sits me down in the anteroom of his office, shuts the dividing door, calls my father at the hospital. I watch through the cracked, yellowing Plexiglas as he talks on the phone; frowning, nodding his head, doodling on his calendar. After he hangs up, he opens the door, tells me to come in. He clears his throat, adjusts his glasses. He says he knows how difficult it is to be a scapegoat.

“But when the girls provoke you,” he says, patting my arm, “try humming a song.”

*   *   *

My father sends me to a famous psychiatrist in a big, mirrored tower.

“What is it about you that the other girls don't like?” he says, pad of paper and studious pen in hand. “Did you have a falling out with one of them?”

“
Fuck
them,” I answer. “Girls never like me, and I don't like them.”

Scribbling away, the bearded man tries again.

“Are you close with your brother?” he asks.

“Fuck you.”

He prescribes children's tranquilizers. But he's the crazy one.

*   *   *

At home, after my piano lesson, my fingers are sore from banging the piano keys too hard. I pick up an empty cellophane package and show it to Jim.

“Mom ate another whole bag of Oreos today,” I say. “I found this in the trash.”

“Don't act like a poor person, Medina,” my brother says, sighing as he turns up the volume. “Only poor people count how much food there is.”

“You don't care how she acts. Even if she eats like a pig!”

My brother throws the channel changer hard against the carpet and yells, “If you talk about it, it'll make it worse!”

As I pick up the dislodged batteries, I breathe hard and concentrate on inserting the shiny shapes between the nest of wires. My brother leans over, gently taking the channel changer away, folding the batteries exactly into place.

“Sorry for throwing it at you,” he says, then makes a frog face that usually makes me laugh. When I don't even crack a smile, he twists me into a half nelson, tickling me until neither of us can tell if I'm laughing or crying.

I don't say anything to my mother about the Oreos. Instead I throw away all the junk food in the house, but my mother grabs her car keys from the foyer, leaves the house, and returns later with a stuffed brown sack. She smiles at me and toasts me with a can of chocolate Yoo-Hoo.

She says, “Yoo-Hoo, skinny, Yoo-Hoo, I see you.”

*   *   *

In my mother's checkbook ledger, there are hundreds of checks written out to Ralph's Market, sometimes more than one a day. My father looks through the ledger, shaking his head, pounding his fist on the table.

He tells Jim and me to go to our rooms, but instead we hide behind the door, cupping our ears to its wooden skin. My mother yells at my father. She says she wants to leave Palos Verdes before the sound of the waves drives her crazy.

“That's what you said about Chicago wind and Michigan snow, Sandy. Verbatim.”

My mother cuts him off, tells him he better find us a nice, normal place to live before it's too late. She insists it's the waves that are the problem.

“You promised to get the eating thing under control, Sandy. You said you'd stop the visits to the fridge at night.” My father puts his palms together reasonably. “I'm concerned about your health!”

“Oh yes,
my health.
” My mother smiles. “I'm sure that's the
real issue
here.”

“Heart disease is something I know a thing or two about, Sandy.”

“You don't care about my health, Phil, you care about my cheekbones.”

As he walks out, she calls out to him.

“I know a thing or two about cheekbones.”

*   *   *

I'm lucky it isn't winter yet, that's when the waves get big in Palos Verdes. The waves are small and swashy now, two feet, perfect to practice on. For the first hour, I concentrate on pushing myself upward as the wave is in motion. Only the third time I try, I stand up and ride the wave to the shore, wobbling but not falling. When the wave ends I know I'll always be a surfer. I know I'll be trying to catch that feeling for the rest of my life.

Jim is stronger, he pushes his body easily upward. But my balance is a little better, I stand up faster, and stay up longer once I catch a ride. I practice every day, even when the local guys paddle out but Jim goes back to shore, embarrassed, swimming fast.

My plan is to be good by December. It's hard to imagine riding big winter waves that tower over my head, but I try to see myself dwarfed by water, zooming across on the diagonal, the lip closing down behind me.

My father gave me a magazine article about a famous woman surfer in Florida, Frieda Zane. She says the only way to get good is to forget you're a girl, and surf like a man, aggressive and fierce. She says to hang around with better surfers as much as possible, study the way they stand and move, and ignore them if they laugh.

“Don't limit yourself to being a lame chick in the water,” she says. “Use your mind—and your arms.”

I cut out a picture of Frieda surfing a big, green, velvety wave in Hawaii and hang it over my bed, where I look at it every night before I go to sleep.

Freida doesn't explain exactly what to do when other surfers laugh. Sometimes they catcall across the water, imitating me when I push off.
“It's a UFO,”
they yell,
“an unidentified flailing object.”

I pretend I don't hear them, but I do.

*   *   *

Palos Verdes is on an earthquake fault line unrelated to the famous San Andreas.

“We have our own fault line,” people like to say, “just like we have our own police force and school system.”

Because of cliff erosion, entire streets on the west end of the peninsula shift about a foot a year, causing sewage problems and huge cracks in the foundations of houses. But Palos Verdes is listed in almost all travel guidebooks as one of the most beautiful coastal regions in America, so the residents stay, despite the certainty their houses will need extensive repairs every four years. The children of these residents learn that money fixes everything, even nature, if there is enough of it.

*   *   *

There is the smell of fast food in every room of our house, even though a housekeeper cleans daily. The bathroom smells like meat. The hallways close to my mother's room smell like French fries, cheese, steaks. A heavy oil smell hangs like fog over the carpeted corridor, mixing with the odor of chemicals from nitrogen-flushed bags.

Lately my mother doesn't allow the housekeeper into her bedroom to clean. “My husband is always in someone else's bedroom anyway,” she says, listening to the peacocks cry.

“Mating, Phil,” she says. “I hear you mating.”

*   *   *

I'm on my stomach in the bay, on my surfboard, experimenting with ways to paddle out faster. The waves are getting bigger now. It seems impossible to get out to the wavebreak because the whitewash keeps pushing me back.

“It's harder for a girl,” Jim tells me. “Your arms aren't strong enough.”

Even though I get mad, I know it's true. When I try calling a surf shop to ask if there's a secret trick to good paddling, the guy who answers laughs. “Pretend there's a great white comin' at you, girlie.” Then he laughs again and hangs up.

First I try pushing water through my fingers like I'm doing the breaststroke, but the board keeps going sideways. Next I try using my hands like scoops, feeling salt stinging the scabby spots near my bitten nails. Finally, I try pushing the water with my hands and kicking my legs, but my knees keep banging on the hard resin.

Soon I'm sweating in the rubber, but I can't take my wet suit off, because there's nowhere to put it. Sweat and salt water start dripping in my eyes, and I punch the water as hard as I can. The rubber is suffocating me so I unzip the top of my wet suit and balance it on my head, wearing only a cotton T-shirt now.

Then I get an idea: I imagine I'm a machine—a paddling machine that never gets tired. I plunge my arms about a foot into the water and propel myself forward, counting out loud, “One, two, one, two.” I paddle across the entire bay faster than I've ever done it before. The only thing that stops me is a gulp of sea water I breathe in by mistake.

Choking, exhilarated, I rest for ten minutes, floating on my back. When I look up at the window, I see my mother's yellow bathrobe reflected in the glass. I wave slowly to her from across the water. Then I put the wet suit back on my head and paddle again, showing off my form.

When I look up a few seconds later, she's gone.

*   *   *

The other girls have small purses or backpacks, but I carry a silver plastic shopping bag, big enough to hold my wet suit, so I can change in the bushes on the way to the cliffs.

The girls laugh, they point, they titter. As we all wait for the bus after school they cup their hands in perfect unison, together in tribes, planning pranks to play.

“Can I sit here?” Cami Miller is gesturing to a place beside me at the bus stop. A place that is always empty. I ignore her grandly, picking at my nails, humming.

“Well, can I sit here?” Cami repeats, looking at the other girls, smiling, winking.

“Sure,” I finally say, “do whatever you want.”

“But I don't want to sit here,” Cami says, giggling, then laughing tiny silvery bells.
“I don't want to catch anything.”

The other girls laugh, in a gaggle. I think of them washing away. I throw my hands out in a wave.

“Die,” I tell them. “Whatever.”

Cami is five times as pretty as me now, but she wasn't always. She only got beautiful when she went to Dr. Rosen for a nose job. All the towel girls go to Dr. Rosen. They tape their chins and ears, sometimes they even get their eyelids ripped open and reshaped into half moons. Tara Pugh had her lips enlarged with fat from her own butt.

There are horror stories of plastic surgery gone wrong, like Mrs. Ambrose, whose face caved in from too many reductions, or poor Steph Stone who chose a nose too small for her face and ended up looking like a devious elf.

“But that's because Dr. Rosen didn't do the surgery.”
The towel girls agree,
“You get what you pay for.”

“I mean, he was like a doctor from Afghanistan or something—from, like, a Third World country or something.”

*   *   *

My father says if I want to make friends I have to start wearing nice clothes. He surprises me with pleated skirts, floral dresses, and little pink socks.

“You don't want to wear those old things; you'll look much better in this,” he says, handing me a dress with clumpy purple flowers all over the front.

He has clothes for my mother too, a few sizes too small.

“I'm not an eight anymore,” she says, “I'm a sixteen.”

“You looked good as an eight.” He holds a chic, slinky dress against her frame. Then he pats her hand.

“I want you to see these clothes as a symbol of encouragement. You can lose weight again, Sandy. I know it.”

“Why don't you give it to one of your
secret friends,
Phil,” she hisses, flinging it aside.

“Mom looks fine,” Jim says.

“Thank you, lamb.” She lifts an eyebrow at my father.

*   *   *

“Why don't you wear your new dress to your French lesson?” my father asks me later.

“Yeah, why don't you?” Jim says, trying not to laugh.

“You'll look like a princess in it,” my father says, grinning.

“She's not filled out enough for that dress,” my mother cuts in. “It'll make her look like a scarecrow.”

“I'll wear it,” I say quickly. “I like it, Dad.”

My mother says, “She's a good liar, like someone else I know.” She looks directly at my father.

“I'll
wear
it,” I say, again.

I wear the dress out of the house, but I sneak into the garage to change into shorts. Even though I feel guilty, I hide the dress inside the teeth of the lawnmower, next to the Goodwill pile.

I look best in my new wet suit, anyway. Jim tells me I look like a pro.

If I couldn't surf, I'd just die.

Surf or Die.
I have a sticker on my notebook that says this.

*   *   *

Today Jim gets the first wave. We're at the bay, the surf is three feet, no one is out but us. He stands, leaning too far forward, then straightens out. I count six seconds, then the soft flannel sea parts for him. I watch him fall and emerge wet, gasping for air. The salt spray drips heavily, the air is clean and fresh.

I swim for his hat, which bobs a few feet away, his favorite black hat that says P.V. Sea Kings. I present it to him, slapping him on the back, telling him he'll be the greatest surfer that ever lived. I tell him how much I love him.

I tell him he is God.

“We're gonna rule the world,” I say. “You'll be the king.”

“And you'll be the queen,” he says.