“Wait,” Lynn said. “There’s another movie.” Something in the tone of her voice kept us where we were.
She said it was a film her father had brought back from a leave he’d had in Japan when he was in the army stationed in Korea. Something about the way Lynn had to dig in the very back of the closet told me it was a dirty movie, something we weren’t supposed to see, though I couldn’t have said how I knew about such things. It was in black and white and began with a shot of a Japanese tea house, a garden with a tiny bridge in the front. A girl in a kimono appeared at the door of the house. She walked gracefully toward the camera. When she was almost on the little bridge, she let her kimono slide to the ground. She smiled and nodded her dark lacquered head and stood there stark naked. Her breasts were nearly flat, no bigger than my tiny teacups, and she had no pubic hair. As she glided over the bridge and out of the frame, her naked twin appeared at the door of the house she had just left.
“This is stupid,” Marly said, and got up and left. I could tell she didn’t think much of my new friends. The rest of us stayed as the film cut to two girls—perhaps the same two, it was hard to tell—naked in a large wooden tub filled with steaming hot water. One waved a bath brush, the other one covered her mouth and giggled. I was puzzled. Except for their elaborate hair, these geishas looked like the rest of us in the showers in Miss Jepson’s locker room. They didn’t seem sexy to me, and what they did wasn’t especially unusual or obscene. I didn’t get it.
The movie was only a few minutes long. The projector clattered as the film ran out and flapped wildly. Lynn shut it off and turned on the lights. Nobody moved. Everyone seemed puzzled but oddly excited. One girl asked Lynn if we could see her dad’s movie again. Lynn shook her head. “No, it might break,” she said. “I have to put it back.” Someone protested, “What difference would one more time make?” But Lynn was adamant. To distract us while she put everything away, she handed us a box of chocolates. Each one was wrapped in foil and shaped like a tiny liquor bottle. “Watch out,” Lynn warned. “They’ve got real booze in them.”
I unwrapped mine, which was marked Cream Sherry, and bit off the top. The liquid inside tasted anything but creamy. It burned my throat like cough syrup. I coughed, then ate the rest of the chocolate bottle, which wasn’t half bad. I ate two more, Jamaican Rum and Crème de Menthe. The last one tasted a lot like Crest toothpaste.
“Won’t your parents wonder what happened to these?” I asked Lynn. The four of us had all had at least two apiece, and the box, which had been full, was now nearly empty.
Lynn shrugged. “If she asks, I’ll tell her Paul ate ’em.”
When we climbed out of the basement, it seemed very, very late. I had sworn I wasn’t going to sleep at all, but now it seemed like a good idea to at least lie down for a while. I headed for the family room with its deep green-and-orange shag. Janie was asleep on the floor, and Marly and another girl snored gently on the facing couches. Lynn came in and found a place near the fireplace. Even she had given in to the idea of sleeping or at least resting for a while. I closed my eyes. Just for a minute, I told myself. The house was quiet except for the breathing of eleven girls, asleep or nearly so, and somewhere two parents, hopefully sound asleep, too.
The next thing I knew, I was dreaming that I was draped like a pepperoni on top of a giant pizza. An equally giant set of teeth were eating their way down the slice toward my greasy naked body. I screamed and sat up, my heart racing, my pajamas drenched in fresh sweat. Lynn was there. “If you’re awake,” she said, taking me by the hand, pulling me to my feet, “then come on. I’ve got a great idea.”
She dragged me into the kitchen. A nearly whole pizza was left on the marble counter. She handed it to me. “No, please,” I said. “I couldn’t eat another bite.”
Lynn shook her head, “It’s not for you.” She grabbed a couple of bottles of Coke from the refrigerator and tucked them under one arm. Then she grabbed the big Polaroid camera.
We went out in the yard. The grass was cool and damp under my bare feet. It was quiet except for the tree frogs and very dark. The moon was nowhere to be seen, but the neighbor’s yard lights were still on. Lynn set the Cokes on the picnic table and motioned for me to do the same with the pizza. Then she sat down on the table, too, her legs crossed. “Boy,” she said in an unnaturally loud voice, loud enough to wake the neighbors, certainly loud enough to wake Paul. “There’s nothing like a midnight snack of pepperoni pizza and Coke. I’m glad we came out here to eat it, but now I am soooo full and soooo tired.” She faked a yawn so big I caught the silvery glint of one of her molars. “Let’s go back to bed,” she said. “Just leave that old pizza for the squirrels. I couldn’t eat another bite.”
We left the picnic table and crouched behind Mrs. Maltezo’s Cadillac, Lynn holding the Polaroid at ready as if she were one of the reporters stalking Jackie Kennedy in Greece. The frogs sang. The palm trees in the front yard rustled dryly. Reflections from the neighbor’s lights glistened on the pepperoni, and the cheese glowed with a light of its own. I could see the Cokes sweating. Then I heard a click like the sound of a small mousetrap snapping shut. Someone had popped the latch on the Airstream’s door.
Roger London came out first. Tall and bony, he unfolded himself from the trailer with the awkward angularity of a praying mantis. I hoped it hadn’t been Roger who called me skinny. Next came a boy whose name I could never remember. He was very short, shorter than me, and had a reputation as both a good surfer and the senior class clown. Roger’s head swiveled on his shoulders, checking things out, making him look more than ever like some kind of bug. “It’s all clear,” he called over his shoulder into the trailer. Roger and the clown had already reached the picnic table and the pizza by the time Paul appeared at the trailer door. He stood there, eyes wide, his frown reminding me of the worried baby face I had just seen in the Maltezos’ home movie. He looked awfully cute.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Oh come on, Boy Astronaut,” the little class clown said, with a nasal voice I recognized from the walkie-talkie. He was the one who’d made fun of the way I looked. “Step out on the surface of the moon for a little pizza.” Then Paul stepped out of the trailer, but he didn’t head for the pizza the way the other two boys had. He stared at the bushes that lined the driveway, stretched, and strolled toward the oleanders, as if they were what he had missed most in space.
“Better hurry up,” Roger said, his mouth full of pizza. “We’re not saving you any.”
“Give me a minute,” Paul said. He had reached the oleanders.
Lynn made a sound with her tongue like a chicken’s cluck. When she was taking a math test, this sound always meant she had come up with the answer. “Perfecto mundo,” she said under her breath. In a split second she was up and aiming her camera.
When the flashbulb exploded, it became clear what Paul was doing. I saw his penis sticking out of his fly, slim and beautiful as any rocket, a long golden stream watering the oleander. “What!” I heard Roger say, frozen with a piece of pizza halfway to his mouth. “Crap,” I heard the other boy, Mr. Funny Man, say.
Paul turned toward the flash, though he must have been nearly blind from the sudden burst of light, and said in a low, clear voice, “Lynn Megan Maltezo. You are dead meat.”
Lynn tore the picture out of the camera, thrust it into my astonished hand. “Run,” she said to me. “Don’t let him get it.”
I heard a low growl coming from Paul’s direction, and I took off down the drive and into the street. I heard footsteps on the asphalt behind me. The pavement was rough, but I had callouses on my feet thick enough to stand a slow walk over live coals. I hadn’t been running barefoot all those years for nothing. I kept going, heading downhill for the Indian River. My feet flew, and in the dark my strides were as long and fluid as they would have been on the moon. I felt the scab on the back of my leg break open, my quiver wound start to bleed a little, but I didn’t care. I was flying. If I jumped high enoug
h, I could escape gravity altogether and go tumbling through space. I held tight to the picture. After I crossed the River Road and reached the overgrown bank, I looked back. Paul was following me. The other boys had either ducked back into the trailer or were chasing Lynn. Paul was running so fast he seemed to be flying, too.
I scrambled through bushes, down the bank, and out onto the Maltezos’ dock. It had been built back in the twenties when docks ran way out into the river and people put summer houses at the ends where they could sit safe from the mosquitoes and enjoy whatever breeze came up the river. A hurricane a few years before had taken the remnants of this dock’s summer house away, but it was still a long dock, though not one in good repair. I didn’t care. I ran down it full tilt, my feet hammering the rickety wood planking.
“Jesse,” Paul called to me from the bank. “Watch out.”
“Coward,” I called back over my shoulder, slowing down a little as I picked my way over the missing boards.
Paul hit the dock fast. He knew where the rotten spots were and was gaining on me. I concentrated on my feet. Careful. Keep going. Careful. It was even darker on the river than it had been in the Maltezos’ front yard. Then I was at the end of the dock. “Give me the picture, Jes,” Paul said. He was right behind me. I jumped.
For an instant, I was floating, like somehow I was suddenly in space. Then my feet touched the water and immediately after, the slimy mud of the river’s bottom. The water at the end of the dock was only up to my thighs. Ripe, sulfurous bubbles rose on all sides of me. I could feel the muck soaking into my pajamas, the bandage on the back of my leg. I’d be lucky if I didn’t get blood poisoning, but I still had the picture. I tucked it into the back waistband of my pajamas.
Paul collapsed on his stomach on the end of the dock. “Phew,” he said, smelling the sulfur. He was panting, out of shape after his week in space. “Give me that damn picture,” he said, breathing hard. I was just beyond his reach, unless he wanted to come wading, too.
I shook my head. “I dropped it,” I said.
Paul looked at me. “You really don’t have it?”
I held up my empty hands. Paul looked at me and sighed. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
I nodded. I was the one standing thigh-deep in the river, so I must be crazy. I wasn’t, however, the one who’d just spent eight days in a sweaty, stinky trailer with two nasty boys and was about to lock myself in for three more. “Here,” he said, offering me his hand. I put one mucky foot on the end of the dock for a leg up, and he stood and pulled, and somehow, not too gracefully, I managed to climb out of the river. Then we walked hand in hand, very carefully, back down the broken dock to the bank, water dripping from my PJs.
When we got to dry land, I tilted my head back and licked my lips twice. Paul kissed me, like he couldn’t help it. He tasted like Astronaut Fruit Cake. No doubt I tasted like pepperoni pizza.
“Jesse?” It was Lynn, on the road above us. Paul froze. “Is that you? Have you got the picture?”
I did. I could feel it inside the waistband of my PJs, the elastic making it cut ever so slightly into the small of my back. I wanted to keep it. “No,” I said, “I dropped it.”
“Damn it,” she said. I could see her face now, a white blob peering down from high on the bank. “Is that Paul? Hold on to him. I’ve got the camera.”
Paul took off running down the sandy edge of the river, then up the neighbor’s wooden steps to the road. By the time I got back to the Maltezos’ house, all three boys were back in the Airstream, the pizza and the Cokes were gone, and a thin sliver of moon was beginning to rise.
I KEPT THE photograph, but I never peeled it apart. When I got home the next morning, it had been developing far longer than one minute. Anyway, I didn’t have the special tube of fixative. I couldn’t bear the idea that sweet, naked Paul would just fade away in the light of day. So I stuck it in the corner of my underwear drawer, where it remained until several years later, when my mother made me clean out my dresser. Then I found it stuck to the wood at the bottom of the drawer, fused into a puddle of its own gray chemicals.
After ninth grade, Paul transferred to a prep school. I saw him only twice in passing after that, once waterskiing on the river with friends in the summer and the last time coming out of a movie with a girl who looked a lot like Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In. But the square stain the Polaroid left in my dresser drawer never went away. It’s still there. I saw it this morning when I was hunting for a matching pair of socks.
14 July 1969
When Apollo 11 blasted off for the moon with Neil Armstrong on board, I was 150 miles away at Turtle Lake Girl Scout Camp in the middle of the Ocala National Forest. In fact, I was practicing a water ballet to the sound of the “Theme from Love Story” blaring from a portable record player over the lake through a set of loudspeakers usually used for ordering campers out of the water in the case of a quick-moving Florida thunderstorm. I was in Aquatics, the unit at the camp that did the most swimming and boating, but even for us, water ballet was a bit of a stretch. This was the brainstorm of my tentmate, Celia, who had seen water ballet on TV during the Mexico City Olympics. Celia had just moved to Florida from California and was full of ideas.
Water ballet was not turning out to be one of her best ones. For one thing, the dark water of Turtle Lake, stained brown with tannin from the pine and cypress trees, made it impossible to see any fancy tricks done underwater. This limited our choreography to waving our hands and feet rhythmically in the air while we swam, but Celia had conned me and our other tentmate, Andrea, whom we called Andy, into participating anyway. Celia was a born leader.
We had just started the opening of our routine, the part where we swam in a circle doing the crawl while rhythmically dipping our hands in the water to the words, “How do I begin”—dip, breathe, kick—“to tell the story”—dip, breathe, kick—“of how great a love can be?”—double dip, breathe, flip onto back. Just as I was rolling over to start my backstroke, I noticed the water was full of tiny ripples, as if Turtle Lake were a glass in some nervous drinker’s hand. On the shore, Happy, our counselor (named by the camp director after one of Snow White’s dwarfs), lifted the tonearm from the record, and in place of the distorted music, I heard a familiar low rumble. Only a Saturn V rocket sounded like that. Apollo 11 was go. There were Americans on their way to walk on the moon.
Floating on my back, I shaded my eyes and looked up, expecting to see the white trail as the rocket headed down-range, but the sky was empty. We were too far north to see the launch, even though we could hear it. I stood up in the shoulder-deep water. Andy stood, too. I could hear cheers from the softball field, where most of the campers had gone after breakfast to watch the counselors play against a team from the YWCA camp, but I couldn’t tell if they were cheering the launch or some spectacular slide into home. Celia, busy counting her strokes, bumped into me. “Hey, Doc,” she said, calling me by the nickname she’d given me, based, she said, on how much I knew and not on the Disney dwarf of the same name. She stood, too. “Hey,” she said, taking plugs out of her ears. “What happened to the music?” I started to tell her, but at the same moment Happy dropped the tone-arm on the record player, starting the music again with an awful sliding scratch that drowned me out.
After we finished our practice, Celia, Andy, and I sat on the floating dock, drying off. Even at ten in the morning, the sun was fiercely hot. I spent the whole summer burning, peeling, and burning again, too fair, really, to live under the Florida sun. No amount of Coppertone helped, so I had given up trying to do anything about it. Andy was also blond, but she had long tanned legs and arms—she was the tallest girl in the camp by a good six inches—and only seemed to burn on her nose and under her eyes, which she kept coated with zinc oxide. Even Celia, who was black, was light-skinned enough to have picked up a crop of freckles on her nose.
Celia was talking about how many miles of parking Disney World was going to have when it was finished, acres of asphalt for employ
ees and tourists alike. You would have to take special trams, she said, just to get to the ticket window. She would know. Her father was one of the engineers trying to raise the huge new theme park out of the vast track of swamp and cattle land that Disney had secretly and carefully acquired outside Orlando over the years. Walt Disney had appeared one night on TV three years before and announced his plans for not only a theme park that would dwarf Disneyland, but a kind of space age city, Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), where all the employees would live. Then Walt had died, leaving most of the kids on my bus more stricken after all those years of watching him introduce The Wonderful World of Color than they were when they heard that Bobbie Kennedy had been shot. Now Disney World was going to be all theme park, with the utopian village shelved indefinitely. Still, according to Celia, it was going to be a truly otherworldly place.
Andy was less keen on the idea. Her father had told her Disney was going to ruin the environment, a word I hadn’t heard until Andy used it. Andy’s father had a Ph.D. in philosophy but drove a Charles Chips truck, delivering potato chips and cookies around Casa Dega, a small spiritualist settlement near Orlando that had been founded way back in the twenties. Andy said Casa Dega was a place where you could get your fortune told by someone who looked just like your grandmother. You could also go to the spiritualist church, where the minister might call out something that fit only you, like, I see there is a girl here whose father is a junior college administrator. Andy had the distinction of having been the only Girl Scout brave enough to sell cookies in Casa Dega and so had won the statewide pennant for the most boxes sold. “Even at seances,” she said, “sweet little old ladies always serve cookies. I just told them about how well they freeze. You know, so they could have them on hand all year.”
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