Swim Back to Me

by Ann Packer

  “OK,” she said after a time, standing normally again but shaking her hands as if she were trying to air-dry them. “I have to maintain.” She ran her fingers through her hair, leaving a trace of Cheetos dust on the edge of her face. “Let’s go. Just don’t say anything funny.”

  We walked half a block in silence.

  “I didn’t say don’t say anything,” she said, and a giggle edged its way into her voice.

  I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t laugh and set her off. I thought for some reason of my father, chuckling a little the previous night as he glanced at the comics page. “I like Beetle Bailey,” he’d said, looking up at me. “Do you?”

  She was a little ahead of me. She wore a halter top, and on her bare back there was a sunburn line from the string of her bathing suit. I wondered if she’d been lying out. Joanie liked to sun herself on the patio, recline on one of the lounge chairs with the New York Review of Books and an iced coffee. I pictured the contours of Joanie’s wide belly, the bits of pubic hair that escaped from the leg holes of her bathing suit, making me want to look and not look at the same time. That sunny patio: soon it would belong to the Levines again.

  “So when are you moving?” I said. “Where are you going to live next year, anyway?”

  Sasha was licking her fingers, washing off the orange dust. “College Terrace.”

  I stopped walking. The whole of College Terrace was just College Avenue and the dozen or so streets that crossed it, each only two blocks long. We had just passed Princeton Street and were on our way to Oberlin. Wherever their new place was, it couldn’t be far away. “You mean you found a house?”

  “Yeah. It’s going to be great.”

  “Where is it?”

  She was silent for a moment. “Dartmouth. Have we passed Dartmouth yet?”

  “Duh.”

  “What?”

  “We’re at Oberlin. They’re in alphabetical order. It’s like five more blocks.”

  “They’re in alphabetical order?”

  “Well, not completely. Cornell is between Wellesley and Princeton, so—”

  “So the person who named the streets was a stoner,” she said, and we both laughed again, though not so hard this time.

  “Well, let’s go see it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Your new house.”

  “Oh. We can’t. Other people still live there.”

  “The outside.”

  She seemed to give it more thought than it needed—torturing me a little, I thought. “OK,” she said at last, and we continued down College, across Oberlin and Harvard. Dartmouth was the weird one: you couldn’t drive through because there was a little park right in the middle; the street stopped and then started up again after the park. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of park you could smoke in; it was open to all the houses surrounding it, nothing like the private park near our houses.

  We got to Dartmouth Street, and Sasha stopped in front of a one-story stucco house with a huge palm tree in the front yard and several terra cotta pots of cactus sitting on the front stoop. “Voilà,” she said.

  It looked small, but I could see why they’d chosen it. The sand-colored stucco, the terra cotta, the palm—it was as Western as you could get. I wondered if there’d be a band of light on the floor for Dan to lie in.

  “There are only two bedrooms,” she said, “but I’m going to take the garage. See?” She pointed at a small structure at the end of the cracked concrete driveway. “Daddy says it’ll be hot in the summer and freezing in the winter, but that makes it better, don’t you think? I’m going to have a ceiling fan and mosquito netting, and a woodstove for when it’s cold.” She glanced at me and then looked away again, trying to suppress a smile. “And a separate entrance.”

  I didn’t really want to think about Cal or how much easier it was going to be for her to see him, so I said we should go, and we got onto our bikes and rode home.

  Cal, I learned, was a dealer, though he preferred “supplier,” as in “I’m a supplier of goods and services,” the services being delivery and, where indicated, co-consumption. He’d met Eric Rumsen and Kevin Cottrell at a party at Lake Lagunita, on the edge of the Stanford campus; the night Sasha and I saw them in the field behind SCRA was the night of his first sale to Eric and the others, two ounces of pot homegrown by a friend of his on a small farm up near Cloverdale. Two ounces was all he’d sell them at a time. “He’s concerned about them,” Sasha said about this, and I thought: Yeah, concerned they’ll turn around and start selling it themselves and he’ll get none of the profit.

  I also found out, during those early weeks of the summer, why Sasha and Cal had been unable to have sex. “It hurt too much.” This wasn’t unusual for a fourteen-year-old girl, she told me with confidence. They were going to try again sometime soon.

  And there was this: they’d used my house that Sunday afternoon because Cal couldn’t wait. They were hanging out at the Union, and they decided yes, they should, they should do it; and Sasha only had an hour before she had to be home, which wasn’t nearly enough time to get all the way to his apartment and back, given what had to happen in between. My house was perfect: nearby and empty.

  This information came to me slowly, in bits and pieces, usually when Sasha and I were high. Days when she wasn’t with Cal, we rode our bikes into the hills: we lay around under giant oak trees, smoking and laughing and sometimes falling asleep in the heat, so that we might wake in the late afternoon with our skin marked by the twigs and bits of dried grass we’d lain on. Gladys always wanted to know where I was going, and so I invented a friend in Los Altos Hills with a swimming pool in his backyard. That I never brought home a wet suit or towel seemed not to occur to her—or maybe she felt she was carrying out her part of things just asking the question. Sasha told her parents the same story, and so we had to name this friend, and we came up with Harry Henry. Saying “Harry Henry’s house” over and over again was quite a sport for us when we were stoned. Harry Henry’s parents kept a mini-fridge in their cabana, and there were Cokes available all day, and cookies and chips galore. Hillary Henry was Harry’s magnificent older sister, who could often be seen sunning herself on a lounge chair.

  One afternoon we leaned against the rough trunk of our favorite oak, passing a pipe back and forth and talking about how sad it was that Harry Henry’s pet iguana had died.

  “Hillary planned the funeral,” Sasha said. “She wrote an elegy. ‘What ocean contains water enough to feed our tears this day?’ ”

  I snorted. “That’s terrible.”

  She socked my shoulder. “No, it’s not. Hillary writes beautiful poetry.”

  “Harry hates her for it.”

  “Harry adores her for it. He illustrates her poems. Didn’t he show you the pictures?” She said the last word with a slight English accent: the picshuhs?

  “No,” I said.

  “No? That sad sketch of poor Iggy with his head on the ground?” She upped the accent. “When she goes away to collidg next year, he’ll be desolate. Fortunately, she’ll cut off a lock of her heh for him to braid into a wristbaund.”

  “A ‘lock,’ ” I said. “Don’t you think that’s weird? And talk normal.”

  “It should be a key of heh,” she said.

  “Talk normal,” I said, “and give me that.” I took the pipe and sucked in a burning throatful of spicy Cloverdale dope. I held it in my lungs, keeping the pipe in my far hand so she couldn’t take it from me.

  “A key of heh,” she said again. And then, dropping the accent, “God, I just realized, I sound like Daddy.”

  “ ‘If you don’t go to Muir Woods with us, your mum will be the only bud along.’ ”

  Sasha laughed. “Very good. Hey, what are you doing, give me the pipe.”

  I took another toke and handed it to her.

  “Speaking of birds,” she said, “do you have a crush on her?”

  “Who?”

  “Hillary.”

  My pict
ure of Hillary was mostly a picture of the girl I’d seen when we were stopped at Mile Ten of the Walk for Mankind, the braless girl in the purple tank top. Hillary had that girl’s breasts and her long, smooth legs, but in truth she had Sasha’s hair.

  “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

  Sasha snorted and said, “Yes, and all bears are Catholic.”

  I sang: “ ‘Get down on your knees and genuflect, genuflect, genuflect, genuflect.’ ” This was from the Tom Lehrer song “The Vatican Rag”; the Horowitzes were great fans, and I had learned the lyrics to all of his songs.

  “Think of a bear kneeling,” she said.

  “Don’t think of an elephant,” I said, and she laughed harder.

  She sucked on the pipe and then handed it to me, saying, “Anyway, do you?”

  It took me a moment to figure out what she was asking. “I want to bed her,” I said, and she bent forward at the waist and shrieked, her shoulders shaking with laughter; and then, in a moment, she was on my lap, her shins on the ground outside my thighs, her face inches from mine.

  And so I kissed her. A quick lean in, my lips pressed against hers for an instant, and then I pulled back again.

  I looked into her face. Saw her long nose and pale eyelashes and pink-rimmed eyes. I had an urge to put my tongue on her eyelid. I cupped my free hand behind her head and pulled her close again, keeping my mouth on hers, lips moving, until I needed to break away for air.

  She was smiling. “Look at this,” she said, and she leaned in with her mouth just open and ran her tongue across my upper lip.

  The next day was the Fourth of July. For a week or more we’d been trying to figure out how to watch the fireworks stoned, and at last we’d come up with a plan. Rather than riding our bikes to the spot where most Stanford families watched, we would meet Cal on campus and have him drive us into the hills, where we’d get privacy—and a better view.

  But we hadn’t planned on having kissed the day before. I woke up that morning thinking I couldn’t go anywhere with Sasha and Cal, and then that I had to see her right away, and then that I had to make sure she never saw Cal again, and then that I should go along with the original plan because otherwise it would all be so obvious. What would be obvious? I started to wonder, but then I was off chasing pictures: Sasha’s face, that glimpse I’d gotten of her nipple a few weeks back, the sight of her butt as I pedaled home behind her at the end of the day yesterday.

  I hung around the kitchen with my father for a while, agreeing with him that I’d be really careful tonight, saying yes, I’d checked my bike lights, they worked. He was going to a barbecue, and he said again that I was welcome, and I said again that I thought I’d just go ahead with my original plan.

  The phone rang late in the morning, and I leapt to answer it, but it was just the barbecue people, asking my father if he had any extra lighter fluid he could bring.

  I ate lunch, lay on my bed for a while, went back to the kitchen and found a Popsicle. At last, I called her.

  And: Of course we were still going. Why would I ask? She was so nonchalant I wondered for a moment if it had even happened. But it had—I knew it had. I remembered the faint lime taste of her mouth, flavored by the candy she’d eaten earlier. I remembered how her tank top revealed the shapes of her breasts.

  We met at seven, rode to the meeting place, and locked up. She didn’t say much, and I wondered what was going through her mind, whether yesterday was all she could think of or the furthest thing from her mind. At last a car pulled up, an aging dark orange Mustang with all the windows open. There was a place on one fender where someone had tried to conceal damage with flat paint, and the car looked as if it had a long, thick scab. Cal smiled at us from the driver’s seat, and Sasha got in next to him. I sat in back.

  She said to him, “I brought food.”

  He said, “Right on.”

  “Fritos, your favorite.”

  “You know how to take care of me.”

  I studied him as he pulled away from the curb. His hair was loose tonight, a little greasy. I stared at his hands, surprised to find that his fingernails were well trimmed and clean. At a stop sign, he reached over and with his forefinger turned Sasha’s chin so she was facing him. Immediately she scooted close, and he put his arm around her and drove with just his left hand.

  I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. But of course it was—what had I expected? That our kiss yesterday would change things? I felt in my pocket for my pipe and clenched it in my hand, so hard that the metal ridges on the bowl dug into my skin.

  After a while Cal turned onto a narrow one-lane road. He took his arm off Sasha and held the wheel with both hands. We drove up a steep tree-thick hill, over potholes, past a run-down house with several old cars parked in a clearing. It was close to seven-thirty, still plenty light out but dimmer, the sky holding on to its last bit of blue. The road turned and got narrower, and a few branches broke as we scraped past some overgrown shrubs.

  “Where are we going?” I said. Sasha had told me we’d go to our usual place, smoke, take in the fireworks, head home.

  “Little Richard,” Cal said, and he turned and gave me a quick grin. “Heh. I like that. Little Richard.”

  “Where are we going?” Sasha asked him.

  “Stopping at a friend’s house. That OK?”

  “Who?”

  “Jeremy.”

  She stiffened. After a moment she got onto her knees and turned to face me. She said, “We can stay in the car.”

  “What?”

  She put a knee up on the seatback and without warning launched herself into the back. She landed with her head on my thigh, one of her knees down in the leg well. She righted herself quickly, scooted over, and sat near the window, behind Cal.

  “What was that, babe?” he said.

  “I want to sit back here.”

  She had a stricken look on her face, but though I looked and looked at her, trying to get her to look back at me, she stared straight ahead.

  We approached another clearing, another house. This one had a porch, with an old rocking chair right next to the front door, and in the yard a clothesline hung with faded towels. We kept going. Cal flipped the radio on, moved the dial through static and voices. There was a guitar playing what sounded like Spanish music, and then he turned it off.

  Now I saw a pair of mailboxes, one with its arm raised. Cal turned onto an unpaved road, and the car bounced as we made our way through a tunnel of wild, branchy shrubs. It was suddenly almost dusk, the sky the color of cheap binder paper, that thin grayish white. I heard a dog bark, glanced at Sasha, saw that her hands were clasped together so tightly that her biceps strained against her skin.

  “Here we go,” Cal said, and he made another turn, down a pitted drive and into a clearing, where three guys were sitting on old aluminum lawn chairs in front of a rusted RV with no tires. Two Dobermans were tied to a tree, and they stood at alert as our car came into view. They had that tight Doberman look, short black hair and brown muzzles and stand-up ears.

  Cal shut the car off, and one of the guys came over and leaned in the window. He was bare-chested and smelled of wine. He shook hands with Cal and then grinned into the backseat, revealing a gap between his front teeth.

  “Hello, Sash,” he said to Sasha. “Hello, boy,” he said to me.

  “Jeremy, meet Richard,” Cal said. He sat still for a moment and then got out of the car, shook hands with Jeremy, and stretched from side to side. His jeans were so old they were worn through at the butt, and I saw pinkish skin between the last fuzzy white threads of the denim.

  He turned around and leaned in the window. “Climb on out, kids,” he said, but Sasha shook her head, and I didn’t move either.

  Cal and Jeremy walked over to the other men. One was about Cal’s age, with blond hair to his shoulders, but the other looked old, maybe sixty: he was mostly bald, with gray wisps above his ears and a scraggly gray-white beard.

  “Who’s Jeremy?” I said.<
br />
  “Cal’s friend.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “That party,” she said. “In the mountains.”

  “Is he a dealer?”

  “No, Richard. Just be quiet, OK?”

  I looked through the windshield at the four men. Cal and Jeremy were talking, but too quietly for the sound to reach us. I was about to say something about Harry Henry, something about what he and Hillary might be doing tonight, when Sasha gasped.

  I looked out her window. The dogs were moseying toward the car, sniffing the ground, raising their heads as they came closer. One of them had a spiked collar around its neck.

  “You’re in the car,” I said. “Nothing can happen.”

  “Shut up.”

  I stared at her. She wore hip-hugger shorts and a plaid shirt with the tails tied in a knot several inches above her belly button. As I looked at her pale skin, and the outlines of her ribs, and the faint roundness of her abdomen, I felt a twinge, and then my dick was like a rock. This had never happened in her company before, not even yesterday, when we kissed. Something possessed me then, and I leaned across her and whistled out the open window, and the dogs came trotting forward.

  “No,” she whimpered, and she pushed me back and dropped into the space behind Cal’s seat, pulling herself into a ball and putting her arms over her head.

  I moved over to her window, keeping my knees on the seat so I wouldn’t bump into her. I leaned out the window, and the dog with the spiked collar came closer. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed he didn’t have enough rope to reach the car.

  “Boris!” the bald man called, suddenly looking over.

  The spike-collar dog growled.

  Now all the men turned. “Boris,” Jeremy said in a harsh voice. “Candy.”

  Suddenly I saw a loop of rope lying at the base of the tree, a good ten feet of rope I hadn’t figured on. I heard a sniffing sound, and I looked down and saw that Sasha’s shoulders were shaking. Slowly, I pulled my upper body back into the car. Candy had turned and was walking back to the tree, but Boris was tense with readiness.

  “Down and stay,” Jeremy yelled, and Boris trotted back to the tree, where both dogs lay down.