“Daddy?” she said, not moving or opening her eyes.
“No, it’s me,” I answered.
“Min! What are you doing here?” She sat up in one graceful motion, a huge grin on her face. She was happy to see me. My breath started coming faster, as though my bike race through town was finally catching up with me. I stood at the other end of the deck, light-headed with relief.
“You didn’t call,” I explained. Then I started walking toward her. As far as I was concerned, Laura and I were the only two people for miles around. But she didn’t stand up, she didn’t move in any way toward me. I sat down beside her on the bench’s warm wooden slats and caught sight of the hot tub in the corner, covered and silent. That was what we needed.
I turned to her. “Laura, let’s use the hot tub. I’ve never been in one before.” The round wooden tub had been installed a few months earlier, before her family had left for Michigan. I couldn’t imagine Laura sitting in a little circle with her brother and sister and parents, all of them naked in the steaming water and carrying on a conversation. The idea made me laugh, abruptly, the sound of my voice sharp and clear in the piney air.
“I don’t really want to,” Laura said. I turned back to her, surprised. She looked at me steadily, and I saw that she was angry at me. In another second, I realized, she might ask me to leave. And I would have to. But I also thought part of her wanted to get in the hot tub with me, and I wanted to win that side over.
“Please?” I asked. “Just think how great it will feel. We can just relax, it’ll be nice. Please, Laura?”
The screen door creaked and Laura’s mother leaned her head out. She was tan too, and had gained a lot of weight. “I thought I heard someone laughing. Hello, Min. Laura, I’m going out. Can you two entertain yourselves for an hour or so?”
While her mother was speaking, Laura had walked over to the hot tub. She turned on a switch on the other side. Underneath the plastic cover I could hear the water start to gurgle.
“Where are you going?” I asked Laura’s mother.
She ignored me. “Don’t forget to turn that off when you’re finished, Laura.”
“Do I ever forget?” Laura asked testily.
Laura’s mother ignored that too. Laura slumped down cross-legged next to me. Her hair fell forward into her face. Her mother said, “Did you bring your bathing suit, Min?”
“Why?”
“For the hot tub, obviously.” She nodded at it.
“You can borrow one of mine,” Laura told me.
“Sweetie,” her mother said, “for God’s sake, don’t pick at your split ends.”
Laura dropped the ends of her hair that she had been examining. “Bye, Mom. Have a good time.”
“All right, I’m going. Bye, girls.” The screen door bumped shut behind her.
Laura pulled the short sleeves of her t-shirt up around her shoulders, stretched out her bare legs, and lay back down on the bench. I scooted back a few feet to give her room and sat in the shade of the house’s eave, arms around my knees, staring out at the trees in front of the high wooden fence that separated her house from the next one over. I had the uneasy feeling she was displaying herself for my benefit. I counted seven pots of rosemary and other herbs scattered around the deck. I wondered who had watered them while Laura’s family was away. I wished I had brought my cigarettes. Out front, a car door slammed and the engine, after a false start, kicked into life.
“She spent the whole summer screaming at everyone,” Laura said, “even about the tiniest things.” I looked at her lying on the bench, eyes closed, and imagined leaning over to kiss her.
“You’d think my father was the biggest klutz around. And nobody did anything. They all acted like it was normal to be angry all the time.”
I was having trouble concentrating on what Laura was saying. I was too intoxicated by the tranquil day and Laura stretched out half-undressed before me.
She said, “Going out with Dave was the only way I could get away from their arguing. But even that didn’t help, it just got me in trouble.”
She had never told me any of that in her letters. “What do you mean?”
Laura rolled onto her side, cradling her head in the crook of her arm. I could no longer see her face, just the slightly oily sheen of her burnished hair, her part dividing it neatly down the middle. “My parents weren’t nearly as laid back about Dave and me as his parents were,” she said. “You’re lucky you have privacy, a place to go where no one will barge in on you.”
I thought of my narrow bed, and for the first time I realized that I had been lucky. Where else could Miguel and I have gone, with his mother home with his youngest brother all day? It would have turned out very differently. I said, “That was because I didn’t tell my mother about Miguel. There’s no way she would have let me see him while she was at work. No fucking way. You’re the only one who knows about him.”
She seemed to consider that. Then she said, “Dave and I mostly fooled around outside. In the woods or on the beach. One time he got a wicked sunburn on his butt.”
I laughed. Here we were, back in our friendship again, trading stories about boys, just as I had imagined it after the first time with Miguel. She was still curled away from me. I wanted to stroke her hair, let her know how much I cared about her.
Laura said, “I think my father is having an affair.”
“Your father?” I was shocked. But I also believed it right away. I had always thought her father was attractive with his gray hair and arched eyebrows that made me feel he was daring me in some way. And he was almost never home.
Then Laura stood up abruptly. “Let’s get in,” she said. “I just want to be quiet for a while.” She pulled the cover off the tub. I watched her carefully. Her father. The water bubbled gently, masking the steady drone of the pump. Laura went inside the house and came out carrying two large white bath towels and a glass of water. She seemed to have forgotten about the bathing suits, which was fine with me.
We stripped in the sun and hurriedly climbed over the rim of the tub to sink naked into the hot water. Though we were used to undressing in front of each other, over the past year Laura had grown self-conscious about her body. Knowing that made me a little nervous. I also felt the difference in my own body from having been with Miguel: how I enjoyed its suppleness, how easy being naked was. Submerged to our necks, sitting across from each other on the ledge that circled the tub, we leaned back, feigning nonchalance. Gradually I relaxed, enjoying the enclosing heat of the water and the breeze that fanned my face. I closed my eyes, listening to the silence interrupted occasionally by the whisper of car tires on the road out front. I felt my body expand as if it were slowly being filled with the water and the water was as wide as the ocean.
After a while I asked, “Why didn’t you write me back?” I looked over at her, but she avoided my gaze. Her long hair trailed in the water.
“You know why,” she said. “Miguel.”
My anger was right there, rushing through me. “What, because Miguel’s Chicano? That’s bullshit, Laura, I can’t believe—”
“No, Min, why would I care about that?” She gazed at me severely. “When I got your letter, it was like you were telling me you had moved to the moon.”
“Why?” I asked, bewildered. “I wasn’t the one who left. You have no idea how much I missed you, Laura. I spent most of the summer doing nothing and hating it. I was miserable waiting for you to come back.”
“You weren’t when you went all the way with Miguel.” She waited. I was silent. It was true: for a few weeks I hadn’t felt as lonely. Her face was getting red from the water’s heat. “I felt like you had turned into someone else, Min. I felt like you had jumped into this other world of sex and pot. I couldn’t understand what you were doing. I still can’t.”
“I was doing the same thing you were doing,” I answered. Laura frowned. Underneath the water, my limbs stretched away from me. I lifted my foot, stirring the thick liquid heat. Then I stood u
p in the middle of the tub, leaned back slightly, and went under, dunking my head so that all of me was submerged. When I came up, Laura hadn’t moved. I swept my wet hair off my face and sat back across from her.
“So you might as well tell me what happened.” I could hear the attempt at indifference in Laura’s voice.
“What do you want to know?” I asked, sounding equally unconcerned.
“You know, what he did, what it felt like.”
“The first time, or after that?”
“Oh. The first time, I guess.”
I smiled, remembering. “Well, I liked it, of course.”
“Of course?” Laura sounded angry.
“Well, yeah,” I answered, baffled. “Fucking is fun.”
“How can you call the first time you made love ‘fucking’?”
Here it was, the argument I had been anticipating for weeks. It was hard for us to look at each other. This time I glanced away. I looked up at the pine trees on the other side of the yard and at the blue sky. “Because it was fucking. We were high, and it seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t anything romantic.”
Laura stared at me, an expression in her eyes like a wince. “I can’t believe you,” she said. “You just gave it away, like that, in one afternoon? How could you let someone you don’t even know very well touch you like that? You didn’t even build up to it.”
“Why should I? I’ve been waiting a long time.”
“So have I,” she replied heatedly.
“Yeah, but you never take the opportunities handed to you.”
“That’s because I’m not—” Abruptly, she stopped speaking, but I knew what she meant. She thought I was a slut, the kind of girl she wanted to be but couldn’t let herself. That’s what it was, I realized suddenly. She was angry at me because I didn’t follow all the restrictions that were in her head keeping her back.
“Okay, start from the beginning. Did it hurt when he put himself in?”
“A little, at first. He stopped until I was ready.”
“Did you bleed?”
“No.”
“Did it feel weird inside you?” She made a face when she said this, scrunching up her nose.
I remembered her description of Dave’s cock, how foreign it had seemed to her. I had never felt awkward with Miguel’s penis, only tired of it eventually. “What do you mean by weird?” I asked.
“Okay, was he rough?” I looked at her blankly. “You know,” she said, “did he pound into you?”
Why was she so scared of it? “No. Well, there were times, later, when we got kind of frenzied. But sometimes he hardly moved at all and took a long time. I liked it both ways.”
“You did?”
We looked at each other, surprised. “Yeah,” I said and laughed. I glanced down at her body refracted and wiggly below the water, then looked away.
“What kind of birth control did you use?”
“Nothing the first time. Later he used rubbers.”
“Jesus, Min, what if you’re pregnant?”
“Well, I’m not.”
“But you could have been. That was really stupid.”
I looked at her. I could feel my jaw tightening. I breathed in, then out. Bringing my hands up through the heated water, I rested them on the surface, then swept them, open-palmed, back and forth as they sank back down. I said, more coldly than I meant to, “You sound like your mother. Do you want me to tell you this or not?”
“Okay.” Silence. She reached up with a dripping hand to push her hair behind her ear. “What about cunnilingus? You said he did that in your letter.”
“I liked that the most of everything we did.” I was smiling. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, remembering. “Guys really love going down on girls, don’t they? Miguel could stay down there for the longest time. I’d have to drag him back up.” I opened my eyes halfway. “Well, I guess I don’t have to tell you, you know what I’m talking about.”
“Not really,” Laura said in a voice I could barely hear.
I sat up. “Dave never went down on you? Didn’t you do 69?”
“No. I wouldn’t have let him go down on me even if he’d wanted to. But he didn’t. He thought it was gross.”
“Why?”
Laura merely looked at me disbelievingly and shook her head. I really didn’t understand. All I ever thought about was getting my face between a girl’s thighs. Underwater, Laura stretched out her legs. One of them touched one of mine. “Sorry,” she said quickly, moving her leg away and sitting up straighter.
I was about to speak when Laura cleared her throat. “How come you keep talking about Miguel in the past tense? Aren’t you still together?” She pushed herself up from the water and stretched out her arms along the side of the wooden tub.
I looked away from her, mostly because it was hard not to notice her round, sloping breasts just above water level. I reached over the rim of the tub to the switch behind me and turned on the jets, then sat in front of one. Beneath the water, its heavy spray hit the small of my back.
Laura apparently took my silence for assent. She asked, “Didn’t you love each other?”
“Love?” I asked, trying to remember the surprising strength of my regret the day I broke up with Miguel. Instead I had an image of Laura’s father with his pants down screwing one of his colleagues, or maybe it was a secretary, on the carpet of his office at Sonoma State, her skirt pushed up and her knees in the air on either side of him. My stomach lurched. I stared at Laura. Was this what she imagined too?
When I didn’t say anything more, Laura said, “From what you’ve said, Miguel sounds really nice. I thought at first you were crossing another line, like with all your pot smoking and driving without a license and everything, and I thought you were choosing someone really bad to do it with. But he isn’t, is he?” I shook my head. She gazed at me for a moment. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Min.”
“Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“I don’t mean it the way it sounded. I mean, he sounds so great. He could have been a real creep, for all you knew. If I had gone all the way with Dave—”
“Yeah, why didn’t you?” I interrupted, anxious to change the subject.
“What?”
“Go all the way. With Dave.”
“I didn’t want to. It wasn’t an obvious thing, the way I guess it was for you. I liked him a lot, he was really nice. I sort of wanted to, but not with him. I don’t know,” she drifted off. We were silent. I listened to the whoosh of the water jets and the dull roar of a far-off airplane. I moved away from the spray at my back. I was getting overheated and a little lightheaded. My body felt rubbery, far away.
“I don’t want to be in competition with you,” Laura finally said.
We stared at each other. Her face was pinched, as though she was about to cry.
“We’re not in a race,” I said.
“But now I feel like I have to keep up with you. I almost did it with Dave just because you had. I feel like I’m always trying to keep up.”
“With me?” I asked, astonished. “But you’re the one who’s had boyfriends. Why would you feel competitive? I’m the one who’s always waiting to hear what happened.”
“Nothing ever happens, Min. I mean, it’s never how I hope it will be. I always think it would be better if I could be more like you.”
“But you want different things than I do.”
“You think I know what I want? I don’t. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want to lose it, but not with Dave. I mean, he’s not somebody I’d want to marry or anything. He’s nice, I like him, but that’s all. I want more than that.”
“Like what?” A small tendril of hope was unfurling inside me. Maybe Laura couldn’t bring herself to have sex with boys because she didn’t like them. Maybe she could like girls instead.
“I want it to be more than fumbling around. I want what you had with Miguel. Min, you have no idea how lucky you were. And I want . . .”
Sh
e closed her eyes and shook her head. Then she cupped her hands to splash her reddened face. The slope of her breasts moved as she leaned forward and gathered up the water. She lifted her arms and brought the water to her face. Trickles ran down her neck and over her round breasts, glinting for a second in the sunlight. I wanted to put my hands on her breasts and let the water run over my fingers. I wanted to touch Laura’s breasts, and I wanted her to like it.
“What?” I said quietly, urgently.
“Well, I want to love him. I want to be loved.”
Then Laura started to cry. She brought her hand up from the rim of the tub to cover her mouth, as though she could keep me from hearing the occasional sob that escaped her. I stood up and pushed through the water toward her, wanting to put my arms around her and hold her close against me. If I hugged her tight, stroking her half-wet hair, she might not keep herself back as she was now, her eyes squeezed shut to fend off the tears, her hand trying to smother all sound. But I realized as I reached out to touch her shoulder that we were both naked, and suddenly I didn’t dare. I stood next to her, inches away, hoping she could feel my silent presence beside her.
Finally I said, my voice sounding odd to me, “I love you, Laura.” I’d meant it as an offering, my attempt at giving comfort. But as the words became sound in the air between us, I realized it was my confession. I was shaking after I said it.
Laura wiped her cheeks with the palm of her hand. “I know, Min, and I love you too. But it’s not enough. I mean in love.”
I gripped the rim of the hot tub behind me with both hands, while inside my chest something that had been stretching out snapped back tightly, like a fist. My eyes filled, but I blinked the tears back before she could see them.
Laura pulled her hair back from her forehead with her hands. The skin around her eyes was swollen, and her face was blotchy from crying. She was still beautiful. She met my gaze and smiled, looking tired and at the same time gratified to see me still there.
“Thank you, though,” she said. We stood in the bubbling water, helpless and half-smiling at each other, until she turned around and climbed out of the tub and covered herself with her towel.
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