by Jessica Raya
“He’s hungry,” Mom said loudly. She was almost shouting. “Somebody needs to feed this baby.”
“They’ve been fed,” the mother said. She lay on a towel behind us, her face stuffed in a romance novel. She glared at me from behind her sunglasses, as if I’d been the one who’d spoken. She couldn’t have been more than twenty.
“What happy babies,” Lorna said.
What did they have to be sad about? I wondered.
“Twins?” Suzanne said.
“Fraternal.”
“They must be a riot.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Twins,” Mom whispered, staring hard at the guppy flapping at her knee.
The mother glared at me again, then got up to retrieve her child. I touched Mom’s arm. “I’ll watch you dive.” She nodded and followed me to the water.
I found a spot on the rough concrete edge while Mom climbed, worryingly, to the high diving board. I’d never seen her dive before. “Springboards are dangerous,” Dad had warned, including the one in our backyard that hung three feet above the water. “You might as well leap off a cliff for how safe that thing is. You might as well bash yourself over the head with a two-by-four.” He’d had half a mind to get it removed. I’d learned my own awkward back dive from a girl at summer camp, feeling guilty the whole time, as if she was teaching me how to hotwire a car.
It was mostly boys in the diving board lineup. They braved sloppy somersaults and back-breaking cannonballs that sounded a sonic boom. Seconds later, they’d shoot up through the water, grinning like they’d won the gold. When it was Mom’s turn, she walked the board slowly, tugging at the loose elastic of her old suit. She put her feet in position, toes at the edge, and stared down at the water.
People in line grumbled. “We’re dying of old age here,” a kid said. “Next time try the ladies’ board.”
Mom turned and took a few steps toward the line of waiting boys. They groaned and started shoving each other back down the ladder to let her off. As they made way, Mom pivoted sharply, gripped the railing, and launched herself forward.
The board thundered under her feet as she hurled herself at its edge. She lifted her arms, bounced twice, and sprang up, up into the air. At the highest point, her body seemed to pause, suspended against the empty blue sky. Then her body jackknifed, her arms circling the backs of her knees, before bursting open again and shooting toward the water in a perfectly straight line.
She surfaced to cheering. The loudmouth on the ladder was whistling through his fingers. Mom swam toward me, smiling, as surprised as I was. The sun sparkled all around her.
“I must look a fright,” she said when she reached the edge of the pool. She slicked her hair back from her face.
“That was amazing,” I said. “Do it again.”
She grinned coyly. “Always leave them wanting more.”
We bought celebratory Cokes at the concession stand. The Girls needed it more than we did. They hadn’t moved on their towels and they were slick with sweat. The young mother and her twins were gone. Mom sat on her towel, smiling at everything.
“You’re soaking wet,” Suzanne said, peeling a magazine off her thigh. Her makeup had slid half an inch. She looked like the oil-blurred woman on the cover.
“I was in the pool,” Mom said. “You know, that big blue rectangular thing over there.”
“Mom dove off the high board,” I said.
“You were diving?” Lorna said, pulling a flask from her bag and tipping it over their cups.
“Didn’t you hear everyone clapping?” I said.
“Was that what that was?”
After their rummy Cokes, the Girls turned onto their stomachs and fell asleep. Mom and I went to the changing room and got in line for the toilets. Mom was in a stall when two women joined the back of the line. They wore V-necked one-pieces and saltwater pearls.
“Dear lord, it’s like a Third World country,” one said. “How did I let you talk me into this?”
“I know. I know,” her friend said. “I thought a change would be fun.”
“You want change, go to Palm Springs.”
“You’re right. You’re right.”
“That trash on the grass.”
“In the bikinis, I know.”
“And Elaine Fisher!”
“I almost didn’t recognize her.”
“On the high dive, showing off like that. Who does she think she’s fooling? She’s making a fool out of herself, that’s who. I feel sorry for her, I do, but it’s no excuse.”
“You’re right. You’re right.”
“If my husband did that, I’d bury my head in the sand. I wouldn’t be running around with trash half my age. I wouldn’t be flaunting it, you can believe that.”
“You know, she still has my punch bowl. The one with the etched daisies? I guess I’ll never see that again.”
“What a pity.”
A girl came out of a stall and I nearly knocked her down trying to get past. I sat on the toilet, staring at the roll of paper and wishing I had my lighter. I thought Mom had looked beautiful up there, but maybe they were right. Maybe she was embarrassing herself. Or maybe I should’ve busted out of that stall and told those old hags where they could put their punch bowl. Instead, I waited until I was sure they were gone. I could still see Mom’s feet under her door when I slipped out. Like mother, like daughter.
When Mom came back to the towels she was smiling so hard it had to hurt. “Everyone ready to go?” she said, already packing up. Lorna and Suzanne complained that it was too soon, their tans wouldn’t be even. “We’ll come back next week,” Mom said, smiling even harder, so I knew we never would.
—
I found out that Monday that Jamie wasn’t really one of us either. He was in a college prep program and they could eat lunch wherever they wanted. For some unfathomable reason he had elected to get locked into the lunch yard with us hooligans every day. But after he punched the door, he didn’t come back.
It was barely a dent, but he had done it. He had left his mark. Alone in the front hall once, I placed my own fist gently inside the grooves, marvelling at how neatly it fit, wondering if this was one of Carol’s signs.
8
Mom seemed determined to make up for all those years she hadn’t swum. She spent whole weekends in the pool. When she wasn’t practising her typing, she was perfecting her front crawl, her fingers either smudged with ink or pruned and white. She bought a bathing cap and smeared herself with lanolin whenever she got the chance.
The Girls came over on Saturdays to play gin rummy, but only after they’d spent a few hours baking beside the public pool. They always stayed until somebody asked for their phone numbers. Their tans were so dark their teeth glowed.
They told us about the men they’d met, Tom from Michigan or Minnesota, Dan who did something or other in banking. They didn’t seem especially interested in the particulars, but I suspected this was beside the point.
“We aren’t getting any younger,” Suzanne said.
“Or smarter,” Mom said.
“Oh, Elaine, you’re a riot.”
When it was just Mom and me, I’d do my homework on the patio table, mumbling about how useless math was while I counted her laps. Mr. Grant said it was important to have goals, she told me. “Your most important competitor is yourself!”
She spoke to Mr. Grant on the phone almost nightly now. When Dad’s old clients called, she hurried them off the phone with cheap platitudes and mixed metaphors. “You know what they say. When God shuts a door, he opens a new can of worms. Okay, you take care!” Heaven forbid the man got a busy signal.
I don’t know what they had to talk about every night after talking to each other all day, but Mom assured me that Mr. Grant was a very inspiring man. After one of his calls, she’d moon around for hours, grinning at the TV, grinning at a book. Sometimes she’d change into her swimsuit and go grin in the pool.
“You wouldn’t believe his
stories,” she said. “He grew up dirt poor, you know. He washed dishes to put himself through law school. He had a lot of doors slammed in his face, but that only made him try harder. The man won’t take no for an answer.”
“I’ll bet.”
Mom stopped towelling her hair and looked at me through a screen of wet hair. “Maybe Lorna and Suzanne are spending too much time over here,” she said.
—
Summer’s empty days stretched out this way for so long it was easy to forget about fall. September was a lifetime away. Then, suddenly, summer school was over and a new school year rushed toward me at meteoric speed. I saw it in every cloud and leaf. There was nothing to do but stand still and wait for it to flatten me.
Labor Day weekend, the grey over Golden was pulled tight as an eyelid. A storm was coming, but our neighbours didn’t seem to care. Boys scrubbed their fathers’ cars for a dollar and little sisters did cartwheels on front lawns while their parents grilled burgers and mixed mojitos in their yards. As I watched them from the window, Mom talked to Mr. Grant on the phone behind me. She’d spent the whole episode of Mary Tyler Moore in the kitchen with her hand cupped around the receiver. By the time she hung up, the lasagna was burnt.
“Oh no!” Mom cried, opening the oven door and waving away the smoke. “Why didn’t you turn this off?”
I didn’t answer. I’d been too busy eavesdropping to notice. Mom never said anything interesting on those phone calls anyway. She didn’t say much at all, except to tell him how wonderful he was. Oh, Brian, you’re hilarious. Oh, Brian, you’re too much. Oh, Brian. Oh, Brian.
She’d started calling him that. Brian.
“So what do you want to do on your last weekend of freedom?” Mom said, excavating a crispy square of noodles from the pan, cutting around the black edges with a spatula. “Aren’t you excited? You’re a sophomore! Oh, don’t look at me like that.”
She poured me some wine to celebrate. When I didn’t drink it, she tipped it into her own glass. She was always in an annoyingly good mood after those calls.
“How about a new outfit for your first day? You could get a pair of those bellbottoms you want.”
“That was two years ago,” I said.
“Was it?” Mom was wearing a pair of my old cut-offs and a sleeveless top with a stain on the front. Her clothes were riddled with them now, blue dots of fountain pen ink and smudges of black from the typewriter ribbon. Once, a scuff on her shoe would’ve sent her back to her room to change. A tear in her pantyhose would’ve ruined her whole day. We had to watch expenditures, she said, a word she’d picked up at work. We couldn’t just throw things away because they weren’t perfect. But I suspected that really she was proud of these stains the way boys were proud of their scars.
“Okay, fussy pants,” she said. “Get whatever you like.”
“Great,” I said. It was like a warden telling a prisoner he can have anything he wants for his last meal. How about some mashed potatoes and a nice prime rib!
—
The mall was crowded with summer-beat families soaking up the free air conditioning. Little kids ran wild in the food fair while teens loitered in tight jeans, swapping spit and shoplifting. Mothers marched from store to store, checking things off their lists while husbands slouched on hardwood benches, watching the fluorescents flicker. I wandered around, trying on costume jewellery, perfume, wigs. I was realizing too late that summer’s solitude had been a gift, and I was glad for these last hours to trickle away slowly.
I was at a record store, leaving my fingerprints all over the new Doors album, trying to imagine my life as a girl who longed for the acid poetry and leather pants of Jim Morrison, when the singing began. Loud and off-key, it drowned out the Led Zeppelin vibrating from the store’s speakers. A group of kids in yellow T-shirts were standing in the atrium, belting out “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” like it was the grooviest tune on earth. I recognized Carol Closter’s tone-deaf rendition before I saw her yellow hat.
“Donations for injured Christian soldiers!” she shouted over the singing. “Your dollar could save their life and your soul!” She shook an empty ice cream bucket at people as they passed. Some dropped a few coins, but most ignored her. She pulled her hat down tightly and tried a more aggressive tack. “You’re letting Christians die, you know! You’re making Baby Jee-sus cry!” I turned around and headed to Bertram’s discount department store, where senior citizens rummaged in bins for huge bags of pantyhose and day-old bread.
Mom’s money went far on a discount rack. I picked out a pair of patchwork jeans I actually thought were pretty snazzy, a simple white blouse, a couple of T-shirts, and a pair of knockoff Keds. A security guard trailed me for a while. I guess I looked suspicious loitering in the sleepwear section among the racks of long cotton nightgowns that belonged in a Mennonite museum. I was in no rush. When he got bored of following me and started watching a pack of hippies by the perfume counter, I found the changing rooms.
Since the night of the fire, I’d done impressive acrobatics to avoid seeing myself naked. The image of myself in a mirror was too startling. For months there had been no part of me—not an elbow or a knee—that I could identify as my own. But here, standing in the Bertram’s changing room, under the unkind fluorescents, I saw myself. There were my sceptical eyes, my downturned mouth, my sunburnt nose. There my long neck, my narrow shoulders, my small breasts. My cock-sucking lips.
I stripped down to nothing. There I was.
I pulled on the jeans slowly, buttoned the crisp white blouse. I pictured the girl in the mirror walking down a hall, head high, shoulders back. I swung my arms and she did the same. I pulled my mouth into a smile and she smiled back.
I heard someone rustling around on the other side of the curtain. “I’m fine,” I said. “I don’t need any help.”
Fingers slid through the gap between curtain and wall.
“Somebody’s in here!”
The hand drew back the curtain, inch by inch. I could already feel it moving over my body, unbuttoning my jeans, folding over my mouth. I tore out of there, arms thrashing, wrapping myself in the curtain and bringing it down in a crashing heap.
Carol Closter stood over me holding a mannequin arm. “You scare easy,” she said.
“What on earth?” A saleslady stood behind Carol. She pulled a tissue from her cavernous cleavage and dabbed her flushed face. “What is going on here?”
“My friend wants to buy crotchless panties,” Carol said. “Where would she find those?”
The saleslady crossed her arms. We hurried away, pressing our laughter into our hands. Clear of Bertram’s, we stopped and let it out. “What are crotchless panties?” I said. Carol laughed so hard she snorted. I bent over, hands on my thighs. My side hurt in a good way.
“I saw you before, by the fountain,” Carol said, catching her breath. “I thought you saw me too, but I guess not.”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Summer school was fun, huh?”
“If you say so.”
“I don’t have to go back yet,” Carol said. “Want to get an Orange Julius? I have two dollars.”
Carol did not, I realized, understand the rules of summer. In a few days, Moody Miller would go back to warming the chair outside Mr. Galpin’s office, Jamie Finley would rejoin the chlorine brotherhood, I would eat lunch with the square dancers, and Carol Closter would resume her role as resident Jesus Freak. Our tans would last longer than whatever temporary friendships we had cobbled together in the last two months—if you could even call them that. Carol Closter and I were not going to double to prom. We were not going to sleep over at each other’s houses and braid each other’s hair.
“My mom’s picking me up,” I lied. “She gets really mad if I’m late.”
Carol’s smile disappeared. “Okay, Robin. I’ll see you at school, I guess.” She started walking away, then stopped and turned around. “I like your outfit, by the way.”
I looked down
. I’d left my clothes in the Bertram’s changing room, along with the money my mother had given me and my bus fare home.
—
The sky was sketched in pencil. A storm wasn’t far off now. I waited at the bus stop. I didn’t know what else to do. I watched haggard shoppers shuffle out of the mall. The hippies from the perfume counter congregated near the doors, bumming for change. The guys had beards. The girls had dreadlocks. One of them dug around in her large fringed purse and pulled out a chocolate bar. She broke off pieces and handed them to her friends. I’d heard about the kids who lived in vans on the edge of town. Draft dodgers and acidheads, guys who sandpapered their fingerprints, girls who read your aura for money. They weren’t like the kids at school who wore hemp clothing and stickered their lockers with peace signs.
The rain started, lightly at first. People hurried to their cars, hands searching pockets for keys. A bus pulled up to the stop. I told the driver I’d lost my fare. “Hippies,” he said, sneering at my patchwork. The real hippies were dancing on the grass behind me, singing and laughing, the girls catching the rain with their long, twirling skirts. Come with us, I imagined them saying. We don’t go to school. We sleep under the stars.
The rain came down harder, raged. There were buckets of it. If Dad were there, he would have been telling me about China’s Huai River for the millionth time. After several years of severe drought, the winter of 1930 brought one of the country’s heaviest snowfalls, and the following spring, some of its heaviest rains. The Huai River rose more than fifty feet. As many as four million people perished. Survivors sold their wives, murdered their children, and ate the dead to stay alive. They believed the river would rise forever, that the gods were done with man. Their thirst for punishment would not be slaked. Dad told this story every time it rained, which was almost never. Even he had to admit he couldn’t give flood insurance away.
The hippies shouted and swore at the sky. One of them thumbed a ride from a Volkswagen van with snakes painted on the side, and they jumped in, laughing again like it was all part of the game. I didn’t like sleeping outside anyway.