Know-it-all Lauren shakes her head. “You’re supposed to be saving your allowance for Lake Tahoe.”
I stick out my tongue.
“What is that?” Frieda asks.
“It’s the Rolling Stones.”
“That’s what it’s called?”
While Gramma putt-putts through the parking lot, I hum “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”
Billy Garcia gave me my first French kiss when I was twelve. It was weird, but okay, and we gagged and spit and laughed, and I felt that tickle thing then—the same thing I feel when I push the Rolling Stones record under Frieda’s nose, or look at Marvin Peters, or dream that I’m as beautiful as Mom and everyone wants me, even the Savage Boy, even mean ugly rotting-back Mr. Marks.
Let’s spend the night together, now I need you more than ever.
“You’re going to go blind staring at the sun like that,” my sister says from the front seat.
“Groovy,” I say, and blow her a kiss with my big Mick Jagger lips.
* * *
Mom’s ecstatic when, later that week, the Lake Tahoe motel confirmation slip finally arrives in the mail. And the two adult tickets for the Bob Newhart–Vicky Carr show. She calls Dad at work and squeals into the phone.
Copycat Lauren stands beside her, jumping up and down with excitement.
Later in the afternoon, Mom slips an invitation, addressed to our entire family, under my door. Come to our first annual pool party! it reads. Steaks and salad provided. Check out the bomb shelter—in progress!
She taps shyly on the door. “Lily?”
“I see it,” I say from the other side.
“It’s the last time we’ll see most of the neighbors before the trip. We’re moving to the big house as soon as we get back.”
“I know.” I want to see the bomb shelter. “But Judy and I aren’t friends anymore. And I don’t want to see Mr.—”
Mom opens my door. “We won’t stay long, promise. It’ll be weird for me too, but I’ll be braver if you’re there.” She looks different. When she cried after dinner last night, Dad reminded me that she’d been through a lot. “She’s changed,” he said, “but she’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.”
Dad looks different too.
Across the hall, their bedroom door stands open. Mom’s been cleaning her closet; empty shoe boxes clutter their bed.
“May I have a couple?” I ask.
Inside one shoe box is some tissue paper with zebra stripes, just like the stripes on Mom’s naked back.
I glue the tissue paper on its inside walls, place Mom’s lipstick-stained cigarette butt inside it, and glue the box shut. I wrap it in rubber bands and Dad’s sports page, and stick it in the deep cubbyhole over my bedroom closet. Where Agnes, the apple doll, can’t get in it, no matter how hard she tries.
Chapter 18
The Shark Curtain
Lauren and I have been in the Tahoe pool for hours when a busload of square dancers unload in the motel parking lot: men in cowboy hats, women in oversized twirly skirts.
We scrunch down sneaky, and glare at the new patrons who gather around the grunting bus driver unloading their suitcases. The side of their bus reads, The Cheyenne Squares, Cheyenne, WYOMING, accented by twinkling silver and red stars. “It’s the pool we saw from the road!” a heavyset lady shouts, pointing in our direction.
“How romantic,” another woman laughs, nudging her friend with her elbow. “I wonder what their restrictions are on night swimming?”
“Hanky-panky,” Lauren whispers.
“Hanky-panky,” I echo. It’s fun being on vacation.
A third woman grabs a suitcase and walks toward us. She sets it on the prickly fake grass fringing the pool area and pauses to read the sign wired to the fence: Lifeguard on duty 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
She opens the gate, pressing her dance skirt to her sides, and squeezes through. When she walks up to us, Lauren and I sink deeper into the water showing only our eyes and the tops of our heads like crocodiles waiting for canoes of screaming natives to tumble into the water.
Mom warned me to “just be careful. Stay in the shallow end, but try swimming again.” She was right. I chased Lauren around the pool doing the breaststroke. The hardest part now is staying in the shallow end.
“My, that looks refreshing,” the square dance lady says. The sun at her back throws a wide scalloped shadow across the water. If it weren’t for the million stiff net petticoats she wears under it, I could see her underwear.
“I’m Mrs. Ford from Cheyenne, Wyoming.” She looks over her shoulder. “We’re all from Cheyenne,” she says.
“I’m Lauren Asher and this is my sister Lily. She used to be a really good swimmer. Now she stays in the shallow water.” She looks at me bobbing in the deep end. “Sometimes.”
Mrs. Ford smiles tentatively.
“I’m getting out,” Lauren suddenly announces. She walks up the pool’s concrete steps, tossing her long red hair like she’s been doing ever since a boy at school told her he liked it. Mrs. Ford grabs my beach towel off a chair and throws it to her. Lauren’s beach towel lies in a soggy puddle under a chair.
“Thank you,” Lauren says, spreading it across the chaise longue. She mimics Mom when she crosses her hands on her stomach, then turns her head to put on her bright pink sunglasses.
“No lifeguard?” Mrs. Ford walks toward the five-foot mark.
I shrug. My voice box was damaged in a fight with a hippo.
“What do you think of the underwater window?” the woman asks, pointing at the deep end. “It must be wonderful to look out on the street from underwater.” An underwater window? “Everyone on the bus wanted to stay here. It’s the only pool like it in Tahoe!”
I take a breath and stick my face underwater. At the opposite end, a giant shaft of light splashes the floor of the pool as if it’s covered in pirate treasure.
“Listen,” Mrs. Ford smiles, “I’ll check on that lifeguard for you, and then I’m going to go unpack. It’s been a long day. See you later?” She is nice. I like her big yellow skirt with orange polka dots too. She catches my eye. “Do you like my skirt?”
I nod.
“I wore it at the Elk’s Club performance this afternoon. You be careful in there while I get that lifeguard, okay?”
I nod again.
“I have to pee,” Lauren says. When she stands up, she wraps my towel around her.
“That’s my towel!” I yell, but it’s too late. Mrs. Ford and Lauren are out the pool gate and heading across the parking lot. Lauren stops to talk to a chubby girl about ten, while Mrs. Ford continues to the office.
It feels good to swim again.
The pool is as still and blue as the ice rink back home; a bumblebee skims its surface. I breaststroke around the deep end where I roll onto my back and float, taking three deep cleansing breaths like the yoga lady on TV.
Suddenly there’s a tug on my leg. Huh? I sit up in the water and look around.
Nothing’s different, no one’s in the pool but me. Maybe my leg is tired, and fell asleep and . . . dropped? I haven’t been swimming in a long time, and I grew three inches in the last seven months. Relax, I tell myself. Coach Betty said the water would always keep you afloat.
I take a deep breath, roll over, and stick my face underwater.
It’s dumb old show-off Jesus, doing a handstand underwater. It startles me at first and the chlorine burns my eyes, but I can clearly see His dry sandals and hairy ankles. His robe hangs straight and dry against His legs too, like paper doll clothes. Which is good, since I really don’t want to see His underwear.
Mom thinks I need glasses because I see things that aren’t really there, but our entire class was tested at the end of the year, and no one suggested I see the eye doctor, only that I not make up my own hand signals for the eye chart.
“Neato, huh?” Jesus wiggles His eyebrows like Groucho Marx. “Did you notice that I’m not wet?”
“So?”
“Did I
scare you?”
“You surprised me.”
He smiles mischievously. “You’re not supposed to be in the deep end.”
I squeeze Mrs. Wiggins’s necklace, then stick it back in my swimsuit. What’s SOG doing here, anyway? Weird stuff always happens when He’s around. I swim away from Him, toward the shallow end, when I feel another yank.
“Stop it!” I cry, louder than I mean to, but when I glance around He isn’t anywhere, above water or under. I’m getting out, damn it. I’m definitely getting out. I should have left with Lauren and Mrs. Ford.
I stretch out my arms and lean into them, hoping to break free from my fear and swim away . . . but with only enough time for a quick gulp of air, I’m pulled under again. Suspended between the surface of the pool and the bottom where a big black 6' is painted on the wall, I jerk and thrash and claw the water but . . .
Don’t.
Go.
Anywhere.
Maybe some brain cell has busted, or I just need glasses. And the curtain of water advancing toward me, fluttering like a breeze in Mom’s silk curtains or Mrs. Wiggins’s lips when she stuck her head out the car window, is not a shark curtain at all.
Or an embryonic sac keeping me prisoner.
And the white pointed teeth chomping at its blurry edges, eager to get to me, aren’t the Savage Boy’s. Maybe I should turn away.
Turn away. Don’t be scared. Glug glug.
It’s my tail. It has to be. Something growing out of me, pulling me down, keeping me under.
I know this feeling . . . I know this place where things are blurry and I can’t breathe . . . I fish the necklace out of my swimsuit and rub her tooth three times . . . If I should die before I wake . . .
Back home the prayer train inches out of the roundhouse, Agnes, the apple doll, stuffing its firebox with old sports pages. I miss my room.
Stretch! I tell myself. Reach for the dry warm Lake Tahoe air only inches away. I used to be a good swimmer; I used to hold my breath forever. Pull hard, break the grip. If lizards can break off their tails . . . Is my swimsuit caught in the filter? I look around me but see nothing. No shark curtain, no tail . . .
Just me and water. The water and me.
Barely visible through the muddied water is the giant glass window facing the street, and families in Hawaiian shirts, swimsuits, and straw hats . . . moms . . . dads.
Walking. Talking. Laughing. Ignoring me.
Shoe boxes appear on the floor of the pool, adult- and children-sized: some open, some unopened, some I decorated myself. Inside each one are aromas from home: shoe polish, leather, bacon, Mom’s cigarettes, and paints. Soggy boxes with air.
I can’t reach.
I stretch my arms over my head and wiggle my fingers. I feel the dry warm Lake Tahoe sun on them and, finally tearing a hole in the shark curtain, I hear Lauren cry, “There she is!”
Instantly, the water is an aggregation of movement, a frenzy of kids’ legs scissoring the water, of beach-ball jellyfish and air-mattress blimps.
When a horseshoe hits the floor of the pool with a loud echoing clank, I spring to the surface, coughing and spitting.
Lauren stands on the lip of the pool, my towel around her waist. “You better get out of the deep end,” she says, “or I’m telling Mom.”
I press Mrs. Wiggins’s tooth to my chest. The smell of chlorine, suntan lotion, and car exhaust fills my sore lungs. Everything is fine, everything is . . . normal.
“Hey,” I cough, “how long was I down there?”
“Like a century.” Lauren rolls her eyes at the chubby girl standing beside her. “How do I know? You’re the one who always checks the time. Ask the lifeguard.”
There’s a squeak from the big high chair against the pool fence. It’s a lifeguard. He’s deeply tanned with white-blond hair, sitting there biting his thumbnail and wiggling a foot.
“Janis,” Lauren says, “this is my big sister, Lily Lamebrain. She’s not supposed to swim in the deep end.”
“Hi,” Janis says quietly. She looks nervously at the pool and the yelling, laughing, splashing kids. Mothers in bright summer clothes lounge nearby, reading. Not too far away a boy drinks a grape Nehi and sticks out his tongue. It isn’t really purple but his mom says it is.
Lauren sits on the edge, her feet in the water. “Stupid swim party’s taking over the whole stupid pool,” she pouts.
Everything’s okay now, but I’m getting out. I’m definitely getting out, and I swim toward the concrete steps.
Mom talks to the “young couple from Sacramento” we met at breakfast this morning. When she catches my eye, she first mimics taking a picture then holds up five fingers and points to her wristwatch. With a quick goodbye to the strangers she hurries off, calling, “Don’t get out, Lily. This is for posterity.”
Okay. She’ll be back in five minutes. I can do five minutes.
I bob in place looking beyond the pool where a motel maid clatters across the parking lot with a cart of clean ashtrays, bedding, and drinking glasses. She passes the giant terra cotta pots and the two short palm trees, one on either side of the office door.
A boy swims up behind me, yells, “You’re it!” and jumps on my shoulders, pushing me under.
I bob back up again. The water doesn’t boil and a shark fin doesn’t dart through the crowd. Everything’s fine. And when Chubby Janis, Lauren’s friend, belly flops beside me, I laugh then hold my breath and sink to the bottom on purpose.
I used to love the water. It used to love me.
Across the pool the TV’s on, and Edie Adams, in a skintight Barbie gown, takes baby steps toward the camera. When she puffs a cigar and says, “Glub glub,” Dad looks up from his soggy newspaper (headline: Lily Swims Again!) and wolf-whistles.
Janis is still and floats overhead like a giant cartoon balloon. Her mouth and eyes are open but she doesn’t see me, and when I poke her, she bobs like an apple in a barrel.
Janis? Her plump white fingers remind me of the hungry grubs Mom ripped from her roses before we left home. Wake up! Wake up! I shake her several times before pressing Mrs. Wiggins’s tooth into the palm of her hand.
Suddenly she blinks and jerks away, then falls asleep again.
“Get back!” the lifeguard yells before the water explodes with his dive.
Instantly he surfaces again, rolling Janis on her back and dragging her to the edge of the pool. One of the moms helps pull her up and onto the pavement, gently laying her across the Do Not Run sign stenciled on the cement.
Nervous moms and dripping-wet kids watch while Tad (printed on his tank top) gives Janis mouth-to-mouth. Behind them, Jesus bites His lip, and Mrs. Ford hugs this month’s issue of Square Dance International.
Mom’s there too; Lauren’s camera hangs from her neck. When she says, “Lily? Stay where you are. I’ll help you out in a second,” people glance at her impatiently.
On the fourth compression, Janis spews a fountain of water and coughs, and the lifeguard props her up to sitting. A few people applaud.
“Oh my God! Sweetheart!” cries a frightened woman. She kneels beside the girl, wiping her face. “She’s epileptic,” the woman explains. “She has seizures!”
“She’ll be okay,” Tad says. “Did anyone call an ambulance?”
“I called, I called!” shouts the pretty young motel clerk threading her way through the crowd. “They’re on their way.” When she touches the lifeguard’s shoulder, I remember that she’d shown Mom her engagement ring when we first checked in.
Janis keeps coughing. “Breathe through your nose,” Tad tells her. “That’s right, you’re doing fine—that’s it, through your nose.” He holds up his hand and asks, “How many fingers do you see?”
When a toddler answers, “Free,” everyone laughs.
Mom helps me out of the pool.
Lauren stands next to Janis. Pee runs down her leg.
Janis pees too: epileptic almost-died pee that soaks the leather sole of Mom’s new Italian sandals.
* * *
As the family car inches out of the motel parking lot that night, for a fancy dinner at Morgan’s Roundtable, Lauren cries, “Mrs. Ford!”
We all look.
“Quite a patriotic outfit,” Mom says about the older woman’s blue and white dress with red sequin stripes. Seated in a chair next to the pool, she passes a bottle back and forth with a man in a patriotic shirt. When she laughs, her chin disappears into the soft folds of her neck.
Dad honks and Mom whispers, “Paul!” but Lauren and I wave and Mrs. Ford waves back. Without both hands to press down her petticoats, they spring up and she laughs even harder.
Mrs. Ford’s legs are short, white, and muscular. I bet she never goes on diets and has never heard of Roman Meal bread. I bet when the Cheyenne Squares vote on where they’ll dance next summer, she’ll vote yes to coming back to Tahoe, but only if they buy tickets early for the Ponderosa and rent bikes like we were planning to do. Again. When Mom’s on vacation, it’s hard getting her up in the morning, and Dad’s already downstairs playing a one-armed bandit when she does.
Mom’s neck is as evenly tanned as the rest of her, and the short auburn hairs at the nape all curl the same way. Her nylons shh when she crosses her legs and taps the dashboard nervously.
“Morgan’s Roundtable is a beautiful place,” she says. “I’ve seen it advertised in lots of magazines. High on a hill overlooking Lake Tahoe—it’s a popular spot with movie stars.” She giggles. “Aren’t you excited, girls? I wonder who we’ll see.” She clears her throat and turns around. “Kind of quiet back there. Everyone okay?”
I bet Mrs. Ford would have let me wear the dogtooth necklace to the restaurant.
“Is there a square dance tonight?” Lauren asks, as we pull into traffic. “Can we go after dinner?”
“Not this time,” Mom says, shaking her head. “I can’t imagine coming all the way from Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the heat of summer, in a bus, no less, just to dance at some square dance convention.”
“Maybe you should get one of those hootenanny dresses, Kit,” Dad teases.
Mom slugs him on the shoulder and smiles. She’s beautiful tonight, tall, tan, and busty in her favorite black cocktail dress that’s low cut in the front and back. She checks herself in the visor mirror. “Windows, everybody? Just till we get to the restaurant?” Mom worries about her hair.
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