“A party,” Tammy said.
“Where?”
“Henry’s Beach. Near the caves.”
“Are Flip and Terry going to be there?”
“Probably. See, I told you you wouldn’t want to come.”
“No, I’ll come.”
“Really?” Tammy hissed into the phone as she exhaled cigarette smoke.
“I thought Brett wanted you to quit smoking,” Jamie said.
“He did. But he just took it up instead, so now it’s fine.”
“Cool.”
“So are you really going to come with us?”
“Yeah. Who’s driving?”
“I dunno. Jimmy or Brett. I guess you could sit in the back of Brett’s truck.”
“Whatever. What are you wearing?”
“I got a bunch of cute new clothes yesterday at La Cumbre Plaza.”
“I haven’t gotten any new clothes all summer.”
“I know. You’ve been, like, wearing those same Op shorts all summer long.”
Jamie looked down at her Op shorts. They were comfortable, stretched out; they adapted easily to the various expansions and contractions of her stomach.
“What’s Debbie wearing?” Jamie asked.
“She got a bunch of new stuff too.”
“So where should we meet up? Your house or Debbie’s?”
“Come to my house.” Tammy spoke in the singsong of boredom. “You can borrow something of mine to wear. Maybe it will snap you out of your depression.”
“I’m not depressed.” No matter how isolated and sad she felt, Jamie would never have characterized herself as depressed. Renee was the depressive, the one her parents had to worry over and tend to.
“Whatever,” Tammy said. “Just come over here and we’ll get ready together.”
Renee!” Jamie yelled up the stairs toward her sister’s room. “Renee! I’m going to Tammy’s and then we’re going to a party at Henry’s Beach.”
There was no answer.
“RENEE! I’M GOING TO TAMMY’S!”
Renee’s bedroom door swung open. Renee came out and stood at the top of the stairs.
“You’re sleeping at Tammy’s?”
“I’m not sure. Probably not, but you might be alone tonight. Is that okay?” For a sliver of a moment Jamie hoped Renee would ask her to stay home. They could play board games, watch television, or even play the imagination games they had made up as children: Ballerina and Little Girl, Indian and Little Girl, Mermaid and Little Girl. Jamie had always been the Little Girl while Renee got to wear the costumes and dictated what exciting figure she’d be each game.
But Jamie hadn’t minded. She had loved hanging out with her sister; just being with Renee had made Jamie happy.
“I’ll be fine, Farrah. Have fun with your skinny little slut friends.” Renee returned to her bedroom and shut the door loudly.
Tammy’s mother stood at the front door without stepping aside, as if Jamie were selling cookies instead of coming over to hang out with her daughter.
“How are your parents since that ordeal?” Tammy’s mother asked. She wore an orange apron over a red dress, like Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, and her brownish-gray hair was stiff and pushed up, not unlike Lucy’s.
“They’re okay,” Jamie said.
“It must be hard for your mother without a church or synagogue to turn to.”
“She goes to synagogue with my dad,” Jamie lied.
“Oh?! The one up off San Marcos Pass?”
“Yeah.” Jamie had never been there and as far as she knew her father and mother had never been there either.
Tammy’s mother’s face expressed a painful, encompassing pity. She looked at Jamie as if she were about to pet her behind the ears.
“So is Tammy home?” The pity brought out a fierce irascibility in Jamie. She wanted to rage at Tammy’s mother, to rip off her own clothes in the spirit of her parents and run pell-mell through the house.
“That’s right!” Tammy’s mother said. “You girls are having a slumber party at your house tonight. Will your parents be home?”
“Yes. My mom’s writing on index cards right now so we can play charades. And my father’s planning a popcorn tasting—you know, garlic popcorn, parmesan popcorn, salted popcorn.”
“They’ve really settled down since that accident, haven’t they?”
Jamie saw herself tearing out into Tammy’s backyard, mounting the diving board, and doing a few spastic naked jumps before yodeling a war cry and flinging herself into the black-bottom pool.
“Absolutely,” Jamie said.
“This must be such a hard time for them. I bet they don’t have parties like that anymore.”
“Nope. My mom put her bathing suits away for the rest of the summer. She said she’s never going in the pool again.”
“You know, I’d probably do the same thing. Although I can’t imagine something like that ever happening here.” Tammy’s mother finally moved back and let Jamie pass into the house.
As she walked up the stairs to Tammy’s room, Jamie dragged her hand along the wall in just the way Tammy had shown her never to do. Tammy’s mother hated cleaning fingerprints off the paint.
Tammy and Debbie were listening to Janna Winter sing “Love Me, Love Me, Baby.” They were snaking around each other and writhing on Tammy’s lacy pink canopy bed as if they were having sex with ghosts. When Janna really started moaning, so did Tammy and Debbie: Yeeeees, love me, love me, baby! Sweet sugah, love me, love me, baby! Yeeeesss . . .
Jamie felt like her cousin Jan.
The song ended. Tammy hopped off the bed and put on a record Jamie had never heard.
“What’s this?” Jamie asked.
“Nazareth,” Debbie said.
“You don’t know Nazareth?” Tammy said.
“I guess not,” Jamie said.
“Where have you been?!” Tammy said.
“I dunno. What should I wear tonight?” Jamie wondered if she ran home and begged Renee to hang out with her, would Renee agree?
“You can wear my clothes if you want,” Debbie said.
“Where are you guys sleeping tonight?” Jamie asked.
“I dunno,” Debbie said, “probably on the beach.”
“We told our moms we’re sleeping at your house.” Tammy went to her window and slid the panel open. With her bony forearm she pushed everything on her pink dresser to one side so she could sit there, her head and hand out the window while she smoked a cigarette.
“Let me have one,” Debbie said.
“God, you’re smoking as much as Tammy now,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, once I started smoking pot, cigarettes seemed so . . .so nothing, you know.”
“What, are you smoking pot all the time now?”
“You’re one to criticize pot smoking!” Tammy said. “Your parents are, like, total potheads!”
“They’re not potheads! They’re just people who smoke, like you two. And I’m not criticizing, I just didn’t know you did it so much.” How is it, Jamie thought, that Tammy could think that her mother, who monitored fingerprints, bowel movements, and milk consumption, was preferable to Jamie’s parents, who only wanted everyone to be happy?
“I guess Jimmy’s been a bad influence on me,” Debbie said, and she and Tammy laughed.
Jamie looked through their new clothes while they smoked cigarettes.
“These are cute.” Jamie held up a pair of jeans with heart-shaped back pockets.
“You can wear them,” Tammy said. “If they’ll fit you.” Jamie took her shorts off and pulled the jeans on, unzipped. She lay on the bed and sucked in her stomach as she struggled with the zipper.
“There’s no way you can do that alone!” Tammy tossed her cigarette out the window and hopped off the dresser.
She held the zipper together.
“Debbie, help.”
Debbie flicked her cigarette out and jumped down to help. She weedled the zipper up while Tammy held the two sides together and Jamie presse
d down her stomach with her fingertips.
“Suck, Jamie! Suck in!” Tammy said.
“I am!” Jamie said, just as Debbie pulled the zipper to the top.
Tammy and Debbie looked at each other, heads pointed toward Jamie, eyes pointed toward each other.
“I gained some weight, okay? It’s no big deal.” Jamie struggled to sit up, then settled for pivoting off the bed and standing.
“Even your boobs look bigger,” Tammy said.
“I think you look fine,” Debbie said. “It’s just we’re used to you being smaller, you know? I mean, like, it’s not like you’re fat now, it’s more that you used to be so small and now you’re like . . . I dunno, regular?”
“I bet your boobs are going to get as big as your mom’s,” Tammy said.
“Don’t say that,” Jamie groaned. “I don’t want all those pervy boob-men hanging all over me.”
“Wouldn’t it be funny if Jamie had those big, whopping boobs? I mean, like the boob shelf. Like in a magazine or something.” Tammy looked directly at Debbie as she spoke.
“Can you stop talking about my mother’s boobs?”
“I wasn’t talking about your mother’s boobs,” Tammy said. “I was talking about yours!” And at that, Tammy and Debbie fell into razor-edged laughter.
* * *
Brett and Jimmy picked up the girls in Brett’s truck.
“I’m not going to sit in the back all by myself,” Jamie said.
Tammy and Debbie had already climbed into the cab with Tammy nestled between the boys and Debbie on Jimmy’s lap.
“I’ll sit in the back of the truck with you,” Jimmy said, and he slid Debbie off his lap and slipped out of the cab.
Debbie huffed, as if her feelings were hurt, then cocked her head at Jamie and smiled.
“Isn’t he the sweetest guy in the world?” she said. Jimmy rolled his eyes and hopped into the back of the truck with one quick jump, as if he were pole-vaulting with his arms.
Jamie climbed in after him and they scooted, side by side, against the back of the cab.
“So whatcha been doing?” Jimmy said, as they rolled out of the driveway.
“Not much,” Jamie said. She looked back at the cab window and saw that Debbie was turned sideways in her seat, as if she wanted to keep an eye on them. Jamie shifted so she wasn’t sitting so close to Jimmy.
“Flip told me about the baby.”
“He did? God, I would have told you but I guess I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Yeah. It’s terrible what happened.”
“Oh. Yeah. It was terrible.”
“Flip was really broken up about it.”
“Really? He never said that to me.”
“Well, you broke up with him right afterward.”
Jamie looked at Jimmy; the wind was blowing back his hair into a mane around his face. She thought she heard him wrong. “You mean he broke up with me right afterward.”
“No. He said you broke up with him.”
“Well, then Flip is a flipping liar!” To Jamie, the humiliation of having been dumped seemed far less shameful than the act of having dumped someone, over the phone, within twenty-four hours of a horrifying death.
“He said you said that you were too sad to be with anyone, and, like, right after you broke up with him he happened to run into Terry at the beach, and she was really comforting to him in his time of need, you know?”
“She was comforting? Did he actually say ‘time of need’?”
“Yeah, she lost a cousin who was a baby or something, so she really knew what he was going through.”
“I wasn’t too sad to be with him,” Jamie said. “I was so sad that I actually needed him.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And he wasn’t very comforting to me in my time of need.”
“Really?” Jimmy seemed genuinely surprised.
“Why would I lie?” Jamie turned away so Jimmy couldn’t see that she was on the edge of a cry.
“Why would he lie?”
“So he doesn’t look like such a dickhead.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said, leaning over to examine Jamie’s face.
“Are you crying?”
“No,” Jamie sniffed.
Jimmy put his arm around Jamie and pulled her in close to him. She could sense that Debbie was watching through the cab window, but didn’t look up for proof.
“It’s okay,” Jimmy said. “You can cry.” And so she did.
When they pulled up at the beach, Jimmy flipped his arm down from around Jamie’s shoulder, hopped out of the truck, and extended his hand to help Jamie out.
Debbie looked at Jamie askance, then ran to Jimmy, wrapped both arms around his neck, and kissed him deep and hard.
“Uh, can we, like, go to the party now?” Tammy said.
Debbie unwound her arms, took Jimmy’s hand, and headed toward the beach with Tammy and Brett following and Jamie drifting in the back. Jamie thought that the only thing sadder than the fact that she was being left behind was the fact that she was growing used to the feeling—she almost expected it. Jamie felt she was like a hanging thread that had to be cut and recut from the unraveling sweater of her friendship with Tammy and Debbie.
Everyone, it seemed to Jamie, was at the party. It was the kind of party Renee and Lori talked about but would never dare attend. There was a crop-circle-sized driftwood fire with a small crowd standing and sitting around it. Jamie could tell who most people were by the backs of their head: Becca Price, Fran Brendan, Alex Mysko, Scott Rhett, Matty Travis, Donald Sheridan, Simon Blue, Josh Emery, Denis Rhoade, Kindall Blitz, John Stasser, Lindsay Trout, Tracy Walanz, David Greatbeck, Steve McMartin, Boo Landis, Bonnie Louise, Jilly Genna, Claire Stanfare. She wondered if anyone would know her by the back of her head. Instead of breaking into the fire circle, Jamie wandered toward the keg that was tucked into a nook on the craggy cliff wall.
Flip was standing a few feet from the keg, holding a plastic bag full of stacked plastic cups. Jamie’s stomach thumped when she saw him. She hoped she looked okay, she hoped he would see her and regret breaking up. She wanted Flip to beg her to come back so that she could reject him, proving herself more resilient than even she herself believed, for who could say no to the near-perfect beauty of Flip Jenkins?
“Dollar a cup,” he said, when Jamie approached.
“Can I just owe you?” Jamie asked, her voice shaky.
“Jamie!” Flip said, “I didn’t realize it was you.”
“You didn’t know it was me?” Jamie felt ill at the thought that her weight gain had made her unrecognizable.
“No, no, I just wasn’t looking. Everyone’s buying cups and I haven’t really been looking at faces.” As he spoke, Flip handed out six cups and took in six dollars, which he shoved into his jeans pocket.
“Can I have a cup?” Jamie asked.
“Yeah, my treat, I totally insist,” Flip said, as if she’d made some motion to turn him down.
Jamie took the cup but didn’t move toward the keg.
“So, what have you been up to?” Flip asked.
“Why did you tell Jimmy that I broke up with you?” Jamie surprised herself with the question. “You know that’s not true.”
“I totally never said that,” Flip said.
“Yes, you did.” Jamie realized she was out of patience for Flip—she wanted to make up for the times she’d been with him and hadn’t been blunt or confrontational out of fear that it would cause him to flee.
“Look.” Flip glanced around as he spoke, never landing his eyes on Jamie. “That was a really hard fucking time, okay? Like, it was the hardest time in my whole fucking life. I mean, I saw a dead baby. Not many people here have seen dead babies, you know? So, you’ll have to fucking excuse me for anything I might have said in the days after that.”
“I know it was hard,” Jamie said. “But why tell people that I broke up with you?”
“I gotta get outta here,” Flip said. He called to Tigger Ha
us, then handed him the stack of cups.
Jamie felt breathless, almost confused, as she stood alone and watched Flip walk away. Could he not even hear her out, apologize, give a reasonable excuse? Jamie thought that once you had sex with someone, once you’d cracked your body open and joined it to his body, you’d be permanently connected on some level, even if you no longer loved each other. How could Flip act as if his obligation to Jamie was finished, like a completed transaction at 7-Eleven: the money’s been handed over, the Slurpee is in the customer’s grasp, no one owes anyone anything. Not even a smile.
Jamie got in line for the keg while keeping an eye on Flip.
He didn’t go far, just to the edge of the fire, where Terry jumped up, took his hand, and pulled him down beside her.
Terry scooted onto Flip’s lap; he turned around and looked back toward Jamie. Jamie looked away before she could read his expression.
When her cup was filled, Jamie stepped away from the keg and chugged down the beer. Tammy and Debbie were nestled into the fire circle; Tammy leaned into Terry Watson’s ear and whispered something that made them both laugh. Jamie’s stomach jolted and she knew it wasn’t the beer but the fact that Tammy was so cozy with Terry. Jamie had no one to be cozy with—an embarrassment in a social crowd where attachment was the means for identification.
If she wasn’t Flip’s girlfriend or Tammy’s and Debbie’s best friend, she was essentially invisible. Jamie decided that her invisibility just then was a good thing: If no one saw her, then no one witnessed her humiliating ostracism.
A small crowd cheered a few feet from where Jamie stood; she wandered over and saw that they were watching Bone-Man Deugal climb the cliff. Boys pointed at him with their beer cups, wagering on how far he could go, if he could make it to the top. After only a couple of minutes, Bone-Man fell, skidding down the cliff, hands dragging as if he’d catch something and stop himself. Everyone, except Jamie, laughed.
Bone-Man stood and went at the cliff again. The crowd cheered once more. After he fell a second time, the group laughed even harder. He stood and tackled the cliff a third time. Jamie couldn’t watch—it was too much like her life, she thought, a continuum of cliff skidding as she clawed at her friends (and her sister, even!), only to slide down below them, scraped and stinging with pebbles embedded in her palms.
The Summer of Naked Swim Parties Page 19