We Run the Tides(15)
“Ribbit,” he says.
I’m not sure if I should leave so I stand there in front of the large, blank television screen, and he watches me as if I’m the show.
“Have you ever given someone a lap dance?” he asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“You don’t think so,” he says and laughs. The champagne rises up, prickling my throat, and then settles back down.
“Come here,” he says, his voice quiet and smooth.
The room is so dim that I suddenly feel tired. As I approach him, he signals to me to turn around and I do. I sit on his lap so we’re both facing the same direction. The taffeta skirt of my dress rises. He places his hands on my hips and moves them in a figure-eight pattern. I stare straight ahead at the dark screen of the TV. I can make out the image of a young girl writhing around and the head of a young man thrown back. Maybe his accident really did hurt his head, I think, as he moans. Soon there’s a rush of heat, followed by wetness.
“Oh,” he moans. He holds me to him so my spine is pressed to his front. It’s uncomfortable and I don’t know how long I’m obliged to sit like that. I count to ten and then I stand and don’t turn around. I want to give him privacy.
I know I’ll see his underwear hanging outside the laundry-room window the next morning. The poor maid is all I can think as I straighten my dress out so it doesn’t poof. She’s over eighty and tomorrow she’ll be cleaning semen off Wes’s underpants.
9
October arrives but the palm trees don’t change color. China Beach is empty except for the fishermen who wait patiently on the cliffs in the early morning. Sometimes they wade out into the water to fish, despite the signs that appear at the entrance to the beach announcing: “People have drowned while swimming or wading.” The warning is in English, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.
Fall gives the flashers who like to stroll by Spragg an excuse to wear trench coats. The upper school classrooms have large windows that look out onto the public golf course that runs adjacent to the back of the campus. It’s not uncommon for us to glance outside the window when distracted or bored and spot a man standing with his trench coat open, exposing himself. “Just pretend you don’t see him and keep your focus on me,” Ms. Livesey tells us whenever a flasher shows up. My father says I should point at the flashers and laugh. These are two very different approaches. Everything I’m told by one adult contradicts something I’m told by another.
On the evening of October 30 my parents realize I don’t have a costume. I tell them it’s okay and I ask my mother if I can borrow a scarf. Then I weave one end of the scarf through the spokes of an old bike wheel. I wrap the other end of it around my neck and carry the wheel in my hands.
“Who are you?” Svea asks.
“Isadora Duncan,” I tell her.
“Who’s that?”
“She was a dancer who died of strangulation when the wind blew her scarf out of the car and the scarf got stuck in the wheel.”
“That’s terrible,” Svea says.
I shrug. “Fashion can be dangerous.”
*
ON HALLOWEEN MARIA FABIOLA, Julia, Faith, and Lotta come to school dressed like the Go-Go’s on the cover of “Beauty and the Beat.” They’re dressed in white bathrobes (on the album cover, the Go-Go’s wear towels, tucked precariously over their breasts, but this was probably deemed too risqué by my friends’ parents). To their faces they’ve applied masks of a white substance that has hardened and cracked on their cheeks. Their teeth look yellow in comparison. The group outfit was my idea; I shared it with them in September, a century ago. Lotta, the Dutch girl, didn’t know who the Go-Go’s were before she came to America. There are five members of the band, but on Halloween at Spragg there are only four.
At school the teachers vote and give me the Best Costume award, which is an awful decision. I know they choose me as the winner because they can see I’ve been ostracized, that I have no one to talk to. Don’t they know that awarding me and my costume that I started making at 8:15 the previous evening is more humiliating?
On Halloween night I take Svea and her dour friend trick-or-treating. Then we give out candy at our house until the big black cauldron is empty.
“We’re all out of candy,” I yell to my parents, who are in the kitchen.
“We can’t let them know we’re home or they’ll egg the house,” my dad yells.
“Turn off the lights,” my mom commands.
We enter a state of high alert. We blow out all the candles inside the jack-o’-lanterns that line the front steps to our house. Then, as a precautionary measure, we carry the carved pumpkins inside. The light switches are turned off so that it appears no one’s home. Sitting near the windows is deemed too risky so we huddle on the carpet on the floor of the foyer. “I feel like Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis,” my sister’s dour friend says.
Even in the dimness I see something I’ve never seen on her face before—a smile.
10
My mother is in a Swedish sewing group. That is, it started off as a sewing group called the Stitch ‘N’ Bitch but it’s been a year or so since anyone’s brought their dress patterns or quilt squares to the monthly meetings. Last winter my mom started calling it the Bitch ‘N’ Bitch because she wanted to chide the members about their constant complaining and cajole them into focusing on sewing. Her ploy backfired—the group loved the phrase so much that they adopted it as their official name. They left their sewing baskets at home and started complaining even more.