Infandous (14 page)

That’s what he asked me last time he called. I avoided answering him then, and I do again, now.

“What do you want, Felix?” I walk with the phone back to the bathroom and grab a towel off the hook on the door. I wrap it around me the best I can with one free hand.

“Look, I know you’re young. Too young for me,” he says. “I get that. But I have this belief, you know? About … relationships.”

In spite of myself, I am curious. “Oh, yeah? What’s your belief?”

He jumps at the opening. “I just really think that whatever the relationship—if it’s for a night or for years—you should try to leave the other person better off than she was when she met you. And even though you’re younger than me … well, Annie, you seemed to enjoy yourself that night.”

I remember the cool soft duvet of his hotel room. A nice hotel, nicer than I’ve ever stayed in. I remember reaching up to him, smiling, and laughing. I remember the way he pulled my panties down, rough in a way I discovered I liked.

I remember the taste of him.

“Do you leave all of them like that?” I manage to ask. “Better than when you found them?”

“Sure I do,” he says, but I’m only half-listening. “I mean, I try.”

I have not been left better than when he found me.

I have been left.

I have been.

I have.

I.

Demeter and Persephone

It seems as though the gods should be exempt from pain. It seems that way, but alas—even those above us must do their share of suffering, though it may look from our lowly vantage point that suffering is for mortals alone. In a way, perhaps, gods suffer more, as they have more to lose. They do not have the sweet sleep of death awaiting them, promising an end to pain if not now, then someday.

There was a goddess who was completely happy. Why would she not be? Under each of her footsteps flowers bloomed, grasses sprung up, rivulets of life-bringing water flowed. When her hand brushed a tree, its leaves spread waxy green and fruit ripened to red on its branches.

Her hair, long waves of copper, undulated behind her as she walked the earth. But she did not walk alone, for at her side was her daughter, her muse, her heart outside her body.

If humans saw them together, they had to look away, so piercingly bright was the love that flowed between mother and daughter. Of course there had once been a male counterpart, a god whose seed had ripened in the womb of the goddess, and of that ripened seed was this girl, this daughter. But the goddess had no need of him now, and it was just the two of them, a duet of beauty.

And though mortals needed to avert their eyes or be blinded by this vision, the gods needn’t look away. One god looked carefully, seeing what pleased him and determining to take it.

For him it was nothing to take life, and had the girl been mortal rather than god, he would not have had to act to possess what he desired. She would have come to him in time, as all souls do.

But as goddess rather than mortal, this girl would never descend into his realm … unless he caused it to be so.

And so he did.

A flower grew, unlike any other the girl had seen. White petaled and luminous, it had at its heart a purple bloom with a scent that called her to it. And when she reached down with her young hand to brush its heart, the earth cracked open at her feet.

She disappeared, and the seam of the earth resealed. The goddess mother heard only what seemed like the hush of wind, but when she leveled her gaze where last she had seen her daughter, nothing was there—naught but the flower, which, having played its part, wilted now, head down, as if ashamed.

In her fury, the goddess demanded the return of her daughter, but alas, the gods turned a deaf ear to her pleas. The earth dried and died under her feet as she mourned, her heart too swollen by grief to pay heed to the mortals’ predicament—and without her blessing, fruit did not flourish and seeds did not flower.

The earth was starving.

Made bitter by her loss, the great goddess clothed herself in the skin of an old woman and found refuge in the home of a mortal queen, where she played nursemaid to the infant prince. If her daughter was lost to her, then she would mold a god out of this boy’s mortal flesh, and so she clutched him to her breast and breathed her sweet breath into his mouth; she anointed him with ambrosia, and she lowered him nightly into flames, and as the days passed, she filled him with sweetness and burned away his mortality.

It might be that if his mother had not interrupted this ritual—finding them together over the fire and screaming in fear for her boy’s mortal soul—and if the goddess had succeeded in molding the boy into a god, maybe she would have overcome her grief, and her memory of her lost daughter would have faded.

But the mother-queen did spy the goddess at her nightly work, and scream she did, and the goddess tossed away her mortal disguise and stood brilliant and blinding in her beauty. And she remembered her own child and left the boy to his mortal mother and resumed her search for her daughter.

At last the earth could bear no more of her grief, and so the gods demanded that the daughter be released from its bowels. But just before she gained her freedom—right before she was reunited with her sweet mother—the girl goddess ate six seeds from the heart of a pomegranate, each seed splitting and spilling sweetness into her mouth, and those seeds destined her each year to six months spent underground.

Now, some say that she was tricked into eating the seeds, that whatever happened underground was against her will, that she returned to the surface and to her mother’s arms willingly and white-armed.

But perhaps the girl found pleasure in those dark rooms underground. It may be that, away from the gaze of her goddess mother, she warmed and responded to the underworld god’s touch. And when she placed the seeds inside her mouth, when she burst them with her teeth and savored their sweetness with her tongue—perhaps she knew exactly what she was doing.

Twelve

I don’t want to admit—to my mother or myself—that I like working at the board shop. For one, I’ve spent the last couple of years digging in my heels and refusing to get a job. For another, I owe the job to Jordan, and it still pisses me off that he is fucking my mother.

But I do like the board shop. I like the way it smells—of coconut from the surf wax—and I like the way it feels. Riley Wilson Boards is not a tourist shop. It doesn’t carry Venice Beach T-shirts or key chains or refrigerator magnets. It doesn’t feature rows of tie-dyed bikinis or sarongs. Riley Wilson Boards carries surfboards. Lots of them. Rows of them, actually, and all kinds—far to one side the used ones, with yellowed spots here and there from old repairs. The majority of the boards are Riley Wilson originals, arranged short to long from the front of the store angling toward the back, standing on end like soldiers in a row. Each is signed like a piece of art—which they are.

On the other end of the store hangs a row of wetsuits, ranging from fall to spring, each suit tagged with its thickness, from 1.5 millimeters all the way up to 8 millimeters, for serious cold-water wimps.

My wetsuit is 5 millimeters, and it hangs now in the back of my closet. I haven’t needed to wear it since May. But I like the way it feels to step inside its neoprene legs, to push my arms inside of it and stretch them out, to reach over my shoulder to find and pull the long cord attached to the zipper, sealing myself inside like a selkie into her skin.

A small display of Rainbow sandals sits near the front door. On the counter is this ridiculous old-fashioned cash register that doesn’t work at all, the only thing in the store that’s for looks rather than function.

I like the repeating curves of the boards, the echo of that graceful swoop up the side of each one. I like the light that floods the shop by ten a.m. each day, the way the light gathers in long rectangles that bend up the boards’ faces—though I’m only there to see it on the weekends, since I’m still stuck in geometry’s clutches Monday through Friday.

I like the way the door to the shop opens—with an old-fashioned knob, not automatically or with one of those metal bars. And I like the door itself, maybe best of all, aside from the boards. It’s a Dutch door, painted turquoise, and the top almost always swings free, so air and sounds from the street waft in. At lunchtime, spices from the Indian place next door almost overwhelm me, and I wish again each day that I was rich and ate out rather than brown-bagging it. But though the job is cool (for a job), it pays shit, and after scanning the menu next door one day, I figured lunch would cost me roughly three hours’ work—before tip—so I bite begrudgingly into my PB&J instead.

The shop has a forward, thrusting, masculine energy. The arrangement of the boards—tips up—strikes me as distinctly phallic, and watching the customers (almost exclusively men, most between the ages of sixteen and forty) as they examine each board, running a hand down the hardened curves of them, making their decisions by touch as much as by sight, sometimes I have to look away, as if to give them a moment of privacy.

Some of the most expensive boards are Riley Wilsons from way back, still in pristine shape. These boards are enormous, up to eleven feet long.

“Surfing really changed in the eighties,” Jordan tells me. “That’s when the thruster was designed.”

Thruster. I kid you not.

“It’s a three-fin system,” Jordan explains, as though I’m not a surfer too. “It’s totally transformed the way the surfer can interact with the wave.” His face is earnest and open, so I don’t laugh or roll my eyes or anything. It’s weird anyway to delve into innuendo with him, of all people.

So I ring up sales, sweep, make sure the wetsuits stay in the right order, get coffee from the place down the street when Riley makes an occasional appearance. But my most important job seems to be fetching Jordan from the back, where he transforms foam blanks into surfboards, whenever anyone has a question. This happens often, and if I were pulled away from my work as frequently as Jordan is pulled away from his, I’d go insane.

But it never fazes Jordan.

Today when I go get him to talk with a guy who has questions about board length—should he pick a board based on his weight or height or both (I could answer
this
question, but he looks at me dubiously when I give him my opinion)—Jordan has the reggae cranked up pretty loud, even though he probably can’t hear it with the earplugs he’s shoved in to keep out the dust. He’s got a face mask on too, with a respirator and a pair of goggles. Tiny fibers float all around as he works.

He’s already whittled down the blank close to where he wants it to be, having cut it first with a handsaw and then smoothed it with rough sandpaper. Now he’s working the power planer, my favorite part, because I like how quickly it gets the job done. With each pass, it smooths off an eighth of an inch or so. He’s got a weight on the left side of the board to counterbalance the weight of the planer, and he works his way down the right side in a single unbroken motion, peeling free a long, thin slice of foam from the base to the nose. It’s almost like riding a wave, the way the power planer thrusts forward, and all Jordan’s got to do is hang on and stay steady.

That’s how it looks, anyway; I know it’s not easy to make such graceful, clean cuts. I imagine it’s like the work I do—it’s easy for him now, after all the cuts he’s made, but I’ll bet that sweeping arc of motion wasn’t always so natural. It’s become part of his body, that movement.

Watching him work, I forget all about why I came back here in the first place, and the guy in the shop gets to wait a little while. It’s beautiful, what he’s doing. In a way it reminds me of myself when I sculpt, but it reminds me of someone else, too—Lolly. The way she looks as she bounces around the Smoothie Shack, her hands knowing where to reach without her needing to look, the joy she emanates just doing her job. Those two belong where they are, doing what they do.

After a minute Jordan notices me and switches off the planer. “Customer?”

I nod.

***

After work I meet Marissa at the beach. It’s six o’clock and still hot. We run across the sand and strip down to our suits, then race into the waves. They’re not big or well formed, so it’s not crowded, and we can goof off without getting in anyone’s way.

The water’s not freezing today, though I’d never really call it
warm
, not on its warmest days. I shiver all over as I dunk my head the first time, but as soon as I surface it’s okay. Marissa has beaten me out past the break, her strokes strong and forceful. She’s always been a better swimmer. I watch her turn back toward me and paddle hard as a wave crests and breaks behind her, and she points her arms over her head and rides it in.

Then her wave is upon me, and I dive deep under it. The water whirls around me, and for a moment I lose perspective of up and down. It’s not silent under the wave; the force of the water makes its own sound. I kick hard and resurface, toss my hair back from my face and lick the salt from my lips.