The Summer of Naked Swim Parties (11 page)

And then she knew that it was nausea, so she wedged her head out from under Flip’s and said, “Flip, I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Huh?” Flip pumped at the barrier in Jamie’s vagina.

“I’m gonna be sick.” Jamie pushed him off and ran toward the water.

A wave rolled up and covered her feet; the chill was startling. Jamie lurched forward and vomited in one foaming stream the color of beer, the consistency of Chunky Soup, the smell of unaired garbage. Jamie coughed and sputtered a bit, then cleared her throat the way her father did during allergy season. At first she hoped that Flip couldn’t hear her, but then she felt so deflated and thin, like an empty sock hanging on a clotheline, that she just didn’t care.

Jamie wiped the vomit from her lips with the back of her hand and then quickly dipped her hand into the lapping water, rubbing her forearm against the gritty sand. A couple was strolling down the beach. Jamie gathered herself up and ran to Flip before the couple could reach her.

Back at the blanket, Flip directed Jamie down so she was on her back again. He wedged his tongue into her mouth and resumed the pummeling.

Jamie’s eyes were running and a chunk of vomit dangled in the back of her throat. She wondered if Flip could taste her barf. She wondered how long this would take.

She wondered if Tammy and Debbie had been lying to her about how good this was supposed to feel. And she wondered, most of all, why instead of things getting better as 
she progressed in sex (kissing, fondling, finger banging, oral sex, sex), they seemed to get worse.

Flip groaned and released a thick stream of sticky liquid onto Jamie’s belly. Jamie ignored the puddle, sat up, and rushed to get her clothes on.

“It’ll get better,” Flip said. “It’ll be easier next time, you’ll see.” He leaned over and kissed her again just as she was swallowing down that wayward chunk of barf.

“Let’s go back to the others.” Jamie stood and waited for Flip at the edge of the rock.

Flip wrapped his arm around Jamie as they walked back to the campground. Their steps were out of sync and they bumped into each other, Jamie’s hand hopelessly bouncing around Flip’s waist, as they staggered silently down the beach.

Back at the campsite, Flip drank so much beer that he tripped on a rock and fell onto the fire pit of the barbeque. 
Everyone jumped up in a panic and Flip rolled in the dirt even though the flames had failed to catch him. The near-burning gave the group a sense of elation and joy, the euphoria that usually follows survival of near-death experiences.

They became louder, more active, like animals infused with a whiff of prey. Debbie opened a new bag of potato chips and began breaking handfuls in her palm before shoveling them into her mouth. Tammy held a mouthful of beer in her open mouth, then added potato chips so she could taste the full salt-fizz. And the boys took turns jumping onto the edge of the barbeque and standing, legs splayed, over the licking flames so they could feel a surge of manhood as they risked burning their balls.

Jamie sat alone on a sleeping bag, watching. She felt as if she were trapped behind a panel of one-way glass: she could see through to her friends, but when they looked toward her, all they saw was themselves.

Tammy and Debbie eventually staggered over to Jamie and sat on either side of her.

“I’m so wasted,” Tammy said, “that I forgot you just lost your virginity!”

Debbie laughed as she crumbled more chips to put in her mouth.

“Well?” Tammy said. “Did you have an orgasm?”

“Did he make noises?” Debbie asked. “Jimmy always sounds like a puppy, you know, like he’s whining to come in the house or something.”

“Did it hurt?” Tammy asked.

“I didn’t really feel anything.” Jamie lowered her voice, even though the boys weren’t listening and were too far away to hear.

“Are you sure he was in?” Debbie asked.

“I think so,” Jamie said. “But it just felt like, I dunno, like a too big tampon that I couldn’t quite get in.”

“So he wasn’t in?” Tammy said.

“Does it feel good for you every single time?” Jamie asked.

“Pretty much,” Debbie said, and she looked up at Jimmy, waving to him as he stood in a victory pose over the fire.

“I have at least two orgasms every time,” Tammy said. “I swear.”

“Maybe it wasn’t really in,” Jamie said. “ ’Cause there was no way I was going to have anything even close to an orgasm. In fact, I barfed.”

There was a beat of silence, then Debbie asked, “What do you mean you barfed? Like, while you were doing it?” 

“I got up and barfed in the ocean, then went back to the blanket and finished the act.”

“That is so sad!” Debbie laughed.

“It was the beer, not the sex,” Jamie said.

“That is just so sad!” Debbie couldn’t stop laughing. 
“Barfing on your first time!”

“Maybe it wasn’t my first time. Maybe it wasn’t quite in, so it doesn’t count or something.” Jamie thought of her first attempted tampon, trailing halfway out of her like a strange, white tail.

“Wasn’t quite in?” Tammy said. “When you really want to do it, it just slips in. I swear.”

“Well, it doesn’t always slip in, but it goes in easy enough,” Debbie said.

“You have got to relax.” Tammy pulled a cigarette from the pocket of her sweatshirt and lit it with a red Bic. “You have to go with the flow.”

“Ride with the tide,” Jamie continued the quote from a Carly Simon and James Taylor song.

And then Tammy and Debbie began singing “Mocking-bird” with Tammy doing the Carly part and Debbie doing the James part. They were bumping their shoulders against Jamie, clapping their hands, and were so involved with the singing that each batted her eyes shut every time she held a note for more than a second.

Flip seemed to have forgotten about Jamie since they returned to the campsite. He was sewn together with Brett and Jimmy: the three of them bouncing off one another and the invisible web that bound them into a three-foot radius surrounding the fire.

“Sing with us!” Tammy poked Jamie in the side.

Jamie smiled and rocked her body back a little as if she 
would start singing. She wanted to fake the fun, like forcing a smile, in the hope that it would bring a genuine fun feeling, but she was so stunned with an empty nonfeeling that she couldn’t even pretend.

Around three in the morning, the girls organized the sleeping bags, the exposed parts of which were already wet with a velvety layer of dew. They zipped Debbie’s and Jimmy’s sleeping bags together as one, so it was like a sleeping bag double bed; and they rolled up Tammy’s and Brett’s sleeping bags, so they could take them down to the beach to sleep.

Jamie’s and Flip’s sleeping bags remained where they were, in the dirt, near the fire. Flip peed on the embers, stretched, burped, and then climbed into his sleeping bag and slipped into unconsciousness.

Staring past the glow of the grill, Jamie could see that Debbie and Jimmy were having sex. Jamie tried to make out Debbie’s face; she wanted to know if it really felt good to her, if it was truly as wonderful as she had said.

The fire turned to dust and the night settled cold on Jamie’s nose and cheeks. Flip made small choking sounds and jerked in his sleep, as if he were receiving an occasional electrical shock. Debbie and Jimmy were a giant, still mound, like a green and brown waterproof bear.

Jamie was awake. She wanted to go home and lie snug beneath her chenille bedspread and stare at the light wedging under her bedroom door, reminding her that her father was wandering around the house in his pajamas, or eating cheese and apple slices in his office while he typed up business plans for huge corporations that were mere ideas to Jamie, names that she heard across the dinner table. Her 
desire to be home was so great that she thought that even if her naked mother scooted into bed with her and talked about things she shouldn’t be revealing (that her father was a flirt, that Renee was immature for her age, that marriage could be tiring) she would be happier than she was at that moment. More than anything, Jamie wanted to wake up in the morning to the thick, smoky smell of breakfast cooking.

Breakfast was the least-complicated meal in her household; her mother was always happy to make it and everyone, even Renee, was happy to sit at the kitchen counter and eat it.

Jamie imagined that she could rewind time and restart at any moment she chose. She would stop just before the trip to Disneyland, on a day when she and Flip kissed for two hours on the beach. He didn’t touch her within the bounds of her bathing suit, she touched only his back; it was thrilling.

In the week before Flip left for Hawaii, Jamie and Flip had sex seven times. Each time, Jamie lay on the backseat of the VW bus or on a bed (his or hers, depending on whose parents were out of the house), lifted her legs into flesh triangles, and waited for something to happen while Flip bounced himself against her. Intercourse was no longer uncomfortable or scary to Jamie, it was simply something she willingly endured. Often Jamie found herself bored during sex and so she invented a little song that she repeated in her head to the rhythm of Flip’s movements. I am in love, my heart soars to Venus, even as Flip pummels me with his penis. As Flip increased speed, so did her song, so that by the end Jamie was merely imagining sounds pushed together into solid Germanic words, like in the final round of the camp song “Do Your Ears Hang Low.” Iminlove myheartsoarstoVenus evenasFlipummelsme withispenis.

At the end of their final encounter before he left for his family vacation, Flip said, “When I get home we’re going to go totally crazy, okay? You are going to be on top!” 

The idea of being on top haunted Jamie from that moment on. What would she look like sitting there? What exactly would she do? These were Jamie’s thoughts as her parents walked into the house with her cousin Jan, who was carrying a large, blue, plastic suitcase.

Jan had acne that looked like hot pepper flakes that you shake from a can in a pizza parlor. Jamie knew the acne wasn’t Jan’s fault, or her choice, but she held it against her anyway. And she blamed her for the intricate silver headgear that was attached to her mouth like scaffolding for Barbie. And her clothes, which had been purchased at Ames (pronounced aim-zez by Jan) and were so thick and raspy that you could have lit a match by scratching it across her knee. And her unyielding size—
Jan was Betty’s height with a few extra New Hampshire pounds packed on.

Betty had left New England when she went away to college. In the years since college, she had returned to her family home only twice: once for her sister Ginny’s wedding, and once for her father’s funeral. So the only time Jamie saw Jan was when her aunt shipped her out for an annual summer visit, or on the occasional Christmas when she, her mother, Ginny, her older brother, Donny, and her father, Fritz, flew out for a week. Because Jan and Jamie were the same age, Betty and Allen gave Jamie the job of host. Because Jan believed that everyone in California was hipper, prettier, and wittier than everyone else in the world, Jamie and her friends were like celebrities to Jan.

Renee was still away at Outward Bound, so her bedroom and the guest bedroom were both unoccupied. But Jan wanted to sleep in Jamie’s room, as she always had, 
in Jamie’s double bed with Jamie. As soon as she said this Jamie flashed on an image of herself and Flip having sex in the bed, the gritty stains he left behind, the tennis-shoe smell of his sweat on her pillow.

Allen had paused at the stair landing with Jan’s suitcase dangling like a giant anvil from one hairy hand. Betty, Jan, and Jamie were clustered at the base of the steps, looking up toward Allen.

“So should I put it in Jamie’s room?” Allen asked.

“But I kick in my sleep now,” Jamie said. “Put it in the guest room.”

“I don’t care if you kick.” Jan spoke in the slow drawl of a hound dog, if a hound dog were to speak. “We always sleep fine together.”

“I’m different now,” Jamie said, and she knew it was true. 
“I’d worry about kicking and I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

“But you’ve always had so much fun in bed together,” Betty said. “Staying up late telling secrets!” Jan clapped her hands and did a little jump. Betty trained her eyes on her daughter; Jamie could read her mind and was not pleased with what her mother was saying.

“We did always have fun but this summer is different. I worry more; I’ll be nervous about the kicking.” Since she had started having sex, Jamie’s sense of space, of the invisible barrier between herself and others, was more acute, more sensitive to invasion. She did not want Jan’s body rolling near hers in her bed. No matter what.

“I could sleep on the floor next to your bed.” There was a hollow silence. An invisible thread cast out from Jamie’s heart and hooked into her father’s heart. He felt the double tug, the signal to pull her up out of the water.

“I’m going to put you in the guest room, Jan,” Allen said. 
“That way Jamie will sleep well and she’ll have more energy to entertain you this week.”

“You could get in bed with her at night,” Betty added, 
“have your girl talk, and then, when you start falling asleep, you could move into the guest room.”

“Great!” Jan said. Even when enthusiastic, Jan couldn’t shed the hound-dog twang.

Everyone knew Jan would eat thirds at dinner that night; to her a single serving was always dished out three times over. Betty cooked mashed potatoes, dried corn chowder, and steak. She called it New Hampshire food, the food of her childhood, but really, it was the kind of food Jamie’s friend’s mothers prepared (although not the kind of food her mother’s friends prepared). There was white bread with butter on the table. Jamie ate half the loaf, Jan ate the other half. According to Betty, white bread fell into the same food group as doughnuts, so was as coveted by Jamie as a chocolate eclair.

Betty shoved a few family questions at Jan, who answered in such a flat, vague way that Jamie wondered if Jan even knew the people Betty was asking about. Later, when Betty was bubbling over the color of her nephew Donny’s eyes, and why hadn’t any of her children gotten those eyes, Jan said, “I guess I never noticed the color of his eyes.”