The Tribes of Palos Verdes (7 page)

“There're a lot of things I don't know,” he says.

*   *   *

“Look at your famous father,” my mother says, showing us a profile of my father in the
Palos Verdes Gazette.
He is wearing crisp surgeon's greens, sitting on a white hospital cot, looking at an X ray of a woman's chest. A blond nurse hovers over him, three orderlies flank his left side like soldiers.

My mother says she'd like to tell the real truth to the newspapers. “He doesn't fix hearts, he ruins them.”

In fact, my father never ruins anything. He has fixed a lot of hearts. Famous hearts.

While he's at the hospital, my brother and I like to look at his books. We sneak into his office, and open to page 223—a naked lady page—Jim's favorite.

The patient is lying on the operating table. Her breasts are visible, covered with a transparent greenish sheet. But it's her heart we are supposed to be looking at. A heart that has
arrhythmia mita extremis,
a rare congenital disease.

There are three doctors over her with thin, silver knives. One of the doctors has big, bushy eyebrows. This is my father. He is repairing a “collapsed left artery,” the text says, “with the expert concentration of a master surgeon.”

But my brother isn't interested in this. He looks at the lady's breasts and laughs.

“You're so gross,” I tell him. “That lady is sick.”

“Dad's the one who's gross. He's the one who does it.”

“He's looking at her heart,” I say. “He doesn't care about those.”

Except, in the picture, my father isn't looking at her heart, exactly. He's looking at the camera and smiling.

*   *   *

“I thought you might want to look through this catalog, Sandy. There's so many things you could be good at.” My father is eating breakfast with us for the first time this week. His words sound stiff, rehearsed.

My mother smiles as she looks at the course titles my father has circled in the community-college handbook:
Art History: The Impressionists from Seurat to Van Gogh,
or
Yoga, Find Inner Peace!,
or the one she laughs at,
Summer Gardens: What You Should Know About Drought Tolerance.

“I already know about drought tolerance, Phil,” she says.

*   *   *

There's a lot of things you have to know if you don't want to be x'd out with the Bayboys. Your hair has to be a plain crewcut, or long and feathered like Skeezer's. You have to wear tan or black boardshorts, the extra-large kind that come to your knees. I wear boy's boardshorts, because most girl's bathing suits are weird, either too lacy or very skimpy. Some of the guys think it's funny that I wear trunks.

One time Andy Aaron is reading
Surfer
magazine at the cliffs, when he holds up a full-page ad of a busty girl in a bikini kneeling on the sand.

“How about them apples,” he says, waving the magazine around, howling like a dog. Suddenly the rest of the guys are howling, too, panting and beating their chests like gorillas.

Skeezer calls out to me, “Hey, Medina, why don't you ever wear a bikini like that?”

Blood rises to my face, but I laugh and pretend to go along with the joke. He asks again, walking over to me, “Why not, Medina? A nice yellow string bikini?”

“Bikinis are stupid,” I say. “Besides, it would fall down in the first big wave.”

“It would fall down anyway,” Skeezer says, running his hand up and down in front of my chest, indicating a flat board.

When I don't say anything, he draws up his shoulders and smirks.

“Oh, you'd look all right in a bikini.” He slaps me on the back. “Don't be so sensitive.”

I smile but don't look at him. Later I cut him off and snare his beautiful ride on a good three-footer.

“Don't be so sensitive,” I say when he shakes his fist at me.

But it's not just hair and swim trunks, there're other unspoken rules. P.V. surfers never wear colored wet suits, or anything bright or modern, no neon. They only wear black wet suits, holes patched with duct tape, discolored with resin stains. They have one- or two-fin boards. They don't ride squirrelly, stupid, tricky tri-fins, and don't like anyone who does.

Secretly, I don't care that much what anyone wears. I don't even care if they surf in sopping wet Levis like some Vals do. For me, the only thing that's sad is watching people go to work in their suits and ties.

It feels so great to walk away and go surfing.

*   *   *

My mother is reading a book by a famous TV psychologist who says most of a person's personality traits are in their genes when they're born. She tells Jim I was born with the same sneaky gene that my father has, that's why we're in cahoots, ganging up against her all the time.

“Mom says you and Dad are alike,” Jim says thoughtfully. “She knows you have secrets with him.”

I tell him it isn't true. My stomach twists around, the way it always does when Jim gets nervous about me.

“No women like you. The towel girls hate you, too.”

“They shouldn't,” I say. “I don't even talk to them.”

“That's just it. You don't talk to anyone but me. You go around giving people creepy stares all the time.”

I tell him I don't feel comfortable around anyone but him.

He sighs. “I just want you to be normal. I'm tired of defending you to everyone.” Then he tells me to forget it, I wouldn't understand.

Even though I offer to give him my new
Surfer
magazine, he doesn't respond.

Instead he says he wishes I were different, sometimes.

*   *   *

My brother and I are in my parents' bathroom brushing our teeth, because our own sink is stopped up with dog shampoo and fur. Jim is in a really bad mood because my mother was crying all night, and he had to go sleep in her room. Quickly he rifles through my father's rows and rows of vitamins.

“I dare you to take these,” he says, pouring out nine bright pink capsules of niacin into his hand.

“What are they?” I ask suspiciously.

“Just vitamins, from Dad's shelf.”

“If they were just vitamins, you wouldn't be laughing,” I say.

“Don't be a pussy, just swallow them, they aren't gonna kill you.”

“If it hurts, I'll kick your ass,” I say.

“Oh, you will?” He is punching me, knocking the wind out of me, bending over my face like a hippo. “Kick it then, kick my ass, big mouth,” he says.

I lie on the tile stunned, trying to breathe. He leans in close, looking very strange, angrily pushing the pills in my face.

“Go on, tough girl, or are you scared?” He flaps his arms like a chicken's wings, clucking, “Bok bok bok.” His eyes are bugged out, sweaty hair stuck to his forehead.

I grab the pills from his hand and swallow them, my eyes closed.

Within minutes my face is flushed bright red, my palms and feet are itching like crazy, my heart is pounding too fast. I am gasping for air. “How come you made me do that, Jim? I thought we were best friends.”

“Oh, man,” my brother says, dropping down next to me, hugging me. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

And then I'm comforting him, trying to stop him from bashing his head against the floor.

*   *   *

Orky and Corky are trained whales at Marineland, the big sea aquarium near our house. Orky knows how to do back flips and dance to the Donna Summer song called “I Feel Love.” They are both very talented and famous. They've been on TV at least six times.

But one day Cami Miller pins me down after class and calls my mother
Orky.
I try to stay calm, but she keeps pinching at me, telling me how ugly I am. I punch her in the side of the jaw until she cries. I say, “I dare you to say that again.”

“Orky, Orky, fat as a whale, gross as a snail,” Cami says, scratching at me. I punch her hard in the stomach. “Your mother is so gross,” she says, “such a whale.” I pull her hair until it comes away in my hand, and then shove it in her gagging mouth. The principal suspends both of us from school for three days.

My father comes to my room and says, “I'm going to have to ground you this time. Your mother's very upset.”

I tell him how everyone at school makes fun of her, I tell him they call her Orky and make whale noises at me when I walk through the halls. My father turns very red. A vein pops out, pulsating on his neck.

“From now on, Medina, if the kids call your mother Orky, just pop them one in the nose for me.”

I start to laugh and say, “That's what I did. I got suspended.”

“You've got to be smarter next time,” he says. “Wait until after school.”

*   *   *

After school the sky is white. The air crackles like hot paper. The annual heat wave came early, in the middle of winter, just before the big waves started to hit. I'm still grounded from surfing.

I'm hosing off my surfboard, talking to the ancient Japanese gardener as he soaks the dying spider orchids with a watering can. When my board is clean and cool, I begin to wax it, explaining how to stroke it from one end to the other with a bar of coconut oil so it leaves behind a small residue of film.

“That way you don't slip off when it's wet,” I tell him.

The gardener smiles, uncomprehending, wiping small beads of sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. He nods his head as he kneels in the bush, ripping away parched leaves with his fingers.

I'm sharing with him in detail all the different kinds of surf wax—the kinds made with pure coconut and the inferior kinds cut with animal fat. I put the board to his nose and he laughs and says, “No, no … busy right now.”

I push. “Come on, it's just coconut. Just smell it a little.”

There is a tap at the window. A rap, klonck, klonck, and a voice that is girlish and sweet.

“Medinaaa,” my mother calls, “I want you to come in now. Nooow.” She wiggles her fingers at me and then pounds three times on the glass.

She is in her bedroom when I go inside to face her. There is a note on the kitchen table that warns me “not to parade around half-naked in front of the gardener.” The house is quiet. I smell bacon and anger in the fading light.

*   *   *

At 1:30
A.M.
, my mother comes to my bedroom, shaking me awake from a deep sleep, holding a pair of nylon shorts between her fingers.

My mother holds my face, cradling it, and rubs the nylon between her fingers, close to the small of my ear. It makes a scratchy noise, a dry itchy noise, sending off sparks from the heat.

“These shorts are not what an old man should see. I saw him. I saw him looking at you.”

As I try to wrestle my face from her hands, she tightens her grip.

“You think you know about men just because you've charmed your father, but you don't.”

Then she wipes her sweaty fingers on her white nightgown, dropping the shorts in the hamper without another word. She slams the door to the bedroom with great force. She uses the door as a form of communication, as a punctuation mark.

*   *   *

I will never wear Dolfin shorts again. I will wear only striped shirts, beige sweaters, huge taped-up chino pants. Cami says only lesbians wear chinos, so maybe I'm a dyke. All the girls circle me after school, whispering,
“Weirdo, dyke.”
Then they try to make me kiss fat Dina Hauser, holding me down on the grass, pressing my face against hers.

I fight them until the principal comes, but Dina rolls over, plays dead. Her eyes are calm, resigned.

Jim tries to throw my chinos over Gull Cliff the next day, balling them into an angry knot, hurling them as far as he can.

But I gather them up again. I run down the sheer face of the cliff, scooting like a crab, using both my arms and legs, triumphantly bringing up the pants on a broom handle.

I laugh, shaking the dirty cuffs in his face like a witch doctor.

I tell him never to do it again. I tell him I love these clothes of my father's more than almost anything else. “Except not more than you, Jim, you idiot.”

“I love you, too, you bitch,” he says, but he's laughing.

*   *   *

The next day I'm running very fast with my father. The harder I run, the better I feel. We run neck and neck with the greenery, the flowers. We pass blond, emaciated women, jogging and frowning, wearing pastel shorts, the thin nylon kind, and matching Nike tennis shoes, running uphill in thin files.

My father keeps looking at his watch because fat begins to burn after twenty-two minutes. The rest is only water loss.

My father barely sweats. He wears aviator sunglasses like a movie star.

“Looking good,” the women call out.

Later we sit at Palos Verdes Park, stretching out after the run.

Still breathing heavily, he asks me, “What would you think if I moved out for a while?”

I close my eyes and stretch very hard, feeling pain radiate down my calf to my foot.

“I think that would be very bad.”

He exhales, explaining that things have gotten to “the point of no return” at home. He says my mother will be much happier without him in the long run.

I bend all the way over, pulling my torso toward the ground. The muscles constrict and tighten down my back. I force my head all the way between my knees and keep it there.

“Why don't we come live with you?” I ask him, the words half-garbled, my throat constricted.

My father sits down on the grass. He puts his chin in his hands. “That wouldn't be practical, princess.” Then he tells me the real truth, that he's fallen in love with someone else—someone he's very serious about. He says it happened by surprise, that he hopes I'll understand he's getting a second chance to be happy now.

All of a sudden, blood is rushing to my ears. I can't hear what else he says, I feel like I'm going to pass out. His mouth is still moving as I straighten up. I see him reach out his hand to me, but I don't take it.