The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank [5]
After dessert, they invited me to go with them to the arts center for a Russian film with English subtitles.
I said, "I don't like to read during movies," and once Julia laughed it became a joke and made me feel that I was irrepressibly witty. So I went with them.
It was the bleakest movie I'd ever seen; everyone died of heartbreak or starvation or both. At home, Julia threw herself on the sofa in Slavic despair and said, "Please to get me some wodka."
They didn't kiss or hold hands in front of me, though once, at lunch, Henry sort of rubbed my foot under the table, thinking it was Julia's. I leaned over to him and whispered, "You're really turning me on." I was a teenager, after all, an expert in the art of mortification.
—•—
At the beach, we left our sandals and sneakers on the path with the other shoes, and spread our towels on the sand, facing the ocean. Henry stood a minute looking out, then bounded into the water.
The ocean was rough, and as the waves rose you could see clear jellyfish and green popping seaweed. Up where we were, clumps of seaweed had dried almost black in the sun. The wind blew so strong that the seaweed whipped loose and rolled down the beach like tumbleweeds.
I looked around us at the people on the beach. A group of women my mother's age wore bikinis and gold bracelets and were already deeply tanned. The really thin ones looked mean. A small community had set up chairs near our towels. A man was pouring something clear out of a thermos into outstretched plastic glasses, while a woman passed a Baggie of lime wedges.
Julia wore a blousy white beach dress and a big straw hat, and slathered herself in sunscreen though she stayed in the shade under an umbrella. She was reading, as usual.
"You seem to really like your job," I said.
She nodded. Then she asked me if I had any idea what I wanted to do when I grew up.
"I'd like to be a great singer," I said.
"Maybe you will," she said.
"I won't."
"How do you know?"
"Tone-deaf," I said.
I sat up on my elbows, watching Henry in the ocean. The water was just getting warm, and he was the only one in for a while. He waited for his wave in a standstill crawl position, his body facing us, but his head turned back to where the waves formed. Then he swam hard, caught the wave, and rode it all the way in to shore. I loved how he looked the last second of his ride—his hair sluiced back, his part zigzagged, his face pure joy. Sometimes he would actually laugh out loud. When he stood up, he'd look toward us, but he couldn't see without his glasses.
I joined him in the ocean. It was cold, but I kept up with him and went under when he did. I stood beside him, and he pulled my arms out in front of me. He'd been trying to teach me to bodysurf for years. "Now wait for your wave." He looked behind him. "Swim hard," he said suddenly. "Now!"
But I missed that wave, and the next one. Then Julia came in. The two of them swam beyond where the waves broke, and I got out.
On my towel, I watched them bob with the swell of the wave just forming. Then he dove under. He pointed his hand out of the water, like a shark fin, and went after her. I saw her arms flailing as she was pulled under.
The next time I looked up, she was coming toward me. Before she put on her beach dress, I got a good look at her figure. She had on a black one-piece and was even thinner than I suspected, with smaller breasts than I had.
That year, all of a sudden it seemed, there my breasts were, and my mother and I kept having to go to Lord & Taylor for bigger bras. Boys gave me more attention now, and it made me nervous. My breasts seemed to say something about me that I didn't want said. My Achilles' heel, they put me in constant danger of humiliation.
My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn't exactly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex anyway. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen almost against their will. Then the sex that you had would be about