Dead End Gene Pool (19 page)

Will doubted my theory that a dismembered tentacle could be harmful.

“So you’re saying that even if those jellyfish’ve been dead for weeks, you can die if they touch you,” he said.

“The nematocysts can still discharge their toxins—sorry,
poison,
” I answered condescendingly.

“Yeah, right,” said Will, and he proceeded to systematically pop the bubblegum pink and blue bladders I had placed in careful rows in the sand.

Before he could destroy my camp, our mother arrived for a viewing. She stood there for a while, hands on her hips, surveying the lineup of jellied cadavers.

“Fascinating,” she deadpanned.

“Actually, it is,” I protested, and pulled out my logbook to show her. “See, that one there, for example—his name is Hydro—well, his tentacles started going crazy when I sprayed some Off! on them, but they didn’t when I sprayed deodorant.”

“Ducky,” she said, crouching down to get a better look. “I think it hurts them when you do that, poor things. Hey, move over a little, you’re standing in my sun. I mean, how would you like it if I sprayed you with insect repellent and poked you in the stomach with a stick?” She pushed her fingers into both Will and me and we giggled. Then she started in tickling us, something I feared more than her anger, because she tickled too hard and too long, and I always ended up gasping and purple and sobbing for her to stop.

One (obviously) boring afternoon, I was in the games room with Will. He was demonstrating his newfound skills at the dartboard. The darts back then looked like hypodermic needles from a James Bond movie interrogation scene, and they assumed the weight of a hand grenade when wielded by the uninitiated. Will threw a few, and missed. He threw a few more, and managed to hit the black outside circle. It might have been the most boring five minutes of my life. I told him I was going to the beach, and headed for the door.

“Waitwaitwait!” cried Will. “One more. I’ll get it this time, I swear.”

He took careful aim, did a few back-and-forth motions with his shooting arm, and then let her fly—just as a man wearing nothing but muscles and a Speedo walked in the room. While the victim writhed in astonished agony, his eyes fortuitously clamped shut, Will and I escaped.

We hightailed it down to the pool, to where we knew we’d find our mother. But all we found was her empty deck chair, a towel, a can of Tab, a pair of “boy watcher” sunglasses, several plastic bottles of tanning oil, and a copy of
The Carpetbaggers
. I started thumbing through the thick paperback, looking for the bedroom scenes.

The cute lifeguard saw my brother scanning the horizon as if he was the mother, and she was the lost child. Like a big zoo cat he oozed down from his white throne and made his gorgeous way over.

“Hey kids,” he said in a
Beach Blanket Bingo
way. “You, like, lookin’ for your mom?”

“Yeah,” we said, blinking at him with stars in our eyes.

Was it mere coincidence
The Carpetbaggers
lay open to page 459?

I think not.

I was seized with an epiphanic understanding of all that was catastrophically wrong with my body, from my white eyelashes, to my concave chest, to my Wise potato chip middle straining against the gingham of my one-piece bathing suit, to my moon-colored thighs and their faint blue road map of Scotland, my unbecoming heritage.

“Wull, your mom’s like over in the Tiki bar, on a long-distance phone call to Chile,” said the lifeguard.

Will and I looked at each other. We knew Haiti, we knew Acapulco, and Nassau, and San Diego, but Chile?

“Okay,” we said in unison, and tried to look like everything was hunky-dory. After giving us a friendly, if quizzical assessment, the lifeguard went back to his station, and I started planning how best to hit puberty. Either that or kill myself.

I began walking toward the ocean, conscious for the first time in my life of my thighs rubbing together.

“Hey, wait up!” Will pulled alongside of me. Yanking off his T-shirt, he said, “You wanna go swimming?”

“Uh-uh,” I said disdainfully, “I’ve got work to do.”

“You do not. Sticking things in jellyfish is not work.”

I reluctantly agreed to go swimming. I loathe swimming in the ocean. It takes the poison of a black widow spider a full hour to take effect, that of a Gila monster fifty minutes, a rattlesnake fifteen, a cobra five. But run into a stingray, a Portuguese man-of-war, a scorpion fish, a blue-ringed octopus, or a box jellyfish (something you can’t even
see
whooshing your way), and you start to croak immediately. And if the flora and fauna don’t kill you, the undertow will.

I followed my brother down the beach to where the lethal briny lapped.

“Race you!” Will yelled, galloping into the waves.

I surged through the water ahead of my brother. He passed me and, well, you know the routine. Except suddenly he wasn’t in front of me, he was knee-high in the water behind me, triumphantly calling, “Fake out!” from the shallows, and I was so far out that the water was immeasurably deep, and calm, and yet when I tried to paddle back in, the sea refused to let me.

What a day. First the unquiet stirrings of puberty, and now the premature onset of death. I’ll spare you the details, but picture trying to swim against a herculean current, and getting the reverse of nowhere, and almost pooping in your one-piece because, having seen a photo of a drowned person in
Look
magazine, you knew yours was going to be a grisly crossing of the bar.

When I was quite far out, and had actually kind of given up and was halfheartedly treading water, the current lessened and I found I could swim sideways a little. I eventually managed to make my spluttering, panic-stricken way to a line of partially submerged pilings that must have been put there by Ponce de León, judging from the buildup of barnacles encrusted over them.

There I clung, caterwauling for my mother, dammit, barfing up seawater, and praying for rescue—just not by the cute lifeguard, because that would be a fate worse than drowning.

But there he strode, and there he swam, a merman with look-at-me, gliding strokes, and a flutter kick that didn’t disturb the water. He arrived by my side in no time, underscoring my humiliating proximity to shore, and gave a head toss that flipped the hair out of his eyes in a perfect arc. He unhooked me from the piling one limb at a time, as though I were a starfish sucking on to it with all one million of my tube feet.

Oh, the extreme mortification. To be carried through the water draped like a heroine over his arms, and to be a nine-year-old without even the buds of breasts to press against his godlike chassis. For miles he carried me, past gawking families on the hotel beach, past the cabanas where the bronzed men and women nodded and whispered sympathetically, past the pools where the round-eyed teenaged girls sighed and shook their heads in envy, and finally to my mother’s deck chair, where she stood, hands on her hips, waiting.

“This had damn well be worth getting me off the phone for,” my mother said.

“Will m-made me swim out th-there,” I sniveled, as the cute lifeguard deposited me on the deck chair. I was scraped all over by the barnacles, and my bathing suit had little rips on the butt and on the frills above the leg openings.

“Jesus H. Christ,
now
what have you done?” My mother’s face was flushed, and she had that look she wore when something bad or scary or emotional was happening, but no way was she going to give in and publicly admit it. Instead, she regarded me with the disapproval she reserved for Obadiah when he gunned the house with diarrhea.

“Omigod . . . this kid is
yours
?” The lifeguard looked at the two of us with idiotlike perplexity.

My mother acknowledged her ugly spawn with a Pepsodent smile and a hand on the lifeguard’s golden forearm.

“Thank you so much,” she purred. “I’m sure a rescue at sea wasn’t necessary. My daughter tends to overdramatize.”

“Hey, like no problem, miss,” the lifeguard said, smiling back and holding her gaze. The perfect white stripe of zinc oxide on his nose had not been the least bit smudged by our encounter.

Mr. Innocence suddenly appeared, like nothing was wrong. Like he hadn’t basically held my head underwater and tried to shove me into Davy Jones’s locker.

“Gee whiz! What happened?” my brother said.

“Nothing,” said my mother, pushing her boy watchers on top of her head like a hair band. “Birdbrain here did something stupid.”

The lifeguard suddenly remembered his duties. “Maybe we should check the kid out. She got pretty banged up hangin’ on to that piece a wood out there.” He took hold of my ankle and lifted it up, revealing a cross-hatching of bloody scrapes and cuts all along the inside of my legs. As he replaced it, I watched the soft flesh of my upper thigh wobble. Then the lifeguard unfolded my arms, and after he inspected them, he returned them to where they’d been, clamped around my shivering torso. My mother didn’t interfere, but stood close by, watching, chewing on her thumb. I thought she was looking for flaws. I couldn’t stop thinking of
Glamour
magazine’s Dos and Don’ts pages. I distinctly saw myself with the black bar across my face (“That hair! That one-piece! No grooming at all!”) and my mother, opposite, on the Dos page in a flattering enlargement.

My cuts were all stinging like crazy from the drying salt, and I was trying not to cry. I struggled to channel my heroine, even though I knew Wednesday was not fond of seaside activities. Certainly she would have been stoic, and delighted by any injuries brought on by a near snuffing.

“Shheesh. You’re really bleeding,” my brother said.

“Hey, little dude, don’t cry,” urged the cute lifeguard. He was proving much better at this than my mother.

“Oh, she’s fine, aren’t you, Toots? They’re only superficial cuts. I’ll get some Bactine and we’ll fix you up.” My mother patted me awkwardly on the rump. “Will, go fetch her a Tab, would you?”

Turning back to the lifeguard, she said, “Listen, I wish there was some way I could thank you properly.” She reached into her bag by the chair for her Fabergé lipstick and started piling it on.

Gross,
I thought. I knew the signs. I stood up, wrapped a towel around myself, and demanded the room key. I could look after my own first aid.

She figured out a way to thank the cute lifeguard all right, starting with the mai tai she bought him at the Tiki bar when he went off duty. As for the person on the other end of the interrupted long-distance call, turns out he only wanted to know her ring size.

 

 

 

THERE MUST BE a trillion ways to deliver bad news by letter.

 

 

My mother dispensed with the usual epistolary protocol. On a postcard from Cozumel she wrote:

 

Like she could fool me with exclamation marks. What she was really saying was:

Since my mother was conceived, born, and raised without a sense of humor, I couldn’t regard her bulletin as anything other than the stone cold truth. The few times I’d met Herr Peter Christian Beer were enough to convince me that my new stepfather and Hitler had been littermates. I already knew I hated everything about him. Like the way he answered the telephone with a razor-sharp “Beer here!” Or how when he patted the dogs, he did it so hard they fell over. It would have been more humane if a soldier in uniform had shown up at the door of my cabin with a folded flag.

Summer camp had been sort of a bust that year anyway. I couldn’t figure out who I was supposed to be, nor could I find a niche among the jacks-playing, skinny-legged, madras-wearing Brookes and Whitneys. It was hard to be ghoulish in a cabin by a lake under sun-filtered pines, with campfires, and s’mores, and “Kumbaya” ringing in your ears. After a couple of fruitless weeks combing the Maine woods for hemlock (not that I knew what it looked like) and recording the effects of formaldehyde on bats snared by the camp nurse, I gave in and learned to play jacks (horribly), swam and canoed, and played Capture the Flag.

Next to Breck shampoo, the hottest seller at the Camp Four Winds supply store was stationery. The amount of summertime mail that went in and out of the Sargentville, Maine, post office was of North Pole magnitude. Following lunch there was a mandatory rest period during which letters were furiously penned by the homesick inmates. The rusty springs of ancient bunk beds squeaked with the force of all those Bics, and tears were staunched by autographed stuffed animals and Lilly Pulitzer sheet ensembles. Even I had gone so far as to miss my mother. Whether this was a genuine sentiment, or one born of peer pressure, it didn’t last longer than the time it takes to skim a postcard.