I’d heard these jokes so many times. “It’s Not the End of the World by Judy Blume.”
“Blume,” he says and shakes his head. “You’re always reading the Jews. Just like your mother.”
He has no clue about Paul yet.
“What’s it about?” Catherine says.
“A kid whose parents get divorced.”
She snorts. “What would you want to read about that for?”
She doesn’t like all the reading I do. Neither does my father. They say it’s rude. They make fun of the titles, the covers, and the way I chew on the skin of my lower lip when I get deep in a book.
But I have nothing else to do. We’re in St. Thomas for spring vacation, and Patrick has made friends with the golf pro and now drives his own little cart, picking up elderly players at their cottages and driving them around the eighteen holes. He gets paid for this in snack bar tickets, so every afternoon when he gets off work we go have peanuts and papaya juice by the pool. Elyse has attached herself to another family for the ten days, a couple from Salt Lake City and their one-year-old son. Elyse loves babies. The mother from Salt Lake sensed her usefulness immediately, and now Elyse spends her days under their cabana on the beach. No one knows where Frank goes. He leaves after breakfast and comes back before dinner with a secretive smirk and half-shut eyes that scare me.
Almost everything scares me these days. I have been on planes before, but this time I was terrified of the distance from earth, the smallness of the plane, and the flimsiness of its metal walls. When we actually landed, my gratitude didn’t last long. There are lizards on the floor, red jellyfish at the shore, and shark fins farther out. I don’t want to snorkel or water-ski or windsurf. And it isn’t just the outside world I’m scared of. I’m scared of inside of me, too. On the second day I ran back to our cottage to go to the bathroom, and as I stood there on the tiles pulling down my suit, a feeling wrapped around my chest like a boa constrictor. The dead star feeling, out of nowhere. I struggled to breathe. I knew I was alone in the cottage and yet the bathroom felt crowded. My heart began to pound and made me so scared it pounded harder and harder until I thought there was no way my body could withstand the force of its beating. I’m just going to the bathroom, I kept telling myself, but my body felt something completely different, as if it were having a whole other invisible experience. Back on the beach, I felt weak and shivery and wrapped myself in a towel. I’ve been in the cottage alone since then, but at night the feeling edges in and I have a hard time falling asleep. Reading is the only thing that calms me down.
“You have your Jews,” my father says to me later, when we are all showered from the beach, waiting to go to dinner, “and I have my magazines.” He picks up the Penthouse he got Frank to buy at the airport.
“Read another letter, Gardiner,” Patrick says.
“All right.” My father flips through the pages. “Dear Penthouse Forum,” he begins. “I never really believed these letters were written by real people, but since last Thursday night, I’m ready to believe anything.”
“They always start like that. It’s so fake,” I say.
“Shhh,” Patrick says
“Yes, Daley, shhh. This is serious literature.” My father grins at me. He is in a good mood, with his drink at his elbow and the magazine in his hands. He reads about a girl who describes everything in her life as boring — her job, her boyfriend, her dog. My father thinks this is hilarious. “Even the fucking dog is boring!” She works in an office building in Chicago.
“Is she ever going to get to the point?” Elyse says, and everyone cracks up. It is cozy in our little cottage by the beach, sitting all of us together on the wicker furniture with big comfy cushions. My father continues to read.
One night she has to stay late to catch up on some work. She gets a little uneasy when the last person leaves, but then she waves her fear away. She knows she’s being a baby. About an hour later she hears the elevator rise and her fear returns. She shuts off all the lights. The elevator stops on her floor and opens. She stops breathing. She thinks if she stays very still — she’s in the corner, facing the wall — he won’t notice her. She doesn’t dare turn around. She thinks she hears something but she can’t tell because her heart is beating so loudly — and then she feels hands on her neck. They are warm. “For some reason I feel myself relax then. I know everything’s going to be okay. His hands are so big. They slide down over my shoulders and around to my breasts. I’m wet instantly. I can hear him breathing and I smell cigarettes on his breath and I feel his stubble on my cheek but I never see him. He takes off all my clothes and pleasures me in every way imaginable and then, finally, he puts his long rod-hard cock inside me and—”
“Gardiner, really, this is going too far,” Catherine says. “Elyse is going to tell this to her class when she gets back.”
“Elyse Tabor! Well, I never!” Patrick imitates the first grade teacher’s constipated grimace.
We all laugh.
“Two more sentences,” my father says. “—and I feel him explode. And then he leaves the building. I never saw his face. I’ll never know who he was.”
The first morning in St. Thomas I went with my father to collect our passports at the front desk in the main building. Everyone else was still asleep. At home there was three feet of snow on the ground but now I was in bare feet and shorts. Our cottage was one of the farthest away, right on the water. We walked on the wide stone paths that connected everything at the resort, and, because it had rained a little before dawn, the stones were wet but warm. We watched a lizard chase another up a palm tree until we couldn’t see them anymore.
“Your mother and I stayed in a place like this in Barbados,” he said. It almost sounded like a fond memory. He never spoke about my mother in front of Catherine except to insult her. It was so much better when we were alone, but we were never alone. I pretended all the way to the front desk and back that we had come by ourselves to St. Thomas.
I have a crush on a blond boy I see at the pool in the afternoons. He’s small and slender and wears long green swimming trunks with orange fish on them. He knows I like him. I can tell from the way he’s always checking to see if I’m still watching him. He’ll pretend to look beyond me, leave me off to the side of his gaze. When we first got there he was hanging out with two girls who looked a lot older than us, but they left after a few days and now he has no one.
“Stop looking at him. He’s a total jerk,” Patrick says. “Do you know what he did in the shop yesterday? He—”
“Shut up. I don’t care.”
We’re finishing up our papaya juices. We’re so badly sunburned that we sit at the edge of our chairs, careful to let our skin touch the least amount of chair as possible. We don’t have sun lotion. We only have something called Hawaiian Tropic, which is coconut-smelling baby oil that promises to increase the sun’s rays. We’re obsessed with getting the deepest darkest tan possible. Elyse has had the worst reaction to the sun. Her skin has bubbled up on her arms and back, and the Salt Lake City family took her to the clinic in town where they wrapped gauze around her forearms, which had become infected. They bought her a long-sleeved shirt and sunblock and have hinted that we should be using those things, too. But we don’t have blisters, just a good burgundy burn that will turn into a deep dark tan by the time we go back to school.