The Summer of Naked Swim Parties Read Online Free PDF Page B

but before they could get started someone turned the music up so loud that Jamie thought she could see sound waves bouncing from the tiles to the rocks to the trees. Everyone watched as naked Betty stepped onto the diving board, dancing to  “Fifty-Two-Card Pick Up.” There was hooting and applause as naked Leon got on the board with her. Betty was singing along, almost shouting the words to the song, her eyes shut, head swinging from side to side:  . . . and then she said pick me up, take me home, tell me how you like it then fetch me a bone. . . .
    Leon lifted Betty’s hand and they did a partner dance but as if on a gangplank since they could only move up and down the board. With his hand extended toward Betty’s, Jamie thought Leon looked a bit like Captain Hook forcing Peter Pan into the ocean with his rapier. Allen was dancing, too, but from behind the bar. Jamie was glad that if the police walked in, they wouldn’t be able to see her father’s penis. And then all the adults were dancing, even Lois, Leon’s bony blond wife, who reminded Jamie of reedy sun-bleached grass. Even Rod, who had left his perch on the rock. He was holding sleeping Lacey in his arms. After a couple of stiff pointed steps, he took the towel-bundled child and laid her under a spiky bush that grew where the grass met the tile.
    Here’s the thing adults should know when they choose to dance naked, Jamie thought: Everything bounces. And the bouncing isn’t necessarily on beat with the music. So watching a naked adult dance is like watching a 3-D movie without the glasses; a shadow image moves beside the real  one. Women’s butts shift up and down, a cover sliding over a pillow. Penises flip-flop in all directions, testicles tagging along. Breasts move more or less, not depending on size, but depending on a certain amount of stringiness of the skin. And men’s breasts bounce too. Chubby Frank’s pubescent fat-girl wedges shook and the aged Daniel had a bounce in his chest where a sheet of skin shifted over the muscle beneath it.
    At the end of the song, Betty and Leon held hands and leaped off the board together. Betty was laughing, a long, honking, donkey bray that always made her easy to find in crowds. When they hit the water, the splash was so big it sprayed all the way to the shallow end. Jamie turned her back to the adults, shut her eyes, and let herself sink into the hollow echo underwater. When she popped her eyes open, she was startled to see the magnified legs of the boys in front of her, their loose-legged bathing suits flapping like the wings of a stingray.

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    Everyone in the family knew that Renee was angry for the following reasons: (1) Renee’s breasts had just started to develop whereas Jamie was pushing out of a B-cup bra.
    (2) Jamie’s period came with the certainty of a full moon while Renee’s periods showed up with the spotty irregularity of a distant (usually alcoholic) relative. And, (3) Jamie would not join Renee in her crusade against nakedness and marijuana smoking.
    Renee, if she could have chosen, would have preferred to have belonged to the family of her best and only friend, Lori Nambine. The Nambines had professional family portraits hanging on their walls—portraits taken with the dog, under an oak tree, with each blond, ovine-faced Nambine wearing a red pullover sweater. The Nambines stored presliced cheeses and lunch meats in actual Tupperware-brand containers. The Nambines went to the Smorgasborg Restaurant for all-you-can-eat dinner every Sunday, and they drove their mobile home to their cabin at Lake Nacimiento on long weekends.
    Whenever Renee could accompany them, she did, for time with the Nambines was real time, real life, Renee once said.

    Renee let the family know that when she was home she was simply tolerating them, biding time before her scheduled six-week trek in Colorado with Outward Bound.
    Sometime after the last pool party, Renee had stopped using Jamie’s proper name and now