Page 65 of Playworld
I felt a twinge of disappointment that I wouldn’t be seeing Naomi, but it was eclipsed by a feeling of relief that she wasn’t coming, which was replaced by the same feeling I’d felt during the commercial, being around all those people and invisible at the same time. It was so intense I wanted to hug Oren when he checked his watch and said, “Let’s go to Elliott’s bedroom and watchIn Search Of.” Because he was my brother, he was always there; ever since the fire, he was my once-upon-a-timer, and I loved him maybe more than anyone else in my life.
—
We were going to Captiva.
Our parents’ announcement about our spring break travel plans was unexpected, which only created that much more excitement between my brother and me. Oren said he knew a couple of “fly chicas” from his school who went every year and that we had to get buff for these ladies, so before bed we moved the dining table toward the windows and did push-ups in front of the mirrors and some Jack LaLanne calisthenics and also dug out the dumbbells Dad had stored in the back of his closet—“curls for girls,” Oren called our sets. “You know what washboard abs are?” Oren said, doing his best flex. “Male cleavage.” The week before we left, Oren and I went to Brooks Brothers to buy new bathing suits with the fifty dollars Dad gave me to spend from my commercial money. “The red Speedo,” Oren said to me, “no question.” And then, in what I wasn’t sure was an imitation of Dad, added, “VeryEuropean.” That night, fromhis bunk below me, Oren fantasized about all the activities he’d do when we were at the resort.
“I want to jet-ski and go snorkeling and play tennis,” he said. “Or maybe sailing. I’m gonna get a Saint-Tropez tan. And I want to collect seashells and make a wholenecklaceof them, like puka beads but bigger. Do you want me to make you a necklace? Because I will.”
And on certain evenings when Oren was done with it, he lent me his copy of the Swimsuit Issue. “It really gives you a feel for the place,” Oren said. The articles were boring, but there was an ad that caught my eye. It read like a public service announcement and reminded me of the sorts of conversations I overheard the adults having at Elliott and Lynn’s get-togethers:
The Reunited States of America
At Time Incorporated, we happen to believe that Americansunitedcan solve any problems America faces.
That’s why, in late February, our seven magazines will speak to their 68 million readers on a common theme—“American Renewal.”
Today most people see nothing but crisis around them. Inflation. Energy. Declining productivity. Weakness abroad and a breakdown of the political machinery at home.
There is a spreading sense of powerlessness…a feeling that, as individuals, we can’t make a difference anymore.
Time Incorporated disagrees.
But I mostly looked at the pictures. And while Oren preferred Christie Brinkley to all the other models; while he could not help draping page fifty-two over his face, what with her nipple discreetly poking against her red suit’s fabric, or pressing the two-page spread of her against the bottom of my mattress slats, as if he were benching the entire top bunk (Christie sat with her nearly naked back to the camera, on the shell-covered sand, at sunset, while terns wheeled and swooped over the Gulf), I crushed on Carol Alt, that slender, angular, wolf-eyed brunette, whose wavy hairfor some reason the editors chose to corral in a bathing cap for most of her pictures, but who, in my favorite photo, let it be blown freely in the prevailing breeze as she lay supine among the sea oats, propped on her elbows in a brown-and-white snakeskin bathing suit. Clenched in her teeth was a single reed, its firm stalk slightly indenting her glossy lower lip. There were captions to all these shots, partly advertorial, that I pored over as if they contained secret information:
On the beach on Shell Island, a boat to match one’s suit is nothing to skiff at, and lucky Carol’s handsomely harmonized ensemble includes a maillot by Moi ($60).
“It’s notmail-lot,” Oren said when he heard me practicing the word. “It’s pronouncedmay-yo.And it just means one-piece.”
—
Our suite at the ’Tween Waters Inn was on the second floor of the Gumbo Limbo building—a long, blue-roofed stucco building with two floors—and it had a view of Manatee Cove, Roosevelt Channel, and Pine Island Sound. “I figured it would be like this,” Oren said with amazement, “but I didn’t know it would be better!” We stood in the walkway’s shade and leaned on the railing, feeling the wet-warm breezes. We each had a map of the resort the concierge had given us, and pointing to our left, Oren shouted back into the room, “Dad! I can see Adventure Sea Kayak Rental. Can we rent kayaks today?” To which Dad said, “We just got here, cool your jets!” And then Oren said, “I can see Captiva Watersports too! Can we rent Jet Skis today?” To which Mom said, “First you can unpack your clothes and put on your bathing suit.” But now Oren was pointing out past the sailboat slips at the humped backs and dorsal fins of a pod of dolphins wheeling far off on the water. “Look,” he said, “there really are dolphins at Dolphin Lookout!” And then he raced off—“I’m going to go swim with them,” he shouted. When I shouted back, “Wait for me,” he said, “Look who’s talking,” and disappeared. Left to my own devices, I put on my swimsuit and slathered myself in tanning oil, since Tanner, who spent every spring break in Barbados, said the worst thing you could do on the first day of a tropical vacation was get badlysunburned. I grabbed a towel from the bathroom, took my map, told my parents I was going to have a look around, and then left our room.
Tweenie’s Pass looped through the resort, and I walked it past the dock at Manatee Cove, down among sailboats’ masts that gonged and pinged in the marina, and eyed the price lists at Captiva Watersports, which offered waterskiing instruction and catamaran rentals, and since Dad had been in the navy, I figured that he could maybe take us all sailing to save some money. I peeked in at the Pelican Roost Boutique and Snack Center, which had diamond-encrusted seashells and dolphins in jewelry cases, sunsets airbrushed on coral, Kadima paddles, and baseball caps and sunhats that readCaptiva Is for LoversorMy Parents Went to Captiva and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. I spotted the Gulf twinkling in the distance. I crossed Captiva Drive, a busy two-lane road whose noise, I realized, I’d mistaken for the surf. I admired the palms that lined the beach, their leaves clacking in the wind. The umbrellas set up by the shore were a darker turquoise than the water, the water an opal I had never beheld in person. The waves were more wavelets when I got to where they broke, and after taking off my flip-flops, I let them lap and purl at my feet. The only ocean I’d ever been in was the Atlantic, which, even in late summer, held beneath its waves a threat of cold. But the Gulf’s waters were the temperature of a warm bath. And considering this contrast, one I’d liked to have shared with Oren, with Mom or Dad, with anyone—a pair of twin boys built a sandcastle to my left—I thought,There it is again.That feeling I’d had at the commercial shoot. I decided to go find my brother.
On my way back to the resort, I ran into my parents on their way to the beach. My father, who hated to take off his shirt because of his chubby breasts, was wearing his khakis rolled up well above his ankles and a shell-pink polo. He was also carrying his leather satchel, as if he’d just been teleported from an audition in Manhattan. Mom wore a bikini with a floral wrap around her waist, her bug-eye sunglasses, and a big, floppy sun hat, which she clutched to keep on her head; in her free arm she carried a pair of novels and a yellow legal pad with notes for her master’s thesis. “Where’re you going?” she asked me, to which Dad, with some annoyance, said, “Let him go.” I crossed Captiva Drive again andthen took the path toward the Crow’s Nest Bar & Grille. I wondered, as I always did, if theein “grille” was pronounced; I figured that Oren would know. As I walked toward the tennis courts, I thought I heard my brother’s voice, and when I spotted two boys playing, I was sure one of them was Oren. But when I walked up to the windscreen that surrounded it, I saw this girl instead.
She was a brunette like Carol Alt, but her hair was straight and slicked back in a wet ponytail. She was tan, like she’d already been here several weeks, and was wearing a white tank top, which revealed two pink circles on each of her shoulders where she’d been sunburned and had already peeled, but looked like scars where wings had been torn off. Her long legs were lustrous and brown down to her ankles, which were delicate and pretty, cupped by her blue pom-pom socks. She was playing with a woman I guessed was her mother because they so strongly resembled each other. What was even more impressive about both of them, the whole time I hung on the chain-link fence, which I soon realized was probably long enough to be creepy, was that during their cross-court rally, they not only managed to keep a single ball in play but, even after I’d left them to go find Oren—someone, anyone—to tell of what I’d just seen, I could still hear the ball tocking regularly behind me on the Har-Tru like the beating of my heart.
“Griffin!” Oren shouted as I walked by the pool.
He was sitting at the bar with another boy. Two years younger than me, and he had no problem getting served. Oren wore a bucket hat with a palm tree insignia stitched into it. On his face: a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators that he’d bought for the trip. His friend was a hulking kid with long hair almost down to his shoulders that half covered his eyes and who was wearing a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves and basketball shorts. When I got a little closer, I noticed that his diminutive right hand was curled violently at the wrist, and his fingers stuck out stiff and pinched together at the tips, so that elbow to digits the appendage resembled the inverted neck and head of the Loch Ness Monster. Both of them were drinking piña coladas.
“Cocktail?” Oren said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Virgin or regular?”
“What’s the difference?”
Oren looked at his friend. “A cherry,” he said. And they laughed.
“My brother, Griffin,” Oren said to his friend. “He goes to the best private school in New York City. How he got in and I didn’t is a complete mystery. Although Mom says his grades were so bad, they probably didn’t think I could cut the mustard.”
“Frazier,” Frazier said to me, and stuck out his Plesiosaur hand, which I, stung by Oren’s jab, pulled at twice in greeting.
“Frazier’s from Dallas,” Oren said. “His family comes here every year.” Then Oren said to the bartender, “Hey, Kessler,” who looked up from the glass he was cleaning. “A Bacardi colada for my brother, please.”