Page 66 of Playworld

“I just saw the most excellent girl,” I said.

“Where?” Oren said.

“Tennis courts.”

Oren squinted like he knew something. “What was she wearing?” he asked.

I told him.

“What color hair did she have?” he asked.

I described it.

“She could really play, right?”

“Like Chris Evert, but if she looked like Brooke Shields.”

Oren glanced at Frazier, then nodded seriously. “I saw her too. That’s Regina Goodman,” Oren said, “she goes to my school.”

I got my drink, took a long suck on the straw.

“Go slow,” Oren said, “those are one-fifty-one proof.”

I waved him off and said, “Tell me everything.”

To Kessler the bartender, Oren said, “Gumbo Limbo 225, please,” and then slid him a five-spot. “Take care of me this week,” he added, to which Kessler winked back; and then we three went to sit by the pool under the blazing sun and cloudless sky and the log-drumming of the palm leaves, and Oren, who was covering himself in Coppertone, told me all about Regina Goodman, with whom I was falling utterly and completely in love. I took off my shirt as he spoke, squirted some more Hawaiian Tropic on myself, which pooled in my belly button and made my pasty skin look like it had been rubbed in chicken grease. “You missed a spot,” said Frazier, pointing at my shoulder. I hung on my brother’s every word.Regina was a sophomore at Ferren and a tennis star. She was from a really rich family. “You know Bergdorf Goodman?” Oren said.

“You mean across from FAO Schwarz?” I said.

“She’sthatone,” Oren said.

“What grade is she?”

“Sophomore. But here’s the thing about her,” he continued. “This is top secret, okay?”

“All right,” I said.

“I mean if you’re looking to get with her,” he said.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“She likes younger guys.” She’d even dated his best friend Matt this year.

“But he’s in eighth grade,” I said.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Oren said. “And shealwaysmakes the first move.” In fact, he explained, sheonlymade the first move. “Don’t even bother asking her out if she doesn’t ask you. Maybe it’s a rich-girl thing,” Oren figured, “who knows? But ifsheapproachesyou,you’re in like Flynn. She wrote Matt a letter. He found it in his locker. ‘Maybe sometime we could get milkshakes,’ she said, ‘and bysometimeI mean tonight.’ ” They met up at Baskin-Robbins that day, Oren said. Matt got a cookies and cream shake, Regina got cherry vanilla, they walked straight back to her apartment in the Dakota, and then bingo: “Matt lost his virginity to her that night.”

“Cherry vanilla.” Frazier chuckled and shook his head.

“This is unbelievable,” I said.

We each drank two more Bacardi coladas, during which time I thought about how Bridget had that funny run but was fun to talk to, while Deb Peryton and I could barely carry on a conversation but she was a good kisser, whereas Regina was clearly a great athlete and I was a John McEnroe fan, so probably we had plenty to talk about between wrestling and tennis while we held hands and walked along the Gulf, once I got her to notice me. This was the last thing I remember thinking before I woke up to discover Oren and Frazier were gone, the pool’s surface was littered with palm leaves, and my skin, pink as uncooked pork, felt like the heating element under a stovetop’s glass.

—

The next few days were miserable. My sunburn was so bad that by the first evening my nose, chest, and shoulders had blistered. That night, Mom made me take a cold shower and then slathered me in Solarcaine.“Stops sunburn pain,”Dad said, peeking in my bedroom,“when someone you love is hurting.”The next day, Mom insisted that if I wanted to go to the beach or pool, I had to don a long-sleeved shirt and a hat and apply zinc oxide to my nose and lips. The tops of my feet were so badly burned they hurt too much to wear flip-flops. “Maybe he should wear socks,” Oren suggested, a little cruelly. I couldn’t do any of the things the rest of the family was doing.

Or, in the case of my father, wasn’t doing. He could not bring himself to sit still on the beach. When he joined Mom and me—I had to remain in the cabana’s shade—he did not read like her or even swim with his shirt on, like I had to, because he never took his shirt off. “The sand gets stuck between my toes,” he said to Mom. His black bathing trunks showed off his pelican legs. He nodded at the water. “Beautiful view,” he said, rattling the ice cubes in his plastic ’Tween Waters Inn cup. “What are you reading?” he asked Mom.