On Tuesday morning, Betty, Allen, and Jamie sat on Renee’s bed and watched her assemble her last-minute things.
“Farrah,” Renee snapped, “don’t come in my room while I’m gone. Ever. No matter what.”
“She has her own room, honey,” Betty said. “Why are you worried about your room?”
“Why do you call her Farrah?” Allen asked.
“After Farrah Fawcett,” Jamie said, “because of my hair.”
“Because of her wish-hair,” Renee said.
“Farrah Fawcett? That blond girl?” Allen said.
“She has awfully big nipples,” Betty said. “Did you see that poster?”
“Mom!” Renee said. “How can you talk about someone’s nipples?!”
“Well, honey, it’s impossible not to notice them.”
“I still don’t understand why you call your sister Farrah,” Allen said. “She doesn’t have big nipples.”
“Dad!” Renee was almost screaming. “You are inappropriate!” Jamie slouched over and glanced down at her chest. She had never really thought about her nipples. Lately she’d been spending extensive time examining her face in the bathroom mirror (looking at smiles, profiles, up and down angles), trying to see herself the way Joseph may have, or the way Flip Jenkins might. But she had yet to scrutinize her body with the same thoroughness. Jamie’s flesh was still new to her, she was just starting to understand how it felt. But now that the idea had been put forth, Jamie knew that later that day she would be in the mirror looking at her nipples and wondering how they compared to other people’s, or what Joseph would have thought had he seen them, or what, if the day ever came, Flip Jenkins would think.
Betty continued laughing at Allen’s nipple comment.
“And don’t wear my clothes,” Renee said.
“They don’t fit me,” Jamie said. “You’re like a kid’s size twelve.”
“Mom! Do you see how she torments me?” Renee asked.
“I wasn’t tormenting her, I was stating a fact!”
“Well, you are a kid’s twelve, aren’t you, dear?”
“I can fit into some size fourteens, okay? Now can we change the subject?”
“I’m a size five in juniors,” Jamie said.
“Mom! Do you hear her?!”
“So she’s a size five,” Allen said. “What do you care?”
“I can’t wait to be away from here,” Renee huffed.
On the drive home from the airport Jamie reminded her parents about her date the following night.
“Are we supposed to know who Flip Jenkins is?” Allen asked.
“I guess not,” Jamie said.
“Is he cute?” Betty asked.
“He’s a total fox,” Jamie said.
“Cool,” Betty said.
“Do I have a curfew?” Jamie asked. “I mean, is there like some time I should tell him he has to have me home?”
“Why would you want a curfew?” Allen asked.
“I don’t want one, I just thought you’d want one.”
“Why would we want one if you don’t want one?” Betty said.
“I just thought you’d want to keep track of me since I’m going to be with a boy, like, on a real date and all.”
“Jesus, Jamie,” Allen said, “you’re fourteen years old now.
You can keep track of yourself.”
“Well, how about if I wake you up when I get home, so you know I got in okay?”
“Honey, you woke us enough when you were a baby,”
Betty said. “Just let us sleep, you can tell us you got in okay in the morning.”
“All right, whatever.”
“When did you say this date was?” Betty asked.
“Tomorrow night,” Jamie said.
“Dad and I won’t even be home,” Betty said. “We’re going grunion hunting with Leon and Lois.”
“Well, what time will you be home?”
“I dunno, three, four in the morning.”
“Mom! Please be home by midnight. I don’t want to come home to an empty house!”
“So stay out past three.”
“Mom!”
“The door will be unlocked,” Allen said.
“That’s the problem,” Jamie said. “Anyone could go in the house while we’re all gone, and then I’d be the first one home and so I’d be the one who’d get murdered by the intruder.”
“For crissakes,” Allen sighed, “have you ever even heard of an intruder in this town?”
“Honey, why don’t you just sleep at a friend’s house?
That way someone will be there when you get home.”
“But Tammy and Debbie have eleven o’clock curfews.
I don’t want to tell Flip Jenkins that I have to be back at eleven o’clock.”
“Sleep at Flip’s house then,” Allen said, and he and Betty laughed.
“Dad! I’m not going to have a sleepover for a first date!”
“So take a key and lock the door,” Allen said.
“But you’ll probably be leaving after I leave on my date so you’ll have to remember to lock it,” Jamie said.
“Fine,” Allen said, “we’ll lock the house. You unlock it when you get home from your date.”
“But what if I forget the key and then I’m locked out till four in the morning when you get home?” Betty turned around in her seat and looked at her daughter. Allen was shaking his head.
“There are no intruders,” Betty said with finality. “You’ll come home when the date is over and your father and I may or may not be home already.”
Debbie and Tammy were on Jamie’s bed waiting with her for the arrival of Flip Jenkins. Jamie wore a red-and-white-striped sailor shirt that belonged to Debbie, Renee’s size-fourteen white pants, which were so small Jamie had to lie on her back and let Debbie and Tammy work the zipper in the same way one would close an overstuffed suitcase, and Renee’s Famolare shoes.
“You look perfect,” Debbie said.
“You look the best you could possibly look,” Tammy said.
Jamie jumped off her bed and went to the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. If this was her best, she thought, what exactly did it look like? Her face appeared as a blur in the mirror: a smudge of freckles, a smear of white teeth.
“Are you sure this is okay?” Jamie asked. “I mean, like, is my best any good at all or is my best, like, you know, like if you told a retarded kid he did the best he could on a spelling test but the test was all three letter words?”
“What are you talking about?” Tammy asked, and at that moment the doorbell rang.
“Stay here!” Jamie commanded, before running downstairs to answer the door.
Flip Jenkins was in jeans and a white T-shirt. His skin
was brown, like a deer, his hair was white and frothy, like ocean foam, and his eyes were blue polished stones.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Jamie said, and she stood in the doorway staring at Flip Jenkins. She had no idea what happened on a date after you said hey.
“Should I come in and meet your parents before we go?”
“Uh . . . ” Jamie rewound a film in her head, trying to remember if her mother was dressed or not.
Allen walked out of his study and wandered toward the kitchen.
“Dad!”
Allen looked up as if Jamie had interrupted his thoughts.
“This is Flip.”
“Are you collecting for the newspaper?”
“No, Dad, he’s my . . .” Jamie couldn’t bring herself to say
“date” as it suddenly occurred to her that maybe she’d been mistaken and it wasn’t a date, maybe it was a get-together, maybe he was just giving her a ride to a party.
“Don’t you have a date tonight?” Allen asked.
“Dad, I’m going to be hanging out with Flip tonight.” Flip stepped into the house and took three loping steps with his hand out toward Allen. Jamie was afraid Allen wouldn’t respond correctly, wouldn’t shake his hand, or—
worse—would hug him, instead.
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Flip said.
“Call me Allen.” Allen shook his hand but pulled his head back away from Flip. Jamie knew he didn’t believe in that kind of formality—he found it insincere; Flip was actually losing points with a method that had likely been a clear winner thus far in his dating experience.
“So, like, what time should I have Jamie home, Allen?”
“I guess you should have her home when you think your date is over.”
“Oh . . . uh.” Flip was smiling, flitting his eyes back and forth between Jamie and Allen. Jamie imagined him sorting through the mental Rolodex in his head, trying to find the best response to this situation.
“My parents are going grunion hunting,” Jamie said, “so they won’t be here to check on me.”
“Cool,” Flip said. “I love grunion hunting.”
“Well, you should meet us at the beach, then,” Allen said. “The grunion will probably come out sometime after midnight. We’ve got buckets and everything.”
“Where are you doing the hunting?” Flip asked, and there was an audible gasp from someplace behind the upstairs banister.
“East Beach,” Allen said. “We’ll be there till three or four in the morning.”
Allen smiled and wandered toward the kitchen.
“Bye, Dad!” Jamie cringed at the cheerfulness in her voice.
She hoped Flip hadn’t noticed how forced her words were, how she was, at that moment, trying to act like she was the normal daughter of a normal father. People her sister would love to be related to.
“Have fun,” Allen said, and he walked out of sight.
“See you at East Beach, Allen,” Flip called after him.
Flip and Jamie sat in the battered Volkswagen bus, parked in the back row of the drive-in theater. There was a case of Heineken on the floor of the backseat and a picnic dinner in a wicker basket on the floor between them. In all her imaginings of dating, Jamie had never even fathomed that a
boy might bring a picnic to a movie. Jamie wanted the date to be over only so she could tell Tammy and Debbie about it—how Flip had pulled out two blue-and-white-checked napkins and laid one on each of their laps. How he had set up her plate of food first: chicken breast, corn on the cob, and a dinner roll, before setting up his own plate. How he had opened Jamie’s beer, then snapped the metal top with his thumb and middle finger so it went sailing across the bus, hitting the back window.
Mother, Jugs & Speed played on the giant screen. Bill Cosby was in the movie so they both expected to laugh, but never did. Jamie sat up straight and tried to arrange her face so it looked like she was watching the film, but really all she could think about was if she had cheesy-looking corn bits mashed into her teeth, if she should finish everything on her plate to flatter Flip (even though she had no appetite), or if the button on her pants was going to pop off if she took just one more sip of beer. Flip was hunched over his plate, eyes turned up toward the screen, holding his roll with his left hand while he lifted chicken or corn with his right hand. Every now and then he turned to Jamie and said something short and quick, like “Did you ever see Bill Cosby’s TV show?” To which she answered, “Uh huh. He’s funny.” Every time Raquel Welch came on the screen Jamie felt small and bland, like a boiled Idaho potato. She worried that Flip would look up at Raquel, look back at Jamie, and wonder why she was sitting in his VW bus when someone more like Raquel would fit in much better. But he didn’t seem interested in Raquel, he seemed interested in Jamie, as she silently gnawed at her meal.
“Did you make this food?” Jamie asked, after finally finishing everything on her plate.
“My mother made it,” Flip said. “She’s, like, totally into doing anything to make me happy.”
“Cool,” Jamie said.
“Your dad seems cool,” Flip said.
“Yeah, I guess he is.”
“Should we meet them grunion hunting?”
“Uh, if you want to.” Jamie wondered if the addition of her parents made her an attractive package.
Flip opened his third beer while Jamie worked on her first. She had tasted beer before, but had never drunk a whole bottle. When her Heineken was three quarters gone Jamie felt so bloated that she imagined untying her belly button and deflating her stomach with one long, slow hiss.
“Another brewhaha?” Flip asked.
Jamie was shaking her head no when Flip leaned over and kissed her: deliberately, intently. She was unsure of what to do with the beer bottle in her hand, if she should put her arms around him while still holding it or if she should try to put it down somewhere. She could feel Flip’s beer cold against her back.
“Come on,” Flip said, and he took Jamie’s hand and led her to the bench seat in the back. She left her beer on the floor by the front seat as she climbed into the back and settled into a body-engaged kiss. Flip’s bus smelled like tar and surf wax, his breath smelled like chicken and beer, his body smelled warm and musky, like the sun. Jamie felt like she was melting—oozing into the seat, into his chest, into his lap. There was a sound track to this extended kiss: the blaring, hollow, horn whines from Mother, Jugs & Speed, Bill Cosby’s stilted drawl, and Raquel Welch’s airy whisper. This kiss was like the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland: a scary thrill.
When it felt like seconds had passed, or perhaps hours ( Jamie’s sense of time as well as her senses of smell and touch seemed new to her, as if she were just figuring out how to use them), Flip sat up and centered the top button of his jeans at his waist.
“Should we go grunion hunting?”
“Uh . . . uh . . . okay.” Jamie felt she would go anywhere and do anything with Flip; asking what she wanted seemed pointless.
“You ever been before?”
“No,” Jamie said. “My parents go with a couple of their friends every year but I’ve always been home sleeping while they do it.”
“It’s so cool. You’ll flip out . . . ” and then Flip laughed.
“Get it? Flip out?”
“Oh yeah,” Jamie panted, “your name.” And she realized just then that she was already flipped out—she was both herself and someone totally new to herself, someone who was frothing with a happiness she had never before felt.
“The grunion,” Flip said, “they just, like, come streaking out of the water, like these silver flashes . . . you know, and you just, like, you just snatch them and put them in a bucket and then you take them home, fry them up in a pan with some butter, and they taste, like, so good.”
“I hate fish,” Jamie said, but what she was really thinking is how strange it was that her body was fizzing, carbonated somehow, simply by listening to Flip Jenkins talk about frying grunion.