Why is it that plants get to take in all this sunlight, turn it into food even, and the three of us are sitting here absorbing nothing more than various shades of burning, possibly even cancer? Black black cancer, that acrid charcoal. I could tell you all about it, and how we're never going to find a cure because we all know somebody with cancer, and god help us if medicine isn't the fashionably late stranger to the party. My ex called me a cynic. My father was a smoker.
"For chrissakes, Mara, you're burning up!"
Nina decided to bring her girlfriend today, and for once, I wasn't the palest one, the one peeling bits of skin off my shoulders by the end of the day. Watching Nina apply sunscreen onto Mara struck me as something less than the lesbian fantasy captured within frat house posters, and was rather a fairly eerie process. It is like when you watch actors taking off their make up backstage, wiping a ghost off their faces and shaking them back into the air of the theatre, to be resummoned and reapplied for the next audience.
Well, I suppose it was like that in reverse, watching Mara's white skin smudge whiter.
"I don't know, maybe we should all get as much sun as we can now. And then we'll have that nice burn to keep us warm when the rain hits on Thursday."
"It's going to rain on Thursday?"
"All through the weekend."
"Ah! No shit, I have to run to campus on Thursday to drop off a paper. Maybe I'll take the bus. Are you sure it's going to rain, Thomas? Where did you read that?"
"I think Ted told me at work yesterday."
"I saw it online too, Nina."
"Well goddamn, summer's really over then, isn't it?"
"It's been over for a few weeks now, hasn't it? Isn't it the twenty-first or something when it switches over?"
"I think so."
"Screw the calendar; you can't tell me that this is autumn sunlight. And who goes to the beach in the fall, right?"
"Well, I guess that would be us."
"And this isn't a beach. It's a lake. You can't have a beach unless you're on the ocean."
The last time Nina had gotten sunburned was when she went with her family to Sri Lanka. In fact, it might have been the only time she got burned in her entire life. There is a sneaking temptation to make a joke about her people being bred to be immune to the sun, but for one, I had already made that joke this morning, and for two, I had the realization that it was probably a little less than a joke. My only inheritance was scuffed up Honda, bestowed on me as encouragement to pack my belongings and move somewhere to make something of life, and have it make something of me.
I lived in that car for a month and a half trying to get there. And when I was halfway to where I was going, I made a phone call to an answering machine and doubled backed, making a beeline for the start of the story, towards the happy hand holding, the first tentative kisses that are felt out with the lips, before we could taste on each other's tongues the sustenance that keeps us alive. She must have tasted on me that black, acrid decay of a bummed Parliament Light before she flung herself across the continent, tasting, herself, ever so slightly of cheap strawberry vodka.
-I know my mom is an alcoholic, she said, and I shouldn't be saying this, but your dad died of lung cancer. Do you really want to be smoking as well?
-Fuck off. He was an alcoholic too, I said as I finished the bottle.
Nina was in the water, treading about with nebulous intentions, deliberating on whether or not she wanted to swim or stand, keep her head above or below, billow up with the passing waves or meet them stiffly like a Dutch dike.
"You don't swim, Thomas?"
"Rather, I swam too much: swim team. The problem is I don't know how to do anything else. I forgot how to really enjoy being in the water a while ago."
"How long ago were you a swimmer?"
"Oh man, I don't even know. High school? I just haven't gone back to the water since then, really."
That was a lie. I had gone to the beach, the real beach, courtesy of Estella's family after graduation, where we had had White Russians in the condo and listened to Elvis Costello. We didn't change our clothes for the entire week.
"What about you? You not a big swimmer either?"
"Hm, I guess I haven't really thought about it too much. It doesn't appeal to me, but doesn't really bother me either, I guess. I didn't bring my swimsuit today though."
Estella and I were busted by the beach cops for skinny dipping at 3 in the morning. They warned us about the riptides pulling out seasoned swimmers and the moustached one gave me a buddy-buddy nudge as we ran back to the condo. We went straight to bed naked and slept on the wet sheets for the rest of the week.
"I think they dump all sorts of trash into the lake as well. It's kind of gross."
"Yeah, I heard about that. I keep telling Nina she's going to get some horrible disease from being in that water, but she doesn't really seem to care."
I had humoured my parents before my dad died, by going with them to the Phillipines for their 25th anniversary. It was the dead of winter and all I had on me were the books and printed out essays I needed for my research paper. My mom had a somewhat disappointed look about her, but must have decided to not let it stop her as she spent the rest of the week drinking rum in the giant sandcastle she commissioned some 8 year-olds to build her, and eating at the various Mongolian barbeques by night. My dad gave me some cash, which I spent at the poorly-ventilated internet cafe writing disjointed emails half a day into the past.
I finally gave in to my mom's insistence that I try the terrific fresh seafood halfway through the trip, being utterly fed up trying to explain vegetarianism to the vendors, who had learned only enough English to pander to the tourists on the island that outnumbered them a dozen to one. As expected, I got not quite deathly ill, but I could make out death on the horizon, it seemed.
Nina was drying off her hair and changing out of her swimsuit, attracting more than a few glances from a Hispanic family down the shore, as well as an elderly Asian family feeding some seagulls.
"Have you ever realized that this beach is usually totally the ethnic beach?"
"It's not a beach, Nina."
"Whatever, babe."
Watching them kiss made me wonder if Estella and I had ever been that sincere. I don't know it was just us or not, but I don't think I was ever as natural at it as Nina and Mara were. It's like they had it all figured out, and knew how to make it count, or if not, were willing to overlook the dark alleys of their doubts, and walk under the bright streetlights of the time they had together.
"So who moved in with who?"
"Ha ha. We still have our own places, thanks."
"While Nina's finishing up school anyway, right?"
"Oh, way to give the game away. So yeah, yeah, we'll be the U-Haul lesbians, but I'm allergic to cats, so don't count on that."
"And I like dogs better anyway."
"No dogs either! It's too close to having children."
-You're burning up, Thomas, my mom said as she put a damp hand towel over my forehead. God knows where she found a thermometer in the Phillipines. Her hands felt soft and cool against my skin, despite the callouses from playing the cello.
Mara's recital was in a few weeks, and it was her big fall performance, the last proving ground before her college would relinquish to her her due degree. Nina had nearly gotten fired from her part-time job trying to get that evening off.
-Aw, damn the man. You know I'd go even if they fired me.
None of us knew if Mara was going to get her visa renewed after graduating. Nina joked about her screwing up on purpose, but I suppose that it is some seriously bad juju to talk about that kind of thing. And in all honesty, Mara was good, too good to force herself to underperform. The first time she had played for us in her living room, it was if each wavering note had trickled down our ear canals and set fire to the kindling in our chests.
Summer was burning itself out, us smouldering along with it, leaving blackened husks to wait for its inevitable return the coming year, complete with new ultimatums of reigniting myself or finally collapsing inwards into the tarry darkness of my heaving lungs.
"For chrissakes, Mara, you're burning up!"
Nina decided to bring her girlfriend today, and for once, I wasn't the palest one, the one peeling bits of skin off my shoulders by the end of the day. Watching Nina apply sunscreen onto Mara struck me as something less than the lesbian fantasy captured within frat house posters, and was rather a fairly eerie process. It is like when you watch actors taking off their make up backstage, wiping a ghost off their faces and shaking them back into the air of the theatre, to be resummoned and reapplied for the next audience.
Well, I suppose it was like that in reverse, watching Mara's white skin smudge whiter.
"I don't know, maybe we should all get as much sun as we can now. And then we'll have that nice burn to keep us warm when the rain hits on Thursday."
"It's going to rain on Thursday?"
"All through the weekend."
"Ah! No shit, I have to run to campus on Thursday to drop off a paper. Maybe I'll take the bus. Are you sure it's going to rain, Thomas? Where did you read that?"
"I think Ted told me at work yesterday."
"I saw it online too, Nina."
"Well goddamn, summer's really over then, isn't it?"
"It's been over for a few weeks now, hasn't it? Isn't it the twenty-first or something when it switches over?"
"I think so."
"Screw the calendar; you can't tell me that this is autumn sunlight. And who goes to the beach in the fall, right?"
"Well, I guess that would be us."
"And this isn't a beach. It's a lake. You can't have a beach unless you're on the ocean."
The last time Nina had gotten sunburned was when she went with her family to Sri Lanka. In fact, it might have been the only time she got burned in her entire life. There is a sneaking temptation to make a joke about her people being bred to be immune to the sun, but for one, I had already made that joke this morning, and for two, I had the realization that it was probably a little less than a joke. My only inheritance was scuffed up Honda, bestowed on me as encouragement to pack my belongings and move somewhere to make something of life, and have it make something of me.
I lived in that car for a month and a half trying to get there. And when I was halfway to where I was going, I made a phone call to an answering machine and doubled backed, making a beeline for the start of the story, towards the happy hand holding, the first tentative kisses that are felt out with the lips, before we could taste on each other's tongues the sustenance that keeps us alive. She must have tasted on me that black, acrid decay of a bummed Parliament Light before she flung herself across the continent, tasting, herself, ever so slightly of cheap strawberry vodka.
-I know my mom is an alcoholic, she said, and I shouldn't be saying this, but your dad died of lung cancer. Do you really want to be smoking as well?
-Fuck off. He was an alcoholic too, I said as I finished the bottle.
Nina was in the water, treading about with nebulous intentions, deliberating on whether or not she wanted to swim or stand, keep her head above or below, billow up with the passing waves or meet them stiffly like a Dutch dike.
"You don't swim, Thomas?"
"Rather, I swam too much: swim team. The problem is I don't know how to do anything else. I forgot how to really enjoy being in the water a while ago."
"How long ago were you a swimmer?"
"Oh man, I don't even know. High school? I just haven't gone back to the water since then, really."
That was a lie. I had gone to the beach, the real beach, courtesy of Estella's family after graduation, where we had had White Russians in the condo and listened to Elvis Costello. We didn't change our clothes for the entire week.
"What about you? You not a big swimmer either?"
"Hm, I guess I haven't really thought about it too much. It doesn't appeal to me, but doesn't really bother me either, I guess. I didn't bring my swimsuit today though."
Estella and I were busted by the beach cops for skinny dipping at 3 in the morning. They warned us about the riptides pulling out seasoned swimmers and the moustached one gave me a buddy-buddy nudge as we ran back to the condo. We went straight to bed naked and slept on the wet sheets for the rest of the week.
"I think they dump all sorts of trash into the lake as well. It's kind of gross."
"Yeah, I heard about that. I keep telling Nina she's going to get some horrible disease from being in that water, but she doesn't really seem to care."
I had humoured my parents before my dad died, by going with them to the Phillipines for their 25th anniversary. It was the dead of winter and all I had on me were the books and printed out essays I needed for my research paper. My mom had a somewhat disappointed look about her, but must have decided to not let it stop her as she spent the rest of the week drinking rum in the giant sandcastle she commissioned some 8 year-olds to build her, and eating at the various Mongolian barbeques by night. My dad gave me some cash, which I spent at the poorly-ventilated internet cafe writing disjointed emails half a day into the past.
I finally gave in to my mom's insistence that I try the terrific fresh seafood halfway through the trip, being utterly fed up trying to explain vegetarianism to the vendors, who had learned only enough English to pander to the tourists on the island that outnumbered them a dozen to one. As expected, I got not quite deathly ill, but I could make out death on the horizon, it seemed.
Nina was drying off her hair and changing out of her swimsuit, attracting more than a few glances from a Hispanic family down the shore, as well as an elderly Asian family feeding some seagulls.
"Have you ever realized that this beach is usually totally the ethnic beach?"
"It's not a beach, Nina."
"Whatever, babe."
Watching them kiss made me wonder if Estella and I had ever been that sincere. I don't know it was just us or not, but I don't think I was ever as natural at it as Nina and Mara were. It's like they had it all figured out, and knew how to make it count, or if not, were willing to overlook the dark alleys of their doubts, and walk under the bright streetlights of the time they had together.
"So who moved in with who?"
"Ha ha. We still have our own places, thanks."
"While Nina's finishing up school anyway, right?"
"Oh, way to give the game away. So yeah, yeah, we'll be the U-Haul lesbians, but I'm allergic to cats, so don't count on that."
"And I like dogs better anyway."
"No dogs either! It's too close to having children."
-You're burning up, Thomas, my mom said as she put a damp hand towel over my forehead. God knows where she found a thermometer in the Phillipines. Her hands felt soft and cool against my skin, despite the callouses from playing the cello.
Mara's recital was in a few weeks, and it was her big fall performance, the last proving ground before her college would relinquish to her her due degree. Nina had nearly gotten fired from her part-time job trying to get that evening off.
-Aw, damn the man. You know I'd go even if they fired me.
None of us knew if Mara was going to get her visa renewed after graduating. Nina joked about her screwing up on purpose, but I suppose that it is some seriously bad juju to talk about that kind of thing. And in all honesty, Mara was good, too good to force herself to underperform. The first time she had played for us in her living room, it was if each wavering note had trickled down our ear canals and set fire to the kindling in our chests.
Summer was burning itself out, us smouldering along with it, leaving blackened husks to wait for its inevitable return the coming year, complete with new ultimatums of reigniting myself or finally collapsing inwards into the tarry darkness of my heaving lungs.
