The Nakeds (24 page)

Her mom was visiting with some women across the way and Azeem was in the pool, doing laps. He said he’d be back and that he wanted to play cards with her when he returned. She didn’t know if he really wanted to play with her or if it was a mercy game.

She watched her mom with the other women. She was laughing, hard, her hand reaching up to cover her mouth.

Women’s bodies were still full of secrets, even here,
is what Hannah thought, looking at her mother and the others, the four of them making a half circle around an oak tree. Her mother looked comfortable and happy, happier than she’d looked in weeks. She was laughing again, her head thrown back, at something one of the women said. From Hannah’s blanket, she could see their four very different bodies: short, tall, medium, and incredibly bony, shoulder blades and hip bones jutting out like little plates. They were naked, yes, but exposed only to a point. Men and boys, though, they didn’t have a choice—everything was out there and vulnerable. She turned to watch a pair of men heading toward the volleyball courts. One man’s penis was incredibly large, smacking at his thigh, and the man next to him, who held the white ball under his arm and who was so much taller than Big Dick, had a little tiny thimble of a thing. She wondered if the thimble bothered him, and then thought probably not—he was here, wasn’t he?

She was near enough so that she could make out Azeem, who looked so small, like a miniature man, doing laps in the pool. There were children standing waist-high in the shallow end. A woman wearing a visor sat with her feet dangling in the water. Next to the pool was the Jacuzzi, which was as big as the pool itself. Up the hill and to the right stood the health food stand that her mom had told her served carrot juice and carob milk shakes—all the breads were brown and the fruit fresh. It was a hut with a thatched roof surrounded by little picnic tables. Hannah was restless and decided to go get something. She put her book down and was reaching for her crutches when two naked teenagers appeared at the foot of her blanket. She saw their toes before she saw the rest of them.
Anything but this,
she thought.

They introduced themselves as Mitch and Mica, the twins her mother had talked about.

“Hi,” Mica said, twirling a piece of her dark shiny hair around a finger. “Whatcha doing?” she asked, as if they were any three teenagers anywhere and not two naked ones and one very clothed one with a big cast on her leg. Mica wore nothing but dangly earrings and a choker, a tight necklace made out of turquoise beads. It was pretty, though, and Hannah wished she was a clothed girl instead of a naked girl because then she could stare at the choker without being forced to see the girl’s happy little breasts.

“Hey,” Mitch said, looking right at her. “Want a piece of gum?” He pulled a foil stick from behind his ear.

“No, thanks,” she said.

“Want to smoke some pot?”

She shook her head.

He too had a choker on. It was made of puka shells. Hannah tried not to look at his body, which was lean and hairless and tan.

“Your mom’s a cool woman,” Mica said.

“She told us about your accident. Can’t believe the guy just left you there.” Mitch unwrapped the gum and put it in his mouth. He was chewing loudly and she thought she saw a bubble of spit escape from the side of his mouth.

“It was a long time ago,” Hannah said.

“Yeah, but still,” he said. “People like that should be punished. They’re dangerous. Look what he did to you.”

Hannah didn’t respond. She hated it when people said things like that. It made her think that they were judging her life’s worth. She grabbed her book with one hand and was using her crutches to stand up. She was momentarily eye level with the boy’s penis. She wanted to die. She wanted to be anywhere but there, looking right at it. “I was just leaving,” she finally said. “I’m hungry and I have to study. I’m going to go get something to eat.”

“We’ll go with you,” Mica said, eagerly.

“No, it’s fine. I have some reading to do.” She patted the book for proof.

The twins looked at her, disappointed.

“I’m sorry. I’ve got a test on Monday—summer school,” she lied.

Mitch looked at her skeptically.

“Your mom didn’t mention it,” Mica said.

“I’ve got some really good weed in my bag,” Mitch said.

“Another time,” she said. “I’ll be back another day. It’s OK here. It’s not that bad. We’ll talk then. We’ll smoke then,” she continued, babbling and nervous. She let her weight fall on the crutches and spun around, wondering how long it would take her and if it would be difficult to get up the hill. She took a hop and then another one.

“Want us to wait for you?” the girl said.

“You sure you don’t want us to come along?”

“We can keep you company.”

“No, no, it’s OK. I’ll be back another day,” Hannah said, lying again and, again, hopping away.

•  •  •

Hannah was breathless by the time she reached the snack stand. She could walk pretty far on crutches, but not straight uphill. She looked down and thought she could still see the pushy twins by her blanket. She wondered if her mom knew that her favorite two teenagers in the place were stoner kids and hoped they’d be gone when she returned.

She stood behind several people in line. They were naked and they were hungry. Every butt was different. One woman’s was shaped like a heart. Another looked kind of square, like two boxes or two marshmallows pushed together. A few had pimples on them, but most didn’t. The woman with the heart-shaped butt scratched it without ceremony, as if it were her arm.

Behind the counter, the woman had only one breast, a puckered scar where the other breast had been. She held an orange above a plastic cup, squeezing it into juice. The scar was thick and looked fresh, recent. She wore a blue bandanna as a scarf on her head. Hannah tried not to stare. She knew what it was to be stared at. She tried to imagine what the woman had been through and what she was made of, coming here, to a nudist camp of all places. She wanted to talk to her and believed they could communicate, that they knew some of the same language. What did perfect Mitch and perfect Mica with her pretty blue beads know about any of it?

No one would admit that she might not walk again, but at night she heard her mother and Azeem whispering to each other, or one of them looked at her with a certain kind of pity, and she knew that it was very possible that this cast too would come off and that they’d fit her for a brace and she’d limp and eventually her foot would twist and they’d leave that doctor too and meet another, one with promises or hope, one she was sure to disappoint, one who would inevitably disappoint her.

She didn’t even want to think about her mother’s dream. So what if her leg was skinny when the casts came off? People who’d had broken legs and worn casts for months had told her that the broken legs were always skinnier than the other ones. They said they were surprised, but that within weeks their limbs plumped up, and regardless of her mother’s dream and Azeem’s pessimism, she wanted to believe that.

The woman with only one breast didn’t smile when she handed Hannah her cranberry juice, but she smiled at the regulars she already knew. Hannah sat at a picnic table in front of the hut. She drank her juice and every now and then she’d look up at the woman and try to catch her eye.

A very tall, skinny man stood in line with another man. They looked around thirty, Hannah thought. She watched the skinny man elbow his friend, gesture with his chin at the woman’s scar. When they got to the front of the line, their eyes stayed fixed on the menu board.

Hannah finished her juice and then waited in line again and ordered a cheese sandwich. She thought about asking the woman an innocuous question, but didn’t say anything because the woman barely looked at her as it was. Even when she handed Hannah the sandwich, she did so quickly without thanking her the way she thanked the others. Hannah decided that it was her clothing, her jeans and T-shirt and one shoe, that offended the woman.

Why so hardcore?
she wanted to say.

Aren’t there other, more important things?
she wanted to ask.

She sat down at the table again and ate her sandwich, watching the line shrink, and when no one was there and the woman was alone, she approached her, smiling. She said,
Hey,
and said,
How are you doing?
and said,
What’s it like working here?
and said,
Do you like working here?
and said,
Nice weather
, and said,
My parents come here and begged me to come
.

She wanted to say,
What’s your story?
and
What happened?
and
Did it hurt?
She wanted to tell her about her mother’s dream, about hamburger meat, she wanted to ask the woman how she really felt about all these bodies, about two-breasted women with long life spans and those men who wouldn’t look her in the eye, but if the woman barely acknowledged simple questions like
Do you like working here?
how could Hannah expect to get the answers to the questions that really mattered?

MUSTAFA’S FLIGHT
into LAX had been delayed. It was nearly ten p.m., and after a bland dinner of prewrapped turkey sandwiches, Nina, Azeem, and Hannah had moved to an airport bar. If Nina wasn’t at a party, she rarely drank, yet tonight she was sipping a glass of red wine and already thinking about ordering another.

The airport and the bar were mostly quiet except for the occasional burst of activity when a plane arrived. There was an arrival now, a cluster of travel-weary people with shoulder bags moving past the bar’s big windows, looking for the luggage carrousel. Most of them seemed lost or unsure, following the few who happened to be the first off the plane or the fastest walkers. Nina imagined that the people in front were lost too, perhaps their confidant strides were lies, and they were as confused as the followers. She thought about the open marriage Azeem had promised not to talk about, but was talking about more and more, how certain he was that it would add another dimension to their marriage—an informed cheating, he was calling it. She wondered if she’d eventually cave, if she was nothing but a follower too.

A middle-aged man swatted his screaming toddler’s shoulder, which only made the boy cry harder. A couple of giddy girls, teenagers, obviously excited to be in Los Angeles or excited to be home, walked arm in arm. And a woman as tall and lean as a fashion model powdered her pretty face as she strode past. Nina was thinking that her legs were long and that if Azeem had been looking at her, he’d certainly want to fuck her. And the woman behind her. And the older woman in sweatpants with the long gray hair. And the squat woman with the immovable bob. And her. And her. She knew he wasn’t picky. “I’m attracted to almost everyone,” he’d admitted more than once.

Mustafa was in the sky now, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, heading toward them. He was wearing a bracelet identifying himself in both Arabic and English as an epileptic. She imagined the boy was worried, nervous, and hoping to be cured, his overly optimistic brother promising as much. Nina was thinking that when they brought him home tonight, she’d have his health to worry about along with yet another mouth to feed.

Azeem had expressed concern that the stress of flying might bring about a seizure, a bigger seizure, more intense than all the seizures that had come before, and Nina imagined Mustafa’s fit, his fluttering eyes and flailing limbs, the focus of everyone around him, all eyes on the whipping, jerking boy he’d suddenly become. She pictured him in his traveling clothes, his best slacks and button-down shirt, with instructions in his pocket:
Take off my glasses, loosen my tie, don’t restrain me or put anything in my mouth, put a pillow under my head, please talk to me sweetly when I come back.

Azeem had bought a deck of cards at the magazine shop across the way and he was happily playing gin rummy with Hannah. It was early in the game and already clever Hannah was winning, three aces face-up on the table in front of her. It made sense that they got along so well, Azeem being twenty-eight to Hannah’s fourteen, and Nina being thirty-nine to both of them. They teased each other and joked around like siblings. Sometimes Nina felt like everyone’s mother.

The bar was dimly lit and smelled like popcorn, onions, and beer. The three of them sat at a square table in the corner where the light was best. A band of it came shining out from the back kitchen and lit an area just above the table, hitting their hands and the cards they held. Nina and Azeem sat on one side with a chair between them for Hannah’s outstretched leg. The bottom half of her daughter’s cast rested on the chair, her pinkish toes just a foot or so from Nina’s face. Just the sight of those vulnerable toes was enough to make Nina feel sad.

“It was great to have you with us on Saturday. I know you weren’t comfortable, but it takes time,” Nina said.

“I don’t want to feel comfortable there,” Hannah said.

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad, was it?”

“Not my thing.”

Nina took a big swallow of the wine and looked around the bar.

Azeem glanced at Nina’s glass before focusing again on his cards. “Why are you drinking?”

Nina looked at the wine in front of her, her lipstick stains, some three in a row, a series of insincere smiles. “It tastes good,” she said.

“You OK?” Hannah wanted to know.

“I’m the mother,” she said.

“I’m just asking. Damn.”

“Don’t say
damn,
” Nina said.

“You let me say
fuck,
why can’t I say
damn
?”

Nina sighed. She leaned back in her chair. She thought about getting on a plane herself, going somewhere far away and alone. “Say
damn,
say
fuck,
say whatever you want.”

“Damn,” Hannah said. “Fuck.”

Azeem laughed and Nina shot him a look.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. Then, “Did you tell Hannah not to mention the fact that we’re married?”