Sara Jaffe
Dryland
To my parents, for celebrating me when
I succeeded and letting me feel free to fail
DRYLAND
ON THE COVER of Swimmers’ World was a swimming guy’s face obscured by splashes. On Swimming Monthly a coach in a rose garden. The smell of cigars stuffed the air at Rich’s News, and beneath it, a note of stale trading-card gum. On the wall, a sign said No Reading. Rich, if it was Rich, unpacked cigars behind the counter, ignoring me. My monthly or so spot-check of swimming magazines consisted of a practiced skimming: contents, capsules, photos. The cover of Poolside had a blond diver toweling off. If Rich took my skimming as reading and called me out, it would be easy to say I’d been looking for something, and if Rich said, For what? Rich wouldn’t.
Next to me, a guy was working. He was pulling magazines off the rack, tearing off their covers, and throwing the magazines and the covers into two piles on the floor. I’d gotten through Swimming Monthly and had just picked up Poolside. The guy said, Poolside, right on. You’re a swimmer?
I’d never seen him before. One of the things about coming to Rich’s was that nobody who knew me went there. Being at Rich’s was like being nowhere. I said, I’m not.
He said, You look like you could be.
I didn’t look like anything — my jeans and my raincoat and my flannel and my henley. I said, I’m not.
He said, Right on.
I said, Are you?
He laughed. He touched a bead on a cord around his neck. He had skaterish hair and he was older than me, my brother’s age, maybe. He said, Not me. He said, Sorry to interrupt your reading. He smiled like he knew me.
I said, I’m not reading.
He laughed. He said, That sign’s just there for the guys who come in to read porn. He made quotes with his fingers when he said read.
The back wall was all magazines in plastic with their titles popping out above blank sheets of paper. A few men stood in front of them. Should someone who didn’t know me be talking to me about pornos? Should he be talking like he knew me and making quotes with his fingers? The men at the back wall shouldn’t, it seemed, be doing what they were doing in public — scoping pornos behind plastic, hard-ons squirming in their pants.
My finger marked Poolside’s centerfold. The guy was still standing right there, as if he had something else to say to me. I turned the pages as fast as I could, barely looking, defeating my purpose. Goggled eyes, ripped abs, smashed boobs flashed by. Swimmers stroked down lanes and water splashed up and hid their faces. The guy ripped off a cover and tossed it in a pile. Any minute he could ask me what I was looking for.
RICH’S WAS ONLY a few blocks up from the River Market. It was raining, surprise. Two rainy days in a row in November meant it wouldn’t let up until June. This was the third day. Not that the rain bothered me. Erika showed up and we put up our hoods and walked around the vendors. Neither of us was going to buy anything. Erika wanted to look at the Fimo beads. She looked at a purple and green bead on a brown leather cord and said, I could totally make that. Erika’s mom made jewelry that she sometimes sold at the River Market. Erika had used her mom’s beading stuff to make me a seed-bead necklace that was as nice as any for sale in the stalls. The prices at the market had gone up or the things we liked now were more expensive — the Guatemala backpacks and the earflap hats. We went because it was what we did, something to do on a Saturday. We got noodles or kettle corn. Erika wanted to go eat our yakisoba by the fountain.
I said, It’s raining.
She said, We’ll stand under the awning by the coffee shop. She wanted to watch the skater boys doing tricks on their skateboards by the fountain. There were signs that said No Skateboarding but nobody stopped them. Other skaterish boys and girls stood around smoking.
Erika said, Don’t you love the smell of cloves?
A couple of the skaters had brown cigarettes. All I could smell was the tobacco from the regular cigarettes. I said, They smell good.
She said, Maybe I should start smoking them. I bet they’re not as bad for you as regular cigarettes. She said, But I wouldn’t know how to buy them.
I said, You could ask one of those kids, knowing she wouldn’t. Or expecting she wouldn’t, who knew, she might. She was the one who wanted to stand in the rain and watch these kids skate and smoke cloves. It was generous of me to watch them with her.
The skaters rode their skateboards up on the cement rim of the fountain. Erika said, Do you think that one is cute? I mean, hot?
I said, The one with the pants?
She said, With the purple sweatshirt.
His pants were stupid too, but not as stupid as the other one’s. Purple sweatshirt kept flicking his hair out of his eyes while he was trying to jump his skateboard up on the rim. Erika said, Don’t you think it’s cute how he keeps flicking his hair?
To me flicking hair wasn’t something to call cute or not cute. I said, Sure.
Erika said, You don’t have to think so just because I think so.
I said, Okay.
She said, Which one do you think is the cutest?
They all looked fine. It really was stupid that skaters had huge pants and hair in front of their faces when they were trying to do something graceful. The guy at Rich’s hadn’t looked like a skater. He’d looked like what, a college student? A guitar player? I pointed to one with slightly smaller pants and a black-and-green flannel and brown hair back in a baseball cap. He was skating around the fountain in circles, smoothly dodging benches and trash and other skaters.
Erika said, Don’t point! She said, He is cute. He looks like a little rascal. You like that type.
Whatever that meant. My guy rolled to a stop and stretched his arms. He took off his baseball cap and his long hair went down past his shoulders. It was long, soft-looking hair for a guy. It wasn’t a guy. It was suddenly so obviously not a guy. My face felt hot and I wanted to take off my raincoat and my flannel. I didn’t move. The girl went and sat down on the bench and took off her flannel, and in her T-shirt you could definitely tell she had boobs. It was embarrassing how much like a girl she looked. The guy with the stupidest pants came over and sat down next to her, close to her, and then leaned in his head and kissed her. They were frenching, going at it, right there on the bench at the fountain. None of their friends noticed or looked. The guy and the girl were mouthing each other to pieces in the rain. The girl’s hand went for the huge crotch of the guy’s stupid pants. Erika said, Whoa. If she said anything to me about how that was the person I picked, I’d be ready for her. I’d blame it on the girl. I’d blame it on the stupid skater clothing. I would say, what was it people said, They should get a room. Erika’s guy flicked his hair and took a speeding leap up onto the rim of the fountain and sailed off. Now it was really raining.
MY DAD PASSED me a drumstick and my mom took some slices of white meat. My dad asked how the market had been. My mom asked if I’d bought anything. These were ideas of questions, the sort of paper airplanes of questions my parents felt obligated to lob in my direction over dinner. I could catch them, crumple them, lob them back.
I said, It’s gotten too expensive. In my parents’ minds the River Market still ran along the river and only sold driftwood and soap. All they could do was take my word for it. I said, A lot of that stuff I could make myself.
I pulled the skin off my drumstick with my teeth. My mind kept veering to the skaters frenching on the bench, to their sloppy tongues, her hand swatting at his crotch. To how the skater girl had been a boy until she wasn’t. My mind went to the instant I saw her boobs through her shirt and realized. It was like the photo at the back of The Elephant Man that I couldn’t stop myself from turning to again and again as if to make sure it was still as horrible, or to make sure that it hadn’t gotten more horrible since I’d seen it last. Maybe I was over the River Market. Maybe Erika and I only went there because we went there, or I only went there because Erika asked me to go.