Exposed
Sherri Alms
Word Count 928
The beach towel flapped around my shoulders and my sandals slapped the dirt between the rows of gravestones, some fallen, lying like gray bodies in the young green grass as I took the shortcut to the cemetery on my way to the pool. The sounds of kids screaming and laughing and adults yelling floated through the trees.
I went through the ritual of gaining entrance to the fenced-in pool, showing my pass, turning past the desk to the women's showers, putting my denim cut-offs and t-shirt in my bag on a bench, showering in my bathing suit, the first bikini I ever owned, white with red, green, yellow, and blue stripes, a halter top that tied around my neck and modest bottoms okayed by my mom. Trying not to think of all the ways my body wasn't perfect. Grabbing the towel to wrap around my waist.
In the brazen sunlight, I squinted to find my friends, Pam and Karen, and a few other girls from school we hung out with. There they were, towels stretched out in the sun near the diving board. The pool was a mosaic of bodies and turquoise water. Little kids ran everywhere followed by warnings from their parents and the lifeguards. “No running!” “Did you hear me? Stop.” “Walk or you will have to leave the pool.” Water droplets from splashing swimmers shimmered and rained down, turning the pavement to pewter.
“Hey,” I yelled. “Hey, Pam, Karen, I’m here.” They looked up and moved over to make room for my towel. “We got here an hour ago. Where have you been?” “Slept late. Anything happen?” “No, the boys just got here.” A group of boys in our freshmen class that we flirted with sometimes and other times turned our bare backs to, whispering ostentatiously with hands hiding our mouths. I squirted Coppertone on my arms and legs, tanning lotion that promised gold-washed skin and a trail of men following, with not a single warning about skin cancer. I sank into the towel, welcomed the hard, warm cement beneath, like a fish who is happy to be caught and slapped down on the pier. What it was to be a teenage girl in the mid-1970s, learning the hardness of boys, of men.
Our routine did not vary that day from all the other glorious days of that job-free summer. We turned and baked and turned again. “Let’s go in the water,” one of us would say and we would jump all at the same time into an open space in the deep end, the water closing over our sinking bodies for seven seconds until we bobbed up again, spitting and shaking our heads. We turned somersaults and splashed each other. Then splashed any of those boys who approached, usually flirtatiously enough to keep them coming back. We dived off the diving board, joining the long lines of young summer bodies ready for the cold shock of water.
By three or four we were hungry and ready to go home, though I was hoping my brother had gotten stuck folding the clean laundry my mom had promised would be waiting for me. “Let’s go to the convenience store. I want an Icee,” Pam said. “Yes! A coke Icee.” They were my favorite. We got cheese crackers and peanut m&ms and ate them sitting on the low wall between the store and the gas station. “Ugh, I’m sweaty,” Karen jumped up and dug out her t-shirt. It was time to go home. We walked the block to the corner near the woods with the old cemetery. A car pulled up as if the driver was going to park and then stopped. It was a boxy car like the mustard yellow Dodge Dart my dad drove, white, I thought, even more boring than my dad’s. A man with gray hair was driving, of course, who else would drive a car like that? He leaned out, “Girls, I need directions. Can you help me?”
We moved toward his open window, lowering our sun-browned faces, Bonne Bell glossed smiles, trying to be helpful, then seeing his lap and what he exposed there. We swayed in confusion, silent butterflies pinned to the curb. Should we be nice? Or run? One of the three of us finally saying, "I'm sorry, we can't help you." Sheepish with uncertainty. We took the first step away. Then we ran, towels blown back by the wind like capes.
We never told anyone, only talked among ourselves, compared stories with the other girls at the pool who had also been beckoned. We whispered, “He had gray hair and crooked teeth.” “His car was light blue, wasn’t it?” “No, it wasn’t, it was tan, just like the one my Aunt Betty has. That’s why I walked to the window.” “I only went over because I couldn’t hear what he said.” We all had a reason why we weren’t to blame, embarrassment oily on our tongues, clinging to the inside of our mouths, as if it would always be there.
It did not occur to us to wonder if we were the ones who should hold the shame in our bodies. Instead, we wrapped our beach towels tightly around those bodies perfect, like the first summer peaches, and hung our heads so the sun could not kiss our faces. We did not tell. We never would, only hurry now through the cemetery, late afternoon light diluted by trees, listening for a male voice to beckon us into the cool shade beyond the gravestones.
Sherri has been a freelance writer for more than twenty years. She recently began writing creative nonfiction. Her essays have been published in Wild Greens Magazine, Five Minutes, and A Plate of Pandemic. After years of urban life in Washington, DC, and Baltimore, she now lives with her husband and two cats in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.