Waterpark

We walked into the waterpark and the sun was warm on our necks and shoulders through our shirts and from below our sunglasses came the glare of the blinding white pavement and through the gates the oddity of humans.  Everywhere hordes of slick bodies pranced, shedding water as they moved in chaotic squiggles from ride to ride to towel.  Do the fattest and funniest looking people go to waterparks, or do they simply look fatter and funnier in their skin-tight swimsuits?  We wondered.  These people were everywhere and we were svelte, Gloria and I; young, attractive, toned, but occasionally, here and there, were the men with ripped biceps the size of my head and I watched them watch her and worried that they might steal her away.  I found comfort in my obviously superior intellect (who would want to spend so much time in a gym? Stupid people!) and humor.  Also, a few young attractive women were about, ageless in their suits and sunglasses, or oddly authoritarian in their red one-pieces with whistles hanging from long cords around their brown necks, their sun-bleached hair pulled pack, and I battled constantly beneath my sunglasses not to look and appraise. 

But Gloria made not looking easy, in her running shorts over a blue one-piece, bringing out her blue eyes, unusually exposed from having left her glasses back in the car.  She had round cheeks, a little dip of a chin, and a sharply angled jaw, giving her wide smile and full face room to glow.  Her teeth were wolf-fang white, her nose perfectly straight.  I would steal looks at her, especially her behind, whenever we were in line for rides or walking up steps being forced into single file in the crowds of chirping, dripping children, and surely this is where the particular chivalrous habit of “ladies first” came from, a simple desire to look.  Gloria’s walk was a waltz, a celebration, a masterpiece.  She was short with short brown hair and all curves, a runner, a bit of an exercise addict, really, and her step included an extra half-beat in which to move and swing.  Her hips would rotate to an almost absurd angle when at full stride, and I could see the concentric circles of her body tilting and gyrating with every step. 

We had not had sex, Gloria and I, we were Christians, were waiting for marriage, and alas, would never make it, not with each other, and walking, shunning the tube rental lines, I could feel the sexual pull all over my exposed skin, and all day the music was with me, the soundtrack that accompanies me whenever actual music is not available, the songs that wake me up in the morning, sometimes having not been actually heard in years, sometimes awful, and always I wished there was a way to hear what I wanted to, but this day, this beautifully hot Southern California summer day, the soundtrack was all Beach Boys and Dressy Bessy, everything bouncing and ecstatic.  I was barefoot and had to occasionally sprint when the particular section of pavement proved too much, the frying pan heat reaching through my calloused summer feet and I would race around children and large, fruit shaped men and women to find cool solace on bright blue foam, wet from the giant Pacific Wave Pool or an entrance to the Lazy Nile River. 

Gloria was incredibly outgoing.  She would stop and talk to strangers, and somehow between her stature, smile and accent, it worked with nearly everyone.  The one exception in my experience was my best friend, Buck.  He would tell me later, after we’d broken up, how he never liked her.  We sat out in the sun at a café and somehow Gloria’s name came up and I wondered aloud where she was and what she was doing.  “I hope she’s chewing rocks,” was Bucks reply.  I didn’t, and don’t understand him, except that he believed she’d hide me away, that I’d have to one day ask her permission to hang out with him.  He said he could picture visiting me in Georgia, kids hanging all over me, Gloria giving him a cold eye.  All this was beyond me.  Buck had a rough upbringing. 

With everyone else it was sheer enchantment.  My family loved her, our college ministry director told us that he and his wife agreed we were the cutest couple, and I laughed silently as Gloria and I walked through the town, hand in hand, and passing men would glance at her sheepishly. 

Six weeks or so after the end I collected everything else I could find from her and put it with the rest of stuff in my ‘Gloria’ box; endless notes, everything she’d ever written me, ticket stubs from concerts and movies we’d seen, little quarter machine toys she’d brought me, pictures.  It was all stuffed in a large blue Reeboks shoe box, notes and pictures stacked at uneven angles and I squeezed the lid with her name on top over the mess and held it out in front of me out my front door, around the garage and into the big green-plastic sour smelling rolling trashcan.  I left the smell and the box behind and recircled the house and dusted my palms against each other and that was mother-fucking that.

Things had not been going well between Gloria and I.  We had dated for almost two years and from the beginning there were problems, “issues” we called them.  There was the affection issue.  I would have to kiss her; it rarely happened vice versa.  I would hold her hand in the car while driving and it would be cold and limp, void of return pressure.  On particularly self-tormenting days I would test her by letting go her hand, waiting. 

She also struggled with speaking affectionately to me.  We discovered that the only time she could be truly sweet was when we were apart.  Gloria worked in the fenced-in chaos of a Montessori pre-school, and throughout the weeks and months I would receive long crayoned notes, usually with pictures of what we had done that weekend, snowboarding, hiking, concerts (I tried secretly and desperately to improve her musical tastes, to add Pixies and Pulsars to her DiFranco and Dave), biking, dancing, all rendered in the waxy scents of childhood, but in person, the warmth was one-sided. 

There was also my depression, which she could not handle.  After insomnianic nights I would appear at her apartment in the mornings around six while she was getting ready for work.  I’d come in with the everpresent bags under my red-sad eyes smelling of cigarette smoke, stained with leaky-pen ink and smiling, desperate to see her, to hear a kind word.  She would tell me to get help, that this couldn’t go on, that it reminded her too much of her alcoholic father back in Georgia.  “Not fair”, I’d say, “I’m not your father.”  And the symptoms would ebb and flow, growing debilitating a couple of months a year. 

I also had wild mood swings, when suddenly I felt anger, even rage, at nothing at all.  I would generally try to avoid people during these half-day-long spells, but sometimes my mood overlapped with our plans, and Gloria would sit in the car beside me in silence as we drove somewhere to meet friends, my right hand pushing the stereo buttons again and again, searching for the ever-allusive track which might sound good to me in my selfishness.  And though I would apologize, those quick-witted stabs of sarcasm towards anything she’d say hurt her deeply. 

I remember driving us to the philharmonic to meet my elderly spiritual mentor and his wife.  It was a warm night and we were running late as usual, this was always an issue with us, we were destined to be that couple, that family, forever late, our friends and families would eventually be led to lying about the start times of parties and picnics.  We were driving and Gloria laughingly showed me the puzzle ring I’d bought her.  It was an eight-piece which was solid when constructed and worn, but would turn to a jumbled mess of thin silver when removed.  I’d given it to her the week earlier for no reason but that I liked the ring and I liked her, and she’d disassembled it four times and couldn’t reconstruct it.  I scowled as I drove, took the ring and dropped it like a dead mouse into a plastic cup holder in the consol and told her next time maybe I just wouldn’t put it back together.  In the next few minutes of driving I realized my absurdity, but instead of apologizing I simply changed my tone and asked her about her workday.  She was looking out her window and didn’t speak for some time. 

So we had our issues, she wanted to settle down, buy a house, start a family.  I kept dropping out of classes, wanted to live abroad, explore the earth.  Beyond those first ecstatic weeks, it was never really working, but something inside me said to stick with it, that it would all come together.

This inner voice urged me into designing a ring, the down payment for which I made on loan from my father.  I remember the custom jeweler calling me to come and inspect the diamond when it came in.  He had a blue plastic mold of the ring, and setting the diamond in its slot, handed it to me.  I held the cheap plastic, cartoon blue holding the shining stone and knew she would just love it.  In that moment I could imagine being happy with Gloria, I could see our children, our house in Georgia, big Southern Sunday dinners with her skittish mother and mustached, wobbly father.

Our first real kiss had been christened with a full-blooded sunset stretched over the eastern most reach of the Rocky’s, the country’s protruding backbone.  My small church was quickly becoming our small church and we had gone, for the third time in a row, to the Monday night gathering, for young adults and high-school aged kids, informal, some singing before candles and dusk-lit windows warming the wooden-beamed ceiling.  We sat and sang and listened and flipped through our Bibles, and after chatting with the others for awhile ditched our stuff in the car and took a walk toward the filling western sky, the oddly unreal view of mountains beyond mountains, the deepening blue above, a planet or two behind.  We sat near Baseline Road, named for the meridian, and the sun was just north of west, but now tucked into its thickening bed of lumps and puffs, we kissed and kissed, holding each other’s hands and faces. 
           

Before that came the flirtations, she came to my house and we played cards with my roommates.  She filled the room with her scent and presence, her quick smile and infecting laugh, tinged with soft accent.  We were all intoxicated with her, the same oiled musk from the week before mixing with the summer sweat in her pores.  We found our shoeless feet touching beneath the table and spent the game forming various shapes and patterns of overlapping and pressing our southern limbs together, our hands hiding our peacocked cards. 

We would say goodbye with hands touching and smiling eyes, through open car windows or over a quickly shared bike handle, the momentum carrying us further and further from shore.  Little notes began appearing one to the other, in the mornings under windshield wipers, slipped under doors and through car windows cracked for the summer’s sun.

A few months into it Gloria told me her story.  We were up in her clean and spacious apartment, it’s female inhabitants keeping it so different than the squat 1950’s house where I lived with four other guys.  Gloria’s bedroom door was closed to her roommates busily prepping their bodies to go out for the night.  We sat in her big comfortable bed and let the warm fall weather sweep in over the balcony and into her room, stirring up the sweet musky scent of her pillows and blankets.  She began by telling me that she had been silly to wait so long to tell me, but that she had been on mushrooms the night we met, and the week after.  She had lived with one of her ex-boyfriends for a month or two.  She had seriously dated a girl from her freshman dorm for awhile as well, explaining that “it was crazy man, the lesbian thing just swept through our floor, we all ended up in these jealous webs”.  She told me that her ex-girlfriend had worn the same deodorant that I currently wore, and that maybe I should switch, so as not to bring back memories.  There was more drug talk, more of that southern slang that was beginning to annoy me, that strange region-wide club of neo-hippie music and name-dropping that turned into a constant reminder of her life before me.   I’d always been upset by subcultures to which I had no connection, and I’d always been jealous. 

I didn’t say much that night, told her everything was ok, then went home.  During the ten minute drive I was flooded with visualizations of Gloria wither her ex-boyfriends and girlfriends.  I was a virgin, and an idealist and Gloria was my first serious girlfriend, and by the time I pulled in front of my house, with its bare flowerbeds and dandelion lawn, I thought that it was over, that in my weaknesses it would be impossible for me to get over my jealousy and judgment. 

Calling myself an idealist is a little off; I was a relational idealist.  I had purchased the Hollywood promise of love-everlasting, lock, stock and barrel.  I remember hearing as a child “A Little Help from My Friends”, that line asking “What do you see when you turn out the lights?”  Even then, at seven or eight years old, I knew what I saw every night, and it was Girl.  I’d lay awake dreaming that she, and there were many of them in all the years of my life, that she was there with me, staring into my eyes as I stared into hers, and we wordlessly understood each other’s every thought, every fear and yearning, tearfully we understood everything.  The nightly ritual changed little into my teens and twenties, projecting the identity of my perfect other onto whichever girl I happened to have a crush on that month, sometimes from a distance, sometimes on my closest girl friends.  This sunset standard was what I carried into my space with Gloria.

I recovered from doubt a day or two after hearing her story, but continued seeing visions of her pre-me sexual ecstasy.  It wasn’t always entirely my fault.  An ex-boyfriend would surprise her on the phone while we were sitting watching a movie in her apartment.  She would squeeze my hand and speak awkwardly into the receiver.  I would rise and pace, pulling a book from the shelves but not seeing the words. 

One week, a year into our relationship, one of Gloria’s exes from high school stopped through town.  He was taking a few weeks to travel around the country staying with old friends.  She agreed that he could sleep on her couch, and told me it was a very old, very safe flame.  I felt awkward with Eric from the start, felt that his history gave him a deeper insight into my girlfriend, that they knew each other better than she and I did. 

I had finished playing guitar for a large night service that week, and after coiling up cords, lunging giant speakers onto wheeled carts, taking down music stands and helping to push and pull it all from the annex to the large church across the busy street, I met Gloria in the emptying sanctuary.  I asked if I could come see her that night, but she told me no, that she had to be up at six.  This was becoming a typical conversation, the late night college student versus the teaching professional.  We said goodnight and I went home in my car after watching the flashing red taillight of Gloria’s mountain-bike blink around a corner.    

Somewhere in there we heard a sermon.  We were attending churches two or three times a week, soaking it all in, and Gloria, as a new believer, loved swimming in this new world of love and forgiveness, with its open friendships and opaque language.  First there was the biblical vocab to remember: creation, atonement, the difference between grace and mercy, grace the undeserved gift, mercy the undeserved reprieve from deserved punishment.  We drove the forty-five minutes into the city to The Firefly Fellowship, a small church of high-school and college students, artists, musicians, young seminarians, recovering addicts and homeless teens.  The sermon on this night, like many nights, was on relationships, the forty-something, rounded Greek-looking pastor guessing, rightly, that young love was what was utmost on the young minds of his ecclesia.  The theme of the talk was how relationships require similarities, in likes and dislikes, dreams and life-goals, priorities and values.  Similarities in relationships were like money in the bank and differences were withdrawals.  I sat uncomfortable through the sermon and the singing that followed, and after saying hello to some friends, I drove Gloria home.  She brought up the sermon, and said she thought we were opposites.  I didn’t reply.  Admitting our opposing natures felt to me like an act of treason, some fact about his kingdom which King Leer would tragically ignore.

Nearly every night for a few weeks during our second summer, Gloria and I would ride our bikes exploring the labyrinthine bike and jogging trails.  The town sat beneath a canyon, perched between the mountains and plains.  From the canyon came the lovely creek where, in summers, you would see kayakers, fly-fishermen, kids screaming in bathing suits, teenagers braving the rapids on giant, blown up truck tire-tubes, and along the creek the town had built the widest bike and foot path.  It wound with every curve in the water, slung under bridges and intersected other, north-south paths making the entire town easily accessible, and Gloria and I explored them all, but our favorite was always the creek-path, winding downhill, ready at any moment to squeeze our hands to lock up our brakes around blind curves or descending beneath the city streets.  We didn’t wear helmets, proud to be part of the last generation of bike-riders raised in helmetless danger, and had to duck tree branches or just let the small ones whack the crowns of our heads.  We would also stop beneath the blooming trees and inhale their liquid life scent and feel our pulses respond to the intoxicating musk, and try to pick our very favorite springtime blooms.  We had blinking red taillights, and when she was in front I’d watch her legs shiny with sweat, her ankles bend above her tennis shoes, muscles stretching and coiling, her running shorts stick to the heart shape of her form, and on the few long straight stretches she would turn and smile at me, and see how long she could coast without looking ahead, the blue of her eyes still discernable in the gathering dusk. 

We first met at an old theater that hosted a disco night every few weeks.  It was always a roaring success, the dancefloor full of bodies, mostly girl bodies, all dressed in retro dresses and tight polyester shirts.  I arrived with two friends.  We parked and walked briskly through the June evening, still cool in our little mountain college town, paid our five dollars beneath the art deco façade and bright marquee and went inside.  We went directly to the dance floor, needing to establish ourselves there, to get comfortable looking ridiculous and skillful with our moves, our tight clothes, and sliding around, undulating, and with sweat just forming on my brow, I saw her.

I’d danced, I remember now, in her direction, and purposely facing a few degrees off center, I shook and spun, the right foot crossing the left, and at the right moment pushing both legs out, my body following the vortex around, my arms swimming at their ease, the swing’s momentum flowing easily into the next sway, leaning over my right foot, reaching out, my left foot leaving the theater floor, and after a few seconds I purposely found her and saw in her eyes success. We smiled and danced around each other, and eventually spoke, shared names, I heard her southern accent sweetly rounding out her curvy liquid body, her boyishly short brown hair framing the round animal face, the outsized eyes, and wide straight smile.

We spent the last dance together, and hugged a sweaty embrace as the music ended and the houselights went up and her scent was heady and sweet.  Happy chatter filled the hall as voices raised in reuniting friends crossing the floor, cocktail-waitresses clinking empty glasses and bottles upon their trays.  Our embrace through tight wet clothes felt very good together but briefly—custom demanded that this end quickly.  The houselights always revealed a dingy floor and walls an odd hue of black, but on this night I didn’t notice.  We parted and moved a few feet away, her to her friends, me to mine, both groups having had gathered in their respective corners after the music ended, and facing my friends I found the pen in my custard yellow pants and an old faded receipt in my wallet and turned, approached Gloria, who stopped her conversation, smiled at me, and accepted the number from my hands.  I joined my smiling, maybe envious friends and we left immediately, the mid-June air still warm in deep night and clear, some stretched white clouds, a few stooping stars, bowing as if in congratulations at my performance and good fortune, and back at the house my hands still smelled of her musky oiled scent. 

We sat in some grass after eating a hilariously priced lunch and watched children jumping on their grounded tubes, the nostalgic chlorine scent evaporating off our bodies.  One girl, aged ten or so, assembled a tower of bright blue tubes and a corresponding pile to climb upon.  The plastic gave way under her weight but on her third try she managed to crawl atop and descend into the tower’s tunnel where she disappeared for a few seconds.  We giggled.  The tower came down, with tubes rolling off over the grass and the girl appearing in stripes between the wheels. 

We’d already climbed the ten stories of the Bermuda Triangle, a miracle of a slide, actually five slides, two steep and uncovered, three giant blue tentacled jobs, winding down and around in darkness and an echoing rush of water.  We had ridden down in the pitch, her first, me following ten seconds later, regulated by the red bathingsuited goddess with a whistle, the ten story summer wind smelling of the plains sweeping our hair.  On the grass she was telling me how we were no longer good for each other and I was nodding silently.  She had gone down and I was smiling, sitting in the little pool at the top of the slide, waiting for the woman to let me go.  I was hoping she would bring it up, our not working.  I had hoped that she would do it or at least give me a chance to do it, knowing that by myself I could not broach the subject, that I didn’t have it in me to begin—She said ok and I let go and actually pushed the walls of the little pool to start the tube moving quickly, and suddenly there was no light, just a dark swirling and dropping, the water splashing and the sensation of hitting blind turns, the tube climbing the walls in its accumulating quickness—I couldn’t speak and of course her hair was up in two little balls, the first time she had worn it that way, shining brown in the sun and green grass backdrop, the hair-style selected especially for breaking up—it was dark and finally a spot appeared in the swirling, a sphere of light approaching—and I choked out that I agreed, and that I loved her, and I stood up remembering that we had driven her car and I picked up my pack and fished out the keys and handed them to her and stumbled down the grassy hill and into the crowd of people and away.  I took one last stumble into the spiky concrete of the wave pool to wet my face fully on my way to the park’s exit. 

My dreams take place in public spaces, primarily in waterparks, my heart pounding, the glare of noon never too bright, the water never cold except in the occasional cloudy day waterpark dream, but always in these a giant hot tub appears and I run to it.  Are they sexual, these waterpark dreams?  Yes, they must be.  The water, the slides, the girls in their brightly colored bathing suits. 

One night, a month after meeting, after having gone bowling, having seen the Fourth of July fireworks from the hills above the town, having been to church together, we decided to rent a movie.  If everything worked out, and my roommates had the intelligence not to join us, it would be our first time alone.  We stumbled giddy through the video store, wanting anything, wanting nothing serious, a film that wouldn’t hold our attention, that wouldn’t ruin the mood with sex or violence, we wanted light fare.  I can’t remember what we decided on.

At the ends of those days my face would softly ache from smiling, and I think that Gloria’s did as well, her smile so much bigger and more perfect than my own, her big eyes staying big despite her full cheeks creeping up and pinching creases like river deltas from behind her glasses.  We sat cool in the basement on the cream colored couch I had brought over from my mother’s house, sitting on opposite ends, and as I lied down, she crept up, and slowly, slowly, we came to be in each other’s arms, her head on my chest, the forgotten movie throwing a flicking light over us in the dark, and I remember a cracking thunderstorm over the house, real or imagined I can’t recall; I touched her shoulders, we whispered words together, questions and answers, every little hair of her back and neck and arms stood on end, there was soft, there was warm, and through the couch we found ourselves falling, through a hole in the basement, down, down and into the deep and glowing coal black heart of the world.