Twelve

I don’t want to admit—to my mother or myself—that I like working at the board shop. For one, I’ve spent the last couple of years digging in my heels and refusing to get a job. For another, I owe the job to Jordan, and it still pisses me off that he is fucking my mother.

But I do like the board shop. I like the way it smells—of coconut from the surf wax—and I like the way it feels. Riley Wilson Boards is not a tourist shop. It doesn’t carry Venice Beach T-shirts or key chains or refrigerator magnets. It doesn’t feature rows of tie-dyed bikinis or sarongs. Riley Wilson Boards carries surfboards. Lots of them. Rows of them, actually, and all kinds—far to one side the used ones, with yellowed spots here and there from old repairs. The majority of the boards are Riley Wilson originals, arranged short to long from the front of the store angling toward the back, standing on end like soldiers in a row. Each is signed like a piece of art—which they are.

On the other end of the store hangs a row of wetsuits, ranging from fall to spring, each suit tagged with its thickness, from 1.5 millimeters all the way up to 8 millimeters, for serious cold-water wimps.

My wetsuit is 5 millimeters, and it hangs now in the back of my closet. I haven’t needed to wear it since May. But I like the way it feels to step inside its neoprene legs, to push my arms inside of it and stretch them out, to reach over my shoulder to find and pull the long cord attached to the zipper, sealing myself inside like a selkie into her skin.

A small display of Rainbow sandals sits near the front door. On the counter is this ridiculous old-fashioned cash register that doesn’t work at all, the only thing in the store that’s for looks rather than function.

I like the repeating curves of the boards, the echo of that graceful swoop up the side of each one. I like the light that floods the shop by ten a.m. each day, the way the light gathers in long rectangles that bend up the boards’ faces—though I’m only there to see it on the weekends, since I’m still stuck in geometry’s clutches Monday through Friday.

I like the way the door to the shop opens—with an old-fashioned knob, not automatically or with one of those metal bars. And I like the door itself, maybe best of all, aside from the boards. It’s a Dutch door, painted turquoise, and the top almost always swings free, so air and sounds from the street waft in. At lunchtime, spices from the Indian place next door almost overwhelm me, and I wish again each day that I was rich and ate out rather than brown-bagging it. But though the job is cool (for a job), it pays shit, and after scanning the menu next door one day, I figured lunch would cost me roughly three hours’ work—before tip—so I bite begrudgingly into my PB&J instead.

The shop has a forward, thrusting, masculine energy. The arrangement of the boards—tips up—strikes me as distinctly phallic, and watching the customers (almost exclusively men, most between the ages of sixteen and forty) as they examine each board, running a hand down the hardened curves of them, making their decisions by touch as much as by sight, sometimes I have to look away, as if to give them a moment of privacy.

Some of the most expensive boards are Riley Wilsons from way back, still in pristine shape. These boards are enormous, up to eleven feet long.

“Surfing really changed in the eighties,” Jordan tells me. “That’s when the thruster was designed.”

Thruster. I kid you not.

“It’s a three-fin system,” Jordan explains, as though I’m not a surfer too. “It’s totally transformed the way the surfer can interact with the wave.” His face is earnest and open, so I don’t laugh or roll my eyes or anything. It’s weird anyway to delve into innuendo with him, of all people.

So I ring up sales, sweep, make sure the wetsuits stay in the right order, get coffee from the place down the street when Riley makes an occasional appearance. But my most important job seems to be fetching Jordan from the back, where he transforms foam blanks into surfboards, whenever anyone has a question. This happens often, and if I were pulled away from my work as frequently as Jordan is pulled away from his, I’d go insane.

But it never fazes Jordan.

Today when I go get him to talk with a guy who has questions about board length—should he pick a board based on his weight or height or both (I could answer this question, but he looks at me dubiously when I give him my opinion)—Jordan has the reggae cranked up pretty loud, even though he probably can’t hear it with the earplugs he’s shoved in to keep out the dust. He’s got a face mask on too, with a respirator and a pair of goggles. Tiny fibers float all around as he works.

He’s already whittled down the blank close to where he wants it to be, having cut it first with a handsaw and then smoothed it with rough sandpaper. Now he’s working the power planer, my favorite part, because I like how quickly it gets the job done. With each pass, it smooths off an eighth of an inch or so. He’s got a weight on the left side of the board to counterbalance the weight of the planer, and he works his way down the right side in a single unbroken motion, peeling free a long, thin slice of foam from the base to the nose. It’s almost like riding a wave, the way the power planer thrusts forward, and all Jordan’s got to do is hang on and stay steady.

That’s how it looks, anyway; I know it’s not easy to make such graceful, clean cuts. I imagine it’s like the work I do—it’s easy for him now, after all the cuts he’s made, but I’ll bet that sweeping arc of motion wasn’t always so natural. It’s become part of his body, that movement.

Watching him work, I forget all about why I came back here in the first place, and the guy in the shop gets to wait a little while. It’s beautiful, what he’s doing. In a way it reminds me of myself when I sculpt, but it reminds me of someone else, too—Lolly. The way she looks as she bounces around the Smoothie Shack, her hands knowing where to reach without her needing to look, the joy she emanates just doing her job. Those two belong where they are, doing what they do.

After a minute Jordan notices me and switches off the planer. “Customer?”

I nod.

***

After work I meet Marissa at the beach. It’s six o’clock and still hot. We run across the sand and strip down to our suits, then race into the waves. They’re not big or well formed, so it’s not crowded, and we can goof off without getting in anyone’s way.

The water’s not freezing today, though I’d never really call it warm, not on its warmest days. I shiver all over as I dunk my head the first time, but as soon as I surface it’s okay. Marissa has beaten me out past the break, her strokes strong and forceful. She’s always been a better swimmer. I watch her turn back toward me and paddle hard as a wave crests and breaks behind her, and she points her arms over her head and rides it in.

Then her wave is upon me, and I dive deep under it. The water whirls around me, and for a moment I lose perspective of up and down. It’s not silent under the wave; the force of the water makes its own sound. I kick hard and resurface, toss my hair back from my face and lick the salt from my lips.

It’s brighter on the other side of the wave. Droplets of the ocean cling to my eyelashes and magnify the sun, and the blue world all around me bobs and sways and glistens.

We dry off and flop side by side on the sand and press facedown into our towels. We don’t talk. We don’t have to talk. Marissa scoots her foot across to my towel and pokes me a little, runs her big toe down my calf. I poke her back.

I drift in and out of sleep and dream of waves and wolves and mermaids. I wake with a start and a gasp. Marissa’s sitting up, watching me.

“You okay?”

I don’t nod.

I’ve got a few wrinkled dollar bills, and she has sixty-seven cents, so we split an iced mocha with extra whip and wander back through town, toward her place.

Neither of us has a lot to say, so we walk like that together, taking turns sipping the mocha.

We pop into a couple of shops just to look around. Venice Beach paraphernalia is everywhere—key chains and T-shirts and magnets.

I leave Marissa at her apartment—“Homework,” I tell her. She squeezes my hand good-bye, and when she pulls away there’s a ring in my palm, with the price tag still attached. It’s twisted wire, just a flat star and a simple band.

“Looked like you,” Marissa says, and she grins. I slip it onto my ring finger. It fits just right.

When I get back to my place, I don’t go upstairs. Instead, I go to my studio and flip the wall switch, watching the familiar flicker become light.

There’s my laptop, and on an impulse I visit the page of the guy who recognized my baby pie. Joaquin. He writes poetry, really bad poetry. No one comments on his poems. The newest one reads:

She

Is Beauty

A long wave

I want to ride it

But it’s not the ocean

It’s the gleam of her hair

She pulls at me like the tide

She calls to me like the cresting sea

I want only to touch her curves

To bear witness to her beauty

To run my hands

To run my eyes

Along the

Shape of

Her

I roll my eyes. Ridiculous. Sappy shit. And in the shape of a diamond. His earlier attempts aren’t much better; I scroll back and skim them. They’re mostly nature poems and a couple about skateboarding. Nothing great, not that I’m an expert or anything, but come on. This latest poem is by far the worst of the bunch. The earlier poems, at least, were about the world. Reading through the poems, I wonder what has changed in this stranger’s life. What’s happened to him that now he’s writing this?

My art has changed too. Before last winter, it was pretty good, I guess, but now it’s better. Maybe that’s because I’m half a year older than I was then and that I’ve had those months to sharpen my ideas. Maybe no matter what, my art would be better.

You can’t separate what could have been from what is. It kind of kills me that my art is better now than before. It’s darker, sure, but it’s more subtle too. It’s the art of a secret keeper. It shows but doesn’t share.

I’m cold now. My suit is still damp under my clothes. But before I go upstairs, I send a message to Joaquin: Your new poem is different from the others. What happened? I don’t expect him to be online and to answer, but he is and he does, almost at once. Yeah, he writes. I fell in love.

Love.

My computer pings as another message comes through. What happened to you?