It Makes You Want to Get Naked
Do you think Brenda Barnett would still look good without makeup?” Regina asked me. It was a couple of days after the Barnetts’ visit—Forrest was off training for the triathlon. Her question caught me off guard.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I didn’t pay that much attention.” Regina had brought down her nail kit. On her list for me this morning, she’d typed, Get a pedicure! Now she was giving me one. She had suggested I might benefit from tweezing my eyebrows too.
“That woman’s got the kind of face that won’t age well,” Regina said, jabbing a metal stick under my nail bed while I kept an eye on Jilly and her friend Emma, playing in the water. Hayward lay on a towel with a comic book.
“If you ask me, without eyeliner and blush and lipstick, nobody would look at her twice,” Regina continued. She was not finished with the topic of Brenda Barnett, evidently. “Great hair, of course. I’ll grant Brenda that much.”
“She probably uses some really expensive shampoo,” I offered.
Regina said nothing more for several minutes. She was focused on my toenails. But I got the feeling she had more to say on the topic of Brenda Barnett.
“I can’t really blame Forrest for taking an interest in her,” Regina went on. “My husband’s a man with a significant appetite. I know I can’t fulfill all his needs.” She dabbed the color on my big toenail and drew the brush slowly over the surface like a professional.
I thought she’d leave it there, but she didn’t. “I’m referring to sex,” she said.
I didn’t look up. She was on to my third toenail now. With one whole foot still to go. At the rate we were going, I’d hear Forrest and Regina’s whole story before we were finished with my pedicure.
“You’re too young to understand, but a man has his needs,” Regina said. “Women do too, of course, only I’m just so tired all the time.
“You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but in our early days we were all over each other like a couple of puppies,” she told me.
“Sometimes we made love three times in a day. In all kinds of places too. The boat, of course. The gazebo. One time Prudence walked in on the two of us when we were having sex on the kitchen floor. I was setting things up to make pancakes and he came up from behind and started kissing me and rubbing my back. I left the mixer on. Batter was flying all over the place.”
I tried not to show my surprise, but the scene she described was hard to imagine.
I said, “Wow.” All I could think of.
“Prudence was shocked, but we didn’t care. We were just so in love. But not just that. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”
This was a feeling I didn’t know about. When I thought about sex, I—not yet fifteen years old—thought about someone paying attention to me.
When I thought about actual touching, I didn’t get further than imagining a man’s arms around me—one man’s in particular, his hands stroking my skin.
I pictured him looking at me. That was as far as I could go.
“You know the island out there where Forrest likes to take the boat?” she asked me.
“My parents own it. There’s this place we used to go to that nobody knows about.
You’ve got to hike in a ways from where you dock your boat, but once you’re there, it’s like you’re in the Garden of Eden.
In all the years I’ve been coming here—long before I met Forrest, even—I never ran into anybody there.
It was our secret spot. Forrest’s and mine. ”
A look came over her. For a moment, I could understand what my father meant when he said Regina had been beautiful once.
“There’s all this moss growing there. It makes you want to take off your shoes to feel it.” She seemed to have forgotten about the nail polish, my toes.
“It makes you want to get naked,” she said. “That’s what we always did. Before the kids.”
I looked out to the water—Jilly, calling out “Marco” in that high, screechy voice of hers.
“Polo!” her friend answering back. Of the two of us—Regina and me—I knew I was the one who’d better keep an eye on the children.
They were good swimmers, but I understood that if anything happened to one of them, it would be up to me to save them.
Regina was off in her own world a lot of the time.
“I think Jilly might be swimming too far out,” I told her. “Maybe we should call the girls in.”
“Oh god,” Regina said. “I’m such a hopeless mother. It’s a wonder my children have survived me this long.”
“You do other things,” I told her. “You’re the one who makes all the lists for us.”
“Oh, those lists,” she sighed. “I could spend my whole night typing up lists for everyone, but what does it matter, really? Most of the things you really need a person to do for you can’t be put on a list. Mostly they’re things you have to do for yourself anyway. Or leave undone.
“The really important things,” she said to me, “are the ones you can’t put on the list. Like ‘find excitement in life again.’ Or ‘be happy.’”
The way she sighed then, it was as if someone had let all the air out of her.
More air than was contained in her lungs.
Air enough to fill Jilly’s swan float, possibly.
So much air leaked out of her, her whole body seemed almost to deflate as it happened.
It was a sigh that went on longer than any sigh I’d ever heard.
Regina turned to look at me, her nail polish brush suspended in midair. “Pills can only do so much,” she said.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I said nothing.
“When you think of it,” she said, “you could wonder how Forrest puts up with me. Why he doesn’t just pack up and go. Only there’s the children, of course. And this place.” She waved her nail brush in front of all we beheld, like an artist.
“Forrest could never think of leaving Wonderland,” she said. “It’s as simple as that. And he will never leave me. Wonderland and the children and me. We’re a package deal.”