The Weapon of Young Gods #39: Frayed Strands

For many years I’d tried to convince myself that nostalgia meant death, that indulging in happy memories was much worse than just a pleasant waste of time, but recently I’d suspected that was a war I’d lost before it had even begun. The impulse to dwell to distraction had long since permanently fused with my frontal lobe, because not only had I been unable to kick the vile temptation, I’d come to enjoy it and-in a pinch-even capitalize on it. What I didn’t realize, though, was how completely uncontrollable it could be, and that almost cost me a lot more than a few lost hours on the day I discovered how completely Frankie had lied to me.

A slow creep of parasitic dread had been gnawing at me ever since we’d left her parents’ place, and I thought I’d need to draw on every reserve of nostalgia-sweetened sanity just to keep both eyes on the road and drive, instead of what I’d wanted to do-swerve wildly and crush her side of the Volvo into the freeway’s guardrail. We hadn’t spoken a word the whole way, but I was sensing a distinct undercurrent of fear from Frankie, running thick and deep beneath the smugly serene vibe she’d been trying to project. I’d figured that it would take a lot for me to be able to concentrate on what to do next-to lash my thoughts together and decide how to deal with the new and ridiculous melodrama that seemed to be invading my life via the girl I thought I knew in the passenger seat.

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Soundtrack (mp3): ‘First Set at Strands’ by Low Tide

I shouldn’t have worried; a monsoon of memory overwhelmed me as I stood atop the cracked concrete stairs above Strands Beach. It was total sensory overload-so much so that I almost backlashed too far the other way. A chaotic world of squealing youth swarmed around me as loud, hyperkinetic children eluded their parents and hurtled down toward the sand. Vibrant bursts of color bombarded my squinting eyes, as towels, spongeboards, bikinis, and wetsuits exuded a radiance only slightly dimmer than the early-afternoon sunlight.

Ten years ago I was one of those kids, marching down to the beach on the last day of school with the rest of the upper elementary students, slathered in sunscreen and wearing zinka all over our faces like war-paint. Languid summers passed there on the locals’ hideout, wedged in between two promontories and sheltered from the crowded crush of human traffic at the harbor and the genteel, sneering elitism of the nearby Ritz-Carlton. I glimpsed the hotel on the cliffs to the right, jutting out over the sand like a feudal stronghold, but its usually immediate association with Nadia was powerless today. Today had been claimed by older things.

Until my mother died, every year at the end of summer she would grant us kids one last epic day of freedom down here, a day that had simultaneously filled me with fleeting relief and nebulous dread. For a precious few hours, I was allowed to ignore the oncoming school year, and whatever horrible rites of passage that I was doomed to endure as the eldest of the three Reed kids. A few of those Strands trips had been marred by hyperbolic childhood tragedy, like the time when I lost my brand-new Churchill fins to a riptide, or when my sister crushed a dying bee while walking on the sand, and had to endure a long half-hour of pain as R.J. and I helped her, bleeding foot and all, up the hundreds of steps to Mom’s waiting car.

On any other day these would be deceptively poisonous reveries, but today as I descended the stairs I hadn’t even tried to shake them off, and my usual reflexes had absolutely failed, so it took a violent shriek from Frankie to release me. She was two steps ahead, cursing and swatting at, of all things, a giant bee that immediately zoomed straight up out of sight. I sighed and prepared to deal with her-with the present-and with another wild stab at the truth, however bizarre and damaging it might prove to be.

We turned left at the base of the stairs, away from the mom-and-toddler territory, and dashed across the hot sand, which was dotted here and there with lithe, fit, presumably single people sunning themselves. Frankie found an open spot and lay down on her own towel, but I quickly dumped my stuff, peeled off my shirt, and without a word to her made straight for the water. It was still pretty cold, for June, but I managed to stay out for a good ten minutes, and even got away with some clumsy bodysurfing before I was unbearably saturated by the chilly Pacific and had to stumble back to my towel.

Frankie gave me a sluggish wave, and yawned. “This is a really nice place, Roy, really beautiful.” I nodded and lay down too, stretching out in the warm sun. Anything meaningful I had to say to her would get a prickly conversation going sooner than I wanted. “Yeah, it’s a favorite spot of mine. Mind if I just shut up and pass out?”

“No,” she said, yawning again. “I’m about to myself. I was up until two last night.” She gave me a weak smile and then closed her eyes, as if to, by sheer laconic will, erase any hint of the awkward drive from Fullerton. I sat up to put on some sunscreen and then lay back again, letting myself decompress. I tried to pay attention to one sense at a time-the sand sticking to my skin, or the hypnotic hiss of the waves-so that when I had to dredge up everything I could remember and construct something mentally coherent, I’d have a blank canvas to work on.

Frankie’s lies-counting her fake name, I’d catalogued several by now-were all pathetic and dumb and I could deal with them superficially, because it gave me something else to think about besides fretting over the same old unsolved mysteries of alcohol and arson and their frantically spiraling consequences. Writing off all her exaggerations as flip and meangingless would only leave me the really bad shit to fall back on, but I wasn’t ready yet to take it personally enough and  work myself into truly righteous fury. I needed time, so I gradually, silently sank into a place where this kind of paranoia was normal, and waited for the wisdom to arrive.

Waves crashed, seagulls cried, and children screamed like bloody murder further up the beach. I mashed some more ideas together and tried to let them ferment in the afternoon heat. I began to lose track of time and set my cranial blender aside for a while to watch Frankie sleep which, serial liar or not, was far from an ugly sight. Her skin was very white against the jet-black bikini, and it was impossible not to appreciate how fucking stunning she looked in it, even though I’d seen her naked a hundred times by now. Frayed strands of blond peach fuzz on her belly rose and fell with every sharp, clear breath, and her mouth lolled open like a magnet, a glorious black hole that had spewed so many sweet nothings.

I had to assume she hadn’t got what she wanted from me yet, unless of course I was really all she wanted, but then why’d she play coy? Why all the brutal hot-and-cold bullshit with her? Was every fuck a lie too? Every smile a denial? That would have to be a massive wall of make-believe; even after getting this far, I was having difficulty visualizing Frankie as a creatively elaborate monster. But hell, despite everything, I still believed her up until this morning. Was I really that gullible? That trusting? Why would my unerring suspicion, my utterly reliable fear of anything remotely risky or sneaky, choose to abandon me at this crucial moment?

Well, because she accepted it, didn’t she? Frankie listened to all my shit, no matter what, let me in, no matter what-if I was bored, or if Peter had a sock on the door, or whatever. She let me hang out when she went to bed, let me sit there in the dark listening to her music, let me know every inch of her body. Who cared if it was all a front? So what if everything was fake-the Iranian boyfriend, the Peace Corps parents-she gave up a lot too, right?

I went around and around like that for a few hours and killed some more daylight, until the tide began rolling in and the wind picked up. Strands got quieter; most people had gone home. I stretched out my right arm to wake her up, my fingers twitching with nerves, and I was still stuck between caressing and throttling her when her small breathing caught slightly and she shifted her body a bit. She rolled her head in my direction, off her towel and onto the sand, and all I could do was give up and carefully brush the grains out of her thick blond bangs. I turned away to rub my sandy hands on my own towel.

“Well hello there, sir.” I looked back and she was awake, but only just. Her eyes were heavy crescents and she smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, I think the sun smacked me down for the count.” It was nearer the horizon and the mercury had dropped another fraction of a millimeter. I smiled blandly and watched her in silence as she searched for her shirt, but then I shivered and took another look out to sea. “We should probably get going, huh?” I heard her “Mm-hmm” a reply and so I turned around and gather everything up to leave.

The air was cooler than it had been-but not by much-and as Frankie and I walked back up the beach in silence, past the remaining stragglers still stretched out on the sand under waning sunlight, I thought I heard someone calling her name. A faint few shouts of “Frankie!” erupted out of thin air, spiked with a few drops of venom. “Frankie! Why don’t you call my cousin anymore, huh?” Frankie said nothing, but picked up her pace a little. That only made the shit come faster. “¡Oye, gabacha puta!, look at me when I’m talking to you!”

I stared back at the patchwork of beach chairs, towels, and their occupants between us and the cliffs, and spotted the heckler right away. Lisa Arroyo was reclining alone on the sand, her face distorted by vengeful contempt. She looked thin and unhealthy, even from far away, and she thrust out her pointy chin to hurtle another wave of epithets at Frankie, who was majestically ignoring her. A few people ogled back and forth at the two girls, and at me, as we hurried up the beach toward the stairs, but nobody else seemed to care.

Lisa must have realized that she was getting nowhere with Frankie, and so started in on me: “What the fuck are you looking at, asshole?” I kept walking, but cocked my head and shrugged, giving her a sardonic little wave as I followed Frankie up the stairs, and soon Lisa’s voice fell away as we turned the corner behind a huge rock. I had to hustle to keep up; Frankie’s long strides took the steps two at a time, and she wasn’t looking back for anything-not Lisa, and definitely not me.

When I got to the top step Frankie was frozen in her tracks, and it took me a second to realize why; a feral engine roar blasted out beyond the parking lot, and I saw a huge truck barreling down Selva toward the Point, making for the dirt track down to the beach instead of the crowded stairs. As soon as it was out of sight, Frankie jumped to life, but her voice still wavered a little.

“Roy, let’s…let’s leave. Let’s leave now.” She began to cover acres of ground again, and I trotted behind.

“We are leaving.”

“Well then…then let’s do it faster, okay?” Frankie kept going without a backward glance, clearly freaked out. All my hours of mental waffling were almost out the window in favor of suddenly playing defense.

“Why? What’s up?”

“Well, for starters, I’m not so thrilled with the idea of seeing someone who dumped me like garbage, that’s why.”

“Um…you mean Ja-uh, Chris Addison?”

“What? Yes, of course, Christian Addison. What the fuck, Roy? I thought you knew that by now.”

“Right.”

“Oh, and I’m also sort of pissed that his tweakie cousin still feels compelled to bitch me out in public. He’s probably still her goddamn hookup, the bastard.” Frankie made it to the car and finally turned around, but she seemed to look right through me, toward some horrible memory of her own. “So please, Roy. Please take me home.”

The past is never past, but nostalgia is death. To dwell is to doom. I unlocked the car from my side and got in. She stood there for a second before chucking her shit in the back and slipping in the passenger side. I glanced down the street in case any monster trucks had doubled back, but it was all clear, so pulled the Volvo to life and made for PCH. I knew I’d need all the energy I could get for the drive back. Francine Ross and I would have lots to talk about, and I wanted to be in control when it was time to unload.