The Nakeds Read online

  Initially a cast was bright white, as clean with possibility as a sheet of paper, and the doctor’s face was full of challenge and determination, an excitement that was contagious. Her mother’s face held hope, her eyes lit up, and she’d squeeze Hannah’s shoulder, offering a silent thanks to the God they no longer had time for.

  At the end, though, the cast was gray and dirty, the cotton fraying where it opened at her toes. After it was removed, it was a thing cracked in half, sitting beside Hannah on the examination table, open like a split hardboiled egg. Each doctor reacted with the same resignation and visible disappointment when faced so bluntly with what he could not fix: a girl clinging to the wall, a girl who needed so much coaxing, a girl falling to the floor, a girl finally refusing to even try.

  Hannah’s last surgeon, Dr. Russo, had been optimistic and had gone so far as to make promises. “I’m not saying you won’t limp—you will, mostly when you’re tired, though. But you’ll walk. I’ve had patients with even more nerve damage walk right out of here,” he’d said. It was all so simple, putting one foot in front of the other, and making it across the street. It was like breathing or sleeping, something most people didn’t think about.

  It was all she wanted.

  Girls her age wanted other things.

  Those first years, they wanted to skip and play hopscotch and swim at the community pool. They wanted bikes with banana seats, with colorful fringe hanging from the handlebars. The girls wanted recess, tetherball and tag, wanted boys to chase and tease and pinch, and even in skirts, they’d climb the monkey bars. They’d swing from fat silver hoops, transported, showing off their cotton panties.

  Now her peers’ steps carried them through malls, to football games and skating rinks. They sauntered in groups, so many lean legs working together, to parties and dances, to Carnation Park East, where the boys had become guys with faint mustaches and cracking voices, guys who waited with cigarettes and joints, with brown bags of fruity wine, purple enough to stain the girls’ teeth.

  Last week, her crush Pablo Parker broke his leg during football practice and the whole school was abuzz. A complex fracture, they said. He might not play for a year or more. Maybe he’d never play again. Today, wearing his own toe-to-groin, Pablo joined Hannah on the bleachers, where she was doing her math homework and waiting for Megan to finish up sixth-period PE. She looked up from her notebook and watched Pablo dramatically maneuvering, getting situated, and finally sitting down with a cranky huff. His cast was on his right leg and hers was on her left, so their two free thighs were just inches apart. She tried not to think about it. He gestured with his chin, saying, “This fucking thing will be gone in three months. Better be off by Christmas break. I’ll die, man. I can’t surf. I can’t take a fucking shower.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “My mom says I have to take a bath. Guys don’t take baths,” he said.

  “A bath isn’t so bad. I take baths,” she told him, immediately embarrassed. “I mean, I have to. You know.”

  They were quiet for a couple minutes, him looking to the field, where the other players had made their way out for practice. She had her head down, was pretending to read from her notebook, but she couldn’t focus on fractions and decimals. She was thinking that perhaps she’d said too much, that maybe he was imagining her bathing like she was imagining him stepping into the tub, naked, except for his own toe-to-groin.

  He stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled so loudly it made Hannah flinch. His able-bodied buddies turned and waved—a couple of them shouting Hey, Pablo through their helmets. When they resumed practice, Pablo turned to her. She looked up from her notebook.

  “What’s wrong with your leg anyway?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You can’t dance or anything?”

  She laughed. “I don’t think I’d be a dancer either way.”

  “You’d be great.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He shrugged. “I want you to sign mine. Remember, I signed yours,” he said, dark eyes playful. He reached into his book bag for a pen.

  “I’ll have to hop over you,” she said, tentatively.

  “Be my guest.” Pablo leaned back, making room for her, and she was aware of his broad chest and his T-shirt pulling at the shoulders.

  “It’ll be weird.”

  “It won’t be weird.”

  She put her notebook on the bleachers and used her arms to lift herself up. She stood, and then hopped in front of him, with her back to his chest, thinking that he had a very good look at her ass, if he wanted it. Finally, she sat down next to him, their two plastered thighs knocking. And then she was leaning over, pen in hand. She held the pen in the air a moment, trying to decide what to write.

  “Write anything,” he said.

  “I’m thinking,” she said. And then she leaned in closer so that her hair brushed his lap and she had to remind herself to breathe. He smelled like soap and boy and familiar plaster too.

  “Fully engage,” he said.

  “What?” she looked up, aware of how close their lips were, and quickly looked down again.

  “When I signed yours, I was fully engaged,” he said. “My art teacher tells us all the time to ‘fully engage.’ ”

  She was writing by then. “Three months will fly,” she wrote. “And then you’ll fly too.”

  After she was finished, she leaned back, aware that something had switched and changed and flipped between them. She couldn’t put it into words, but she knew they wouldn’t be the same. They might be more comfortable and get to know each other as friends or they might be awkward, speechless in the school corridors.

  He bent forward, looking at her signature and words. He nodded his approval. “I want to ask you something,” he said then. “What do you do about the itching?”

  “Wire hanger,” she said. “But you have to be careful. You could hurt yourself.”

  He moved closer to her and their casts clacked again. “How can you stand it? Year after fucking year,” he wanted to know.

  She shrugged, not knowing what to say.

  “It’s your whole life,” Pablo continued. “I mean, for you, Hannah, there’s no end in sight.”

  “There’s an end,” she said, not at all sure. And her feelings about his comments were mixed. She felt irritated that he’d reduced her life to this one big and continuing problem, but also she felt excited: He’d said her name out loud, and his observation, however reductive, meant he’d noticed her, year after year after year.

  2

  BELMONT HEIGHTS was a place with sidewalks and palm trees and beachy bungalows, a cheerful neighborhood where sweet-faced retirees donned orange vests and silver whistles, where they held up stop signs and cheerfully led the schoolchildren across the street.

  Their house was Spanish-style, a modest two-bedroom, two-bathroom, lots of redbrick and terra cotta tile, hardwood floors and arches introducing the dining room and kitchen. In the big backyard, there was a tire swing hanging from a tree and a one-bedroom apartment that Hannah’s mom called a cottage. It was where Hannah’s stepfather, Azeem, lived briefly as their tenant before he and Nina became a couple.

  When they first moved in, Nina furnished the cottage with a bed and a dresser, hoping to find someone to take Hannah to school in the mornings. She put up fliers at the university near their home, offering free rent in exchange for Hannah’s transportation. The cottage didn’t have a shower or a stove, which meant that the prospective tenant would need access to the main house. Nina had hoped for a college girl, someone who might become a big sister to Hannah, but only young men had applied, and after interviewing several of them, she settled on Azeem, a clean-cut Arab student, who said he was studying psychology.

  Yes, he was studying psychology, like he’d said in the interview, but once he’d moved in and Nina asked about his studies, he told her, proudly, puffing up, she thought, that his emphasis was in human sexuality. Even Azeem’s ea
rliest conversations with Nina were peppered with all that he’d been learning.

  When he talked about Masters and Johnson, the sexual revolution, and intimacy therapy, his face lit up.

  He’d drop the word penis into a conversation and it was like he was holding his own out to her.

  He wanted to join a nudist camp, he admitted one morning, and she couldn’t help but picture him naked. He was sitting at the table with a bowl of granola and Nina leaned against the kitchen counter with a cup of coffee.

  “There’s a great place up in Topanga Canyon. Would you ever want to go?” He lifted his spoon, held it in the air a moment, and looked at her.

  She took a sip of coffee but didn’t answer him.

  “Does a place like that interest you?” he pressed.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ve never been shy about that sort of thing, either.”

  He smiled at her, then dipped his spoon into the bowl, lifting a hearty bite of cereal to his mouth.

  It was the worst sort of flirting, she thought, as if they were naked together already.

  He told her he was writing a term paper on what he called the orgasm.

  “A whole paper?” She laughed nervously. How much was there to say? But even as she teased him, she imagined herself having one right there at the kitchen table.

  He’d only been living in the cottage for a week, running into Nina in the house and having those short, charged conversations, and the tension between them was undeniable. He was eleven years younger than she was, a student, a kid, she had told herself. Still, in the kitchen a few mornings later, he reached up into the cupboard for a bowl and Nina was reaching for a cup, and their fingers brushed, and they both laughed awkwardly, moving away from each other. The next morning when she entered the kitchen, it was he who was nervous, knocking over his box of granola with an elbow. Clusters of cereal fell from the counter to the floor, almonds and raisins and dates.

  “I’m sorry if I surprised you,” Nina said. “Here, you eat in peace. I’ll be quick.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and carried it into the living room.

  From where she sat on the couch, she could see his hunched body, the white T-shirt taut against his strong back as he cleaned up the cereal.

  And that night in the hallway, there they both were again, each offering to let the other past first—no, you go, you go, no you go—until finally they both stepped at the same time, bumping chest to chest, and squeezed by. Nina couldn’t sleep that night, tossing fitfully, and hoped that he wasn’t sleeping in the cottage out back, either.

  She stepped on an almond sliver the next day and smashed a lone raisin several days later that he’d missed. She was peeling the raisin from her bare foot, thinking about him, when he entered the kitchen. “I was just thinking about you,” she blurted out.

  “And you me. I mean, me you,” he said.

  And that night he moved himself into her bedroom, and within the week, his clothes joined her clothes in the closet, and that weekend, they were heading up to The Elysium, the nudist camp in Topanga he’d told her about, to take off those clothes, and within the year, they were married. They had one ceremony at the courthouse downtown, where Nina wore a light-blue dress and cream-colored shoes, Azeem wore jeans and a gray button-down shirt, and Hannah, in her walking cast that month, followed them up the steps into the building.

  And two weeks later, they had a second ceremony at the nudist camp, where they stood naked with all the other naked people, and said their vows on the lawn.

  3

  HANNAH’S MOM and Azeem wanted her to join them on the weekends at the nudist camp, but she refused. They tried begging. They tried bribes. They wouldn’t let up. They described the camp as a paradise. The rolling lawns and clean air. Los Angeles pollution disappeared once you left the city and went up into the mountains, they said. There are tennis courts, volleyball, and all the nudist kids. There’s a wonderful brother and sister, Michael and Mica, who so want to meet you, her mom said. They’re just your age, twins. They’re in the gifted classes too. They like the same music you like. They read and write, and the boy keeps a journal. He likes science and insects just like you do.

  Hannah pictured a naked fourteen-year-old boy on a green hill writing in a little book, drawing spiders. She shook her head no.

  “It’s a family camp,” they reminded her.

  “Naked family,” she responded.

  “Fine,” her mom said. “We’ll bring the camp to you.”

  And on Fridays, Hannah’s mom and Azeem stepped out of their pajamas the minute they woke up and did just that. They turned up the thermostat and moved around the house. Her mom did laundry, scooped the clothes they were not wearing into the washing machine. Azeem pushed the vacuum in the living room. He sat down at the desk in the den and studied. Her mom dressed for work, but the minute the day was done and she returned home, the skirt and blouse came off.

  It was a lot to see.

  It was more of them than Hannah wanted to see.

  While the one thing Hannah could not see was her own body—at least not all at once. There was her leg covered up with plaster, sometimes to the knee, but today to her crotch. Unlike her mom and Azeem, she was never naked. Even stepping into the bathtub with a trash bag twisted and tied around her cast, she was partially covered up. She was always hidden. She was always trying to scratch a part of herself she couldn’t see. She wasn’t whole, not really. She was a girl in pieces—there were her arms, muscled from using crutches in a way other girls’ arms were not. Her biceps and forearms were sharp angles while other girls her age still held on to a thin layer of baby fat that made their limbs soft. That softness was only one of the things she envied. She had mismatching legs, one lean and muscular from all the extra work it did and the other one thin and atrophied.

  If I’m a girl in pieces, if I’m fragmented, if I’m imperfect parts that do not fit together, my mom and Azeem are whole bodies, was what she thought, watching them on Fridays.

  The first Friday was startling despite the buildup and warnings—remember what we’re doing on Friday, her mom had said early in the week; don’t forget, Azeem reminded her on Thursday while they watched the news. Ten more hours, they said when kissing her good night. Still, watching them make breakfast was a surprise, and dinner too—the ease with which they handed each other the spices and utensils—the pepper, the cumin, the spatula, the plastic basting tube that her mom used to squeeze the hot fat onto the chicken’s back. She tried to look at their eyes when they talked to her but it was all too much. Azeem stirred the pot of couscous. After a quick taste, he stood on his toes to reach a top shelf for the pot’s lid. Her mother leaned down, opened the oven, and hot air shot into the room, pushing her back while her breasts swung, big and heavy, in front of her. Hannah was aware of her T-shirt, the fabric covering her shoulders and chest, she was aware of her jeans, the waistband cutting so slightly into her stomach, one denim leg cut off completely for the cast to make its way through, and she was aware of her tennis shoe and one sock.

  At the table, she tried unsuccessfully to ignore her mom’s breasts, which didn’t look as good and high as they did when she walked around the house, shoulders back, aware of her posture. As her mom leaned over and spooned some couscous onto her plate, Hannah noticed a sad humility to those breasts, their loose skin and bumpy dark nipples.

  She tried to ignore Azeem’s chest too when he asked her questions about school, when he talked about his own final exams that were coming up, a research paper that was due the following week. “I’m writing about the history of nudism,” he said.

  “Tell her the specifics,” Nina said, proud.

  “I’m exploring how nudism is viewed in other cultures. I’m contrasting the Europeans with Americans.”

  “Mostly it’s about how hung up Americans are,” her mom said, taking a sip of her water.

  Azeem nodded. He picked up his fork and knife. He cut into the chicken breast, rubbed what he’d cut in
a circle on his plate, soaking up the juices, and stuffed it into his mouth.

  Hannah tried not to look at her stepfather’s ass when he stepped away from the table to get seconds, but she couldn’t resist. He was an average man in so many respects, at least physically—average height, average weight, and on his body an average amount of hair, except for his ass, which was extremely furry. Hannah thought of two little black dogs walking away in midair. She’d seen men’s asses in movies and in the books Azeem read, and she’d never seen an ass like that.

  Hannah turned and looked at her mom. “This guy from school broke his leg last week,” she said. “We’re sort of becoming friends.”

  “Friends?” her mom said, smiling big.

  “It’s not like that,” Hannah said.

  Just then, Azeem, with a steaming piece of chicken on his plate, sat down. “What did I miss?”

  “Nothing,” Hannah said.

  “Hannah was going to tell me something about a friend of hers,” Nina said.

  “Pablo broke his leg playing football,” Hannah said.

  “That’s too bad,” Nina said.

  “Multiple fracture. His cast looks like mine.”

  “A toe-to-groin?” Her mom was surprised.

  Hannah nodded. “He might be coming over here to study for a test. It won’t be on a Friday, that’s for sure,” she said.

  “The more the merrier,” Azeem said.

  “Please, please, don’t mention the nudist camp,” she said.

  “Maybe he’d like to come along one Saturday,” Azeem said, smiling.

  “You could invite Rebecca or Megan,” her mom teased.

  “Yeah, right,” Hannah said.

  “What else shouldn’t we talk about?” Azeem asked.

  “Your paper on the history of nudism.”

  “Oh-kay.”

  “Or your sex studies. Or your nudist friends.” Once Hannah started, she couldn’t stop. The list was long. The three of them could be sitting at the table all night. “Or the fact that you’re naked here on Fridays,” she said. “That’s particularly embarrassing.”