Mother and Stepmother finally came down to the beach with a blanket to sit on. Mother was big, round, and naked, her breasts resting on her stomach and her privates hidden by thick, curly hair. Stepmother was still wearing her white cotton underwear, white bra, baseball hat, and sneakers. Stepmother was always slow to undress. Maybe it was because she was from West Virginia, or because her father was a minister, or maybe just because she didn’t realize or care about how badly Girl needed to get in the pond.
“Hurry up and take your bra off so we can go swimming!” Girl yelled across the beach. Stepmother’s cheeks got a little red as everyone turned to look at her, the only clothed person at the nude beach. Sometimes she even swam in her underwear, though it clung uselessly and sagged at the bottom when wet. It embarrassed Girl. Both of the children were good swimmers but they weren’t allowed in without a grown-up watching because you couldn’t see through the greenish-brown water. Someone had to count their heads and make sure they surfaced.
“It’s okay, you can go ahead,” Stepmother said, and the children ran into the pond. Girl dove down to find the cool water close to the silty bottom and swam underwater as long as she could hold her breath, pretending to be a frog princess. Water streamed from her hair when she surfaced, and the sun was hot on the top of her head. The pond was sun-warmed and opaque, filled with tadpoles and fishes the size of her hand. If you could swim in the clouds and the birds were fish it would be just like this, she was sure of it; only the smell would be brighter.
Girl got a big inner tube to float around in, careful to make sure the valve stem was pointing toward the water so it wouldn’t scratch her back. She stuck her butt through the hole in the middle and leaned her head back against the hot black rubber, her feet hanging over the other side. She paddled her hands to make the inner tube float in lazy circles. The best part about swimming naked was that she didn’t have a bathing suit going up her crack. She closed her eyes and breathed the warm tire smell blended with the scent of diluted mud and sunshine.
Brother swam up to Girl. He had the littler inner tube around his stomach, the top half sticking up in the sky like a skinny black donut. “Let me have a turn in the big one,” he whined.
“No. I got it first,” she said, kicking her feet to get away. Thwunk! A wad of wet mud hit Girl in the back of the head.
Girl scrambled out of her tube so she could chase him properly. As soon as she was free, Brother doubled back and snatched the big inner tube, leaving the little one floating nearby. Girl grumbled at him, but knew that it wasn’t worth chasing him. His legs were longer and he could swim faster than Girl could. She pulled the smaller tube over her head, forgetting to check for the valve stem and scratching a red line down her stomach. She dog-paddled around the lily pads and daydreamed about Indians and wolves, wondering when she’d be old enough to get her own Swiss Army knife. There would be marshmallows later, and singing around the campfire, and swinging with Stephanie in the white rope hammock that left cross-hatched lines in the backs of their legs as they tried not to breathe in too much scratchy wood smoke.
Stepmother was still sitting on a blanket at the nude beach, trying to get up the nerve to get fully nekkid. Stepmother had thought she had left behind all the hang-ups from her southern Methodist upbringing, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to unhook that bra. She watched Girl raise her knees high as her daughter entered the pond, mud dripping from her feet and falling with a glop into the greenish-brown water. The little girl’s bottom was still white—it was the beginning of summer—but her forearms and legs were browning up in the sun. Stepmother wasn’t sure that a nude campground was such a good place to take a little girl. She didn’t like the idea of adult men seeing her daughter’s vulva even if she didn’t yet have breasts to speak of, but Mother had been going here for years and it was important to her, so Stepmother had caved and said okay. Besides, she loved camping and singing songs around the fire and collecting pinecones and little bits of things she could glue together into animals or whatnot. Once she found a burr and told the children it was a “porky-pine egg,” and they watched and waited so long for it to hatch that she worried they’d never give up.
Stepmother had brought her canoe, strapped to the top of the station wagon. It had been hard to get up there—she was only five foot two—but she had managed it like she managed everything else. She was strong—even though she was well-padded, thick muscles lined her shoulders and arms under her pale white skin that always freckled and burned in the June sun. She didn’t need a man for anything—she was the man, only with these breasts that hung down nearly to her waist and got in the way of everything. Stepmother had been a professional Girl Scout, going through all the ranks until she was employed full-time as a camp director. She had always been happiest walking down dirt paths inside the cave of the forest branches. Stepmother looked for white fungus growing along the sides of fallen logs, and when she found one, she took her pocket knife from her front pocket and pried it from the rotten log. That was another problem with being
