Summer Vacation

Memory:

San Diego. Fifteen-Years of Age. Mission Beach.

Valerie and I are sunning on our towels, trying to act like the tourists ten feet from us are not my parents. We are pretty-young things, here to catch some sun, waiting for the next male visitor to try his latest and greatest pick-up line for our pleasure. We are fifteen. We live for this. We cannot buy cigarettes, we cannot drive a car, we cannot buy beer. But by god, we can show what we're working with and we will do it. Male attention is currency and we're making a killing. I could never act like this on my own accord, but laying next to my petite best friend gives my self-esteem an amphetamine high. Each double-take is a hit. Each cat-call, each comment, each shot-down visitor. We cherish them all. We're a unit of teenage canned-heat, and together, we are a carcass the vultures can't resist.

A young man stops by and begins to chat us up. I can't remember what he looks like, only that he is interesting enough for us to lie about our age in order to keep him around. Who he was is irrelevant anyway. He is an idea. He smiles, asks the same questions as every-other-boner-wielding man that's stopped by our terry-cloth island of hotness. (A/S/L?!?) We smile. Giggle. Lie through our white teeth.

Just then. Incoming. She's upon us before I know it. Before I can get up and intercept her at a distance. Before I can keep the illusion alive that we are not adolescents, not on vacation from a place not as interesting as this one, not so hot-to-trot as we perceive. She is a black cloud on our teen sex-parade. She is my mother.

"Kimberrrlllyyy! Do you have sunscreen on?" She draws out my name and the word sunscreen for emphasis. She knows exactly what she's doing. My mother, the saboteur, continues. "Because you know I love you and I don't want you to get burned!"

My mother, with a simple statement, sinks our battleship. Our male visitor cannot get out of there fast enough. He doesn't exactly run away, but he doesn't have to. The illusion is over. And we are mortified- burned not from the sun, but by my own flesh and blood. In one benign moment, my mother re-establishes the balance of power. We are in her kingdom of sand. We do not shit on her bed of hospitality.




I'd kill for moments like that now.
My mom rules.