Brown Bottoms of Barnegat Bay (Jayne's Nature) Read online

  from Jayne’s Nature:

  Brown bottoms of Barnegat Bay .

  by Jayne Louise.

  Monday, July 18, 2005

  Sarah called the other night and told us she had to watch a neighbor’s children and that her sister Hannah had complained about having to go with her. I think Sarah did some of the complaining about that too. She asked us, in all humility, if we would mind having Hannah come over for the day. We said we wouldn’t mind at all.

  That’s kind of an understatement– we all like Hannah. She is the youngest one who came to out Kupala Night campout and the first ‘convert to the cause’ (as Jem says it) from that event. Hannah is just eager and easy-going enough to see the real, harmless fun in getting naked in the woods and playing like a little kid with a bunch of friends. But more importantly Hannah sort of looks up to all three of us, me I guess especially, and when I know someone sort of admires me like that I will do whatever I can to be a good influence to her. So of course she is always welcome to join us in whatever we’re doing.

  We’d had plans to go sailing, so Sarah drove her over early, at about 9:00, and then took off at once for the Causeway to go over to her babysitting assignment. She didn’t even say if she’d be envious that we’d be out sunning all day. Right away we packed the cooler and left for the boat. Hannah was excited– she’d never been sailing with us before but I’m pretty sure she already knew we wouldn’t be in swimsuits all day. She had come in her yellow-and-blue bikini and a pair of shorts and flip-flops for the street and had nothing else with her but a Chapstick and pocket change. But none of us wore much more than that anyway. Hannah helped Jules carry the big cooler full of turkey sandwiches and and bottled Dasani down the dock and Jem and I got the boat ready to go. The sailing school was in the middle of a class and they were all over the place as I carefully steered us out past the bulkhead. Even as we watched two girls tipped over a Laser. Jules and hannah hoisted the main and Jem and I rolled out the two jibs and we power-sailed out towards the center of the channel. I figured we’d just anchor somewhere, far enough away from traffic, and lie on the deck all day. It was already 90 degrees by 10:00.

  Jem had come out in the bottom of her new hot-pink swimsuit– the Rio-cut one that bares most of the sides of her bottom– and my aqua tanktop that drapes a little low on her, almost like a little dress, but she took off the tanktop even before we got to the channel. There were boys amongst the students in the sailing school but I don’t think they could’ve seen her by then. I thought she was pretty brave but then she stepped down to stand in the open hatchway, able to enjoy the feeling of being topless without worrying about being gawked at. Hannah sat with me in the cockpit staring at her for a few moments and then took the sun lotion to apply it to herself. Of course Jem took it right after her and made kind of a big deal about sloshing it all over herself. It’s a good thing I understand her so well– Hannah looked at me as though I should have been appalled by my younger sister’s suggestiveness but I just said, ‘How else are you going to put it on?’

  Jem laughed. Hannah blushed a little. ‘I guess so,’ she said. She looked at Jem again. Jem only handed the stuff up to Jules and ducked down for a bottle of water.

  Jules went forward and lay down on the foredeck under the sails. She had her top undone. I had Hannah hold the tiller for me while I tied up my hair with a cotton bandanna, and she did well enough that I let her steer for a while. I wanted to think she was trying to impress me, but she really did seem pretty good at it. We went straight across the channel into the shallows of the middle of the Bay and I had to pull the centerboard up a little and let the main luff to keep us safely upright and off the bars. But there wasn’t much wind and we still had the motor going.

  When we got to our usual spot, in the middle of the Bay, we dropped anchor just to windward of the boggy mud bar so the bugs wouldn’t bite. Jules sat up to help with the anchor, leaving her bikini top right where she laid it, but it managed to slither off the side and she went right overboard after it. Hannah shrieked, surprised that no one announced we were going in, and then started taking off her top too. Jem’s period was just about over today and she wouldn’t take off her bottoms, but she went into the Bay too, followed by Hannah and finally me. I took off everything, therefore being the first one to be all naked today.

  We played around the boat a little, finding places where we could put our feet down and other places where we couldn’t, not because it was too deep but because of crabs hiding in the seaweed. It never fails– no matter what we do or where we go, one of us always gets pinched. It’s never very painful and they can’t really break the skin, but the surprise scares a scream out of you every time! I got grabbed first today and my foot wasn’t even on bottom. I really think the devillish little things reach up to grab you before you even step on their turf.

  Hannah got weirded out by the crabs and the seaweed and just floated on her back beside the boat. A couple of speedboats and jetskis went by, nearer to the channel. They ignored us for being sailors the way we ignored them for being motorboaters. Other sailboats passed and people waved, from a distance. Nothing much bigger than a Laser or Sunfish was going to get too close to us here.

  Jules and Jem wandered away through the seaweed and stood up on the mud bar about twenty yards behind the boat. At low tide it comes up out of the water. As of late morning the water was about up to their thighs. So there wasn’t really anything to do there and they both half-swam back to the boarding ladder.

  I stood up on the deck, naked, blotting myself with a towel. As the tide recedes the bugs come out, so it’s important to get as much of the salt off as you can. Those greenheads can really hurt– and you cannot imagine the places they choose to bite!

  Hannah came up after me and we each got out a bottle of water and went forward to lie on the foredeck. Jules and Jem would have to have the cockpit seats. Hannah half sat there beside me for a few moments and finally made up her mind to take off her bikini bottom as I had done. Then Jem came forward, now naked, still rubbing her hair with the towel, and said, ‘Do you guys need lotion?’

  I turned my head, looking back at her. ‘I was hoping you’d ask.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said seriously, and went aft to get it.

  I’d been hoping Jem would ask because I really didn’t know how Hannah would take it if I’d asked her to put lotion on my bottom, you know, or if I’d asked if I could put it on hers. Many people, especially the people I chat with online, especially the men online, seem to think there is something sexy and even naughty about us girls putting lotion on each other’s backside. No assumption could be further from the truth. The fact is that we are sisters, we are all girls, we all have the same kind of backside, and we all have the same need, especially when sunning naked, to have lotion safely applied all over, even where you can’t reach yourself. So it’s just a necessary favor that we do for each other, and there really isn’t any more to it than that.

  Then people have asked me if I liked looking at or even touching my sister’s bodies. I hesitate to say ‘yes’ to that question because they will almost always get the wrong idea. Yes, I love my sisters, and that means every part of them. and they love me in the same way. When you love someone like a sister, sometimes you have only her body to look at, because her heart is in her words and in her actions and sometimes she’s just lying there not doing or saying anything. So when I look at my sisters, I smile a little to myself, because I am very pleased that they are here with me and in the world, and that they love me as much as I love them. Putting lotion on each other’s bottom is just an act of love, the kind of love than naughty-minded p
erverts online will never understand.

  Hannah watched Jem kneeling with her knees apart on the deck beside me, putting the lotion on my bottom. I was proud of that, because Jem showed her exactly how to do it without making it too strange. Of course Jem is thorough– she has to be, if she doesn’t want to let me, the sister she loves, burn in uncomfortable places. So of course she enjoys doing it, because she is doing it out of love. Of course I enjoy it because I know it is a symbol of how much she loves me, of our interdependency as sisters. And I was very happy to see that Jem turned right to Hannah without asking and shook out another handful of the the stuff, slopping it all over her shoulders and going all the way down her back too. Hannah seemed a little tense at first, but Jem has a lovely way with a massage and when she’d come to the small of her back she just let out a really deep sigh and relaxed. I stared at her till she opened her eyes at me. ‘I love a backrub,’ she said softly. ‘Sarah never gives me one any more.’

  I smiled at her. ‘You’ll just have to come out sunning with us more often then.’

  ‘Mmmm. I would love to.’

  ‘So do,’ I said.

  Jem finished with her and then returned to the cockpit where she put lotion on Jem’s back too and then let Jules do hers. We did not hear much from them, back in the cockpit and downwind of us, for a while. Hannah asked me a little about the boat, about how Daddy lets us take it out on our own, and I explained to her that it’s really ours, not Daddy’s and that where some girls have cars of their own we just happen to have a boat. She was impressed. But I don’t know why people are. Dove costs less than a car, especially to insure, and aside from membership in the yacht club it’s much, much cheaper to keep and to use. So we really do try to make as much use of it as we can, especially in summers when there’s nothing else to do all day.

  We rolled over after about 20 minutes and back again 20 minutes later. Jem went below for a pee– not going in the water– and Hannah went over the side for hers. They were both drinking much more than I was, which was good, because we were all sweating like crazy. I swear it was 95 degrees in the sun and there was so little wind that our hair dried fast and didn’t even blow much. Every breath of breeze was deliciously soothing. But I’ve been out on lots of hot days like this before. I just lie still and absorb the freedom of the day like a sponge.

  None of us was hungry till after 1:00. Jem went below to rinse off with the Sun Shower, the little black plastic bag you fill with fresh water and hang on the front of the mast to get hot in the sun. But there wasn’t much left in it, and she began to pump more out of the water tank. ‘The water’s almost gone,’ she called up.

  I lifted my head– for just a moment. ‘How can that be? It was full before.’

  ‘No,’ she said down there, in a serious voice, ‘it wasn’t. We never filled it last time.’

  ‘Drat,’ I said.

  ‘Are we going to dehydrate?’ Hannah worried.

  ‘No. We don’t drink that water. We have Dasani.’

  She nodded a little. ‘Oh. Good. Okay.’

  I thought of something and then lifted my head to call back, ‘Jem! Don’t use the Dasani for washing!’

  ‘Duhh,’ she said loudly, and cracked open a bottle to take back to the cockpit for herself.

  So we were out of tank water for washing. So the salt would dry on us and make us dry out faster. The next big tragedy was that all the ice in the little cooler was melting and the sandwiches were sort of swimming in what was left of it. ‘We’d better eat these,’ Jules said. So she passed one to each of us.

  I stayed right where I was on the foredeck, taking the sandwich she handed up through the hatchway, and propped myself on my elbows to unwrap and eat it. One bite told me all I needed to know. ‘Ew,’ I said. ‘Is this the turkey from yesterday?’

  ‘We didn’t get turkey yesterday,’ said Jules. ‘It’s the stuff Mom bought on Saturday.’

  ‘The stuff from Shop-Rite?’ I worried. Shop-Rite is on the mainland. For us Island locals, going over the Causeway on a Saturday morning in the summer is insanely stupid. The tourist traffic going to and from Walmart and the day trippers and new weekers coming onto the Island and the people leaving after 11:00 can back up both ways for hours. That’s not an exaggeration. The only reason Mom had gone over at all was to drive Mrs Albertson to the hairdressers’,. But the lunch meat had been sitting in the car for an hour before it got home, and for all morning with not enough ice on the boat. And now it tasted like it.

  ‘This is bad too,’ Jules said back in the cockpit.

  ‘Drat,’ I swore, and got up to hands and knees then.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ worried Hannah, looking up too.

  ‘Smell that before you taste it,’ I said, and paced aft to the cockpit. Sure enough all four sandwiches were bad. We unwrapped them, to put the plastic in the trash, and flung the sandwiches as far away from the boat as we could. the gulls had a very loud feast over them before they had all broken up and sunk. As mean as the crabs were to us we should not have given them to them either.

  I got out another bottle of Dasani and put up my feet on the other cockpit seat, sulking. This was not turning out to be such a good impression on hannah. Worse than that, I had been getting a headache. My stomach felt awful– and it wasn’t from the one bite of too-old turkey roll. I was dehydrating, probably from too much son and not enough to drink.

  Since we’d had nothing to digest we didn’t have to wait to go over the side for another dip., I got very bored and swam straight out from the boat to a channel marker about 100 yards away. Halfway back I noticed two guys approaching on jetskis. Fortunately they saw my head in the water and altered course, still insisting on going outside the channel marker just because they believed they could. For one brief instant I almost wished there were some hidden rocks or something to make the channel marker that much more important. But the only thing that was important was that there was some naked chick from a sailboat treading water where the Bay was only four or five feet deep, and they went right by and never really looked.

  I hung on the boarding ladder watching them go. But I didn’t have to pee at all.

  By 2:00 the sky had begun to get dark for the inevitable thunderstorm. ‘Drat,’ I said once, and then we were all getting ready to go, pulling up the ladder, putting things away, hoisting the mainsail. Jules took her usual job, that of winching up the anchor. She likes using muscle like that, though we had only put out the ‘lunch hook’ –the lightweight anchor for very calm weather– because, after all, this was supposed to have been our lunch!

  I got the motor started and turned us east, towards the island, where the sailing class had long sine adjourned though we could easily make out the masts inside the breakwater. It was about two miles in a straight line. Jem and Jules rolled out the jibs. My head was really throbbing so Jem offered to take the tiller and I sat back in the sea in front of her and hung my head back into the breeze. Hannah watched from the hatchway and gazed about through the binoculars at whatever she could see. I don’t know if there were anyone else about who was gazing through binoculars at us– there really were not many boats out by now. The sky grew darker and the wind increased and came round to straight on the starboard beam– a southwesterly summer blow. Dove heeled over– I turned the winch to let the centerboard down all the way again. Hannah appeared anxious, but Jem is a good skipper and held us on course and with the motor still running we were making good time.

  We were halfway across the main channel when the sky broke loose. At the first rumble Hannah shrieked. Rain began to pelt down in thick fat drops. Jules grabbed her towel and scampered down the foredeck hatch. ‘We should have put up the awning,’ Jem said.

  I hook my head. ‘No. When it’s starts blowing it’d blow right off.’

  Jem nodded, considering that. ‘Do you want to get something on? We’re almost there.’

  We all looked– the yacht club was less than a mile off. ‘No. I’ll h
old it and you can get Hannah to help take the main down.’

  Jem came out and rolled in the outer jib, and, blessed with only very mild gusts while they worked, Jem and Hannah– both of them still topless in the rain– got the mainsail down and wrapped up securely. Sure enough the wind picked up dramatically. Dove heeled, under the smaller inner jib, the best storm sail on the boat for the balance it gave us, and kept up the speed. But that was as bad as it got and anyway the motor is on the port side so it only got a better bite in the water. Squinting forwards in the deluge made my head hurt really bad. I guess the rain should have made me feel better, but it didn’t. I had this awful sensation of just not wanting anything or caring about anything. It was worse than craps– and I felt like I had those too.

  We were approaching the club and I was still naked, sitting in the cockpit in the pelting rain, so I retrieved my gray-green shirt from below and got it buttoned up pretty well by the time we got to the cove. Of course by then the shirt was soaked through anyway and hung from my shoulders like a wet dishrag but it was good enough till Jules and Jem who were better dressed than I was, negotiated us into the slip.

  Naturally the rain stopped almost the moment we stepped onto the dock. The four of us collected all our stuff, including what was left of the Dasani in the big cooler, and hiked up to the car. Hannah sat in front with me for the ride back. We were all still dripping wet and now sweating as well, since the rain had been too short to have cooled off the day at all. I opened about half the top of the shirt as I drove. Then Hannah happened to look at me. Jem realized what she had noticed and said, ‘Oh, don’t mind her. She walked all the way up the street like that once.’

  We all laughed, even hannah. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That sounds cool.’

  ‘It was a dare,’ I said. ‘And besides I do have something on!’ And I pulled up the shirt to show her that I had put on some panties– from among the clothes we all keep on the boat– before we’d gone up to the dock.