Borderline

by Catherine J.S. Lee

So here I am, the June before my senior year, and we've got it all mapped out, Scooter Marantz and Bimbo Dexter and I, ready to run my practically-antique '66 VW microbus up and down the coast from Ventura to Oceanside, almost three months of seeking that perfect wave. It's going to be a totally bitchin summer, the last one before the real world crashes in, and we are going to live every second of it.

Or so I think, until the parents tell me they're going to Italy to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I can't hang with my tech-head big bro, Kurt, because he's off to Hawaii, the lucky dog, to upgrade some tourist bureau's web servers, and he absolutely will not take me with him. What I'd give to ride that big Hawaiian surf! So all of a sudden my plans are in ashes, cold as yesterday's barbeque, and I'm this close to being packed off to the farmstands and orange groves of Bakersfield when Gram Nesbitt breaks her hip.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not glad Gram broke her hip. But things do start looking up again when my Harlow grandparents in Boston agree to take me to their summer place on a Maine island called East Haven. I hear that Maine has, like, twenty-five hundred miles of coastline, so excuse me for thinking there must be surfable waves there somewhere.

* * *

Buddy Dexter, Bimbo's dad, is the one who taught us to surf. We were twelve then, wound-up little grommets, but Buddy always had that Zen thing going, patient as Buddha himself. When he was young and first rode a longboard, the concept of soul surfing didn't exist. Being one with the wave was how everyone used to look at it.

Scooter and Bimbo dissed Buddy behind his back for his clean devotion to the waves. They wanted to be Kelly Slater, loved dreaming about money and babes and video games with their own names on them. I just wanted to be like Buddy Dexter, in a pure zone, feeling that ocean magic.

Four years later, Buddy is diagnosed with MS and has to hang up his wettie. I inherit his Hobie longboard, and don't think it doesn't immediately become my prized possession. Scooter and Bimbo are hotdogging with the shortboard riders, getting air like the skate-punks do, but for me, surfing is still a dance with several tons of peaking water. Carving a line across the face of the wave, catching the lightning.

* * *

Nonnie and Papa meet my flight from LAX, and even though they never do that my-haven't-you-grown-up schtick, we still have to give each other the once over. I'm always afraid, since I usually only see them at Christmas, that they'll have gotten old on me, but they haven't yet. Papa's still got a head full of wavy silver hair and the only pencil-thin mustache I've ever seen in real life. Nonnie has that debutante thing going even though she's crowding seventy, perfect posture and tinted blonde hair and a whole wristful of gold chains and diamond tennis bracelets. My carrot-red mane is down to my shoulders, and Nonnie pushes it back from my face to kiss my cheek.

I stow my suitcases in the trunk of their red Saab convertible and stretch out in the backseat. As we wind on up the coast, the towns get smaller and smaller, poorer and poorer. I get more and more alarmed because there isn't a real beach in sight. Plenty of rocky shores and looming, jutting ledges, so many pebbles they must've rained down from Heaven, but not one decent beach with sugar sand.

Finally, two steps from forever, we turn off the main highway. Before long, spanning a stretch of choppy green water is the old-fashioned iron bridge to East Haven. I can't get over how far out the tide goes here, like someone pulled a bathtub plug in the freaking ocean. When all this water comes rushing back in, then we should have some surf.

I say, "How cold's the ocean?"

Papa glances at me over his shoulder. "About fifty-two degrees in the summer. And no surf, if that's what you're asking."

In two days the freight people will be arriving with my board, and there's no surf. I scope out East Haven's main drag, five blocks of red brick three-stories, the street hugging the shore. Then I see two dudes with skateboards under their arms, and I think, Sometimes, you have to ride 'em like you find 'em. Kurt doesn't leave for Hawaii for another week, so I make a mental note to have him overnight me the old skateboard that was everything to me before Buddy Dexter taught me to surf.

Past downtown, we come into a neighborhood of grand late-Victorian summer cottages. Papa turns into one built in the shingle style – I know this because I'm planning to be an architect – all gables and dormers and deep verandahs. Out the back door, the wide yard goes right down to the ocean. Tall, white-blooming hedges run down both sides, and everywhere are flower beds blooming in white and complementary peaches and purples. My room's huge and airy with a view of the bay, and I tell myself I've definitely seen worse digs despite the lack of surf.

* * *

Next morning, while Nonnie and Papa are doing their geezer version of tai chi among the flower gardens, I ambulate on downtown. I'm starting to think that even in Bakersfield I'd've had my microbus and could've made it to the beach at least a few times. I check out a pocket-sized park with a brick path through the middle and stairs with grindable iron railings leading down to the pink granite seawall. Then I see the sign: "No skateboards, skates, or scooters allowed."

I'm on my way home when I meet a kid carrying a board. He's thirteen, fourteen max, trying way too hard with stick-on tattoos and hair twisted into stiff points all over his head. He tells me the scene's in Gleason, a bitch for all the skate-rats too young to drive.

I ask if it's any good, and he tells me not bad, a nice fast half-pipe and a couple of ramps, not fancy but better than nothing.

When I get back to Nonnie and Papa's, I ask where Gleason is.

"North near the turnoff to Moose Island." Papa picks up a stamp with a pair of tweezers, looks at it through a magnifying glass, and adds it to one of the piles in front of him. Maybe that's the kind of hobby to have. I mean, what are the chances I'll still be able to surf fifty years from now?

I explain about the skate park, and ask if I can borrow the Saab, but Papa says no.

Nonnie says, "He could take the beach wagon."

The beach wagon. That sounds intriguing.

Papa examines another stamp. "If he promises not to speed."

"It doesn't go fast anyway," Nonnie says with a little flip of her hand, and I have one of those oh-oh moments, because, as any dude can tell you, by your wheels you are known.

* * *

The beach wagon's actually pretty tubular, a robin's-egg blue 1953 Ford station wagon, which Nonnie and Papa bought with the house and use for tailgate picnics and rides on summer evenings. It's cherry, 4,723 actual miles, and I just know it'll go faster than they think it will.

After Fed Ex delivers my skateboard, I follow Papa's directions for the ten or so miles to Gleason. Just before the turn to Moose Island, I see the half-pipe and a couple of ramps, surrounded on three sides by evergreens.

Two girls sit on the hood of a rusted-out Camaro, and even though they hide it when I park a dozen feet away, I'm pretty sure they're smoking a joint. One girl is small, with pulled-back hair dyed even redder than mine naturally is, and a tank top that enhances the kind of chestal area my buddy Bimbo admires. The other is tall, slender but strong-looking, with thick, purple-streaked black hair past her waist.

"Ain't seen you around here before," says the redhead when I walk by, "or your funky car, either." The tall girl just looks at me, and I eyeball her from behind my ultra-dark shades.

"I'm visiting. Just got here a couple days ago."

"You gonna do some tricks for us?"

I don't answer, I just saunter over to the half-pipe. It's got a good, fast pitch, and I fly back and forth a few times, then nosestall, hanging on the pipe's lip. As long as I keep it simple, I probably won't embarrass myself too badly, so I roll up the other side and get enough air for a three-sixty with a frontside grab. It's all coming back to me now, my old moves still there in muscle memory, and I pull off my entire repertoire of spins, stalls, flips, and grabs. The girls are looking at me as though I just beamed in from Planet Zork.

The redhead shouts, "Come here," so I walk over to the car. She's taking a joint out of an Altoids tin, and well, I don't mind if I do, because I haven't had any doobage since I left California.

The girls move apart and I sit between them, all of us leaning back against the windshield. The redhead's Lainie, the quiet one, Kat. The breeze is just strong enough to make it hard to light the joint, but at last Lainie gets it going and passes it to me. I take a hit and hand it to Kat. Our fingers brush, and as I look into her eyes, big and deep and grey as the ocean on a cloudy day, I'm immediately caught in the undertow.

"Is Kat short for Kathleen?" I say.

"No." She reaches across me and gives the joint to her friend. "Lainie's the only one calls me Kat. My name's Kateri. Kateri Dellis."

"That's a great name," I say. "Different. With rhythm."

"It's Passamaquoddy," Lainie says. She looks at me as though she's waiting for a reaction. Kateri studies the sky.

I'm confused. "Passa. . . what? What's that?"

"Pas-sa-ma-quod-dy," Lainie says. "Native American. Indian."

"Don't say Indian," Kateri tells her.

"Kat wants to learn to skateboard," Lainie says. "None of the bozos around here will teach a girl."

"Why don't you say it the way they say it?" There's enough vinegar in Kateri's voice for a vat of sour pickles. "They won't teach a squawgirl."

Lainie lets this pass, so I do, too. "You need sneakers," I tell her.

"I'll go barefoot. Please?" She's already untying her lace-up boots.

I set the board down. She stands on it goofy-footed, right foot forward, but I don't try to correct her. Everyone has a natural stance. Arms out at her sides, she starts off easy, rolling down the ramp, barely wobbling. When she feels comfortable with that, she wants to try the half-pipe. I'm dubious, but she shoves off anyway, rolling back and forth a little higher each time, looking pretty steady.

"Hey," she says from two-thirds up one side, "this is really great," and that momentary break in concentration is all it takes. It's a hard wipeout, and she sits with her eyes closed and her teeth clamped over her bottom lip. Lainie runs to her, and so do I. Tears are dripping off Kateri's chin onto her purple lace top, but she doesn't make a sound.

There's a map of ramp rash down the side of her left leg from shorts to ankle. After carefully straightening out her knee, she wipes her cheeks with a handful of hair. We help her up, and she limps to the Camaro. Lainie tells me to follow them, so I do, driving across a string of tiny islands and short causeways to Moose Island, a fishing village with an air of general decrepitude, very different from East Haven.

We end up at Lainie's, a small house nowhere near the ocean. No one's home. In the bathroom, Kateri pours a quarter-bottle of peroxide over her leg, while I admire her perfect toes with their accent of pale blue nail polish. Lainie gets tweezers and tries to pick splinters out of Kateri's palm without much success. "Let Zach try," Kateri says, and I'm determined to do a good job. Otherwise the hand-holding part will be over way too soon.

* * *

Scooter's the one who gets the girls. Bimbo's immature and not too bright, isn't above saying, "Nice lungs," or some other dumb anatomical comment. Scooter's da man, a smooth talker, has that tanned blonde surfer-dude thing down pat, turns on the charm and they're his until he moves on, which he does whenever he thinks one's getting serious. Bimbo's there to pick up the leftovers, and I'm always on the sidelines, the philosopher rumored to be celibate, but that's not by choice, it's because I couldn't get laid even at a swinger's convention. The beach chicks just don't dig me – I'm too tall, too skinny, I have bright red hair and the ghost complexion that goes with it. And I'm a soul surfer, which is so far from cool it's not even on the map.

Just once, Scooter tried to hook me up. He didn't like to hurt anyone's feelings, so he'd always introduce his about-to-be-cast-off girls to Bimbo. I don't remember one ever refusing the switch – until Ramona, who rolled her eyes and said, "I've had some of that, and it wasn't so great."

Bimbo was speechless. Scooter, intent on hooking up with Julie, nudged Ramona in my direction and said, "This is Zen-master Zach. Why don't you take him for a ride?"

I guess Ramona figured there was no need to be coy. She peeled off my baggies right there in the back of the microbus and gave me my first handjob. I managed to keep it together for that, but I was so excited about finally getting to do the wild thing that I came just before I entered the golden gates. Let me tell you, a girl puts max effort into the prelim and then doesn't get the main event, unhappy doesn't even begin to describe her. As for a guy's reputation with the ladies, well, let's just say word travels that network like a chaparral brushfire.

* * *

Thursday, two days later, I'm up early doing tai chi with Nonnie and Papa in the backyard. There's nothing here to stay up late for, no movie theater, no parties, so I'm getting in the groove of going to bed at midnight and waking up at seven. The tai chi thing is good, not like surfing, but I like the discipline of it all, the paradox of controlled movements that free the mind.

So I'm following Nonnie and Papa's moves, breathing in the smell of ocean and old-fashioned roses and French lilacs, the sun climbing over the angled roofs of the house, sunrise peach and amethyst already bleached from the powder-blue sky. Spirea, bridal wreath – Nonnie's teaching me about gardens, says an architect needs to make the acquaintance of green and growing things – has turned the hedges to six-foot-high summer snowdrifts, making this yard so private that only boaters or Moose Islanders with telescopes could ever see us.

Wind chimes – big bamboo temple ones, small tinkly brass ones, and all sizes and pitches in between – swing from the branches of the two old oaks, the purple and white lilacs, the white flowering crabs. If I close my eyes and get in that meditative state, the smells and sounds and the cool breeze could almost convince me I'm in some secret Zen garden. It's the closest I've felt to nirvana since my last ride on Buddy Dexter's longboard, now over a week ago.

I'm totally in the zone when I hear a voice say, "Zach?" I open my eyes, and standing there on the path that comes down the north side of the house are Kateri and Lainie. I can't tell if the slightly-pinched look on Kateri's face is embarrassment or nervousness, but she lets Lainie lead the way into the backyard. The three of us stand there, suddenly clueless about what to say to each other. Nonnie and Papa watch, and I know Nonnie would be over here in a second if Papa wasn't holding her elbow.

I do the introductions, and when I introduce Kateri, I want in the worst way to take her hand, touch her shoulder, do something to show Nonnie and Papa that we already have a connection. But I don't.

Kateri pulls off her space-age shades, and as she and Nonnie look at each other, it's obvious they're connecting, incredible as that sounds. "Let me get some lemonade," Nonnie says, and Kateri says, "I'll help you," and they climb the back porch steps together. Papa keeps eye contact with me as we chat with Lainie, which I figure is his way of not looking at the perky nipples pushing through her tight suntop.

Over lemonade, Kateri tells Nonnie how much she likes the house, and the yard, and the view, and the antique wicker furniture on the back verandah, and the old glass lemonade pitcher, and the chewy macaroons on blue-and-white clipper-ship plates. The girl I think I'm getting to know would never notice or talk about stuff like this, but Kateri's studying everything, like a traveler from another time or a parallel universe.

"You met Zach at that skate park?" Papa asks, and Kateri and Lainie nod.

"Zach's going to teach me," Kateri tells him. "Aren't you, Zach?" My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, and all I can do is nod.

* * *

When we leave the house in Lainie's car, we drive half an hour north to the big salvage store in Calais, where Kateri buys a way cool pair of purple suede Airwalks. Then we hit the park, and man, what she lacks in skill she more than makes up for in guts. No matter how many times she bails and gets bumped, banged, and bruised, the warrior girl gets right back up to do it again.

For two weeks we meet at the park to ride and hang out. At first, Lainie's right there with us every minute, but one day Kateri's alone, and after that we see Lainie less and less.

Nonnie and Papa invite Kateri to lunch, and it's scary how well they all get along, as though she's a proper Boston preppie instead of a purple-haired dudette. For me, there's quite a disconnect between Kateri's punked-up appearance and everything else I know about her, the special school she goes to for gifted science students, her plans to be a geneticist, her love of early Bob Dylan and J.D. Salinger and ice hockey. Some people might say Kateri's a poseur, like a hodad aping the surfer look and cool but never going near the ocean. I don't think this is anywhere near that simple.

The one thing I can't figure out is what's up with her family. She never mentions them, and she never lets me pick her up at her house, always meeting me at the park or at Lainie's. I know she lives on the reservation on the road to Moose Island, and I'm curious what it's like there, trying to figure out how to invite myself over without being a total jerk. If Lainie hadn't told me that first day, I wouldn't even know Kateri was anything other than an exotic-looking downeast girl dreaming of her small-town escape.

I've known Kateri about a month when, one rainy day while we sit in my room playing chess and stopping to make out every time one of us loses a man, she says, "My parents have invited you to dinner tomorrow night." Which is great, though I would've liked it better if she'd invited me herself.

* * *

More nervous than I expected, I turn the beach wagon off the road to Moose Island into Champlain Point Reservation, called by the tribe "Sipayik." I wind my way towards the water, where the Dellises live in a house surrounded by evergreens on a ledge above a pebbly beach. All I know about Kateri's parents is that her father is the tribe's lieutenant governor and her mother teaches sixth grade at the reservation school.

The front door opens while I'm parking the car and Kateri comes out, followed by her ten-year-old sister, Anna. We stand there looking at each other, suddenly shy, until Anna grabs our hands and says, "Come on. Moose steaks on the barbeque," and pulls us towards the house. There's a sweet, resinous smell inside, green and spicy, and just breathing it in puts me at ease. In the living room, the walls are covered in birchbark and hung with both black-and-white and colored photographs of people in tribal dress. Ancestors and elders, Anna tells me, who guide the family and the tribe. Kateri stares out the window while I look at the photos.

Kateri's mother is hulling strawberries in the kitchen, humming as she works. She's tall and serious-looking, the front of her long straight hair held back from her narrow face with an elaborate beaded clip.

"Mom, this is Zachary," Kateri says.

Her mother bows her head and says, "Welcome, Zachary," and almost smiles, but not quite. Her porcupine-quill earrings swing back and forth.

I can't think of a single intelligent sentence, so I dip my head like she did and say, "Thank you."

"Daddy's outdoors," Anna says. I can tell from her tone that she's her father's girl.

We walk across the deck that overlooks the ocean, which tonight is flat-calm to the not-so-distant Canadian shore. Kateri's father is at the grill, spraying a squirt water bottle to cool the coals. His hair's almost as long as Kateri's, onyx-black, pulled back and woven into narrow braids. One of the braids wraps the rest into a bundle as thick as my wrist.

Anna says, "Daddy. The boyfriend's here."

As he turns, I see a profile that should be on money: hooded eyes, a proud nose, cheekbones so sharp they could cut paper. "Welcome, Zachary," he says in a deep, slow voice. Like his wife, he does not look me in the eye, which is fine because Kateri has already told me that this is the Native way. Eye contact is a challenge, it shows lack of respect. "You like musuwok?" he asks. "Moose meat?"

"I've never had it."

"A new experience, then." He spears a steak and flips it over. "Daughters, show our guest where his people first landed."

Anna takes us across the yard and down a footpath between two walls of ledge. Over small beach pebbles worn smooth