“Aren’t you going in the shower?” Phoebe asks.
“I always have the TV on while I shower.”
Lila puts on the Food Network and raises the volume so she can hear Giada talk about bruschetta while she’s bathing.
“Are we seriously not going to talk about last night?” Phoebe asks.
“Actually, I do have a question about last night,” Lila says. “Did we eat cabbage?”
“Yes,” Phoebe says.
“Ugh,” Lila says. “I can’t believe my maid of honor let me eat cabbage two days before my wedding. Cabbage destroys me.”
“So the wedding is on.”
“Of course it is,” Lila says.
Perhaps this is when Phoebe should say, Actually, I can’t go surfing. Actually, I shouldn’t get any more involved in this wedding than I already have. Actually, I just came here to kill myself, and surfing is pretty much the opposite of killing myself. Surfing is an activity that belongs to other people. There is a whole group of things like this that live in a box in her mind—things like dancing to techno music and rafting through the Grand Canyon—things she decided were for people in California. People like Ryun. People like her mother before her mother died.
But she came all this way to see the ocean.
“Okay,” Phoebe says. “Suit yourself.”
Lila drops her robe. She steps into the shower. Giada toasts the bread. Phoebe stands up to leave. “Oh, while you’re out there, get me some Gas-X,” Lila yells, and Phoebe’s sympathy from last night vanishes. This spoiled child, yelling out commands from inside her marble shower. Not even a thank-you.
ON THE BEACH, they are handed wet suits that look to be half the size of their bodies. Phoebe and Gary glance at each other with suspicion.
“And these are supposed to fit us?” Gary asks.
“Absolutely,” Aspen, the instructor, says.
But Phoebe can’t get her suit up past her thighs. Gary’s gets stuck at the calf.
“This is ridiculous,” Gary says, tugging at the fabric. “I’m supposed to get all the way in this thing?”
He hops on one foot while he tries to pull it up over his calf, then tips over like a rigid skyscraper.
“Shit.” He laughs when he hits the ground.
Phoebe likes his loud balloon of a laugh. Likes it when he curses, too. It makes it easier to believe he was once a teenager. That he wasn’t born a father. Or a fiancé. He’s just Gary, trying to put some pants on.
“You okay?” Phoebe asks.
“Nobody tells you about this part, do they?” Gary says.
“No,” Phoebe says. “In all the surfing movies, they always edit out all the montages of surfers just trying to put on their wet suits.”
“That’s the surfing movie I’ll make one day,” Gary says. “Just extremely hot people getting stuck with one leg in their suit and then falling over.”
“I’d like to point out that you just called yourself hot.”
“I hope you can excuse it knowing it was done only for the sake of continuing a joke.”
“And we appreciate your sacrifice.”
He looks down at the suit suctioned to his calves. She wonders where he got those calves. His father? Football in high school? Gym after work for twenty years? He didn’t seem the type, but she’s lived long enough by now to know it’s foolish to ever be surprised by someone’s secret hobbies.
“Well, it’s a very dramatic scene, I admit,” Phoebe says. “Will they be able to do it? Or will they just get stuck there, forever, on the sand?”
“It looks like it,” Gary says. “I mean, there’s no goddamned way.”
Juice comes over, already in her wet suit. A pro. “What’s wrong?” Juice asks.
“I can’t get it over my calves, sweetheart,” Gary says.
“I can’t get it over my thighs,” Phoebe says.
“Help us,” Gary says.
“Ew,” Juice says, and looks at the two of them. “This is weird.”
Juice walks away to practice standing up on her surfboard. Phoebe pulls her suit up, slides her arms in the holes, and celebrates, while Gary lies there in defeat.
“Okay,” Phoebe says. “It’s basically just like wearing tights.”
“I don’t wear tights.”
“You just got to shimmy this thing up slowly.”
