SKINNY DIPPIN'

SKINNY DIPPIN'

If it wasn’t for Nanny, I wouldn’t be able to say I’ve gone skinny dippin’. But I did. Just that one time.

No one ever knew why I was such a prude, not even me. I guess the reason doesn’t matter, though. Fact is, I was a thirteen-year-old prude, not comfortable in my own skin. I’d say it was because of all the changes my body was going through, but I know that’s not it. My skin wasn’t comfortable before the changes, either.

I remember being eight years old, sitting in the tub, when my mother and Daddy’s cousin walked right into the bathroom. Mama was showing Sarah around the house and neither of them thought a thing about bursting through the door, like I wasn’t even there. Luckily, I was holding a washcloth at the time, and I quickly covered up while trying to force my knees through my chest.

“Maaah-muh-uh,” I cried, “I’m taking a bath!”

Caught in mid-sentence, while she was showing off the double entrance into the bathroom, Mama just glanced over at me.

“What in the world is your problem? You don’t have to cover up, it’s not like you have anything we haven’t seen before.”

Then she kept right on talking to Sarah and they eventually sashayed out of the room, like it was no big deal.

It was a big deal to me. To this day I still remember the embarrassment.

I could have understood if it had been Nanny busting in, but Mama should have known better. She was modest herself. They were complete opposites when it came to their bodies. We never saw Mama stripped down unless she was in her bathing suit. Nanny had us help get hers on.

My grandmother was a little beach ball with arms, five feet tall and almost that big around. An excellent seamstress, she could whip up even the most difficult patterns and turn out a masterpiece fit for any NYC runway. But she’d rather not wear clothes at all. She must have told me a thousand times how she thought humans should be more like animals, not hampered by societal rituals when it came to clothing.

“Clothes are too restrictive,” she’d say. “Much better to let the elements move around you, like God intended.”

Thankfully for everyone around her, Nanny respected the time-honored tradition of covering her body instead of flitting around like the fabled emperor. But that didn’t mean she had to like it. Her other granddaughters were more like her than Mama or me.

“What’s wrong with you, Stephie?” Dee Dee would taunt as I covered my face when she pranced around the bedroom with only her panties on. Of course, Dee Dee had nothing to be uncomfortable about. She was twelve, flat-chested, and waistless. Katy was only ten, so she really didn’t have a dog in the hunt, and our cousins, Belita and Tina, lived with Nanny so clothes never mattered much to them, either.

As we often did during the summer, the Prescott girls were spending the week with Nanny and Pappaw, Belita and Tina. Pete hadn’t joined us on this particular trip because he had baseball practice every day.

Our grandparents lived outside Rockport, an hour or so away from Corpus. Their little community, Holiday Beach, nuzzled the shores of Copano Bay, one of Pappaw’s favorite fishing spots, and we loved spending time there. We’d fish with Pappaw, cook and play Yahtzee with Nanny, and run around exploring the rest of the time. But our favorite thing to do was go swimming in one of the Beach’s two pools.

Nanny and Pappaw, being two of the handful of residents living at Holiday Beach full-time, were charged with unlocking the pools at 9:00am and locking them back up at 10:00pm. Pappaw was fishing by six and asleep by ten, so the keys and the responsibility fell to Nanny.

When we’d drive up and exit Ol’ Betsy, Nanny’s 1968 Chevrolet station wagon, towels slung over shoulders, sauntering in like we owned the place, everyone waiting at the gate snapped-to. Nanny would charge up to the front of the line, her five granddaughters shoving their way through the crowd behind her. Once the other kids figured out who we were, they’d step back and let us pass.

Nanny was the queen of summertime, and we were her princesses.

One night, when we were riding sugar highs like roller coasters, trying our best and failing to not wake Pappaw, Nanny came up with one of her brilliant ideas. The clock was swiftly marching toward midnight and none of us were close to tired, so Nanny proposed we head down to one of the pools. She said a midnight swim would be just the thing to wind us down.

“Grab some towels, girls. We’re goin’ for a swim,” she said.

“But, Nanny, our bathing suits aren’t even dry yet,” I moaned, thinking about the cold, wet material climbing up my warm, dry skin. “Besides, the pool’s supposed to be closed.”

“Well,” Nanny answered, “we don’t need our bathing suits and I’ve got the keys.” Scooping the keychain out of the ashtray where it usually slept, Nanny held onto the purple rectangular fob, letting the keys dangle. They started dancing as if to Caribbean music.

The other four girls started stripping.

“But Nanny, we can’t go driving around with no clothes on,” I cried, my mind conjuring up a cartoon version of Nanny and us five girls, crammed into Ol’ Betsy nekkid as the day we were born, being pulled over by a traffic cop. Never mind the fact Holiday Beach didn’t have any cops.

“Girls, get your clothes back on,” Nanny told the others. “We can’t drive naked down to the pool. We’ll undress in the pavilion.”

Turning toward me, she asked, “Have you ever been skinny dippin’, Miss Priss?”

“Of course not, Nanny.”

“I have,” said Dee Dee, grinning like Nanny’s black and white Felix clock.

“You have not!” I exclaimed.

“Uh huh! You weren’t there.”

“Okay, girls. That’s enough.

“Stephie, there’s no better feeling in the world than floating around in the cool water on a hot night. It’s like velvet rolling over your skin,” Nanny explained.

“Y’all go ahead and go. I’m going to bed.”

“Aw, ya big baby,” Dee Dee said. “You don’t have anything we don’t have.”

“C’mon, Stephie,” coaxed Belita. “We’re gonna have fun. You can at least try it. If you don’t like it, you can always put your clothes back on and wait for us in the car.”

I didn’t even undress in front of Dee Dee and Katy, much less an entire party. As I stood in the middle of Nanny’s living room, contemplating my choices, the last five sugar wafers I had eaten must have kicked in.

“Fine. I’ll go along. But I’m not promising anything!”

“That’s my girl,” Nanny said. “OK – everyone have a towel? Everybody out to Ol’ Betsy. Hup, two, three, four. Hup, two, three, four . . .”

Ol’ Betsy had an air conditioner, but Nanny rarely ran it. She liked driving down the road with the windows rolled down, her left elbow hanging out. So there we were, packed into the station wagon, wind blowing through our hair, driving down the caliche road. Irrepressible Nanny and four giggling girls. And me.

Once we pulled up to the pool, Nanny got serious.

“Now listen, girls. We want to have fun, but we can’t be too loud so keep it down.”

The thing is, even though not many people lived full-time at Holiday Beach, plenty of people showed up as soon as school was out, electing to spend their summer away from town. There were only a few other houses in the vicinity of Nanny and Pappaw’s but one of them stood within spitting distance of the pool. Their lights were out, but I happened to know that one of the sleepers was a boy I had befriended a couple of days before. He was a year older than me, and not all that cute, but still didn’t need to know my crazy family was out at the community pool, taking a midnight swim. With no clothes on.

Nanny left the lights off, thank heavens. And no sooner had I parked my butt on the picnic table in the pavilion, trying to get up the courage to undress, when Nanny and all four of the wild ones were stripped and running for the pool, leaving clothes in piles on the concrete floor.

Wait. It was Nanny and three of the wild ones running for the pool. The wildest of them all had turned around and was running toward me. I stood up to fend her off.

“C’mon, Stephie,” Dee Dee cried. “Get those clothes off!”

Before I could put up a fight, Dee Dee had my shorts pulled down and was trying to yank off my t-shirt. Thankfully I was taller than her.

“Leave me alone, Dee Dee,” I yelped.

“I’ll give you one minute,” she said, her eyes dancing mischievously. “If you don’t have those clothes off by then, I’m gonna have the other girls come help me and we’ll get you undressed.”

“Fine,” I said. “Turn around.”

Rolling her eyes at the absurdity of having to turn around when I’d be standing in front of her, stark naked in a few seconds, Dee Dee turned her back toward me and started counting down. I knew she wasn’t kidding about enlisting the other girls to disrobe me, so I hurried out of the rest of my clothes and, arms across chest, inched toward the pool.

“If you’re worried about us looking at you, you’d better be quicker about getting into the water,” Dee Dee said.

She might as well have hit me across the bottom with a two by four. Running through the gate I lengthened my stride and plunged into the water. Pushing up from the bottom, I hit the surface, gasping for air. As I caught my breath, I heard the others clapping, trying to whistle.

Nanny sure knew what she was talking about. The water felt like satin sheets, cuddling against me from all angles. For a few brief moments I was able to tune everyone else out and relax into a feeling of weightless abandon I had never known existed.

But before long, the four wild ones, and Nanny, were running along the sidewalk, taking turns jumping off the diving board, trying to outdo each other. While they had at least tried to be quiet after we first arrived, with every upward movement of the fun scale the noise increased. I never did round up the courage to prance around in the moonlight with only air against my skin, but I did enjoy the feel of cool water embracing me.

Until the light went on inside the neighbor’s house.

“Oh my gosh,” I yelled, louder than all of them, pointing to the window. “LOOK!”

Wet heads jerked toward the light. Without even thinking, we all six ran to the towels, wrapped ourselves up, grabbed the piles of clothing, and ran for Ol’ Betsy. Nanny’s towel fell off as she struggled to get the gate locked, so she grabbed it, draping it over herself like a toga then skittered to the car.

“Go, Nanny, go,” we hollered as she was trying to find the ignition.

Just before the second light went on, Ol’ Betsy cranked up and Nanny hit the gas. Not one of us breathed until we were far enough away for her to turn on the headlights.

“That was so much fun,” Belita yelled.

“Oh, my gosh. Do you think they saw us?” I asked, clutching my towel across my chest.

“Who cares?” Dee Dee asked. “It was dark. They couldn’t see anything important, even if they did see us.”

“I don’t know where you were,” I said, “but where I was, the moon was bright enough to shine off that white skin where your bathing suit was supposed to be.”

For a moment everyone was quiet. Then we all burst out laughing at the same time.

“That was so much fun,” I yelled as Nanny aimed Ol’ Betsy, with girls hanging out three windows, whooping and hollering, toward her house.