The Summer of Naked Swim Parties by Jessica Anya Blau

I’d probably get an erection, too. You don’t understand dicks. Dicks think for themselves, okay? You see big juicy tits and your dick gets hard even if those tits belong to your girlfriend’s mom, okay? I mean, fuck. I couldn’t help it.”
    “Okay, that’s fine. But I just can’t fool around knowing that your boner started with my mother.”
    “Whoa,” Flip said, and he sat up as he noticed Allen, wearing only his underpants, pacing around the pool.
    Allen paused at the deep end, slipped off his briefs, and dove in.
    “Please don’t say anything about my dad’s dick.”
    “I could barely see it from here, although it did look kinda bouncy.”
    “Please, Flip, please think about me for a second. I don’t want to hear about my dad’s dick.” Jamie imagined Labrador Flip ripping open a Hefty bag, spewing wet, smoldering garbage on the floor as he searched for a stringy chicken bone while Jamie stood beside him scolding, No!
    “Man, you don’t have to worry about my boner anymore.” Flip laughed.
    Allen had pulled himself out of the pool and was staring over at Jamie and Flip, water skimming down his body. Flip waved.
    “Allen!” Flip motioned for Allen to join them.
    “Oh my god.” Jamie turned her head.

    Allen picked up a towel that was draped over a boulder and wrapped it around his waist.
    “Your mother!” he said, as he loped toward them with his lopsided gait.
    “Mom okay?” Jamie asked. Now that he was no longer naked, Jamie was relieved by her father’s presence—it created a padding between herself and Flip.
    Allen sat down and crossed his legs. Jamie and Flip sat up.
    They were in a circle, facing each other, like the kids who sat way out on the field at Jamie’s school and smoked pot. The stoners.
    “That Nazi in there said I had a selfish, yellow aura . . . anti-Semitic bitch!”
    “Whoa, is she a Nazi?” Flip asked.
    Allen looked over at him, then back at Jamie.
    “Now your mother thinks I’m fooling around. She believes the fräulein.”
    “What’s a fräulein?” Jamie asked.
    “Wait, is she a Nazi aura reader?” Flip asked.
    “A fräulein is a young woman, in German.”
    “Is she a Nazi or not?” Flip said.
    “No, she’s too young to be a real Nazi,” Allen said. “But she might be anti-Semitic.”
    “What’s that?” Jamie asked.
    “Jesus Christ . . .” Allen slapped his hand on his forehead.  “How can you be my child? How can you have grown up in this house and not know what an anti-Semite is? Where did we go wrong?”
    “Sorry, Dad.” Jamie wondered if her father sometimes felt about her the way she currently felt about Flip: a startling disappointment.
    “Have you ever heard me say those words before? Have  you ever heard the term? What about history class? Don’t you get history class at school?”
    “Last year we studied the California missions. And the Chumash.”
    “We studied the gold rush,” Flip said.
    “An anti-Semite is someone who hates Jews,” Allen said.
    “Are there Jews in there?” Flip asked.
    “I’m a Jew!” Allen said. “Jamie’s a Jew!”
    “Whoa, is that why you guys have bagels in your house?” Bagels were so foreign to Flip that he pronounced the word with a soft a.
    “We have bagels because I bring them back from Los Angeles, where you can actually buy bagels. I mean, can you believe a town like this, all these fancy people, all this money, and you can’t even buy a bagel here?”
    “Dad, I’m only a half Jew. Mom’s an atheist.”
    “If the Nazis started exterminating again, you’d be dead.  That’s all you need to know.”
    “So you think the German gave you a bad aura reading because you’re a Jew?” Flip asked.
    “Eh . . .” Allen didn’t seem angry anymore. “She probably just thought she had to pick someone from the crowd to have a bad aura and she randomly picked me.”
    “You think she’s making it up?” Jamie asked.
    “Sweetheart,” Allen said, “your mother’s probably the only