The Frustrated Teenager and the Embarrassing Parent

Close encounters of a nude kind

Alice, lying on her front, was still able to see Jan and Pieter walking away to the headland around which Maggie said there was a nude beach.  They were walking in a relaxed but confident way having a conversation with lots of hand waving.  Alice couldn’t imagine that Pieter didn’t have a girlfriend but if he did where was she?  She reckoned that he must be at least twenty and even if he didn’t have a girlfriend he surely must have had one in the past and knew what to do in bed.  Jan and Pieter reached the headland and went round it.  She wasn’t quite sure she believed that there were beaches where people just walked around with nothing on without taking any particular notice of each other.  Perhaps it was one of those urban myths like the alligator in the sewer or the Kentucky Fried Rat.  Her mum asked Alice to rub some sun cream onto her back and then Maggie did the same for her.  It felt nice and she wondered what it would feel like if Leo was doing it.   About half an hour later Alice started feeling a bit restless and said to her mother, “I’m just going to cool off in the sea and then walk along the beach a bit.”

“OK,” said Maggie sleepily.

After her dip Alice started walking along the beach at the water’s edge.  She didn’t know if she’d have the nerve to go all the way to the supposed nude beach.  It still didn’t seem possible to her that such a place could exist so close to the town and she suspected that the whole thing was a wind up by her mother.   At the end of the beach the waves washed over a few metres of flat sand where the rocks came to just short of the sea.  She stopped unsure of whether to go on or not.  A young couple not much older than her carrying beach mats passed her and walked through the shallow water round into the next bay.  There didn’t seem to be any harm in following them, so she did, only to stop in amazement when she came almost face to face with a naked middle aged man sporting a huge beer belly walking up and down as if on guard duty.  His skin was deeply and evenly tanned and Alice wondered if he’d even worn swimming trunks in his life.  There were nude people everywhere she turned and what amazed her even more was that there were properly organised sun beds and parasols and a man with a leather bag going around collecting money for them just like on the town beach.  She saw a young family with children playfully screaming and running at the water’s edge.  A couple in their seventies, fairly slim but with bodies wrinkled by gravity and sunlight, gingerly paddled hand in hand.  But what really caught her eye was a dark haired woman about her mother’s age with beautiful Mediterranean features on a sun bed having an animated conversation with the man sitting next to her.  Her first reaction was what a good looking woman she was but then Alice was shocked to see that she only had one breast.  She glanced up the beach and noticed two men standing in the water some distance away that looked like Jan and Pieter.  Without waiting to find out for sure she turned and hurried back the way she’d come.  The sight of the one breasted woman had left her disturbed with a knot in her stomach.  What she couldn’t get over was that the woman was carrying on as if everything was normal and hadn’t actually even noticed that her breast was missing.

As Alice got near to were she’d been sitting with Maggie a man with a leg amputated just below the knee came out of the sea and hopped over to where his prosthesis was propped up again the side of a lounger.  Alice looked down at her body to see if it was all there just in case there was some disease going around causing people to lose bits of themselves.

“Well,” said Maggie when Alice sat down again, “is it a naturist beach?”

“A what beach?” said Alice

“A nude beach.”

“Yes,” said Alice

“You look really worried,” said Maggie, “what up?  You’ve seen a naked person before haven’t you?”

“Well, yes,” said Alice, “but not very often and not cavorting around in the open air and there was…there was…”

“There was what?”

“There was a woman with only one breast,” said Alice.

“Lots of women only have one breast.”

“But she was just sitting there with nothing on just chatting away to this guy as if everything was normal.  She hadn’t even had any reconstructive surgery.  There was just a scar.”

“Perhaps she couldn’t get reconstructive surgery where she came from.  What do you expect her to do?  Put a sticker over her scar saying ‘stay away I’ve had cancer,’ wear a bikini top with a balloon in one of the cups?  I really admire someone who’s got the self confidence to go out like that and just say ‘take me as I am and if you don’t like it you get stuffed.’  Having breasts is part of what makes me a woman, and its part of what makes you a woman as well, but if I lost one or both of them I wouldn’t be any less a woman if that makes sense.  That guy over there isn’t less of a man because he’s only got one leg is he?”

  No one had ever called Alice a woman before.  She thought about what her mother had said and although it was paradoxical she thought that she understood.

“I think bikini tops are just a bloody nuisance and if a man can go bare-chested on the beach then so can a woman how ever many breasts she’s got,” said Maggie. “But if you feel more comfortable wearing one then that’s your prerogative.”

When they went to bed that evening Alice put one of her long T shirts with a wacky embossed logo on the front.  This one had a sleeping cartoon character with a stream of Zs coming from it.  In the middle of the night she woke up drenched in sweat because the air conditioning had gone off.  There were still lights on outside so it didn’t seem to be a power cut.  Probably a circuit breaker had tripped but it wouldn’t be possible to get any of the hotel staff to fix it before morning.  In the dim light Alice saw that her mother had thrown off the covers and was lying naked on her bed facing away from her.  Alice decided to do likewise pulling of her T shirt and neatly throwing it on top of her suit case a couple of metres away between the wardrobe and the door of the room.  She then straightened out the soggy sheet, flapped it up and down a few time and then let it drape over her.  It was incredibly hot and stuffy in the room and she found it hard to get back to sleep again.  Thoughts raced through her head and she ran a hand over her body seeking a foretaste of the pleasure that she hoped to have with Leo but Pieter’s face replaced his in her fantasy and he wouldn’t go away.

When Alice woke up in the morning she felt very uncomfortable: she had a headache; the sheet was damp and rucked up around her in sticky folds and she was desperate for pee, a feeling not helped by the sound of her mother running the shower in the bathroom.  Alice was about to call out to Maggie to ask her to hurry when the shower stopped and Maggie came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped round her.  Alice’s clothes were out of reach and she thought of wrapping the sheet around her until she remembered the Greek style bathroom with no separate shower stall and water on the floor all the way to the toilet.  The sheet was wet already but she didn’t want to make it any worse.  Maggie sat down on her bed facing away from Alice.  So Alice thought that she would make a quick dash for the bathroom while her mother was looking the other way.  At the same moment Maggie thinking that Alice was still asleep took off the towel and started to cross the room in the opposite direction towards the wardrobe so that the met in the gap between their beds.  They tried to step past each other both going the same way and nearly colliding.  “Good morning, how are you?” said Maggie.  Two close encounters of a nude kind in less than 24 hours were too much for Alice.  She made another attempt to step past her mother and this time successfully reached the bathroom door.

“Sorry mum can’t stop to chat.”

As she showered Alice thought of what she would say to her friends after the holiday.  “We drank shots all night,” she imagined Thea saying.  Her wildest night had consisted of sharing a litre of wine with Maggie instead of their usual half litre.  “You mean you met this fabulous Dutch guy and you didn’t try to do anything with him,” she heard Jasmine saying.  She wasn’t properly back together Leo so she could do what she wanted and she wasn’t sure that she wanted another session of fumbling around with a complete beginner anyway.  She was a woman for God’s sake.  She wanted a sex life and she wanted it now.