On Target

Target dressing rooms are lit like gas station chip aisles. Light that is at once bright and gray, severe and dull.

Every year I come here high to pick out a bathing suit.

I should just do plain black. Black top, printed bottoms. Will that make my ass look big? Or my boobs look smaller? Is the print supposed to be on top? What did that magazine say? Maybe the ruffle one. It’s weird. I like it. No. I’m high. Can I pull off strapless? Stick to halter. Halter always works. I love halter. I hate this black one.

I end up with a controversial purple and gold thing. One strap. Braids of fabric. Sparkles. Later this summer, on some impulsive Tuesday, I’ll come back and buy a black one.

I’ll always be chasing the Perfect Black one of 2004 :The year I get too into yoga. (It isn’t my fault. I live in Santa Monica.) Perfect Black is from the Macy’s in the Promenade. Buy it on my birthday with a check from my grandparents. It rubs against my schoolwork at the beach: sandy notebook pages and wind wrinkled drafts of scripts I’m too proud of. It soaks at night in motel hot tubs: the hot Indio air wicks the spit from your tonsils and yes I’ll have another beer I just graduated college. It droops through the dusty slats of my mom’s pool recliner in its later years: dogs lick droplets of pool water from the concrete and more protein shake, forget what it’s like to chew, the raw meat of my face held together with screws, more Vicodin, and at least I can work on my tan here. Perfect Black Top disappears quietly.  Perfect Black Bottoms stay with me through four apartments.

Anchor Print is bought in the dead of winter, and maybe that is why it’s a trooper. Quick Target stop before Big Bear. It makes it’s premiere at night: the water sears our legs and the cold air cuts our faces and it’s hard to say which feels better and later I’ll have to pretend to like Scattergories. It’s faded when summer starts. It comes on after my bridesmaid dress: Coors Light and chlorine and Lauren’s still in her veil, and here comes security again, and I should go to bed but instead I stay up and make out with the wrong groomsman (I have a boyfriend. They’re all the wrong groomsmen) and Anchor Print spends the next two weeks in my trunk tied up in a Vons bag. It gets saggy and comes camping the next summer: string cheese moist from the cooler and flip flips left at the creek and mushrooms and Jameson and Jameson and someone come pee with me and these are the best people I’ve ever met and I don’t have a boyfriend anymore.

Blue Stripe is from a Target in Texas.  We drive to Austin in a rented SUV and listen to Britney and smoke pot from an apple and never get tired of staring at the sky.  It pops its cherry in the hotel pool, where another girl has Blue Stripe as well. She’s there with her parents. It bothers her more than me. Sucks to be fifteen. Sucks to get a bathing suit from a Target in Texas. Back in L.A., Blue Stripe is on all the time: rinsed and hung and back on before it’s dry. Pool parties after sleepless nights: naps in rafts and dance music over huge speakers and Blue Moon to kick the hangover. Weekday pool parties: chips and salsa and the smoke of charred chicken and another perfect day. Pool parties with good people and great dogs: cannonballs and grown ups being thrown in and water guns and floatie noodles and who left us here unsupervised and this is why we live in L.A.

And anyway, now here I am with this purple and gold thing.