I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman

FOUR GIRLS

FOUR GIRLS on the overpass in bikinis, caught behind the net of the chain-link fence, and I’m wondering whose idea it really was to stand there virtually naked and wave at and catch the traffic coming both ways. I doubt they are even aware of the bikini’s tragic history—how Reard insisted he’d named it for the island, not the bomb blast, but then admitted he was cashing in on a hot topic, even so. But this is history and it’s not fashionable, especially when you’re young and virtually naked with so many men moving beneath you. These are girls who have recently discovered that the bodies they have are the bodies men want more than they themselves do. And such beauty in itself is not dangerous but it puts them at risk as they flirt and turn like the spinners and spoons my father taught me to use to lure the perch and the pike up into daylight and air. That’s what I was as a girl—a quiet magician, casting beguilement and false promise over the water. And the one lure believed by many to be the most devastating was my favourite— the Syclops with its life-like, side-to-side waggle, multi-flash and vibration, with its wire strand soft as boot lace—springy, with no memory. 72 Who could fail to love the head of a fish ripping like an axe head through the skin of the water. And all these men moving under them in sports cars and hatchbacks and suburban utility vehicles are wearing even the promise of their large hands like expensive accessories. This is what they imagine, these girls: hands that will reel them in, unfasten them and have them raking for air. And then spill them back into the wet coffin of their lives. They will learn to confuse sex with salvation. I’ve done it, too. All my life. And it’s made me lonely. It’s history and it’s not fashionable, but before they were born Bikini was removed forever, vapourized by Bravo in nineteen fifty-four. And while the islanders of the atoll still remain homeless, marooned on a distant island with no reef and no lagoon when in the past they’d sailed their canoes as far as the eye could see, these four girls in scraps of fabric named for a literal hot topic are spinning slowly above a slick, wide spine of traffic. Glanced at. Desired. Forgotten. And I’m pressing on in second, sliding through the belt of shadow under the overpass. Remember, a lure is crafted to respond to every eddy and swirl in a current. In my mirror the girls are slim silhouettes. And how small they become. How precious and precise. Out of their depth. 73 ...