Ike picked up his phone and made a call. His voice harmonized with David’s as they repeated the same phrase, “We’re sitting on the L.I.E.”

“What’s the L.I.E.?” I asked. I’m from a town in Southern California that has one freeway: 101. You take it north or south and there ends your choice.

David and Ike yelled, “THE LONG ISLAND EXPRESSWAY!”

“Where the fuck do you think we are?” David was astounded by my lack of knowledge concerning the roadways of the greater tri-state area.

Every now and then, when I’m in New York, New Jersey, or even Baltimore, where I now live, I think how odd it is to find myself here—this place where there’s snow, salted roads, tolls, and expressways. Thunder still awes me—it never rained in California. I am stunned by the level of discomfort people tolerate on the East Coast: humidity, mosquitoes, potholes. I’ve traveled abroad hither and yon, went to graduate school on the east coast, lived in Canada for several years, yet I still, often, feel like some lost California girl who’s been snapped to the wrong place. Like Darren in Bewitched, finding he’s in a medieval village instead of Mr. Tate’s office--the result of Endora’s flaming temper.

So I was feeling that Bewitched sensation as we sat on the L.I.E. waiting, like everyone else, to get to the beach.

The sunroof was open. Ike’s poodle wore ribbons that sagged in the heat. I stood on my seat and stuck my body out the sunroof—a sorority girl in a limousine. David and Ike looked up at me; David was still on the phone.

I was wearing a tube top. Not a Texas tube top—a structured one, with bones—it was long, covered my belly. Ike answered his phone, “We’re stuck on the L.I.E.!” I listened to these New York boys on their New York phones talking to other New Yorkers on their New York phones, everyone in New York cars with Empire State plates, parked on the L.I.E., with the heat making visible waves off the backs of cars like floating oil, and I reached for the hem of my tube top and yanked it down. To my waist. Where it sat like a corset below my breasts that seemed to look out at this strange roadscape with as much wonder as I.

David and Ike hung up their phones, stared at me and laughed. Deeply. Hysterically. They grew up with an indoor pool where no one ever went naked swimming. They took family vacations in Caribbean resorts where one never leaves the gated grounds. Their Bar Mitzvah albums have wooden covers with burned edges as if the album had been rescued from a schooner fire at sea.

I stood there for three or four seconds. Then I ducked down and pulled my top up.

“Why’d you do that?” David asked, they were both still laughing.

“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t.

Growing up, my friends and I swam naked at the beach at night, black waves covering us like wet capes. We swam naked in the mountains in swimming holes and streams, standing on rocks slick as oil from the furry moss. We skinny-dipped in backyard pools, in country club pools at night, and even, once, in the pool of an old folks’ home where no one seemed to mind. Boys changed into their wetsuits on the beach. My girlfriends and I watched until we knew their naked bodies so well that it didn’t occur to us to watch.

The traffic slowly moved. The cars shifted, everyone trying to duck into the same empty space—it was as if a giant hand were playing that game where, with only one slot open, you slide the squares around to reveal a picture of a panda.

Ike turned up the CD. I’m lost in love and I don’t know much, was thinking about, fell out of touch, but I’m BACK ON MY FEET . . . .

I stared out my open window and thought about California—a place where I’d probably never again live, but would carry inside me with a fierce sort of nationalism, a foolish pride that would, certainly, get me nowhere.