San Diego seems utterly filled with fat, tanned families, wives with untamed manes of chestnut brown hair, men with paunches and bad tattoos, children with spindly legs and potbellies, thick, wet stalactites of hair running down from ponytails sagging at the backs of their heads. Leathery old women with emphysematic voices call out to towheaded three-year-olds with soggy diapers doing cannonballs in the pool. Palm trees sprout up everywhere, framing the occasional fighter plane or helicopter circling over the harbor. Bright tropical flowers mingle obscenely on traffic medians. An apple-shaped woman with platinum hair times, on her fake Rolex, her apple-shaped teen daughter’s swim across the length of the pool. The daughter kicks great, sloppy splashes and surfaces at the deep end spitting and sputtering, pulling at her eyes with her fingertips. “Eighteen,” her mother announces.