At the beach, it’s almost always warm. It’s warm but it’s not hot. You’ll be gone before the summer comes, and the sand still doesn’t burn. You leave your flip flops in the car and climb the boardwalk steps. You don’t let the kids. Splinters! you warn when they try to slip theirs off. What about you? Jack says. They like to touch your callouses. You have blood blisters from the mornings running barefoot on the sand and they watch as you stick a needle in.
At the beach, it’s sun and warmth and clouds then sun again then rain and wind but never cold. There’s nowhere else you have to go, no school or work. You still teach a couple of times a week, on Zoom, but you show up sweaty from your run, salty from your swim. Your hair smells like chlorine from the pool and you remember no one else is close to you and you almost laugh.
At the beach, your mom texts, your grandma calls. They live here too but you don’t call them back. Your grandma’s old and sick. None of them wear masks. You stuff your phone into the bottom of your bag.
At the beach, you go before the sun is up and it’s so dark. The moon reflecting off the waves. There are a thousand blues; before the sun comes up it’s black and the water is slate gray. The sound’s a rolling crash and whoosh when there are waves, which there often aren’t because the Atlantic can be quiet, easy; except when you arrive. Those first weeks, it’s November—the year and month that you turn thirty-eight. The first month, the wind blows hard, the water churns, and even when it’s still dark, you watch, can still make out the roiling froth of it.
At the beach, you see a klatch of dolphins. Dolphins for kids from Florida are like deer for kids from further North: you’re used to seeing them. You’ve seen them your whole life, but you grab the kids. You bring them closer to the water and Jack keeps saying, I can’t see them, and you worry he might cry, but then, finally, Right there, you say, follow my hand. One of them jumps, twirls, up in the air and you all stare and someone claps and more people come closer to the shore. And then there are not just three but four then seven, then a whole pack somehow, maybe twenty total, closer to the shore than you’ve ever seen, and the boys are so excited, squealing, and people get their phones and start taking videos and pictures and you try to think it’s lovely. But also, later, driving home and everybody tired, salty, sandy, you say to David, Was that normal? Have you ever seen that? Why were all of them together? Do you think something was wrong?
At the beach, David doesn’t have his surfboard, because there are no waves and all four of you swim at once and Jack wraps his arms around your neck and his legs around your waist and the waves aren’t waves so much as hills, ebbing, flowing lolls and you jump up when they come and both Jack and Henry squeal and finally you convince Jack to just hold your hands and then Henry puts his head under the water for the first time and then Jack’s jealous and he wants to do it too and he swims from you to David and then back again and everybody’s noses get a little burnt and that night everybody sleeps the whole night in their own beds.
At the beach, the bag of popcorn rips and spills and seagulls come. One of them shits on Jack’s head and Henry laughs at him. Jack cries and David is out surfing by himself. You try to wave to him to come in but he just waves back, paddles further out, and you pack up, towels, blankets, the green, and blue, and purple plastic shovels, the orange plastic crab, the purple seahorse, the pink castle cone, the chips, remaining popcorn, fruit.
At the beach, you bring the children out to swim because they would not stop fighting at the house, but Henry says he doesn't want to swim. He kicks and cries in the car. He says he hates sand and hates sun. He wants to go back home, go back to his school, to see his friends. He says he hates you and he hates his dad and he hates Jack and this is not his home and it’s not his fault that Daddy lost his job.
At the beach, you see a woman and a man you know from high school though you cannot, in the time you see them, remember either of their names. They have little kids, littler than yours. Henry’s jumping off a rock and you say, Sorry if he’s a bad influence, and the woman looks at you, her face blank. Her kids are girls. They’re bad enough all on their own, she says. And you feel chastened, hope you look to her like someone else. Whenever you come back here, you feel shocked to see that any time has passed at all. And it’s jarring to you that this couple—Tara and Scott, you think you remember later; you think that you remember him touching her back, cupping her ass, in the halls, him kissing her after school next to her beat up yellow truck—are so middle aged, the thinness of their skin, the way their bodies look a little lumpy and worn out. You avoid the mirror that night after you shower, while you help the kids out of the bath and dry them off.
At the beach, the children disappear. They run down the sand with David and you read a book. It’s been too long, you think, after a while, since they left, too much quiet; you get scared, and you stand up. You look for them. You’re not wearing your glasses and one of your contacts fell out in the ocean and you stand on tiptoes, squint, but David brought his surfboard and you have all the other stuff, the food, David’s phone and wallet, yours. You walk down to the water, peer out for them. You walk up toward the dunes. Finally, after you have asked another family, from far away, if they’ve seen a man, two boys, all three of them come: the boys thrilled and David quiet, looking down. We played! Jack says. You look at David. They played, he says. They didn’t get too close, he says. He stops. They got close, he says. They’re kids. A little girl. Five or six, says David. They didn’t even care she was so young. They ran around with her. There were no masks. No one wears masks here, and you get anxious. It was… starts David. It was so fun, mommy, Henry says. He is your social child, gregarious and charming. Every couple of days he makes lists of all the friends he’ll have over when you go back to New York, one after the other, the games they’ll play, the things they’ll eat. Her smile was luminous, he says.
At the beach, you meet your parents, who you haven’t seen all the months you’ve been here. We live here too, your mom still sometimes texts. But you’re not being safe, you sometimes respond. You’re using this as an excuse, your mother says. She’s not wrong. She got sick a few months ago, was briefly in the ICU. She follows Henry into the waves though she’s not wearing a bathing suit. She wears jean shorts; she’s 65. She rolls around and gets all wet and her shorts fill with sand and as you’re in the parking lot saying goodbye, as she piles stacks of the Christmas gifts she bought them weeks ago into the back of your car, your dad tells her she can’t get in his car like that and you give her leggings and a towel from your trunk so she can change.
At the beach, you’re out walking after everyone’s asleep. You wear a sweater even though it’s still not cold. You pull it up over your head, slip out of the linen pants you’ve been wearing non-stop the past six months and you swim in your underwear and short-sleeved shirt. You think about those times, at the beach, when you were a kid. When your friends had curfews and you did not and you’d drink a whole bottle of Bacardi Limon and you’d swim out and no one noticed you or called for you or ever asked you later where you’d been. And you’d think sometimes something would happen, a shark, a rip tide, you’d drown. Sometimes you’d hope for it. But every time the only thing that happened was your arms got tired, the booze started to wear off. You drove yourself home.
At the beach, you take the boys, because David has an online appointment with the unemployment office, and they’ve been trapped inside all day remote schooling and Jack threw his iPad and it cracked and Henry told his class during morning meeting that his favorite word was “disembowel.” Fresh air! you say. And the wind whips and whirls, the cracking palm trees’ leaves woke you up in the middle of the night and you weren’t able to get back to sleep. You bring books. And you drive them out and you all trudge out of the car, over the dunes, and slip off your shoes and sit down but the sand blows on your skin and in your face and stings and the pages of the book flap and almost rip, and Henry yells and Jack looks like he might cry and you pack them up and all go home again.
At the beach, David surfs and you take the boys. You hold them both then both boys swim. Henry’s always been strong, but Jack’s been practicing. There’s a pool at the house you’re borrowing, and he dives every day for the rings David ordered online, throwing them then swimming down, then coming up, then swimming down, then coming up, then swimming down, then getting them, then throwing them and swimming down again.
At the beach, it’s cold and you and the boys sit on shore again while David surfs. He hasn’t surfed this much since you were kids. All these years, all those apartments in New York, you complained sometimes, lugging all those boards around. At night, you look too long at him. You wonder if parts of him are dying or already dead; the way all he does all day is get flare pens and sign on to Google Meets and make breakfast and then snack and then lunch and then snack and then dinner and then all the same again. The way the boys throw the pens or hate their math or run out of the room or wet their pants. The way they yell at him. You think often, closing the door to the bedroom so that you can start your class or scroll your phone, you’re so glad that it’s not you instead.
At the beach, you see a girl you knew in school. She is, obviously, not a girl now. She dated a line cook at the same restaurant where you were a hostess when you were in high school and you got high sometimes in the parking lot in his car before work and you used to laugh and laugh, hands clutching the soft sticky sides of his car’s seats. He used to sneak you little bowls of calamari during service, saved you the tentacles. You’d sneak him Styrofoam cups of booze from the bar. But then he died from opioids your second year of college—they were still dating—and you don’t want to talk to her. You don’t know what you’d say. She gets closer though and it’s fucked up, unkind, the way you feel no desire to ask her how she’s doing, the way you mostly want to run away. But then she looks right past you, at you, but her face stays placid, blank.
At the beach, you watch the moon come up. You watch the sun go down. The sky goes pink. The sun comes up behind the ocean, goes down below the dunes, so you mostly watch the ocean, the blue green of it shifts then goes slate grey. You watch the sky go purple, pink. You get chicken fingers, subs, the Publix bakery plastic box of cookies that you used to buy and eat all by yourself when you were sixteen. When you put the boys to bed you don’t make them shower and they have smudges of chocolate on their cheeks and you lick them off and they both say gross—Henry says gross and his brother looks at him then looks at you then he says gross, too—and you all laugh.
At the beach, you sit in the sand by yourself, bare legs and bare feet. Your grandma’s died.
At the beach, all by yourself. Everyone is fast asleep and once again you’ve had some whiskey and it’s a five-minute drive so you come out, the windows down, the music on. You leave your sandals in the car, go up the boardwalk steps, back down. You walk out to where the water meets the shore and you go in. You don’t know what month it is. The water isn’t warm except the air still is, and it’s a shock at first, but also it feels good, and you go in past your ankles, then your thighs, then your waist, and you hold your breath as a large lolling wave goes over your chest and then your shoulders and then you dive head first and pop back up and you swim until you’re tired enough that you think you might sleep.
At the beach, the kids get an assignment from their school back in New York, where they’re still enrolled, to make snowmen because in New York there’s snow, so you build a snowman out of sand and take a picture and post it on their classes’ streams.
At the beach, the sky’s another different perfect blue, and you’ve all swum. You’ve built a sandcastle, had sandwiches and snacks and David let both boys take turns paddling out then riding small waves in and you packed Oreos and doled them out and Jack looks out at the water for a long time and then looks back at you. I hate it here, he says.
At the beach, you watch pelicans swoop down and up along the waves and the boys know to feign awe when you point and you all swim and you all eat and you all run around and you all paddle the surfboard out and ride it in and you all fall and the kids only fight once and you’re only short with David twice and no one yells or gets too burnt or refuses to swim and it is as perfect, as good and rich and warm and full as any day can be.
At the beach, alone again, your family’s driven back up North to somewhere David got a job, but you stayed an extra week for your grandma’s funeral. You’ve lived off one large pizza you ordered the first night and the kids’ leftover Easter candy and your stomach hurts. At the funeral you sat next to your dad and your mom gave a speech and you cried hard into your mask and your dad looked straight ahead almost the whole time and then he looked at you then looked away. He whispered to your sister, but plenty loud, Even she is sad. You run an hour barefoot on the sand—your callouses are finally hard enough that you don’t get the blood blisters anymore—and then you swim and then you lay your body, in just your sports bra and your underwear, flat and wet and spent against the sand.
LYNN STEGER STRONG
Lynn is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight. Her non-fiction and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, New York, The LA Times, the Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, and elsewhere. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bates College.
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