LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
It’s siesta time. The house is silent, except for the faint crash of the ocean. My sister sleeps across the room, and it may be the smallest she ever is in my memories. Back then she had round rosy cheeks to match her round blue eyes, wispy blond hair curling in the humidity. I have a hard time not picturing her the way she is now, lanky, stylish, just past twenty years. It seems impossible that we have grown so much in such a short time. It felt longer when we were living it.
But on this lazy afternoon we are still authentic children, and her cheeks are still round and her body still small as it rises and falls with shallow summer naptime breaths. We never want siesta time, it only happens at the insistence of our parents, because otherwise we will become cranky as the evening wears on.
“But we’re not tired,” we whine, eyeing the grass, trees, sand, and ocean waiting for us outside. For minutes we stubbornly sit up in our beds, quietly protesting our forced stillness. Molly mostly falls asleep first. I read or write until my eyes droop and the midday heat makes my limbs heavy. Even though our parents will see our napping when they come to wake us, we deny having needed the rest.
“I was just closing my eyes because I was bored,” is a popular excuse.
I don’t know where I got the journal I’m writing in now. There is something antique about it, something that makes it more special than some of the other regular lined notebooks I keep. This one is hardcover, bound in a fuzzy red plaid fabric. The pages are slightly yellow and lightly lined. When I get older and find this journal, it is hard to decipher some of the entries. The sentences are basic, the handwriting shaky and unsure, and the spelling is near unreadable.
“We ar at the beech on Cape Cod.”
“Snikrs liks playing with the bal but does not like swiming.”
Snickers is our dog. Once when she was a puppy she fell through the ice at our local pond while we were skating. My dad managed to fish her out quickly, but since then she has never been a swimmer. Once on this trip she has ventured into the ocean past where she can stand, and it was only when all of us were also in the water, swimming out to the free floating dock.
“Go back, Snickers! Go back,” we scream, worried she will drown. Her face is panicked, her paddling fast and disorganized. Finally she does turn around and spends the rest of the afternoon sitting on the beach, staring wistfully out at us as we jump off the dock over and over again. On the swim back a jellyfish stings me for the first time and I keep crying long after the sting has faded away. I even fake a little bit of a limp, and tell my mother I’m concerned about some sort of rotting infection. My mother ignores me.
I’m really into all things rotting and molding at this age, and knowing this my parents have brought a children’s science kit to the beach house, filled with various bacteria that you can grow in a Petri dish. I watch with fascination as a shallow clear dish filled with what looks like red Jell-O slowly grows a world of green and blue fuzz, purple tendrils, and white scales. I am delighted by this and then devastated when my mother finally throws it out.
“It was getting pretty gross,” she tells me.
“That’s the point, mom,” I reply.
My mother and I often disagreed with what gross things could and couldn’t be in the house. Despite my dramatic experience with the jellyfish, a week later a friend comes to visit and points out that the quarter sized clear jellyfish that wash up on the beach don’t sting at all. You scoop them up with your hands and let the slime seep through your fingers. It doesn’t matter that they are almost featureless; we find personality in each and ever one. Giving them a new home in a purple plastic bucket of seawater, they become our pets. We place them at our bedside at night, only to make the fantastic discovery that they glow in the dark. The thirty or so little jellies emit a soft blue aura that serves as a night light for one evening. The next morning my mother trips and almost spills them.
“What is that?”
“Our pets, the jellies.”
“Well, take it out of the house.”
“Why? They are our pets,” we protest. “They light up at night.”
“I think you killed them. Jellyfish don’t want to be in plastic buckets, they want to be in the ocean. Don’t you think they look unhappy?”
They do look awfully still in the bucket, and now that she’s mentioned death it’s all we can see. We return the jellyfish to the ocean that morning, dumping the bucket into the shallows and peering at the pile of slime that sinks to the bottom.
“You know, jellies don’t swim. They just float. They will float away,” my friend says. It takes weeks to shake the feeling that we murdered thirty helpless jellyfish.
The house isn’t ours, we only rent it for a few weeks in the summer, and we only do this for two or three summers in a row. The owners of the house also own a small sailboat, and when we rent the house we also rent the boat. This makes my parents very happy, because they love sailing but rarely get the opportunity because they don’t own a boat. One day toward the end of our two-week stay they decide to pack a picnic lunch and take my visiting friend and I for the whole afternoon on the boat.
It’s a beautiful sunny day with good wind. I’m wearing a puffy yellow life jacket that I hate because it feels like it’s choking me and enough sunscreen to protect Dracula but still not enough to keep me from accumulating the freckles that will cover my arms and face later in life. I don’t remember most of the trip, or even if I liked sailing. The events of this day defined sailing for me in my memory, to the point where I don’t remember how I felt about sailing before it. It is the end of the day and we are coming back towards the mooring. Our picnic lunch is mostly eaten, leaving only half a bag of goldfish crackers. We can see the shore, and my parents point out that the owners of the house are standing on the beach, watching us. I suppose they just came to check in on the house, but I don’t really know. Also on the shore is my friend’s father, come to pick her up after her week of visiting. The sailboat is coming in extra slow and the wind that behaved well all day has now died and the air is stale. We have to turn sharp to come into the mooring. My parents yell the appropriate warnings for turning, official sounding sailing terms I have long forgotten. Ropes whip around, the bow swings quickly from one side to another, and then I am under water.
It doesn’t last long because my life jacket brings me to the surface, still too tight around my neck. I can see the boat, which is on its side, sail completely in the water, and I can see my friend, also bobbing in her lifejacket. I spin around by flailing my limbs and find my parents, swimming towards the boat with the immediate goal of making it upright. All around me are the goldfish crackers, quickly becoming bloated with seawater. I can see a jellyfish, pink and long, beneath my little kicking feet, and I immediately begin to swim towards shore.
It was not a dangerous capsize, my parents would remark. Only funny that it happened as the boat’s owners and my friend’s father were watching. It was a major event for me. I wrote about it in my “What I did this summer” essay in the fall for my second grade teacher. I kept sailing at various points in my life, mostly at summer camps, but always experienced anxiety around tipping and particularly the days in sailing class where you had to flip the boat on purpose. I don’t sail much anymore, although maybe I’d like to try again some day.
The diary entry from the day of the capsize is probably the most difficult to read of them all.
“Today we capsised the bot. It waz funy but skary. Ther wer goldfis crekrs evry were. Tomoro we go home.”
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks