Still Life with Tornado(20)
“We lost Alleged Earl,” I say.
“He’ll be near City Hall,” she says. “It’s Sunday.”
“You’re ten. You never followed him when you were ten,” I say.
“You don’t remember things all that well, do you?”
“I remember lots of things.”
“You don’t remember asking his name. You don’t remember that he goes to City Hall on Sundays. You don’t even think we did this before.”
“So this isn’t original?” I ask.
“Nothing is original. We know this already.”
Ten-year-old Sarah walks under City Hall into the underpass. I’m about to ask her if she knows that Philadelphia City Hall is the tallest municipal building in America, but then I remember she’s me and she knows because I know and I’ve known for years.
She says, “Did you know that City Hall is the tallest municipal building in America?”
“Yep,” I say.
“Did you know that this is where Dad proposed to Mom?” she says. “And then they went upstairs and got the license?”
I search my brain archives. I seem to have forgotten this, too. I say, “Not very romantic if you ask me.”
Alleged Earl isn’t at City Hall. Ten-year-old Sarah says, “He must have changed his routine.” She walks west toward the art museum, and I walk back down Broad. “See you tomorrow,” she says. “Maybe you can tell me why we dropped out of high school.”
“Stop saying we.”
MEXICO—Day Two: Selfish Bastards
I was mortified that Mom wore a bikini. She never wore a bikini on the New Jersey seashore, but in Mexico, nearly everyone wears a bikini. As I watched the drunk adults—most of them younger than Mom and Dad—swagger around in their bikinis, I felt like Mexico was all about sex.
Sex and drinking.
I was ten, and this was obvious. So looking at Mom in her bikini, ordering drinks from Martín the beach bar waiter, just grossed me out.
The other people at our resort were animals. They left their empty beer cans on the sand. They talked in that loud, drunken way all day and night long. One time I saw a couple making out so hard that it was nearly sex right there on the water’s edge. There was a kids’ club place—glorified babysitters—but there were only a handful of younger kids in there. The thatched hut sat next to the spa-massage tent between the pool and the beach, and the little kids could look out at the animal-people doing their animal-things while they made crafts or played bingo.
Every thatched beach umbrella had a hand-lettered wooden sign nailed to its trunk. The sign said:
RESERVING BEACH SEATS AND UMBRELLAS IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. DO NOT LEAVE PERSONAL BELONGINGS OR TOWELS ON BEACH CHAIRS. CHECK LOST & FOUND IF YOUR ITEMS HAVE BEEN REMOVED.
This sign was also posted on the wall behind the beach chairs. It was posted at the towel exchange hut, and it was even posted in our hotel rooms. And yet every single morning on vacation, 85 percent of the beach chairs had random towels and personal items on them and there were no people in sight. If you were late to the beach, you didn’t get an umbrella until you waited long enough to figure out which chairs were really being used and which were inappropriately being reserved while the people who reserved them went to breakfast. Sometimes people would just walk around the beach chair area, scoping. Sometimes they would make the towel attendant come to the beach and remove things from the chairs so they didn’t have to do it themselves. It drove people crazy. This was resort behavior. No rules—even when there were rules.
Our family followed rules. It was in our nature. Dad was in insurance. Mom was a nurse. We never reserved beach chairs. Day Two was the first time we realized that everyone else did.
Day Two started with a two-hour-long “vacation club” time-share presentation. I’d explain it to you but it was so boring there’s no point. The only things that came out of it were resort credits for all of us—Bruce and I got a kayaking adventure and Mom and Dad got a romantic dinner on the beach—and my fascination with people who can do math upside down on paper. I still try it sometimes. My best numbers are zeroes and ones.
By the time we got to the beach, it was eleven o’clock and all the chairs were taken—some legitimately, some not—but it was hard to tell which were which. Dad walked around three times until he found one chair under a thatched umbrella with a dry towel slung over it in the way that chair-reservers do it. Dad removed the towel from the chair, and Mom said, “We’ll have to share until we can find more chairs.” Dad went off to find a beach attendant to get us another chair. Mom took the extra towel and spread it on the sand, sat down, and looked out to sea. I said I wanted to get in the water so she covered me in sunscreen and looked at her watch and said, “You can only stay out there an hour.”
I ran into the surf and then stopped at ankle deep and walked slowly instead.
The water wasn’t what I thought it would be. Mom and Dad told me it would be crystal clear and turquoise. But seaweed had come in from the Atlantic. That’s what the Amstar vacation-guide guy said later. He said, “Nothing we can do about it. Storms do this.” The water past the huge globs of seaweed still looked dirty because the seaweed had been tumbled there on its way to the shore, and if I looked at it long enough, it looked like watery diarrhea. No chance of seeing fish. No chance of seeing my feet or even my own hands underwater. Once I saw what it looked like, I didn’t want to get into the water at all, really, but I did. In my head I imagined what it was supposed to look like. Clean, blue-green, with white angelfish. Just like the website picture Mom showed me. I didn’t last the hour. I managed to avoid waves and clusters of seaweed for about fifteen minutes and that was it.