Beach

My boyfriend was in the beach mud up to his ankles and he stepped out of it backwards as he cast the fishing line, pitching the yellow rod like the baseball he had just been throwing with Pepper, his friend. Just before he threw the line out he said, “Step back!” I took three large steps—on the last landing on a wooden stake stuck in the sand like a candle in cake. I let myself fall to the sand, higher behind me where it was further from the water. I sat with my elbows on my knees and picked up the aged wooden stake with a torn edge which had cut the bottom of my foot. Noah was already eager to feel rugged and then egged on by the outdoorsy culture of the North Carolina natives, his Uncle Ed especially, but I couldn't tell if he was fishing right or not. The row of beach chairs were behind me 20 feet with Uncle Ed, Aunt Nancy, Mom, Dad, and Pepper: all Noah’s. I watched him concentrate on his new sport between team Man and team Sea. The flies started biting my salty legs, sunned heartily, and the most discouraging, the bloody tear on the palm of my foot was feeling all the more peppered by grains of sand. Soon he caught a crappie.

Noah had had a brain aneurysm two months and a week before. I helped nurse him back to health after the operation. He needed companionship which I provided easily, driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in my mom’s car into the fogless hills of Marin eating gourmet sugar cookies shaped like watermelons in Noah’s mother’s well stocked Marin kitchen. In North Carolina, he was already well on his return to his forgetful, carefree, cocksure mannerisms, the occasional jocular reference to the scar on his skull. The hair on that quadrant of skin they pulled back was filling in slowly like the grasses taking root in the sand dunes, at parts outpaced by the scar. Once I told him that all his drawings of comic figures were bald though well rendered.

It was a hard time then because I was out of college, jobless and busy resisting the tenuous hospitality proffered at my parents’ house, pickily choosing how to appropriately spend their money: absolutely not on novels but yes, handcrafted diaries. I slept in the guestroom in the brass bed that was once my eldest sister’s, now married, professional-schooled, children born. I knew I would soon be leaving town so didn’t go out except to conference with old friends. If it had been a different summer I’m sure I would’ve been more sacrificial, throwing all of me into romantic love, but for better or worse I hardly had anything to throw in the pile.

Sometimes we talked seriously about the aneurysm like when I had my first fig and prosciutto pizza for lunch, underneath which was preciously chewy, aromatic crust, more akin to bread.

My patience was tested as he hemmed and hawed over which personal pizza to order: pretending to resist the temptation of ham, trying to get something I would like, telling the server to come back later. He was never certain unless we were ordering burgers at Pearl’s. I wondered how I was able to not love him, helpless and courageous as he started going to restaurants again, staples tracking a railroad from his third eye to his ear.

“Law school will be fine. You’re the same person.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I worry. Maybe I should take a year off.”

“Maybe. We could go do something.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to put off law school. Where would I go?”

Any dozen places, I thought, any city in China, teaching English and saving frogs or learning Swedish massage on a dairy cow farm or at the most simple, pear picking on a Kibbutz. It would forge that adventurous bond between us.

“Well, if you want to do something together, I’m free for the rest of my life,” I said. My leg was shaking in the booth, a twitch a Chinese proverb warns will make coins fall out of one’s pocket and quickly fortuneless.

“At the same time, it’s like, I want to exercise my brain. I’m going to get the Golden Farms all natural, nitrate free pepperoni, roasted anaheim and pablano peppers, cheeses, tomato sauce and fresh herbs.”

“Good choice. I hope you like peppers.”

“Oh. Yes. Would you like some pepper with those peppers?”

The sun shone outside the restaurant but the breeze was cold. I gripped his thick, comfortable palm under the table.

“Then go. If it’s too hard you can always quit.”

“Yeah I need to email them about this.” He pointed to his head.

His brain had been exposed. I thought of the last minutes of the last episode of “Six Feet Under” sometimes, sometimes when driving, and transferred my love for the show to Noah and want him to stay in my life like family until we both died.

Back to that week on the outer banks of North Carolina, that day. I couldn’t very well mope about my de-chunked foot, but I did anyway as I hobbled on the long boardwalk between the beach to the back porch, already threatening splinters. I didn’t treat the minor wound or spray anything to deter the biting flies, in a self-punishing gesture—slicing through the warm Atlantic heaven Noah had provided me—for already having given up on the relationship.

Soon after, we arrived in New York City—an expected relocation for the two of us and for our caste. The August heat induced daily amnesia as I willed each moment to evaporate. He in law school housing and I in a green and apricot gentrification-ready flat one subway transfer and three quarters of an hour away. When I visited, I would merely sleep in Noah’s bed between dinner and breakfast and we meekly entertained ourselves with DVD rentals letting downtown happen without even our curiosity. I’d fall asleep suddenly at nine thirty, then scoop a grapefruit, go to work. Rental DVDs were anonymously public, sticky like door handles from the however many who watched before us. Could I become one of the masses by renting a DVD or would I have to do more? The best days were when he received a package from Noah’s mother with lime green silicone kitchen tools.

His schedule allowed me, when not temping part time downtown, to pursue my extracurricular interests so it was as though we were singletons. One evening after work I went to an opening for a vegan bicycle co-op with brew, homemade and free for “participants.” Outside the entrance, sculptures and chairs sat on the sidewalk unoccupied and the room inside was a studio/gallery space with a bike repair shop in the rear. Energy efficient light bulbs were chandeliered with rubber string and discarded incandescents. The event was overwhelmingly casual as if all of us guests were window shopping and had left our wallets at home: slowing at the table of pamphlets, the counter with chilled jars of beer and flax seed chips, and the hanging bikes on display like halal butchered goats. The entertainment was a poetry reading and film screening. When the lights went out I settled on a stool and felt less out of place.

The woman on the bench nearest me was in a state of collapse slurping an empty 48 ounce Jamba Juice until the poetesses and poet entered the dim spotlight and the straw idled at her lips. The film projected on the wall behind them and to the right. Horacio embraces charcoal limbs of dust/margarine crush. A claymation mountain shed trees like tears with random text flashing in single frames. The Jamba girl had a large chest, ample sitting parts, and tiny conical ankles that she tucked under herself, undemocratically taking up one and a half spaces. But her hair was straight, brown, and combed, cloven by a clean part and on her tote bag was sewn a little metal tag with a brand name my eyes strained to make out.

Perhaps I would find a place to store the calendar of events; the show was growing on me. I hoped the girl didn’t see me staring at her so I glared down the poet/filmmakers. The crying mountain had erupted with sexual lava and a live oboe started playing. Then a clipboard landed on my legs and the girl’s hand was parting from it. So Janine had signed up for the e-lert. Should I sign up, I wondered?

“You should sign up,” Janine said.

“I am going to,” and I did before passing the board. “For any reason in particular?”

She twisted out of her seat and faced my stool, her eyebrows level with my knees. “Well, when I’m not drunk,” she said lifting the smoothie cup, “I am gainfully employed at a studio of photography.”

“Cool. Did you go to art school?"
“I went to Bard. But so yeah,” she said. She didn't speak like she was drunk but her neck and wrists were loose at the hinges. "I drink dark and stormys since I quit beer. Beer started giving me acute headaches because I had some in India, last time I was there, and there's this extra fermentation process there that gives the slum dwellers an extra high.”

“Oh!” I said. She was either very garrulous or hermetically scholarly, acquiring information like that. She reminded me of my friend, Lulu, who asserted herself in conversation by knowing things no one had ever heard about, and who undercut herself by being frank about her ambitions to be a lead guitarist in a band as well as a documentary film maker. The disappointment was, over time despite my skepticism, Lulu was well on her way to becoming what she dreamed and now dreaming more. "What were you doing in India?" I asked Janine.

“My photographer took me as a production assistant.”

The show had ended a couple minutes ago but we stayed in the audience area. I unconsciously kept track of everyone's shoes as I was in need of a new pair and at the same time trying to conjure my clearest impression of India. I asked her which part they went to because I had read about farmer suicides in Andhra Pradesh and knew a college friend from there. Wherever she went I can't remember.

She continued pointing to the chandelier: "Have you been here before?"

I shook my head.

“My photographer is Mary Ellen Clark.” She paused and I shook my head again. “She donated two pieces for fundraising of Mexican circus travelers. The other piece was from twins convention in Twinsville, Ohio.”

“Oh! I think I may have seen that—the ones with twins.” Which was true: a book had passed through my hands once of simple and fascinating black and white portraits of twins young and old, in semi-candid moments and they looked happy as newlyweds. “Those are really interesting.”

“Yeah! Awesome. She's great. So we did the Mexican acrobat idea in India.” She was fully straightened in the chair now yet languid. “And found this very good circus that has been around for generations but might go out of business.” Her leggings were so tight on her calves they appeared to want to inch up from her ankles.

“Very cool,” I said. “I’ll look that up.”

“Yeah definitely. Circuses are the most intense, atavistic communities. Technically, they’re migrant workers but they’re also enmeshed in the local cultures.”

“Sort of like here,” I said, which made no sense.

“Yeah, so if you ever want to meet some acrobats we might be hosting them in a couple months to promote the show.” She gave me a quarter sheet flyer with some information and a xeroxed photograph of a boy in clown clothes whose knees and elbows bent the wrong ways. “He’s not coming but two acrobats are. So you should come.”

I told Noah about Janine when he saw the flexible clown on my nightstand. “She said I should come,” I said. He was fully clothed lying on the long edge of my bed, probably smudging the white duvet with the subway grease on his sneakers. He breathed loudly through his nose. A mirror was behind him that inevitably distracted my gaze from him, but it also made me want to continue explaining. Seeing my talking face elongated my comments because I was thinking what to say next and watching myself think and talking while waiting for my intended words to align with the moving image, further subdividing each moment, and deciding if I was poorly dubbed or well.