She shakes her head, and clutches harder at the handlebars. Avery, clasping a wrench, nods approvingly and points her toward civilization. She turns onto Rockaway Beach Boulevard, gasping a little at every jolting chink in the road, accompanied by the tinny and self-generated pling pling of the bicycle’s bell. Cars pass her by like benevolent sharks, and ten or twelve blocks along finally she relaxes enough to unhunch her shoulders and look around.
It’s a time-warped, patchwork little neighborhood, a jumbled mix of blue-collar row houses with tiny, well-tended front-lawn patches of grass, larger Arts and Crafts bungalows with encircling porches and wicker furniture, modest mid-century ranch-style homes, and the odd glass brick-and-concrete Postmodern effort, all of it entirely unlike the faux-Mediterranean, gated-community sprawl of La Jolla. She remembers Emily’s history of Rockaway, the once-upon-a-time playground of elite New Yorkers looking to escape the city heat and summer at the beach; now there are large, shabby-looking buildings in the distance—housing developments? she wonders, warehouses, abandoned factories?—bruising Brooklyn accents—although yes, she remembers, Rockaway is technically part of Queens—kids yelling in Spanish and the constant thwunk of basketballs somewhere on cracked schoolyard macadam. She passes so many synagogues, yeshivas, and Catholic churches she begins to wonder if she is pedaling in circles, until she spots the commercial district up ahead, at the intersection of the boulevard and Beach 116th Street. There is a liquor store, a Baskin-Robbins, and a lingering Blockbuster, a chain grocery store she has never heard of, two hardware stores, a Chinese restaurant, a CPA, the dime store where Avery works part-time, a Buy the Beach Realty, and a Pickles and Pies Delicatessen—Egg & Roll, $2.39. There is the subway station for the A train that sweeps down through Manhattan for its long stretch across Brooklyn and Queens, tunnels beneath Jamaica Bay, and emerges onto the Rockaway peninsula to spit out weary passengers. There is also a ladies’ apparel place, which Sarah at first mistakes for a vintage clothing shop, offering the print dresses and quilted housecoats her grandmother used to wear, the window mannequin wearing a sagging nylon brassiere and cut off at the waist. She buys turpentine at one of the hardware stores. She buys a knish.
In a junk shop she finds a thick book: A Collector’s Guide to Seashells of the World, which she buys with the notion of identifying some of those scattered shells she’s seen; her walks on the beach, now, will be purposeful, will be research. She pedals home on the rickety plinging bicycle, her thighs burning. The pretty cover photo of a mollusk trembles in the wicker basket—This is what I’ll paint, she thinks, pleased: shells—and she rides over the road cracks carefully; there is a new half-gallon of merlot in her backpack, and she worries that if she falls the bottle will shatter and a shard will puncture her, nick her spine or pierce a lung.
When she gets the book home, however, she finds the written part of A Collector’s Guide to Seashells of the World laborious, obsessed with classification and boggy Latin words; Mollusca-Gastropodae-Mesogastopoda-Cypraeidae-Cyprae-Tigris bears no relation at all to the glistening tiger stripes, the whorls, the fierce horny spines, the sinuous geometries, the corallines and saffrons and ceruleans of the shells in the book’s generous color plates. She normally doesn’t like photographs, hears the impassioned rant of an old art professor: A photograph is a dead image of a dead thing! It’s painting, a painting, that creates and gives life! But she has to admit the color photos outshine the prosaic, monochromatic shells she’s actually found on the beach. Perhaps the photos will serve as a prompt, she theorizes. The juxtaposition of glossy dead thing with imperfect real specimen. And so she spends an hour or so each morning leafing through the book over her fresh-ground, cooling coffee, idly admiring the rainbow color rays of gaudy asaphis clams and the fluted projecting scales of giant clams, also known as crypt-dwellers.
THERE ARE THREE different kinds of sand to walk on, she discovers. On the other side of the low brick wall that marks Nana’s property, farthest from the water, the sand is dry and siftable and pale as snow, the warmest to bare feet but the most dangerous with its buried broken things, sharp fragments of plastic and glass, bits of abandoned toys.
The next section is slightly damp, toughened and stiff from the last lunar swell of surf, and the most obstacled with shells, seaweed, ragged seagull feathers, twisted limbs of wood. This sand almost carries her weight without breaking the surface.
Then the wet, darkest sand, briefly and constantly re-soaked with each slow roll and break of a wave. When she steps here she craters the sand for a mere second before her foot trace is swirled away. She lingers, slushing her feet back and forth in a few inches of cold briny water, liking how she seems to disappear with each step.
When she heads back to the warm sand up by Nana’s, she notices a man in shorts studying the house, thick-torsoed but with long and shapely legs like a cocktail waitress; he exits the beach onto the small street and disappears from view. Another man, she notices, is sitting placidly on Nana’s wall, wearing sunglasses, a dark sweatsuit, and black knit cap, curly hair fringe flapping in the breeze. He is unshaven, bum-like. She is annoyed at their presence; it is disruptive.
The early-May beach has been blessedly empty, the ocean and bright air still too chilly for bathers, not even a lifeguard on duty yet atop the high rickety chair facing the sea, and she’s used to having the span of shore all to herself. She is looking forward to swimming, soon; maybe she’ll begin each day with a brisk, invigorating ocean swim. She sits several yards away from the bum-like man and leans her back against the wall proprietarily, prepared to sketch. After a moment she pulls aside her long cotton skirt and exposes her legs, hoping to maybe get some color in the weak sun. She inspects her pale and stubbled calves and thighs, so dry these days, her skin, something she should take better care of. Maybe get some Vitamin E oil, they say that works well, diminishes the marks of time, of old scars. She rubs at her thigh, remembers glowing a perfect unblemished peach, her apricot child skin, her tender, once-upon-a-time skin. She drifts her fingers through the sand, sifts free a shard of glass, bottle-green, like old ginger ale bottles, she thinks, apricot and green, the vibrant colors of those little-girl summer beach days. The ritual stop at 7-11 to buy Coppertone and bruised blushing apricots and those emerald bottles of ginger ale to pack with crushed ice in the cooler. At the La Jolla Shores they’d choose the most isolated spot, stab an umbrella deep, spread beach towels extravagantly.
She always swam off by herself, she remembers, leaving her parents and baby brother with their radio and magazines and baby-boy toys. She remembers the happy stumbling sandy run, the blithe, flapping free dive into the sea, the euphoria of swimming deep. The brief fear as the solid world dropped away beneath her, then surfacing, feeling and realizing the effortless float, the joy of floating free, arms outstretched to greet the next wave. And after each wave came, flipped and roiled her underwater like a scrap of paper and dragged her back to where the ocean broke down and thinned, she’d scramble up from the seaweed and sand crabs, cough, and look for them, her parents, eyes burning and searching and the start of another fear, of panic, but there, always, every single time, there they are. Her parents, watching for her.
Her father waves, proud and affirming, her mother applauds overhead, making it okay to swim back out all over again alone to meet and conquer the next swelling, frothing wave. When she has enough brine in her throat she staggers back, to her mother’s fresh palmful of coconutty Coppertone, a popped-open bottle of that cold ginger ale, a piece of bruised fruit sweating ice, sweet things to cancel the salt and soothe. A brisk rub with a sun-hot towel, their admiration and cheers for a discovered shell, a perfect seaweed fan, the tiny sand crab she’s carried home in her cupped palms, the painstaking drawing she’s made—Mommy, Daddy, come see, come look!—of a perfect seahorse or mermaid or happy family of fish in the damp sand.
You should give them a call, she thinks, blinking. Really, you should call, see how they’re doing, if they need anything. You should check in with them, they’ve been so understanding and supportive and not bothering you. She studies the piece of glass, so careless of people, really,