Living Out Loud Read Free Page A

time.
    I saw Paul on television the other day. He seemed to have changed less than I had. He doesn’t appeal to me as much anymore; neither does the safety he once personified.

AT THE BEACH

    T he lifeguard’s girlfriend is blonde. Hasn’t it always been so? Her tan is the color of Karo syrup. Her shoulders are broader than her hips. And when she swims, her head knifes perfectly through each wave, so that she emerges sleek and shiny, a golden seal.
    Here we are in the land that time forgot. It has been nearly twenty years since I last spent the summer in this seashore town. There is bad modern architecture where once there were dunes, but nothing else really has changed, except for me. On Sunday mornings the same people hold the same numbers in Jack’s Bakery; the same white wooden boats lie waiting for disaster to one side of the same white wooden lifeguard stands. And the sea, arrogant as always, rises, falls and breaks, rises, falls and breaks, silver green to the horizon. Its message is clear: “You grew up, you went away,” it says. “You married, had children, came back. Who cares? Who cares?”
    I did not know it would be like this, although perhaps I should have. Life here was never what I expected. I grew up here, not just because the time passed, but because the time I passed was some of the loneliest of my life. I never understood why we did it, pulled up all our roots each June to journey to a succession of rented Cape Cod-style cottages, with not a decent knife or spaghetti pot in a one of them, to rest and relax among strangers.
    My mother neither drove nor swam; despite her olive complexion she burned, and her prominent nose was a terrible shade of red all summer long. There was too much laundry and too little hot water. My fantasies of an endless summer always ended badly. I went to dances at the local firehouse, with a consuming need shining so brightly from my light eyes in my tanned face that only the boldest or blindest asked me to dance. Mostly I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
    This was called the vacation. It still is, and is still, in some ways, inexplicable. The first day here, as night began to fall, my elder son said, “We go home now, Mommy.” He was appalled to find that I expected him to sleep in this strange place. And beneath the hard eye of the sun, next to the smug sea, the loneliness once again grabbed me by the throat. It had a new weapon this time. A girl who once cultivated a tan and tried ineptly to pick up boys, I was now too old to do either. The lifeguard’s girlfriend is young enough to be my daughter. “Who cares,” the water said. “Who cares?”
    It is still a puzzle to me why we do this, although it becomes a little clearer every day. Amid the muddle of strange beds and new habits and sand in the sheets, a moment will blaze through: the hieroglyphics of gulls’ tracks in the salt-and-peppersand, the long climb up the lighthouse steps, the sand crabs in the green plastic bucket, dug up every fifteen minutes or so to make sure they are still there. That is why we are here: so that our children can have these moments, or so that we can watch them have them. I do not know which.
    I am here to look for someone. She might just be me—a younger me, a different me. There is something about this place that makes me aware of the Russian-doll aspect of personality, the little round papier-mâché woman in the babushka inside another, and another, and another, the child inside the girl inside the woman.
    Once, when I was in my early teens, I became intrigued by a theory that time was really place, that all history is taking place in some other location. It is a profoundly dumb theory (and horrifying when applied to waiting in bank lines), but sometimes here I almost believe it. I