Woods Cove, 1959
Lin Nelson Benedek
Eight flights of stairs from the sea cliffs to the sand. Past clumps of African daisies, rugged wildflowers, my brother and I climb barefoot onto sharp rocks leading to the tidepools, sea anemones, hermit crabs. The waves are cold, fierce, lift us up, wash over us, tumble us around, then deposit us at the shoreline with scraped elbows and knees, salt water in our nostrils, on our tongue. The tide gently rocks our weight first onto one thigh, then the other. Our fingers collide with sand crabs and shards of seashell, the sun burns down on wet hair and backs as we make a mermaid with seaweed hair and sandy breasts. We bury ourselves up to our necks in wet grit.
Back home the sand rolls off our legs in muddy streams, the shower rinses salt from little cuts on our skin. Before dinner my father drinks a Rob Roy, very dry, straight up with a twist, my mother a Jack Daniels Presbyterian, and on the bamboo sofa, my sister and grandmother play two-player Canasta. My brothers turn the pages of a heavy volume of New Yorker cartoons from the twenties, thirties, and forties. Rasping from the phonograph in the corner— Mrs. Carpenter’s old seventy-eights: She started a heat wave by making her seat wave. She really can can-can. A sign on the wall reads: No Stuffed Shirts Allowed. Mrs. Carpenter, my grandmother’s friend, lets us come here every summer. This is her bungalow, and I know her only by the things in it; the pitcher shaped like a cow, a casserole in the form of a duck, a platter with a rooster painted on it.
I sit at the desk at the end of the room, dip the antique nub of a translucent green fountain pen into India ink and write my name again and again on filmy onion paper in as many styles as I can. I press the pulpy ink blotter onto the wet letters I’ve made. The old phonograph needle catches on a groove: Someone to watch…Someone to watch…Someone to watch…
In the middle of the night, I wake to the sound of my parents fighting. I get out of bed. My bare feet pick up traces of sand in the hallway. The wood floor creaks. I hear my father’s voice: “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.” I stop at their door, pause, then return to the room I share with my sister, open and close the door which fits into the frame like a stage door on a theater set. Everything shakes slightly. The walls are thin, flimsy. “Things take a beating here,” my grandmother always says. The limp fog and the salt air seep into the wood, making everything swollen; and the sun burns it off, leaving things dry, rough, musty, worn. Expansion and contraction.
I climb into bed with my sister. In the half-light, the pink-skirted dressing table, the painted wooden mirror, the tufted bedspread look unfamiliar. I want to think that when Mrs. Carpenter lived here with her husband there was dancing, laughter, no angry words. I feel the warmth of my sister’s body, the flannel of her nightgown. She smells like glycerine and rosewater. Trying not to kick my feet, trying to stay on my side of the bed, I remember the daddy-long-legs in the garage, walking precariously on stilts. I picture the morning glories beside the trash cans in the back. They open up at daybreak, begin to fade at midday, close up their shocking blue petals after dark. I take a chance that things will be all right by morning, and close my eyes for the night.
Lin Nelson Benedek is currently working on a book of short memoir pieces and a volume of poetry. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles, where she maintains a practice as a marriage and family therapist.
