Living Out Loud (3 page)

We were careless. We always forgot to open the jars. The lightning bugs would be there in the morning, their yellow tails dim in the white light of the summer sun, their feet pathetic as they lay on their backs, dead as anything. We were always surprised and a bit horrified by what we had done, or had failed to do. As night fell we shook them out and caught more.

This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older, even as they know that it is only one bone from a sometimes troubled body. And to fill my own soul, too, so that I can relive the magic of the yellow light without the bright white of hindsight, to see only the glow and not the dark. Mommy, it’s magic, those little flares in the darkness, a distillation of the kind of life we think we had, we wish we had, we want again.

I
was a Paul girl. Still am, I suppose, at the core. It was one of four choices you had, in 1964, when I was on the cusp of adolescence: a Paul girl, a John girl, a George girl, or a Ringo girl, with all the attendant Beatle buttons, glossy color pictures, and daydreams. Little did we know that in some broad way we were defining the sort of people we were on our way to becoming.

The girls who picked George as their favorite Beatle were self-contained, serious, with a touch of the wallflower and a bit of the mystic. The ones who picked John were aggressive, irreverent, the smart mouths, the wisecrackers. Ringo got anyone who was really determined to distinguish herself, the kind of girl who would wear wax fangs or weird clothes to get attention, who would choose the one at the back of the band, with the big nose and the strange looks. And Paul got the little ladies like me. He was cute in a mainstream way, funny in a mainstream way, a public persona
not much different from the most popular boys in the class. He was for girls who were traditional, predictable, who played by the rules.

Who knew what John might do? We Paul girls were not in the least surprised when John blurted out that line about being more popular than Jesus, or when he married Yoko. Paul, on the other hand, was sure to marry a Paul girl and have lots of pretty children, which is precisely what he did. He’s even aged wonderfully. Nowadays he looks like one of those computer-generated pictures of someone twenty-five years later, the ones that add only lines and gray hair and overlook the usual accumulation of fat and jowls and rapidly enlarging forehead.

Over the years I’ve sometimes tried to escape being a Paul girl, but it’s never worked for long. I once made an attempt in high school, taking a crack at a hefty blonde who’d made fun of me in the cafeteria and missing her substantial jaw by a good six inches because of bad eye-hand coordination. And once or twice, particularly in convent school, I’ve had friends so good-natured and conformist that they made me seem like Irma La Douce for a time. When the going got tough, however, I always wound up a Paul girl again. I’d had lots of practice. One of the most satisfying things about growing up Catholic during the 1950s were the rules, which were not then, as we say now, flexible. The only questions were of degree: If you inadvertently ate baloney at lunch on Friday, would you go to hell if you were hit by a car during recess afterward? If you sucked on a cough drop in the car on the way to nine o’clock mass, had you violated the Communion fast requirements? And which was worse: to leave a piece of Host stuck to the roof of your mouth during breakfast, or to move it with your finger in direct violation of what the nuns had told you about stuck Hosts?

Is it any wonder I became accustomed to the letter of the law? Rules were a relief. They were like basic tap-dance combinations: you could set them up any way you pleased, add the
stray shuffle or heel-and-toe, but at least you didn’t have to improvise everything. Of course there were always the people who seemed not to need rules—the John girls, as it were. My last year in high school I nursed a secret admiration for them, even while I scrambled each morning to match kilt and crew neck, circle pin and earrings, knee socks and Weejuns. In Indian-print dresses and sandals, the John girls skipped pep rallies, asked the history teacher whether Richard Nixon wasn’t as bad as Adolf Hitler, and applied to alternative schools.

I got to know them better in college, and realized that they had their own set of rules, and that they distrusted deviation and liked conformity as much as I did. Talk about how high you got even if you didn’t; look bored; disdain all academic disciplines except for philosophy and creative writing; use rhyme in poetry only on pain of death; and affect a writing style as close as possible to that of
Franny and Zooey
. That was how their game was played.

We’ve all changed a good bit since then, although when I wear dinner-plate earrings just because everyone else is wearing dinner-plate earrings, I sometimes have my doubts. More of my life now is about character building than image making. While there aren’t quite as many rules as there once were (you can pull a piece of baloney out of your purse in church on Friday and nobody seems to mind as long as you show up) I distrust them more. They just don’t work as well for human relationships as we might like. I wouldn’t insult either my husband or myself by reading one of those one-minute marriage manager books. And as far as kids are concerned, the rules are just plain silly, as you find out the first time you try to give a baby his every-four-hour nurse and discover that an hour-and-a-half later he’s hungry again.

I guess I can tap-dance better now—more improvising, fewer set pieces. I think of the Paul girl as a bit like an illustration in a coloring book: black outlines, no fill-in. It was useful
in its time, in its place. It made it easier to believe in God, to hate certain people passionately, to choose Paul without thinking twice about any of the other three. Of course, I now understand the bits of those three that were attractive to others; I understand the gestalt, which was a concept, not to mention a word, that was beyond me at the 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.

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-pepper
sand, 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 expect to come around the right corner, past the right telephone booth, and see a vaguely familiar sixteen-year-old waiting for a call from some moron with a nice car and a letter in wrestling. What a horrible thought—the thirty-four-year-old me trying to convince her of the monumental waste of time, the sixteen-year-old me wondering why this lady with the two kids and the gray in her bangs is haranguing her. If I was so vulnerable and stupid then, can I really be so strong and smart now?