Issues → July/August 2008 → Features →

Lifetimes Unfold on Scarborough's Sands

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(page 3 of 4)

If it got hot enough, on a summer night, we'd get lucky enough to return to Scarborough at night. Our fathers came home from work and we ate dinner in the overheated air, one window fan blowing it back at us. Too hot to play outside, too hot to watch tele­vision inside, suddenly we were hustled back into the station wagon and headed to the beach for "a dip."

A dip meant we couldn't linger. No sand castles. No long walks. We convoyed with other relatives in their station wagons, parked in the now nearly empty parking lot, and ran directly into the ocean. On those hot nights, even our parents came in, our fathers in long, baggy swim trunks with their pasty legs poking out, bellies hanging over the waistbands. Our mothers wrapped us, wet and shivering, in towels. Back in the car, we huddled together, our sandy feet rough on each other's legs. Back home, the air was still and heavy, but in bed my skin felt cool from the ocean, and when I closed my eyes I could almost hear the waves crashing, could almost feel lifted by them.

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When I moved away from Rhode Island, I swam at beaches all over the world. On a Greek island, I went topless for the first time. In Portugal, I kissed a man who barely spoke English. I drank too much red wine on a beach on the island of Majorca and ate grilled sardines on a beach in the south of France. The waters of the Carib­bean, and off the coast of Mexico, and along Rio de Janeiro, are warm and clear and blue-green. On Bermuda the sand is pink; on the island of Hawaii it's black. As an adult, I was constantly drawn to beaches. They were more beautiful, more deserted, more romantic, than Scarborough. Yet, when I grew tired of humid summers in my adopted home of New York City and decided to rent a house on the beach for a month, it was Scarborough to which I returned.

For seven summers, my family and I took over a split ranch with an oversized deck in a development called Eastward Look, a stone's throw from Scarborough. By then, my father's emphysema had worsened, and even though the beach was a short walk across a busy road, he and my mother drove to the beach, usually staying for just an hour or two. My cousins and I, though, stayed all day. We rubbed sunblock onto each other's shoulders and backs and shared our grownup problems. We weren't Beatles wives anymore; we were wives of real-life men. And over those summers, our marriages broke up and new lovers appeared. Sometimes we cried on that beach. For fun, we read magazines out loud to each other.

At the ends of those days, we walked back to the rented house, eager now for margaritas and sophisticated hors d'oeuvres. Our parents sat back and let us cook for them -- grilled pizzas and whole fish. Before it grew too dark, we played long, heated games of bocce, until our parents went to bed, tired, their noses sunburned. It was our turn to stay up now. On the deck, we opened bottles of Chardonnay and talked into the night, just the way we did when we were kids, our sandy bodies tangled together. I got up early and met my father in the kitchen to bake berry pies and homemade biscuits before it got too warm. Then the two of us sat together on the deck and drank our coffee and talked.

After my father died, I stopped renting the house at Scarborough. His birthday was the Fourth of July, and each summer he'd thrown himself a huge party at the beach house. He'd played John Philip Sousa music, bought kegs of beer, and grilled all three meals for dozens of people. To be at the beach in July without him seemed not only difficult but wrong somehow. And so it was a few years before I returned to Scarborough.