They used to call to me while I was playing on the beach. If I remember correctly, they were always young men, smiling, in shorts and T-shirts, wearing a visor or ballcap and sunglasses. They'd get my attention and tell me to freeze or pose or smile for them, then they'd take my picture and ask me to go tell my parents what they'd done.
Sometime later my mom would summon me from play and show me the photo that had been taken and mounted within a small plastic souvenir keychain you looked through like a tiny telescope, able to alter the image by holding it up to bright sunlight or cupping your hand over the back until you could barely see anything but shadow.
I've found two of four I used to own. One of the missing ones featured myself and another child about my own age, an adorable blonde I used to play wedding with in her bedroom with the door closed. We were all of five or six at the time, so wedding involved gazing into each other's eyes and murmuring, "I do," followed by me attempting to carry her bride-style across the room. As we were both about the same size, this proved rather difficult, but part of the fun was seeing how far I could travel with her before my knees gave out and we'd crash, giggling, to the floor. Then it was time to get married again.
When I was sixteen, I saw her again for the first time in ten years and showed her the photo, thinking she'd say, "Oh, how cute!" and laugh about it with me. It was just a shot of the two of us on the beach with the cold Atlantic behind us, holding hands and smiling. She looked through the plastic lense, pocketed it, and walked away from me. That was the last time I ever saw her or it. It's okay; she wasn't cute anymore anyhow. Tall, gangly, her hair limp and darker than the pale flyaway wisps I remembered, with severe features replacing the softer, rounder ones I'd been so fond of long ago. Yup. She was downright homely as a teen. A lot of kids seem to go that way--adorable kids growing into average looking or worse adults...some of the uglier kids growing up astonishingly attractive.
The other missing photo is of myself holding hands with another girl I used to know. She was of the homelier variety, but she was the one I used to take baths with. My memories of her are why I wince whenever I hear someone saying they've put two small children of the opposite sex together in the tub or in the same bed. Differences beg curiosity to unravel them. I last met up with her in high school and unlike the tall, athletic, almost masculine blonde, this one became shy and reclusive: a head of brown hair peering warily from the depths of her hoodie, a much prettier face turned downward often out of embarrassment or shame. I was afraid to approach her after my run-in with blondie. She never approached me, either.
I gaze upon a slightly faded, slightly muddy image from the past and see a well-trampled beach of pale sand abutting a chilly dark blue ocean. In one photo stands a child of about five and half. He is tallish for his age and well-formed with poorly chopped black hair blowing in stringy clumps around his chubby features. He squints eyes I know are vibrant blue and large. His smile is genuine, but there is more gum than teeth to be seen. Sand clings to him. What was I doing that day when the photographer caught me? Building sand castles? Trying to catch the little grey potato-shaped crustaceans each wave uncovered before they scurried farther up the beach to burrow swiftly in the sand again? In this photo I'm standing proudly in a black and yellow pair of sporty-looking swim trunks. I look like I just bought the beach. It's a confident child, happy to be singled out for this recognition.
In the second photo, the one I just found again tonight, I'm only four and a half--and my, the difference between the images! In this one I'm sitting sort of sprawled like I'm actually too weak to have adapted to the concept of posture yet. The sand clings to me as I sit there in a slightly oversized set of red, white and blue trunks, the look on my face more uncertain, more wary. "Okay, I'll sit here and smile for you...but then what? Who are you?" As if the older me had become a pro at posing for souvenir beach photographs. My hair is even worse. My mom cut it for me for years. It was perpetually asymmetrical. 'course those were her heavy-drinking years, which might explain some of it.
I started thinking about what that kid knew back then. What he wanted. What actually lay before him...and I felt really bad.
Here is a random child. A small, smiling face with a squeaky voice and too much energy. He likes the beach. He likes the sound of the ocean and the seagulls...someone's portable radio playing not too far off. Airplanes roar by towing banners advertising for local businesses. It's very hot, but the water's a touch too chilly. It's fun to bake a while, then abruptly chase away the heat by body surfing in the smaller waves. Now and then a boat of some kind passes, seemingly way too close to shore, and he's so excited he must stop and stare as it goes by, full of wonder at the shape of the thing, the people he can see riding it, the way it slices through the water or bobs dangerously through the deeper, darkened troughs and high swells on a rough surf day. He wants to rent a raft...but he recently saw the movie JAWS, so there's a delicious tinge of actual terror involved in sitting silently and still upon a flimsy raft that's drifting out too far beyond the drop-off point.
He learned to swim from a high dock in Wareham, Massachusetts. Mom brought me out there to stand amongst a dozen or so other kids roughly my own age while two adults wrapped bathsheets loosely about our middles and lowered us into the water in these terrycloth slings and shouted, "Now kick and swim! Move your arms and move your legs! Just move them! Go! Keep swimmming!" ...although we never actually swam anywhere. We'd be hauled right back up and stand there dripping, bored, while the next victim wildly flailed around. Eventually, we moved to kickboards; headstone-shaped lengths of Styrofoam with clear plastic windows I was entranced by. The other kids would wade far out into the shallow water of Buzzards Bay, lay partially upon their boards at our instructor's command, then begin kicking furiously back to the shore. I'd be drifting lazily along, fascinated by the miniature flora and fauna visible through my little window, unaware I was being yelled at and laughed at.
So, while I've never been any kind of great swimmer, I'll happily remain in water for hours on end--especially if there's any kind of aquatic life I can interact with or study. I still enjoy collecting shells and fossils, bits of colored glass worn smooth by years in sandy water, and can find endless attraction in tidal pools, or poking about in suspicious formations in the sand.
The kid in the pictures suffered multiple bad sunburns as a small child. I recall an older girl who I thought was creepy because she took so much pleasure in peeling me after a burn. I quickly learned to peel myself so there'd be nothing left for her the next time she saw me out playing. I remember being so burned that for an entire day or two I could not even move. I'd lay stiff, in agony, on cool sheets in air conditioning, slathered with Noxzema, wimpering every time I had to get up to use the bathroom or try to feed myself. That was back when most people still laid out in their own yards for hours on weekends, tanning so deeply they began to resemble processed deli meats. As a small child I'd tan, which made me look exotic with my coal-black hair and really offset my startlingly blue eyes. As an adult I burn in splotchy patterns and my hair has faded to a dark brown with dark rust highlights, swiftly going silver along the hairline and back from my temples. I am unable to tan. I don't have the patience to lay still and sweat anyway.
The little boy seemed happy enough and could at times be bursting with exuberence, yet he was also shy and by age six growing more and more mistrustful. It wasn't until second grade that he was issued thick eyeglasses and the weight really began to settle around his middle. That's about the time the severe teasing and regular beatings by other children began. He retreated slowly, fighting all the way, desperate for attention, to belong, to have fun. Fun is for children and it's sad when they're unable to enjoy it very often. When you're older it can become a struggle. Try and get as much as you can squeezed in before you're forced to grow up.
Eddie liked drawing--sometimes on his father and the faces of other kids--and he liked teasing the cats he lived with who didn't care much for him at all. He loved animals, but wasn't mature enough to understand them yet. I still bear the scars of our misunderstandings and fondly think of them as souvenirs of the many animal friends I've had who've taught me so many things over the years. Eddie liked his bicycle and playing at the construction site next to the townhomes he lived in. He hated school, but enjoyed art. He spent any free time watching cartoons and drawing and playing with his plastic animal collection, his Evel Knievel stunt cycle, board games, and looking at comic books. He chewed Big Red gum and loved Coke and Pepsi. Happy Days and Hogan's Heroes were his favorite TV shows. Late on Saturday nights he'd hear laughter downstairs and he'd creep slowly and quietly down the carpeted steps until he could see the backward reflection of the TV in an almost black photograph of the sun rising over the Mediterranean, and he'd do his best to make sense of the adult allure of Saturday Night Live.
Eddie played with a few neighborhood kids, but never really considered any of them friends. They moved into and moved out of his life so frequently that it seemed strange to him to bother forming attachments to anybody. He had no nearby relatives, and his youngest cousins were still at least a decade older than he was anyhow. There were two kids he usually hung around at school, but their overall playing style was mean-spirited (including his own), a childish form of domination, like immature bucks butting heads for fun. One of these kids was twice his size and already on his way to becoming an anal-retentive perfectionist while the other was meeker, but more easily swayed by the will of the larger child and not Eddie.
While still socially immature, the highly observant and analytical Eddie began to mature much faster than his peers intellectually, and while neither large enough nor quite fit enough to take on many of his antagonists physically, he was soon schooling himself in arts of subtle manipulation and psychological warfare. Only because I can see this now am I kind of weirdly glad I was badly abused as a child. Otherwise, I might have grown up into an adult Stewie Griffin. I am grateful for the lessons of humiliation, pain, and loss I have endured, for in many ways they have only made me stronger. I hold no ill will against my former classmates and neighborhood children, because even I was just another stupid kid. I think my parents could have done a better job of disciplining me, though, because I stare at these photos of this unsuspecting little child and it renders my heart cold.
Every child deserves the best possible shot at a future. No child deserves to have their leg broken by a parent. In my day, when I did something that upset my parents, I would be beaten into submission, beaten into a nightmarish world where absolutely no one could be trusted, where there was no solace in the strong grip of an adult's hand while crossing the street, where thunderstorms must be endured quietly and without visible fear. My parents were already well into their thirties when they adopted me. They were teenagers during WWII, raised by strict immigrants fighting for every inch they could get in this foreign land. Children were for doing chores and eventually helped bring home money to keep food on the table. Playtime was a rare luxury, thus it became one for me also.
This kid imagined growing up and driving a fancy sportscar, living in a mansion with servants, a pool, stables, and tons of adoring friends. He didn't know how it would happen; only that it was supposed to. He would be an artist. He would be rich. He would travel the world. He would be happy.
I've had dreams where I've met myself as a child, and I have immediately embraced myself and held on for dear life, wishing I could somehow protect myself from everything to come. I once dreamed I got up and went to the bathroom and on my way back found someone in my bed. It was me, and I woke myself and sat down and held myself, just sitting there silently, literally speechless, wishing there was some way to crush the pain away.
Some nights I trick myself into deep sleep by imagining I abruptly have no memory of my past whatsoever...and I smile as I drop off to peaceful slumber.
But each day has new lessons to learn, new trials to endure. There is more and more work and less and less fun. And there's a box full of photographs out in the shed. Most of them artful: landscapes, animals, landmarks, tourist attractions, aircraft, watercraft, trains. There are funny photos and staged photos and strange photos, but very, very few pictures of me. I strongly dislike photographs of myself. There are only two in my collection I actually think are pretty cool. In one I crouch in hiking gear atop a high rock wall in the mountains of West Virginia. In the other I'm sitting in the cockpit of the biplane I flew in on my 37th birthday. These are pictures of me adjusting after the bulk of the private horrors I have endured. I prefer them greatly to those of the little kid innocently poised on the brink of a decades-long hell.
I very rarely set foot on a beach anymore.
That was a place I was brought to. Now I go to the places I want to visit myself.
This book is a collection of short stories that depict events in Author's life while she lived in Romania, then in Greece, and last in America. It's a beautiful and very sincere account of a young woman's life and comming to age.
