That Week at the Beach

by Dana Gynther

That week at the beach, my family began to unravel. Well, not the kids, they were oblivious as children often are, and made of stronger stuff. The teenagers were preoccupied with sneaking out to smoke cigarettes and meet boys while the under-twelves were a typical gang of summertime cousins wrapped up in their own world. None of them noticed the adults.

Of course, they knew that Grandpa was sick. His head was now bald, and his face a disconcerting pink, post-radiation. He was still amusing and gentle, attentive, interested – especially since the liquid holding his brain too tight had been drained, making him himself again but leaving a short dark scar on his newly shorn scalp.

The kids saw those differences—the scar, the too-rosy skin, the lack of hair—but he was still standing over six feet tall, wearing his sneakers and colorful polo shirts, walking and talking, having a laugh. Maybe they thought 81-year-olds were just like that. They probably didn’t guess he would be dead in six months’ time. But neither did I.

My kids had seen me sobbing a few weeks before, when we were still in Spain. My mother had called with his diagnosis and then put him on to say hello. His speech was painfully slow and he had no recent memory—this was before they’d drained that liquid away, making him normal again. I was terrified. Would we make it in time? Having lived abroad for fifteen years, only returning to the States for a month every summer, I always knew this might happen: being too far away when a crisis came, missing a crucial family event. And with aging parents, this “event” was inevitable.

Watching me cry, my kids were stunned into silence. But now, here was Grandpa on the veranda of the big beach house, looking out on the Gulf of Mexico, eating mixed nuts, chatting about books and movies. Same old Grandpa. I guess the kids thought he’d gotten better. Or that the progression would take years. I was hoping that myself. But while the gamma knife took care of the brain tumor, nothing was to be done about the lung cancer.

“Do you think it’s because I used to smoke?” he asked me as we looked out on the water. The view was perfect from my cousin Patsy’s beach house. She was the one of my Aunt Reba’s six children who had really done well for herself. She had lent the house to my family due to my father’s condition. Patsy had always had a soft spot for him. Most people did.

Dad had picked up the smoking habit at 18, a newly-minted GI ready to go to war. The Good War, WWII. Cigarettes were a part of every soldier’s daily rations, a successful, cynical ploy by tobacco companies. And though the war ended as he was finishing basic training, he took the cigarettes home. They accompanied him through college, graduate school, marriage, his career and his children’s childhoods. He finally let them go when I was 19. And that week at the beach, I was already 45.

“Hard to say, Dad. But the cancer isn’t your fault.”

I think my mom did blame it on his smoking, she of no visible vices. She probably bit a deep gash into her tongue to stop from saying “I told you so.” Or maybe she did say it when the two of them were alone. Or whispered it to his sleeping body. My mother was a fighter and, gosh, did she want him to battle cancer. Just weeks before he passed away, she was pushing him to go to the gym, as if that would save him.  But that was still a few months down the road.

My brother’s family wasn’t there that week at the beach. It was too big, even for the three-story wooden beach house with the widow’s walk on top. Also, my brother was always considered less in need of pampering than his three sisters. Not because we were women, but because he made good money as an oncologist. His was a specialty that I always thought was wasted on our family (why couldn’t Larry be something useful, like a pediatrician or a dermatologist?) until that summer. Then I was thankful to hear his assessments, although I didn’t want to hear them at all. Not about our father. We were all so fond of him! There were no conflicted feelings about him like we had with our mom, who was more judgmental and who occasionally threw a barb, surprising you anew with how sharp her tongue could be. Even though she loved to smile and despite the fact that she grew smaller with the years until, in her eighties, she became a tiny hunchback, a fairy book character with gnarled hands and feet, piercing blue eyes and crooked teeth, smiling away. We loved them both dearly; they were good people. But it was my dad who was truly warm—just like the palms of his large, soft academic’s hands.

The firstborn, my brother the doctor, and his six kids from two wives were absent that week. Who knows what dynamics they might have added if Patsy’s beach house had been large enough for us all. No, they weren’t there.

Linda, the second born, had flown down from Colorado in a state, visibly older and far heavier than when I’d seen her the summer before. I was shocked. What had happened during the last twelve months to prompt such a change? She was wound so tight I thought her skin would crack, that her eyes would pop out. She talked manically. Linda was speaking so loudly and, when suddenly quiet, grinding her teeth in such an audible clatter that purple jellyfish were drawn to the coast, feeling the vibrations and mistaking it for a breeding ground of small crustaceans. The kids were afraid to swim after that, but enjoyed the thrill of catching the jellies in buckets and watching them move up and down, daring each other to touch their bell bodies.

It was that week at the beach that I realized that my sister had serious mental health issues. That she was fragile and unhappy and easy to set off. The first day, she got furious at the children who she claimed had gone through her luggage and stolen her cigarettes, yelling at them, her awkward teeth snapping, her fists curled tight. She scared them and they steered clear of her after that. Though, the truth was, Linda also longed to avoid the adults. She sought out the company of her peers, the teenage girls, the grownup-looking non-adults bereft of responsibilities. And although they allowed her to teach them to play poker the first night, they didn’t want to spend their week at the beach with a 50-year-old going through a breakdown. To be honest, I didn’t either.

Who could have guessed that she would never return home to Colorado? That she would stay with my parents, inhabiting her teenage bedroom, regressing to that time decades before. She read old books, watched cartoons, complained about doing chores, and slept all day to be up all night—a foolproof way to avoid my mother’s gaze. And to drink alone. She was there, in her cups, when my dad died six months later. And stayed on, claiming to outsiders that she was taking care of our elderly mother, who was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. When mom died at 90, eleven years after that week at the beach, Linda hunkered down in the family home, agoraphobic, crippled by anxiety and immune to the smell of cat piss. Finally, my sister Lisa physically removed her and nearly 50 years of possessions from the home I grew up in. For sale… Sold.

Linda came south to go to the beach and never went home. I guess there was nothing left there. A twenty-year relationship in ruins and a career that had never gotten started. She had never married, never had kids, and this absence left an unfillable hole in her heart. Maybe in Colorado she had done the same things – read old books, watched cartoons, drank vodka— her depression and anxiety having always gone untreated.

Lisa was also at the beach that week. She came down with three of her four kids and her second husband, who was not their father. There in Patsy’s house, all living together in the family microcosm, it became clear that their marriage was falling apart. I couldn’t believe it. The last time I had seen the two of them, they were newlyweds and could barely keep their hands off each other. You would bump into them in my parents’ dining room clasped together in a molten embrace, right before Sunday dinner, still in their church clothes. The steam was not coming from the roast. Those public displays had made everyone uncomfortable, but no one more than her children, who would turn away in shame and disgust. Their mother, of all people!

And now, on my next annual visit, Lisa was no longer in love with him. In lieu of her previous passion, she was icy cold whenever he was nearby. You could feel the chill—see your breath! —even on the hot, sunny Florida coast. Usually a cheerful person with a loving nature, with him she became an emotionless Catherine Deneuve or one of those soap opera villains, able to cut him to the quick. Although he wanted to appear strong, he withered before her, knowing he wouldn’t be this beauty’s partner for long.

As for him, there is not much to be said in his defense. He was a rebound relationship after a too-long, miserable marriage. His name was Golden. At least, his middle name was. His first name was Kip. He had a twin brother named Chip. Evidently these were people who didn’t know the difference between a given name and a nickname.

Golden drove his newly-purchased Miata down to the beach. A two-seater sportscar bought by a man who was presumably the stepfather of four children. But in it, there was only room for his lovely wife or his own child. Was she at the beach? I don’t think so, though she had a tendency to become invisible. She was a frail, ghostly child called Victoria. A weeper, pale and humorless, she had a hard time when the summer cousins got together. No, I don’t believe she was included in this family vacation. But her father was, though it was plain to see that his days in this family were numbered. Oddly, even that week at the beach, he wasn’t on his best behavior. On arriving to Patsy’s, he ran through the house to lay claim to the best room; when a big platter of oysters was served, he chose the plumpest ones for himself; when checks came, he looked the other way.

Golden came down in his Miata with my husband Carlos; Lisa and I drove an SUV full of kids. Caroline, at fifteen and a half, brought her friend Devon. She wasn’t looking for family time; she didn’t understand it was Grandpa’s last summer. These two hung out on their own, sidestepping the needy aunt to go on implausible errands. I didn’t see them much and forgot they were there.

Her other kids, Jack and Natalie, were with mine, Claudia and Lulu. They were about the same age, four kids born in four years. That summer they were almost-12, 11, 10 and 8. They spent their time running around on the white sand beach, riding bikes, eating popcorn and brownies, and not-quite-flirting with the neighbor kids. Jack had another game he liked to play: hiding Golden’s stuff. He would slowly drink a can of soda out of the corner of his mouth, carefully watching the man he never considered a stepdad search. It was a slow burn. Golden looking here and there for a lost object, until finally, he lost his cool. Infuriated, suspicious, unable to blame anyone outright, he would slam the door and go out to the porch to puff on a cigar. It gave the kids a momentary victory. How they resented him being in their home, his whispering authoritarianism (“Are you going to allow that?” he would say in my sister’s ear), his obvious wish that he could have their mom to himself.

I watched their marriage imploding, until finally, I turned to look at my own. It was not satisfactory. There was a wall of resentment built solid between my husband and me. We were two adoring, affectionate parents who never touched one another. Not even there, on the romantic Emerald Coast, with its pastel sunsets and turquoise waters, the days spent in bathing suits. When had the last time been? I couldn’t remember. I wonder if anybody else noticed the robotic nature of our interactions, our lack of physicality. But then, an absence is hard to spot. Dirt is so much easier to see than clean.

Claudia and Lulu were probably never quite aware of how much we struggled in our marriage. Probably because when they were around, we were happy, transformed by their very presence. We joked and laughed and enjoyed ourselves. But when they drifted away, leaving our sides, our smiles dimmed until they were long straight lines. Even back then, when my dad was still alive, any pretense of a real relationship between Carlos and me was long gone. But we would keep it up for almost ten more years.

There is a group photo from that week at the beach; Devon, the friend, must have taken it. We are all standing on the white steps leading up to the big wooden house. We are smiling, seemingly delighted to be together, there on a family holiday. The five kids are in front, so young, skinny and small. Caroline, the teenager, is the only one who looks tall and filled out. Within a few years, she would be the shortest of the dozen cousins, but that week at the beach, she was a giant next to them.

On the next tier the younger sisters stand with their husbands. I am on the step behind Carlos. We stand with our arms dangling down, untouching. Lisa has her hand on Golden’s shoulder in a false display of affection. After the photo was taken, they got in the car to go home; she would barely talk to him on the 5-hour drive. It would take another six or eight weeks until he moved out, frozen to the core. She is quicker, more efficient than I. On the step behind us stands Linda, alone; her bloated form, so different from the year before, is hidden by those in front. On the top, on the porch itself, are my parents, the solid foundation of everyone before them. My mother grins next to my dad; I believe she is holding his hand. In this photo, in this light, you can barely tell he has no hair; his scalp simply looks white. His complexion is back to normal, his scar is not visible. He smiles beneficently as always.

It was his last summer. His last trip to the beach or anywhere else except for hospitals.

A few weeks after this trip, back in our hometown, he was admitted into the local one for a blood clot. I brought him a dozen red roses.

“No one has ever given me roses before,” he says.

I am surprised—he loved to grow roses at our old house in St Louis – but pleased that I could give him a new experience, albeit a small one, at the age of 81. I sit on the edge of his hospital bed, almost too short for him, wanting to discuss something other than illness.

“That was some week at the beach, huh?”  I shake my head. Instead of a holiday, it had seemed an endurance test. And what a revelation it was to spend time together in one big house. In just a few days, secrets became common knowledge. It was our dying father’s last summer with his three daughters and there we were: the mad queen, the ice queen and—what was I? The not-quite-finished queen. At 45, still in a dead-end job, still trying to publish a novel, still in a marriage that wasn’t working.

“It was great,” he says with a smile. “Because we were all together.”

At the end of the summer, we hugged each other tight. We didn’t know that I would be back in six months, an anomaly, the only time I ever went home twice in a year. As usual, I was astonished by the changes wrought in a matter of months. My dapper dad, now in a wheelchair, on oxygen, puffed up with steroids. How lucky we were to spend that last week all together: both my parents, my sisters, and my brother too. And as always, my father was amusing, gentle, attentive and interested. Until he closed his eyes and his body stopped.

 

Dana Gynther is an American who has spent half her life in Spain. She has written several novels, notably Crossing on the Paris and The Woman in the Photograph. She is also a potter and painter and runs the co-working art studio Medusa.