It will always be three days of rain at the Golden Dolphin Motel in Brigantine, New Jersey. I think they played cards, or perhaps a board game. Perhaps Scrabble, although I would have remembered that because of my love of words.
My mother's pack of Viceroys, perhaps by then cozily tucked in its Robin's egg blue vinyl holder with the tiny kangaroo pouch on one side for her lighter, purred at her elbow with her cocktail, sweating on a lazy square of paper towel. The ashtrays were marbeled plastic cups the color of dog's droppings—never the wonderful tartan sand bags of an earlier period, which my mother conscripted into duty when the ball bearings in her car ashtray shot out at her one day, as if the dashboard were spitting them. Her lucklessness with spray cans and folding chairs and cars was the greatest source of her story-telling, and she collected and curated each episode, embellishing it in the retelling with genuine good humor and a kind of grace that made her—even as the butt of the joke—seem more attractive.
By this time it was Gordon, with his obscenely short cotton bathrobes and moccasin-slippers. He used a metal lighter, like Nannie's, and the hollow mechanical click, musical and depressing, was the auditory symbol of his presence, an avatar long before the age of the web. It sat on the undiffused fire engine red of his pack of Winstons—a still life by Braque.
After the thumps and bumps and muted sighs, separately they came out of the bedroom into the tiny kitchenette, scrounging for snacks in the under-counter refrigerator as if they had read, in a novel or magazine, or perhaps one of those manuals so unique to the seventies, that one gets the munchies after sex. They were the age I am now, yet taller and more comfortable in the world, and rather cool in their smoky Polaroid lenses.
In the afternoon I made a pencil drawing of the surf, turning my tablet on its side, applying a pattern to the waves, bunching and assimilating them in a manner that was both cheating to nature and surprisingly satisfying to my eye: I had gotten it right.
On Saturday night they went to dinner at the Brigantine Hotel, seven windy blocks away. I was alone in the room. The picture window that faced the beach was black, with no moon or sparkly ocean surface, and the sound of the ocean was lost beneath gusts of rain. I had cup after cup of Lipton tea, the old man on the paper tab of the Flo-Thru tea bag raising his cup in a frozen toast to me, as if to cheer me up. I was probably 13, and I couldn't find anything in the room to console me. The furnishings lacked involvement. The words in my paperback book spoke beyond me, as if addressing someone else. The emptiness punctured me like a vaccination. I was terrified.
On Monday the pool opened, and I swam extra hard to make up for the two lost days, even as my mother folded her dressing gown and snapped her cosmetics closed. She raked her comb through the bristles of her hairbrush with bravado, then, more gently, wrapped her toothbrush in a sarcophagus of Kleenex. Addressing the mirror, she gave me a few final instructions while tucking her hair into place.
Vacation was over.
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