The Before Times

Happiness

It comes back to me now, in the hot mornings, that there was a time when nothing could stop me from loving the day, the simple fact of it. I woke up and I had a whole day ahead of me. Though it might be full of many difficult emotions and conflicts, that fact of the day itself was bigger than any incident within it. I think that was happiness; waking up, having the day ahead, wanting to jump into it without reservation, without yet knowing where dread was in my stomach, or depression was in my arms. Not even the impulse to linger in bed a little to daydream . Eyes open, feet on floor, all one instant.

It was summer, of course. I woke up in my bed in the back bedroom of my grandparents’ house in Cape May. Blackout shades left over from the war still pulled over the windows at night, dark green crackled monsters that could snap out of your hand making you shriek and spin loudly back up to the top. They fixed it so German U-boats could not see into the house, and were necessary even in the back rooms. My grandfather was a master of caution. If anyone suggested he replace the shades, he said they were still “good,” and the Germans hadn’t attacked Cape May, had they.

He knew that was funny, and I knew he knew, and he knew I knew he knew, which made me feel as though—if there were a key to the world, I had access to it.

I shared the room with my brother. We each had a narrow bed pressed against a cool plaster wall, and we each had two drawers in the rickety chest that faced the end of my bed. There was no other furniture. Who needs a lamp when it is still light out at bedtime? There was a shallow closet where clothes had to be hung sideways; my dresses went there. The shelf at the top of the closet was for beach towels and extra stuff. Too high to reach.

My brother and I woke feeling cut to ribbons. The combination of sandy sheets and sunburned skin will do that to a body. I changed right into a dry suit and pulled shorts and a tee shirt over it. No bathing suits at the table!

Our younger sister and the baby were in another room and we weren’t allowed to wake them. We could hear someone in the kitchen so down we went. The stairs split at a landing, one set going down into the living room, the other to the kitchen. Those were the dangerous ones we weren’t allowed to take. We had to got to the living room and walk around. We weren’t welcome in the kitchen either, but if my grandmother was in there alone she didn’t mind. I loved the scent of the red iron laced water running into the porcelain sink, and the sight of the green glass bowl of maroon plums on the blue Formica tabletop. Best was the back porch, slanted with age and thick and bumpy under dozens of coats of grey paint. Big old stone tubs handled the wet bathing suits; then they went up on the grey fraying line that bisected the room. The screen door had a lazy slap; the back steps were another forbidden zone. No matter; the vista was of interest. Bunnies cropped the lawn with clawing lips; a jungle of bayberry and trumpet vine stretched for miles.

I felt safe in the simple routine of that house. For the rest of my life I have appreciated predictability, and have written schedules and lists for myself, yearning for the known to slowly manifest again. Breakfast, play while the adults did whatever—Grandad took a five mile walk and came back tanner than when he left and wet with what Nanny called “perspiration.” Then Grandad’s breakfast, flitch and tomatoes fried in butter and brown sugar if he could wheedle them out of someone. When Elva came she would make it for him. She lived in the black section of town and came from people who’d lived there forever and had never been enslaved. She told me this fact dozens of times, and every time I said, “I’m glad.”

Food was as simple as it gets. Grandad loved to drive out to the farm stands and chat with the people who refilled the baskets and put the fruit into paper bags. We bought huge cantaloupe and honeydew melons, cucumbers, tomatoes so sweet you ate them like a fruit, peaches that tasted like the sun and sugar had a baby, potatoes, rhubarb, and flowers for the table. Nanny made a salad every night of cucumbers and tomatoes marinated in apple cider vinegar and sugar, and if Gran had his way, fresh flounder caught that day. I always went to the farm stands and to the docks with him. He’d sold his boat before I was born so I had to settle for watching the other boats pull up to the dock and empty out the catch. The fish were still alive but not for long. Long tables awaited their arrival and men with cleavers and thin knives immediately went to work. Dock cats swept around their ankles eager for a useless head. Within minutes of docking you could have a fresh fillet wrapped in newspaper to take home. Nanny hated the smell of fish in the house, but that was considered her problem. I insisted on cranberry sauce with my flounder, and since my grandfather, who been immigrant poor in Kensington and put an obfuscating coating of catsup (he used the generic, having developed the habit before the Heinzes coined a new word for the sauce) on everything he ate, I was indulged. He liked me to want things.

Once a summer we went to the boardwalk for a soft serve. In August there was homemade peach pie or Brown Betty with Breyer’s vanilla on top. Sometimes vanilla junket, or a chocolate chip cookie. Sandwiches on the porch for lunch eaten with hands still shriveled and lips still blue from the ocean. Once a summer we went to the boardwalk in Wildwood and Grandad and I made sure to get the front seat in the roller coaster. Then I went again with my brother. We got enormous blooms of pink cotton candy on paper cones and discovered you could squeeze it into a hard candy.

Grandad, having become an adult at age eight when he went to work full time, was not precious about childhood except for safety. He let me read his Ian Flemings and took me to see Psycho when my feet dangled freely from the theater seat. During the stabbing scene he tipped his popcorn bag in my direction, and we munched and enjoyed the blood splatter. I still approve of this parenting.

The main event was the beach, twice a day except during heavy thunderstorms. We went to Philadelphia beach by car, careful to spread plastic sheets over the seat when we got out so we wouldn’t wet them when we got back in. The flaw in the system was that the plastic got burning hot and rides home were excruciating. We raced to the hose in hopes it would quell the pain but the hose water had heated up too and the first water out was hot as a bath. I loved to put the nozzle in my suit and feel the water jet down my body, going from hot to freezing. Then I passed the hose along.

I loved and still love the Atlantic Ocean more than anything on earth. It was quite a mess in those days, full of seaweed and jellyfish, waste water after storms, tar from oil spills that stuck to our feet and had to be removed by rubbing with Sea Breeze. It was rough, too, and I always got home with my suit full of sand. Often I was boiled in a wave, certain I was going to die of lack of oxygen. Occasionally a wave slammed me hard on the ocean floor and I saw stars under water. There were constant rip tides and sea pussies but only rarely did the lifeguards put up the red flag that meant no swimming. Instead they performed a lot of rescues, always fun to watch. I confess I swam straight into a sea pussy once to have a turn at a drama at sea. A boy pulled me into the dinghy and rowed me in. Did George Washington cross the Delaware with a greater sense of triumph? Grandad loved to bathe in the ocean and wasn’t concerned with its dangers. We were sea creatures, he and I.

At night I went down the block and helped the Volker twins lower and fold the flag as we listened to Taps drift over the scrub lands from the Coast Guard base. Grandad liked to say “if I were a young man of no ability I’d join the Coast Guard.” We were put to bed, the blackout shades pulled when other kids were still out playing. My mother had hated this too, and yet she repeated it. Day was done. I tried to stay awake until midnight to see the day out; I knew that very day would never come again in the entire history of the universe. It was up to me to honor it in all its glory. But two long swims got the better of me. I was probably asleep by eight-thirty.

I could go on, I could go on and on. Those days are right behind my eyes. They ended when I was seven. There is a lot of life I could think about, but I go back there most, to the days of happiness.