My father, carrying me out into the surf, told me that all life comes from the sea, that our blood itself is made of salt water. My mother said, “Harriet, slip out of your bathing suit and see how soft the water feels on your body.” My father’s chest was smooth and sunburned pink. His arms had freckles and there was a bulge in his tight shiny swimming trunks. I saw my mother’s breasts, even the points of her nipples, when she leaned over to help me out of my bathing suit. The ocean turned us into bodies: its buoyancy, I think, or maybe that small jump you have to take in order to ride up and up and up over a wave. The sharpest memories of my father occurred within one short period of time-the summer we rented the cottage at Seaview, a sleepy, makeshift summer town on the Jersey Shore.

My parents rented a cottage in Seaview the summer I was eight. We had never done that before, and never would again. Not only my family of three in our white cottage, but Grandma Doland and Aunt Mary and Aunt Birdie, who was my father’s retarded sister, in their mint green cottage. Uncle Lionel Doland, my lawyer uncle, and his pretty wife and their twin babies in another cottage, a lemon-colored one. We made up a kind of Doland family “estate” although we were just renting small cottages. We were far from being rich. My father was a bus driver in Newark.

That summer he was able to get occasional three-day weekends and a two-week vacation and I saw more of him than I ever had in my life. He liked to swim in the late afternoon when the water was rough and green and the waves high. He carried me into the surf and jumped the waves and wore a playful expression on his face, an expression I associate now with dolphins-beautiful, endangered dolphins. I put my arms around his neck and my cheek against his, and once I licked his cheek and tasted the salt of the sea, and he laughed at me and didn’t seem to mind. After that, all summer, whenever he took me out into the ocean, I did that-I licked his rough, sunburned cheek and tasted the salt, and he laughed. It was the first time he didn’t mind my acting silly.

I was happy to be living in a cottage at the beach close to my father’s relatives, whom I saw only on occasional Sundays and holidays in their dark cavernous apartment in New York City on Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-second Street-before Amsterdam Avenue was part of creeping chic. I loved going to that apartment. Those dark rooms and windowless hallways held secrets, unhappy stories, mysteries, disappearances-things that didn’t go on in our sunny four-room apartment in Enfield, New Jersey. How did Birdie get her hunchback?-or what had Aunt Mary’s husband done that was so bad?-or what had happened to Grandpa Doland? My heart beat fast when I walked into the lobby of that building. The walls of the lobby were made of marble, swirly and streaked, pink and liver brown, with blue veins. I imagined I was going inside of a body.

At Seaview my mother, whose own mother had died when she was eleven, seemed to relish running across the street to see whether Grandma needed something from the market, or bringing her a bowl of egg salad for lunch, or sitting out on the screened-in porch of Grandma’s cottage talking, although I never thought Grandma was much of a talker. Birdie was the talker. Birdie talked on and on about the same things over and over again, and Grandma let her. My mother admired Grandma for never complaining about Birdie, whose mind would stay like a six-year-old’s for the rest of her life. My mother found endless proof that Grandma was a pillar of patience and generosity. The real proof, however, was the fact that Grandma did charity work: she visited old people at St. Agnes’ Hospital downtown. My mother would often say that she wanted to be a volunteer at a hospital like Grandma Doland, but my mother never seemed to find the right hospital.

“Sweetheart, don’t feel obliged to do charity work just because my mother does,” I heard my father tell my mother after supper one night during the previous winter. “I’m not saying Mother isn’t a wonderful person, but you’re wonderful too, Rosalie.” He touched my mother’s cheek with his fingers and told her that she had the loveliest blue eyes in the world.

“I honestly want to volunteer,” my mother said, “if only I could find a hospital where the patients aren’t so sick and where the nurses are nice.”

“Well if you do,” my father muttered, “don’t carry it too far.” His tone took on an unfamiliar gruffness, and he rose from his chair and wandered over to the window and stared out into the night. I thought I heard him whisper, “Charity begins at home,” but maybe I made that up. He kept his face close to the windowpane and his breath steamed it up.

I have to admit that at Seaview my mother didn’t only pay attention to Grandma Doland. She spent time with me. She loved the beach and took me swimming in the morning before breakfast when the ocean was calm. First we walked along the water’s edge where the waves broke quietly, with scarcely any foam; bubbles-lazy, sweet bubbles. I thought I heard my mother humming. The beach was deserted except for a fisherman or two. Seaweed, dead fish, old pieces of tarry wood, seagull feathers, shells, crab claws. The silvery blue fish smelled rotten; they stank. I found a stick and poked at them.

In the water my mother said, “Honey, slip out of your bathing suit and feel the water on your body.” I held my legs together and wiggled from side to side like a mermaid. For a moment or two I floated, head up, staring at the sky, then head down, turning over and over. I pretended I was swimming, but I let my hands touch bottom and hoped my mother would be fooled. “You’re beginning to swim,” she said, smiling.

After our early morning dips we went back to our cottage and had breakfast at a faded red Formica table with silver legs in front of a window that faced the street. Outside there were blue hydrangeas and bushes with tiny hard, red berries. Over coffee my mother would read the Seaview Daily Gazette, which was delivered to the door by a newsboy. One morning after she finished reading the paper, she said, “Harriet dear, bring this newspaper over to Grandma’s; she might enjoy reading it.”

I found Grandma on the porch. She didn’t notice me at first. She was standing over Birdie, combing her short straight hair with sharp slaps of the comb. Then, from what I could see, she yanked Birdie’s hair together and fastened it on the side with a barrette.

Birdie yelled “Ouch” and Grandma snapped, “Oh, be quiet!” When Grandma saw me, she brightened. I was wearing my red shorts and a red-striped polo shirt. I handed her the newspaper and told her it was from my mother. She said, “How thoughtful of her!” A few seconds later she said, “I have an idea, Harriet. In the mornings after your mother finishes reading the paper, bring it over to me and I’ll pay you ten cents. That way you’ll have your first job.” As I was leaving I heard her murmur, “May God bless you.”

I liked the idea of earning money. There was a small wiry Mickey Mouse doll in the window of the candy shop down on Main Street that I had admired and which my mother wouldn’t buy me because I had “enough dolls.” I was an only child and she worried about spoiling me. Now I realized that if I saved my money I could buy it for myself. I loved that Mickey Mouse already, his spindly black legs, his big clumsy feet, his perfectly rounded mouse ears, the black plum of a nose: something so lovable and spunky and sad about him.

The idea of a job made me feel important and I ran back to our cottage and told my mother about it.

“Your first job!” she exclaimed. “I hope you said ‘thank you.’” There was a trace of nervousness in her voice as though this new job might be a test for both of us. “We’ll have to figure out where you can save your money.” She searched in her dresser drawer and found a red zipper change purse and handed it to me.

Over the next couple of weeks I brought Grandma the paper and she showed me how to play tic-tac-toe. Away from her dark apartment on Amsterdam Avenue she wasn’t as serious; and yet still, she didn’t seem to breathe. She never opened her mouth, never yawned, never laughed. Her words came out of the inside of her like a ventriloquist’s. The dimes piled up in my red change purse. My mother was proud of me. “Well, sweetie, you’ve saved a lot of money,” she told me in the middle of August. Every so often, usually when my father was with us, we went for a walk on Main Street and I would steer them past the candy store where little Mickey was in the window. One day I overheard my father say, “Rosalie, let’s get her the Mickey Mouse doll,” but my mother shot him a look, a serious look. Instead my father bought me a bag of assorted caramels.

About a week later, as my mother fluffed out and brushed my hair, she said, “I have an idea for what you can do with your earnings.”

“I already know! I’m going to buy the Mickey Mouse doll.” I was very confident. My mother continued to brush my hair. “Harriet honey, you have a million dolls at home. Why don’t we take your money and I’ll add to it, and we’ll treat the children at St. Vincent’s Hospital to ice cream.”

I knew that it made more sense to point out that the children in the hospital probably had plenty of ice cream than to say how much I wanted the Mickey Mouse doll. You weren’t supposed to want anything-that’s what I was beginning to learn. The less you wanted and the more you gave away, the more wonderful you were.

“You’re a lucky kid,” my mother said.

“How come I’m so lucky?” I asked, knowing it was a question I wasn’t supposed to ask. She searched for an answer, her hand on top of her head. The question startled her. “You have a mother,” she answered, her tone slightly harsh; then a few seconds later she added, “and a father.”

On the next Thursday my mother and I took a bus to St. Vincent’s Hospital in the next town, about fifteen minutes away. St. Vincent’s had a children’s ward and was run by nuns. They wore eyeglasses with steel frames. They carried Bibles and wore crosses around their necks and rosaries dangled from their apron pockets, or from their hands, from everywhere. I was never raised as a Catholic, although Grandma Doland, I’m sure, would have liked it. My father didn’t care for religion.

The children’s ward was boiling hot. A nun in white led my mother and me into a large room with enormous, tightly shut windows and a row of beds on each side. The beds were like cribs. I forced myself to look at the children, most of whom had contraptions on their bodies: braces, casts, pulleys with weights, harnesses. One tiny girl was sitting in a tiny wooden wheelchair next to her bed while a nun in black was making her bed without ever looking at her. She reminded me of Birdie, but smaller. I noticed the neatness of the beds and the awful silence and the heat of the room, and I stood closer to my mother. Presently a cart with dishes and ice cream was wheeled into the center of the room by a nun in white. She sliced the ice cream, and my mother signaled me to go over to Sister so that I could take the saucers of ice cream around to the children. Everything about that room frightened me. If I breathed in too deeply I was afraid I would smell the rotting fish on the beach. In the silence I thought I could hear screams.

I brought a boy his ice cream. He said, “Hello, my name is Anthony. What’s your name?”

“Harriet.”

“How old are you?”

“Just eight.”

“When’s your birthday?”

“May.”

“What’s your name?”

“Harriet.”

Again he asked me how old I was. I searched the room for my mother who was talking to the sister in white, next to the cart. Anthony was like a record with a scratch on it and I was the needle caught in the scratch. “Excuse me,” I said to Anthony, “I have to bring ice cream to the other children.”

A small boy, his feet gripped to a bar with weights on the end, called out to me. He had a rash on the inside of his arms. I handed him a bowl of ice cream. “Do you got any bubble gum?” he asked. I shook my head. “Do me a favor, girlie. Give these baseball cards to Lenny. He’s the kid with the cast on his leg.” The boy pointed to a black boy at the far end of the ward. The cards were sticky and when I walked across the room everybody stared at me. I gave the cards to Lenny. I noticed how his dark brown toes stuck out of the chalky whiteness of his cast. I pictured myself running errands forever and ever between the boy with the rash on his arms and the boy with the cast on his leg.

I brought an older girl her ice cream. She was a teenager, I think. A plaster cast covered her entire body and a bad smell steamed up out of the cast. For a second I thought I smelled b.m. Only her face and her hair, which was thick and red, stuck out of the cast. The girl asked me how old I was, and while I told her, she gobbled down her ice cream. “See if you can get me more ice cream, honey,” the girl said.

The children seemed like prisoners of their beds, and I was a prisoner of them all. And my mother sat on a chair far away on the other side of the room, talking to the nun in white, not looking at me. I tried to catch her eye but couldn’t. My mother was wearing a blue dress with a million tiny white daisies, white earrings, a white bead necklace. She had on high heels. I re- member thinking that she looked prettier than I had ever seen her look. I had the feeling that she was happy. She was finally doing charity work.

When I finished giving out the ice cream, the nun made a speech thanking me for giving a treat to sick children with the money I earned from delivering newspapers. I hid myself behind my mother, out of view of the children. I wished I had refused to serve the ice cream. My mother should have served it; after all, it was her idea.

On the way back to Seaview, my mother bought ice-cream cones at a drugstore lunch counter, one for me and one for herself. As we left the drugstore, she said, “The nun and I had an interesting talk. She said that many of the children never have visitors-no one to talk to, no gifts, no treats. Week after week-no visitors.” I slowed my pace. I didn’t want to hear another word about sick children. “Walk a little faster, Harriet,” my mother urged. I tried to walk as slowly as I could.

The next morning when I brought the newspaper over to Grandma Doland, she said, “I hear you went to St. Vincent’s yesterday. May the Blessed Mother smile on you.” She touched her fingers to my cheek and leaned toward me, but didn’t smile. She wasn’t a smiling grandma.

I missed my Mickey Mouse.

“Out of sorts?” Grandma said. “I won’t keep you,” and she handed me fifty cents-two quarters. “A bonus for being such a good girl.”

The money was useless, I thought as I went back to our cottage where my mother was packing a picnic lunch for the beach. I would never get the Mickey Mouse doll. “What did grandma say about the hospital?” my mother asked me.

“Nothing,” I replied, “but she gave me fifty cents.”

“Didn’t Grandma Doland say anything?” my mother asked again; “I would have thought she would have been so proud of you.”

“Nope,” I said, and handed my mother the fifty cents. “Here, give the money to kids who need it.”

My mother looked sad. “Are you sure Grandma didn’t say anything?” she asked again, refusing to take the two quarters and turning back to the picnic lunch. When her back was turned, I took the two quarters and hurled them out the window into the blue hydrangeas. I promised myself I would never go swimming with her again before breakfast, and I didn’t.

In spite of the hospital and not getting the Mickey Mouse doll, it was a lovely summer. I helped take care of Uncle Lionel and Aunt Sue’s baby twins, and Aunt Sue gave me one of her flowered silk scarves as a present. Once she and Uncle Lionel took me to an amusement park. “The child doesn’t need to see freaks,” my grandmother said to Uncle Lionel before we left. “It’s okay, Mother,” Uncle Lionel told her. “Don’t worry. She’ll be fine.” He was firm with Grandma. I’ve already seen a freak, I wanted to say-Aunt Birdie; her hump seemed enormous to me, her head like a turtle’s head.

Every Sunday afternoon all of us brought casseroles and salads over to Uncle Lionel and Aunt Sue’s house-because theirs was the biggest cottage and faced the ocean-and had dinner on their screened-in porch. My father brought out beers and passed them around, and sat and drank and smoked and watched. At those times Aunt Birdie would sit herself next to my father and start yakking. Birdie, I noticed, didn’t yak as much when Uncle Lionel was around. Uncle Lionel was more jovial than my father, but once in a while I heard him scold Birdie. “Okay, okay! Enough!” when she was talking too much. Once I heard him tell her to shut the hell up, she was driving him nuts. My father never would have said anything like that. Instead he listened and got a faraway look in his eyes. At those times his face seemed to turn white and he’d light up a cigarette and forget to flick the ash. He seemed to go into deep freeze until the cigarette stub burnt his fingers and then he’d toss it to the concrete floor and stomp on it.

My mother noticed that white, mean, deep-freeze look on my father’s face and I overheard her ask him what was wrong. He answered in a voice that scared me: “I can’t stand listening to Birdie go on and on. It’s like I came to a line in myself and I can’t go over it. So many years of her yakking . . .”

But more and more it seemed that my mother went out of her way to pay attention to Birdie, to have long conversations with her, to look at the picture puzzle she was working on and ask her questions about it. I began to think that my mother paid more attention to Birdie than to me. Once she bought a new cotton dress for Birdie. White with purple swans. The dress was too long, and my mother had to sew up the hem, and it took her hours to do. She did the sewing over at Grandma’s cottage, one evening on the porch. Birdie was yakking on and on about a new picture puzzle, and my mother was complimenting her on being able to do a thousand-piece puzzle. Suddenly my father stood up and slammed out the door and headed toward the beach. I knew he went for a walk on the beach because when he came back he took off his shoes and emptied a pile of sand from each shoe right onto the floor of the porch. Birdie was still yakking to my mother.

A couple of days later my mother bought Birdie white earrings-“summer jewelry” she called it. “Why shouldn’t Birdie have some summer jewelry like Aunt Mary or Aunt Sue?” she said to me in the store. Uncle Lionel was supposedly the big spender in the family, but he didn’t spend money on Birdie. My mother did. One evening I overheard my father tell my mother that he knew for a fact that Birdie had a drawerful of summer jewelry and that she shouldn’t feel obliged to pay so much attention to her. “Don’t carry this thing too far, Rosalie,” he warned. “You’ll end up spending every minute of your life and all your money on Babette.” He called Aunt Birdie by her real name, and I thought he sounded angry.

“We have to lighten your mother’s burden,” my mother replied.

“Let Lionel be the one to lighten my mother’s burden,” my father whispered, lighting a cigarette.

On August 31 we left Seaview, went back to Enfield, and I started third grade. All three of us talked about the good summer the family had had together and how nice it was to have a big family. But in December, a week after Thanksgiving, my father disappeared-and in the next two years we heard from him only once, and he never came back to live with my mother or me again. He moved to Oregon. I’ve often thought about that summer and tried to figure out whether there were any clues as to why he left. My mother said that the ocean made him restless. Maybe. But once in a while I believed it was because of me, because I was selfish, because I didn’t want to do charity work.

During Christmas season my mother was busy consoling Grandma Doland. Sometimes I worried that my mother had fallen in love with Grandma Doland. I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that waves were pouring over me and I was jumbled up in them, drowning in them and under them. I was suffocating and dying. No one was holding me tight. And four or five months later when I came up for air, I found myself living in the dark cavelike apartment on Eighty-second Street and Amsterdam Avenue-with Grandma Doland, Aunt Mary, Birdie, and my mother. I was inside the body. I was inside the body, but all I could taste was dust.

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