The pool didn’t reek of chlorine—only light.
The grass was cut into perfect, manicured squares
along the pavement.
Twelve years old, I ate in silence,
a linen napkin folded in my lap.
Club sandwiches on china—
mini glass bottles of Heinz;
Grey Poupon.
Ceiling fans turned slowly.
Air-conditioning hummed in the lobby,
a breeze lifting my hair.
I wished my mother would speak less,
wished my father would speak more.
She spoke with her hands,
he with none.
My father had started making
real money, vacations upgraded
from condos on the boardwalk
to quieter, Waspier spaces—
straight from camp pickup
to the old, white-shingled resort.
At camp I’d caught a bug;
my mother feared whooping cough.
She raged no one had told her,
but found a goy doctor in a town
with a real lighthouse to see me.
I didn’t like that she used those terms—
goy and WASP—
when I only wanted to fit in.
Bronchitis, he said, without much banter.
A few pills should shake it off.
She worried too much.
She worried the wrong things.
After tennis, my mother booked a massage.
My father and I walked to the beach.
No umbrellas, no lifeguard stand,
not one footprint.
Only dunes,
the ocean capped in white.
We raced to the surf and I touched first—
but the cold was a jolt in my lungs—
a sudden, doubling coughing fit.
He struck my back until I hacked
that club sandwich into the sand.
Then, silence. The coughing vanished.
He cupped the ocean in his hands
to rinse the bitter grit from my chin—
washing away those strands of my insides,
which were really his insides, too.
