With my eyes closed, I see white-hot shimmering light. It’s soothing in a way, soothing in its emptiness. The light almost seems to block out reality. Maybe none of this is real. Maybe I’ll doze off and wake to find I’m somewhere else, someone else.
Voices carry over sand with surprising clarity. I can hear people three blankets over, hear their conversation as easily as if I were part of their group. Maybe I should be ashamed of this, but eavesdropping is one of my favorite activities at the beach. It’s just human nature really, to be curious about others, to compare our own lives with theirs. Are we better looking, fatter, smarter, poorer, happier? I’d come up short right now, by just about any measure.
Even better than eavesdropping at the beach is people watching, an activity I’ve refined over the years. I sit with my low chair tilted back a bit, book propped on my knees, dark sunglasses on. It’s impossible to tell that I’m staring, not reading. I can spend an afternoon immersed in the lives of strangers, much more fascinating than reality TV.
The group just to my left, for example. A family on vacation: Mom, Dad, son around 15, adolescent daughter who brought a friend along (she’s at that age when girls simply can’t be parted from their nearest and dearest, and that’s not family), and one unidentified 40-ish woman, Dad’s sister, maybe? She’s around the same age as the one I’m sure is Mom, but she’s blonde and heavy-set, nothing like the slender brunette who is now rummaging through the red soft-sided cooler.
“Do you want more cherries?” she asks, looking hopefully toward the teen in surfer shorts, whose long, slender torso is stretched out on a beach towel.
“No,” he grunts.
A few years ago, I bet she would have responded with a stern “No what?” But now she’s wary, servile almost. She paws around a bit more.
“I have watermelon too, and plums, and there’s still a sandwich in here.”
He doesn’t answer, but in fairness, she hasn’t asked a question.
“Something to drink?” she pleads, and he rolls onto his stomach with another negative grunt.
I want to tell her to stop the fussing. This begging to please him, to get his attention, his recognition even, is irritating me and, more importantly, him. As a high school teacher, I certainly recognize teenage annoyance. “He wants to be left alone, Mom,” I want to holler over to her. “He doesn’t want anything to eat, he doesn’t want anything to drink, he just wants you to stop buzzing around and get your own life.”
Which is, of course, what I need to do. I need to, as my mother put it, “consider my options.”
“I’ll take the kids for a few days,” she offered. “Go somewhere nice and peaceful, somewhere you can think. My treat,” she added, realizing that money was on my current list of worries.
Consider my options. Lying here on the sand, seeing nothing but the white-hot light behind my eyelids, the best option seems to be to do nothing. Besides the chatter from blankets around me, I hear the surf crashing relentlessly and the gulls screeching overhead. The whole of Cape Cod National Seashore is soothingly, stunningly beautiful, but this stretch, with its high dunes and swaying beach grass, is the perfect spot to think, to plan, to decide.
My options. One, of course, is to turn my back on you completely, or as completely as possible while we share two children. No one, especially not you, would blame me if I started divorce proceedings immediately. Affairs are common, the stuff of jokes and soaps, banal and tawdry. This is something else, something I can’t get my brain around. As I come awake each morning, the facts reassemble in my consciousness like puzzle pieces, and then I still can’t believe the finished picture. What in the world were you thinking?
We had everything we said we wanted: two healthy children, teaching careers so we could do work we love and be on the school schedule, a comfortable home close to family, a long, happy life together. And we got it; we have it all, all except the last. What made you throw it away?
The beach is probably the worst possible place for a 36-year-old woman who’s feeling insecure about herself, her desirability. My friends all tell me I look terrific. “How do you stay so thin?” they ask. “Good genes,” I laugh, “and sometimes, good jeans.” See, I’m witty, too, witty, slim, attractive. But now do I have to add “for my age”?
Off to my left I notice four girls around the age of my chemistry students. They’re sprawled on a tie-dyed sheet a few yards from my towel. Nothing I could possibly do, not yoga, not weights, not organic food, not even Botox could make me look like them. Their perfect skin, their shiny hair, their glow – is that what happened? Did you really, truly find that irresistible? So irresistible that you’d betray me, throw away the life we made? The current psychobabble says we can get through this, even come out “stronger than ever,” whatever that means. The magazine racks at Turner’s IGA checkout display dozens of headlines about this pop star and that politician who confess their tales of woe and recovery, their post-infidelity stories, whether victim or perpetrator. But you and I are real people, not flashy faces. You and I have real lives, a long history, almost two decades of holding hands and sharing dreams.
So many hours, so many days of tears and pleas and explanation. You’ve tried to help me understand. The trouble is, I do understand. I teach high school, too. Just this past spring, a tall, blue-eyed lacrosse player with a cute sheepish smile had an obvious crush on me. Me! It’s so easy to recognize the adolescent admiration that grows into something close to worship. In the world of high school, it’s a cliché, yet you bought into it. Why?
A few of the morning arrivals are packing up now, but many more sun-seekers are streaming in to take their places. They lug chairs and coolers and boogie boards, towels and sand pails and even screen houses. It amazes me that this beach can be blanket-to-blanket people, yet when I close my eyes I can feel so alone and invisible; the action swirls around me but never touches me.
Now I open my eyes just a sliver and watch a new group setting up in front of me. It’s a young family, husband and wife in their late twenties probably. The wife is very pregnant; the husband carries a toddler, a cute little guy in red plaid surfer shorts. They probably drove here right around his nap time so he could fall asleep in the car seat. Now he’s draped over dad’s shoulder, slowly coming awake to the wonder of where he is. Dad points excitedly toward the waves just a few feet away, then hands him off to mom and begins to unpack the gear, marking out their territory for the afternoon. Now mom awkwardly lowers herself into the first-opened canvas chair, uncaps a plastic bottle of sunscreen and begins to smooth it onto her child’s chubby shoulders. They look, all three of them, pleased with the beach, with the day, with their now and future lives.
They remind me of us a decade or so ago, when Natalie was a baby. We didn’t have a house then, just a cramped apartment and each other. I remember how awed we were by her sweetness, her innocence, how terrified we were that she might break. I remember your mother saying, “These are the best years of your life,” and me responding ruefully, “Thanks, Anne, good to know. We’ll keep reminding ourselves of that at 3 am when we’re taking turns in the rocking chair.” Yet we laughed more then, felt more delight and wonder and anticipation.
Now our days are a blur of “Don’t forget” this and “Call me if” that. You head out to the hardware store on Saturday mornings to pick up another tool or part for the downstairs faucet that won’t stop dripping. I raise my voice one more decibel to remind the kids yet again to pick up this or stop doing that. Dinners are grab and go between karate lessons and Daisy scouts, and always the piles on the hall table remind us both of papers that need grading and lessons that need planning.
Two kids to raise, a dog to feed and walk, a lawn to mow, careers to nurture: all of this seems stale and conventional and tiresome. And then one day, a doe-eyed, auburn-haired beauty walks into your college-prep English class, a good student, astounded by your intellectual brilliance, your passionate grasp of Great Expectations, your wit, your sophisticated humor. No wonder all those awkward high school boys pale in comparison. No wonder she wanted to stay after class to bask in your brilliance, brilliance that’s all sewed up in your warm, boyish smile. No wonder you were charmed. No wonder you were tempted. No wonder you wanted to respond.
Still, the wonder to me is that you did. And conveniently, you responded right after she turned 18, right after graduation day. You know the law, of course, had access to records that listed her birth date. Was this affair really a horrible, thoughtless lapse in your self-control, as you claim, or had you actually planned it for months, looked forward to June, when you could finally respond to her blushing adoration with no legal or consequences?
I’ll never know the truth. And I’ll never stop seeing her tear-stained face at our screen door last Thursday, never stop hearing her choking sobs as she vented her anger and heartbreak on me, thinking it would be her revenge on you for ending it. She’s just a child really, no femme fatale, no “other woman.” She believed your lust was love. She didn’t know you’d set aside a separate compartment away from your real life, a temporary place to indulge your ego.
So now I lie here on Bradley Beach and think about my options. You’ve begged and promised and pleaded and cried. You’ve tried so hard to convince me of your genuine remorse. And I am convinced. I believe you wish it had never happened. But it did, and now I have to decide how to live with that, how to proceed with life from here. I have to find a way around the huge lump of sadness that’s taking up the whole inside of me.
If only it were just about me. But the kids are part of this too. If I leave you, they’ll survive, but they’ll have only a part-time Dad. Do I want them to have beds and books and favorite ice cream bowls in two different places? Do I want to drive over to your place, wherever that might be, late at night because Aaron forgot his stuffed tiger, the one he can’t sleep without? Do I want to miss one of Natalie’s long, involved stories about her sleepover with Brynn or Madison because it’s “your day to have the kids?” Do I want to spend Thanksgiving without them because I’ll “have them” for Christmas?
I could, of course, get mean, could deny your time with the children, because you do, surely, deserve to be punished, punished hugely and terribly and forever. Just now, I’m watching a girl her age strut down the beach, weaving in and out among the towels and chairs and umbrellas, swaying on her long, tanned legs. She knows all eyes are following her, with her aqua and black striped bikini, following her with frank admiration or rueful envy, depending on age and gender. How old should a girl be before a man can ogle her and be a “regular guy” instead of a pedophile? 15? 17? 13? Where’s the line? Natalie will be 13 in 4 short years, then 18 soon enough, and she might just have a crush on some handsome, charming teacher. Did you think of that? When did you start seeing your favorite student as a potential lover instead of a high school kid?
I remember being 18. I remember being full of hopes and plans and dreams and ideas. I was sure of all the things I’d never do (“settle” for anything less than my dreams) and some of the things I would surely do (travel, make a difference). The specifics were all potential and possibility.
And then I met you, and shared it all so openly and earnestly. I remember our “firsts”: first apartment, first brand new car, first house, first child, first real fight – and even then, I never doubted we were meant to be together always.
So now I lie here in the white-hot summer light of my favorite beach, considering my options: leave my cheating husband, who couldn’t refuse the delights of a young girl entrusted to his care, and make a new life without him. Or stay together, for the sake of the kids or our marriage or whatever, and work on forgiving. How I wish I could.
You tell me you’ll never hurt me again. You tell me you’ll spend the rest of our lives making it up to me. You promise that in time, we’ll be whole again, we’ll be the same as we were before all this.
That’s such a pretty thought, but you’re wrong. Whatever I decide, whatever option I choose, nothing ever will or ever can be the same again.
Nothing, ever.
Voices carry over sand with surprising clarity. I can hear people three blankets over, hear their conversation as easily as if I were part of their group. Maybe I should be ashamed of this, but eavesdropping is one of my favorite activities at the beach. It’s just human nature really, to be curious about others, to compare our own lives with theirs. Are we better looking, fatter, smarter, poorer, happier? I’d come up short right now, by just about any measure.
Even better than eavesdropping at the beach is people watching, an activity I’ve refined over the years. I sit with my low chair tilted back a bit, book propped on my knees, dark sunglasses on. It’s impossible to tell that I’m staring, not reading. I can spend an afternoon immersed in the lives of strangers, much more fascinating than reality TV.
The group just to my left, for example. A family on vacation: Mom, Dad, son around 15, adolescent daughter who brought a friend along (she’s at that age when girls simply can’t be parted from their nearest and dearest, and that’s not family), and one unidentified 40-ish woman, Dad’s sister, maybe? She’s around the same age as the one I’m sure is Mom, but she’s blonde and heavy-set, nothing like the slender brunette who is now rummaging through the red soft-sided cooler.
“Do you want more cherries?” she asks, looking hopefully toward the teen in surfer shorts, whose long, slender torso is stretched out on a beach towel.
“No,” he grunts.
A few years ago, I bet she would have responded with a stern “No what?” But now she’s wary, servile almost. She paws around a bit more.
“I have watermelon too, and plums, and there’s still a sandwich in here.”
He doesn’t answer, but in fairness, she hasn’t asked a question.
“Something to drink?” she pleads, and he rolls onto his stomach with another negative grunt.
I want to tell her to stop the fussing. This begging to please him, to get his attention, his recognition even, is irritating me and, more importantly, him. As a high school teacher, I certainly recognize teenage annoyance. “He wants to be left alone, Mom,” I want to holler over to her. “He doesn’t want anything to eat, he doesn’t want anything to drink, he just wants you to stop buzzing around and get your own life.”
Which is, of course, what I need to do. I need to, as my mother put it, “consider my options.”
“I’ll take the kids for a few days,” she offered. “Go somewhere nice and peaceful, somewhere you can think. My treat,” she added, realizing that money was on my current list of worries.
Consider my options. Lying here on the sand, seeing nothing but the white-hot light behind my eyelids, the best option seems to be to do nothing. Besides the chatter from blankets around me, I hear the surf crashing relentlessly and the gulls screeching overhead. The whole of Cape Cod National Seashore is soothingly, stunningly beautiful, but this stretch, with its high dunes and swaying beach grass, is the perfect spot to think, to plan, to decide.
My options. One, of course, is to turn my back on you completely, or as completely as possible while we share two children. No one, especially not you, would blame me if I started divorce proceedings immediately. Affairs are common, the stuff of jokes and soaps, banal and tawdry. This is something else, something I can’t get my brain around. As I come awake each morning, the facts reassemble in my consciousness like puzzle pieces, and then I still can’t believe the finished picture. What in the world were you thinking?
We had everything we said we wanted: two healthy children, teaching careers so we could do work we love and be on the school schedule, a comfortable home close to family, a long, happy life together. And we got it; we have it all, all except the last. What made you throw it away?
The beach is probably the worst possible place for a 36-year-old woman who’s feeling insecure about herself, her desirability. My friends all tell me I look terrific. “How do you stay so thin?” they ask. “Good genes,” I laugh, “and sometimes, good jeans.” See, I’m witty, too, witty, slim, attractive. But now do I have to add “for my age”?
Off to my left I notice four girls around the age of my chemistry students. They’re sprawled on a tie-dyed sheet a few yards from my towel. Nothing I could possibly do, not yoga, not weights, not organic food, not even Botox could make me look like them. Their perfect skin, their shiny hair, their glow – is that what happened? Did you really, truly find that irresistible? So irresistible that you’d betray me, throw away the life we made? The current psychobabble says we can get through this, even come out “stronger than ever,” whatever that means. The magazine racks at Turner’s IGA checkout display dozens of headlines about this pop star and that politician who confess their tales of woe and recovery, their post-infidelity stories, whether victim or perpetrator. But you and I are real people, not flashy faces. You and I have real lives, a long history, almost two decades of holding hands and sharing dreams.
So many hours, so many days of tears and pleas and explanation. You’ve tried to help me understand. The trouble is, I do understand. I teach high school, too. Just this past spring, a tall, blue-eyed lacrosse player with a cute sheepish smile had an obvious crush on me. Me! It’s so easy to recognize the adolescent admiration that grows into something close to worship. In the world of high school, it’s a cliché, yet you bought into it. Why?
A few of the morning arrivals are packing up now, but many more sun-seekers are streaming in to take their places. They lug chairs and coolers and boogie boards, towels and sand pails and even screen houses. It amazes me that this beach can be blanket-to-blanket people, yet when I close my eyes I can feel so alone and invisible; the action swirls around me but never touches me.
Now I open my eyes just a sliver and watch a new group setting up in front of me. It’s a young family, husband and wife in their late twenties probably. The wife is very pregnant; the husband carries a toddler, a cute little guy in red plaid surfer shorts. They probably drove here right around his nap time so he could fall asleep in the car seat. Now he’s draped over dad’s shoulder, slowly coming awake to the wonder of where he is. Dad points excitedly toward the waves just a few feet away, then hands him off to mom and begins to unpack the gear, marking out their territory for the afternoon. Now mom awkwardly lowers herself into the first-opened canvas chair, uncaps a plastic bottle of sunscreen and begins to smooth it onto her child’s chubby shoulders. They look, all three of them, pleased with the beach, with the day, with their now and future lives.
They remind me of us a decade or so ago, when Natalie was a baby. We didn’t have a house then, just a cramped apartment and each other. I remember how awed we were by her sweetness, her innocence, how terrified we were that she might break. I remember your mother saying, “These are the best years of your life,” and me responding ruefully, “Thanks, Anne, good to know. We’ll keep reminding ourselves of that at 3 am when we’re taking turns in the rocking chair.” Yet we laughed more then, felt more delight and wonder and anticipation.
Now our days are a blur of “Don’t forget” this and “Call me if” that. You head out to the hardware store on Saturday mornings to pick up another tool or part for the downstairs faucet that won’t stop dripping. I raise my voice one more decibel to remind the kids yet again to pick up this or stop doing that. Dinners are grab and go between karate lessons and Daisy scouts, and always the piles on the hall table remind us both of papers that need grading and lessons that need planning.
Two kids to raise, a dog to feed and walk, a lawn to mow, careers to nurture: all of this seems stale and conventional and tiresome. And then one day, a doe-eyed, auburn-haired beauty walks into your college-prep English class, a good student, astounded by your intellectual brilliance, your passionate grasp of Great Expectations, your wit, your sophisticated humor. No wonder all those awkward high school boys pale in comparison. No wonder she wanted to stay after class to bask in your brilliance, brilliance that’s all sewed up in your warm, boyish smile. No wonder you were charmed. No wonder you were tempted. No wonder you wanted to respond.
Still, the wonder to me is that you did. And conveniently, you responded right after she turned 18, right after graduation day. You know the law, of course, had access to records that listed her birth date. Was this affair really a horrible, thoughtless lapse in your self-control, as you claim, or had you actually planned it for months, looked forward to June, when you could finally respond to her blushing adoration with no legal or consequences?
I’ll never know the truth. And I’ll never stop seeing her tear-stained face at our screen door last Thursday, never stop hearing her choking sobs as she vented her anger and heartbreak on me, thinking it would be her revenge on you for ending it. She’s just a child really, no femme fatale, no “other woman.” She believed your lust was love. She didn’t know you’d set aside a separate compartment away from your real life, a temporary place to indulge your ego.
So now I lie here on Bradley Beach and think about my options. You’ve begged and promised and pleaded and cried. You’ve tried so hard to convince me of your genuine remorse. And I am convinced. I believe you wish it had never happened. But it did, and now I have to decide how to live with that, how to proceed with life from here. I have to find a way around the huge lump of sadness that’s taking up the whole inside of me.
If only it were just about me. But the kids are part of this too. If I leave you, they’ll survive, but they’ll have only a part-time Dad. Do I want them to have beds and books and favorite ice cream bowls in two different places? Do I want to drive over to your place, wherever that might be, late at night because Aaron forgot his stuffed tiger, the one he can’t sleep without? Do I want to miss one of Natalie’s long, involved stories about her sleepover with Brynn or Madison because it’s “your day to have the kids?” Do I want to spend Thanksgiving without them because I’ll “have them” for Christmas?
I could, of course, get mean, could deny your time with the children, because you do, surely, deserve to be punished, punished hugely and terribly and forever. Just now, I’m watching a girl her age strut down the beach, weaving in and out among the towels and chairs and umbrellas, swaying on her long, tanned legs. She knows all eyes are following her, with her aqua and black striped bikini, following her with frank admiration or rueful envy, depending on age and gender. How old should a girl be before a man can ogle her and be a “regular guy” instead of a pedophile? 15? 17? 13? Where’s the line? Natalie will be 13 in 4 short years, then 18 soon enough, and she might just have a crush on some handsome, charming teacher. Did you think of that? When did you start seeing your favorite student as a potential lover instead of a high school kid?
I remember being 18. I remember being full of hopes and plans and dreams and ideas. I was sure of all the things I’d never do (“settle” for anything less than my dreams) and some of the things I would surely do (travel, make a difference). The specifics were all potential and possibility.
And then I met you, and shared it all so openly and earnestly. I remember our “firsts”: first apartment, first brand new car, first house, first child, first real fight – and even then, I never doubted we were meant to be together always.
So now I lie here in the white-hot summer light of my favorite beach, considering my options: leave my cheating husband, who couldn’t refuse the delights of a young girl entrusted to his care, and make a new life without him. Or stay together, for the sake of the kids or our marriage or whatever, and work on forgiving. How I wish I could.
You tell me you’ll never hurt me again. You tell me you’ll spend the rest of our lives making it up to me. You promise that in time, we’ll be whole again, we’ll be the same as we were before all this.
That’s such a pretty thought, but you’re wrong. Whatever I decide, whatever option I choose, nothing ever will or ever can be the same again.
Nothing, ever.
