That’s what it looked like: flat brown, leading out to the sky. My heart sank when I saw it.
We made our way to a parking lot that was just about on the beach. I stayed very still in my wheelchair. Part of me wanted to cry. I never really thought that it would be brown. I’ve lived my whole life in a development, and this was the one big treat the outside world thought to give me. But they’ve already ruined it. Nothing poetic came to mind. I wondered if I would even feel anything at all, sitting in my wheelchair, on the beach, looking out over a brown ocean. Could you feel the old feelings, looking at something like that?
And then I realized, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to feel the old feelings. At the end of the day, they’d just turn me around, wheel me back into the bus, and take me back to my bedroom in the development. Why tease myself? Why give myself another memory to be sad about losing for the rest of my life?
When the woman came to wheel me off, I sort of panicked. I glared at her so hard when she leaned in to unlock my chair that she backed off and waited. I could see two red spots of embarrassment forming on her cheeks. Then I realized she was younger than I’d thought, maybe eighteen, nineteen. Those heels were silly to wear to the beach. Silly and sort of sad, as though she’d put in far too much effort for such an unimpressive excursion. I looked out the window again, at the brown ocean. There were heavy, low clouds, blocking the sun. Everything seemed metal and flat. I told myself there was no danger of feeling too much. Of course I’d be willing to leave this behind. Then I relaxed some, and looked up at the woman, so she helped me off of the bus and wheeled me forward onto the sand.
When all of us were unloaded, there were twelve cripples placed strategically over the beach. It was like a sick art project, or something. I had this idea that we all looked like we’d been deposited in trash bins, placed in regular intervals along in the sand. I’m not sure how long I just sat there. After a while, I stopped focusing on the brown ocean and focused instead on the sky. Clouds scudded over me. They were really speeding past. A gull lifted up and circled over my head, between me and the clouds, then it let out a single cry. The sun never came out.
After a while, the woman came and distributed lunch. I unwrapped mine on my lap. It was a ham sandwich, on white bread. With mayo and cheese. I took a bite, and as soon as I did a little gust of wind passed and scattered sand over my sandwich. The next bite was gritty. It tasted better after that. I sat and chewed, and suddenly a thin crescent of sunshine slipped between two clouds and spread out over the water. The waves spilled over with gold, and the roughness of the water beyond them was like a sea of goldfish scales. Then the clouds closed. The water went back to flat brown. It was almost as if I’d made it up.
I dropped my sandwich on my lap. I spun around in my wheelchair, to see if anyone else had caught that little passing through of the light. A couple of cripples were sitting there wide-eyed, as if they were in shock. The boy was facing away from the beach. I watched as the woman went to him and bent toward him. His whole body flexed. The woman backed away. She saw me watching, so she came over in front of me.
“Are you done with your sandwich?” she asked.
I narrowed my eyes and she backed off. By myself again, I ate the rest of it. Slowly. Everything about it was heightened. The softness of the bread, compared with the grit of the sand. The saltiness of the ham. The taste filled my whole head. When I was done I finished the Coke that came with it, watching the water the whole time, wishing for another brief glimpse of light.
After I was done, the woman came to take my trash. She slipped it in a tote bag she was carrying. “Can I show you something?” she asked. She wheeled me forward on the beach, all the way to the tide line. I noticed that the edges of the waves, as they reached up on the beach, were tipped with white foam. A scalloped hem. Little bits of foam broke off from the waves and skidded by themselves along the wet sand. Under my chair, the waves came and went. They left a silver rim after they left. Little holes opened and closed in the sand. There was an offering of new shells, sparkling, and then the wave returned and took it all back.
Don’t give me this and then take it away, I wanted to tell the lady, standing behind me. Don’t you dare give me this for a minute, and then send me back to the development. There was sea spray hitting my face, and I could see out in the water dark shadows where it got deeper abruptly. It looked as if there were enormous, flat sharks hovering below the surface. Beyond them, the ocean stretched out to where it finally met with the sky. The birds were wheeling above me, and the clouds scudding, and the ocean was coming and going, and I wanted only for the woman to keep wheeling me out. To keep moving forward. Not to go back. To wheel forward into the depths of the ocean, and then to float, rowing maybe, forward and forward and forward until I reached the place where the brown ocean met up with the clouds. As I was thinking this, the sun peeked through again, and for a quick second the whole thing was washed over with light so that each little wavelet deep out in the ocean was illuminated with a rim of gold paint.
This is all we get, I thought. Just quick moments of brightness that get taken away before you understand what you’ve been given.
Then the woman was wheeling me away from the ocean, back toward the tarry sand and the parking lot and the bent-over palm trees — real palm trees, not made of recyclables — with their long beards of shredded bark, scaling away from the trunk. Like old men, abandoned in the parking lot. The woman was about to park me where I’d been sitting before, but I looked at the boy with his back to the ocean, then looked up at her, and somehow she got it and wheeled me over to him. She lined up our wheels side by side, and he couldn’t turn to look at me but I could tell, even though his expressions were frozen, just how awful he felt. He had curly brown hair, and a sad little mouth. He seemed softer than most of the boys at my school. A little on the chubby side, I guess, but in a way that was sweet. I’d always thought he was a faker, but just then I felt differently about him. I wanted to tell him about the ocean, but I couldn’t talk, and there was nothing to write on, and before I knew what I was doing I’d leaned forward and kissed him.
Just on the cheek. His skin was soft under my lips. I watched him to see if I could pick up some sort of expression, but his face was really frozen. I don’t know if he liked it. Maybe he felt something, I don’t know. I’m not sure if it was the right thing to do. I just wanted the day to be somehow marked by something other than the feeling of leaving the ocean.
After a while the woman wheeled us all back onto the bus, and we started moving again. Back toward our development. Again we passed the abandoned houses, the empty fields, the rows of silver. I felt pretty lonely and sad. But then again, when I licked my lips they tasted like salt. My skin was warm and my hair was sticky, and even though I kept my face toward the window, so the wind would brush past me, I could feel the boy I kissed watching the back of my head.
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Gaby: Hello? Are you there?
MARY3: Yes, I didn’t know you were finished.
Gaby: Yeah, that’s it.
MARY3: Thanks for telling me about it.
Gaby: Yeah, well, I’m not sure it was the best thing to do. The whole thing seems a little dampened by trying to describe how great it was.