by Wendy Burden
I sat up and took off my mask, and oh God, there was Cassie Diggins, her dark face about an inch from mine, her pancake turner cocked and ready to strike. She gave the surface of the water a tsunami slap, and my ocean reverie dissolved into the murk of tepid soapy water. I scrambled from the tub, scuba tank clanking, just as a colossal clap of thunder rolled heavily over the roof of our house.
Why They Invented Florida
EVERYBODY HAS TO pay the piper sometime. My mother paid up during spring vacations, when our grandparents went to Paris, Henrietta went home to Scotland, Cassie Diggins remembered she had a husband, Edward went to stay with old Mary Falusi, and camp didn’t start for another two months.
For me, getting there was more the point of the vacation than the destination: the fabulously pink Roney Plaza Hotel, on South Beach, in Miami. At Union Station we boarded a Deco stream-liner train called the Silver Meteor. It left at seven in the evening, and by the time we pulled into Miami the following afternoon, just when some of us were dying for our mai tais at the hotel bar, Will and I would have forensically covered every inch of the diners, sleepers, coaches, tavern, and the round-ended observation car at the end of the train, where the caboose should have been.
Leaving freezing cold Washington in a cloud of steam, just like in the movies, the Silver Meteor would slowly gather speed and settle into an initial rhythm. I always looked out the window for the first ten minutes to make sure we really were on our way, and watched as the dark rail yards, and the cluttered backyards of the poor, and then the factories on the outskirts of the city, generalized into a blur of dull Northeast Corridor landscape.
After my mother had freshened her makeup, and made sure her children were presentable—shirttails and stomachs tucked in (“Remember, you are a reflection of me”)—we’d head off to the smoky tavern car in the back, finding our sea legs and swaying exaggeratedly like we were drunks. While she had her cocktail(s), we ate dry roasted peanuts and drank Shirley Temples with a dozen extra cherries in them, which is why Will and I will eventually succumb to cancer of the Maraschino, if melanoma doesn’t get us first.
When our mother was “relaxed” and Will and I were thoroughly cranked up on sugar, we’d have to run to make it to the second seating in the dining car. The cover of the menu invariably featured a travel agency illustration of a tanned, carefree Barbie and Ken sitting under a palm tree on the beach. It also invariably featured Oysters Rockefeller, pan-fried trout, Steak Diane, and prime rib so enormous it hung off the plate. The waiters were seasoned, old black men with big pink hands and kind faces, graceful in their starched white jackets. They waited on you like they had all the time in the world, carrying the thick china and heavy hotel silver in layers up their arms as if they weighed no more than leaves.
After dinner we’d go back to the tavern car and play bingo for tubes of Sea & Ski suntan cream. I would have preferred cash, or a Zenith color TV, but when in Rome and all that. Sometimes they showed movies, but watching them in a swaying train with a full stomach made you want to throw up.
Our mother’s plan was to get us all in bed by Petersburg, North Carolina (10:05 P.M.). Barring that, by Raleigh (12:20 A.M.). Then she gave up and locked her door, having rung for the porter to come to Will’s and my room. When he showed up, all smiles and aren’t-you-up-late jokes, he opened up the beds with a special key, and down they plopped, fully made up and good to go. Even though I avoided mine at home, the top bunk in a first-class sleeper was a veritable delight of Let’s Play Tree House, or even Mortuary. It was engineered in such a way that you could spend hours up there with nothing but a few toys and the three toggle switches: one for the white reading light, one for the blue night-light, and one for the porter—although you got sent to my mother’s Hell if you messed with that one. There were built-in places in which to store your comics, flubber, Silly Putty, and trolls; and pockets to stash contraband like Cheez Doodles or exploding caps. Even if you were a grown-up, you got to be netted in by a web of canvas so you didn’t tumble out if the engineer had to slam on the brakes in the middle of the night for broken-down cars, or dumbstruck cows, or blondes strapped to the tracks by Snidely Whiplash. (The latter of which would be the case on a night train we once took from Chicago when, somewhere between Syracuse and Utica, we plowed into a woman who had lashed her own self to the tracks, for obvious reasons.) Best of all, when you went to sleep, the beautiful blue light stayed on like a guardian angel, so you never felt scared, even if you woke up discombobulated in the middle of the night and wondered what planet you were on.
At the crack of dawn Will and I would pop up like prairie dogs and look out the window to find ourselves in the midst of boundless orange groves. This view always struck me as exotic and as foreign as if I’d woken up in Egypt and we were speeding through a landscape of pyramids.
Riding between the cars was obligatory on the way to breakfast. They left the windows on the platform open, and you could feel the speed of the train on your face as you leaned through the curves, and the slam of displaced air when a train passed from the opposite direction. When our cheeks were numb we’d go stand between the cars, one foot on each wildly sawing edge like we were straddling a couple of wild animals. Gulping in the diesel-laden air, we’d claim we smelled the ocean even if it was still a hundred miles away. Then we’d stick our heads back out the window and pop blood vessels screaming as loud and as long as we could.
Our mother was always in a spectacularly good mood when she was southward bound. As soon as the train crossed the Florida state line, it was like she really forgot she had children. And until we crossed back over it on our return, she pretty much ignored us.
Being left to your own devices in a five-star hotel is still my idea of a really good time. Will and I had the keys to our room. If we were hungry, we could charge any meals we wanted. If we wanted to swim, there were lifeguards at both of the pools and on the private beach. And if we really needed her—“but it had better be for a damn good reason”—we knew exactly where to find our mother: from nine to five, she was either in her favorite deck chair, or at the bar. After the sun’s rays were too oblique to tan, she had a bath and a clothing change in her room, and if she didn’t have a date, we all ate out somewhere. But she almost always did, so usually Will and I ordered room service and watched TV all night. When we were younger, our mother would conscientiously hire a sitter, and then we would watch TV all night with the sitter.
Mornings after a date, my mother would lie wasted in her deck chair and, if prodded, would recount her evening to me. The mid-sixties was the height of the discotheque craze, and all the big Miami hotels had them. Go-go dancers were a phenomenon I found repellently fascinating.
“So which one did you go to?” I’d begin the inquiry.
“Oh God, let’s see. Well, we started at the Eden Roc—”
“That’s where they have the girls in the cages, right?”
“Yup. In Harry’s Bar.” (Yawn.)
“And what were they wearing? What were their boots like?” I was really into the outfits.
“They had on gold lamé short ones,” my mother answered wearily, taking a long suck on her Bloody Mary. “And white fishnets, and gold hip-hugger skirts so short you could see their asses.”
“Neat-ohhhh . . .”
“Then we went on to the Shelbourne, where they go-go on top of the tables, and one of the dancers had her wig fall off. I’m afraid she was not a blonde, after all.”
“Whoa . . .” Wardrobe malfunction of such mythic proportion was beyond my juvenile imagination.
“Quite.” She stirred the ice cubes at the bottom of her empty glass with a stalk of celery and took a bite off the end. “Hey, rub some of that oil on my back, would you?”
My mother’s rotisserie timetable was very specific. First, she would lie on her back with her legs spread eight inches apart at the calves, her ankles turned out, and her arms by her sides, but not touching lest it occlude the path of the almighty UVs. Then it
was a half hour with the knees slightly raised, the feet now flat and pointed a little in, and the arms above the head to permit exposure of the pits. Then it was onto her side, with a half hour on each one, her legs held in a scissor position. (Tanned inside knees are the mark of a master.) After a dip in the pool to cool off, she flipped onto her stomach, and followed the same routine, first with her head turned left, arms up, and then with her head twisted the other way, with arms down so her elbows could get their share. Then it was time to scoot all the way forward. With her arms hung over the top edge of the chair and her feet splayed, she looked like a cutout person that had fallen straight over. This was the position in which my mother devoured her bodice rippers.
You’d never have guessed this woman could read Greek and Latin. Or that she had a degree in anthropology from Radcliffe, and would go on to earn a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford. The only thing you’d catch my mother reading, other than a textbook, was something from the drugstore rack with a cover depicting a woman standing in front of a brooding English castle. My guess is these romances diverted her from the mess that was her real-life love life.
I always figured my mother would die of skin cancer. (She wouldn’t.) Certainly her obsession with being tanned was of the age, but she went beyond the trend by insisting we be tanned too. She considered a good burn as meritorious as a battle scar, and until we were a color somewhere between magenta and carmine, and our shoulders were sloughing off in sheets, she wasn’t satisfied.
“You look like you’ve been growing under a pot. Now get out and enjoy the sunshine!” (Get out and get some second-degree burns!)
Red-haired, blue-eyed children of near-Lapland ancestry have been known to blister under fluorescents. Basal and squamous carcinoma cells were choosing teams on my epidermis even as I rubbed the oil on my mother’s leathery shoulders by the banks of the Roney’s Roman Pools of Salt Water.
In reciprocity my mother would indulge me by taking me on her back and swim-walking around in the shallow end. Her skin was always hot from the sun, and slippery from the tanning oil. It smelled of her own bittersweet perfume: coconut, perspiration, Diorissimo, Prell shampoo, citrus, and booze. I would close my eyes and rest my cheek on the warmth of her shoulder, and pretend she was the momma koala bear and I was her baby.
If it rained, the three of us drove to Monkey Jungle, where our mother got all misty-eyed over her old pet spider monkey, a horrible creature no one missed but her. (Like the alligators, and the various snapping turtles that outgrew the bathtub, the monkey had been anonymously donated to the Washington Zoo when we’d moved to the house in Georgetown.) We always visited the Seaquarium, where glided, and skulked, all manner of gloriously toxic marine life. At the entrance there were vending machines that would make a blue plastic dolphin while you watched, then spit it out at the bottom, all warm and sweaty like it had just been born. We watched them milk the cobras at the Miami Serpentarium, or we went to the Flipper School and swam with the dolphins—a supposed “treat” I found disconcerting, since they’ve been known to mate with humans. The last thing I wanted was to be deflowered by a dolphin.
But it hardly ever rains in Miami. And there wasn’t a whole lot to do at the Roney except swim, and get into trouble. Will spent most of his time hanging around the games room, trying to get a bulls-eye on the darts board. I spent mine doing field experiments on toxic invertebrates, namely Portuguese men-of-war.
Like Camp Tan, Camp Man-O’-War also kept to a strict schedule.9 A.M.: Canvas beach in search of subjects. N.B. Handling poisonous physalia is not for the faint-hearted. I used a net I had found by the pool and a tennis racket someone had left by their cabana. Even dead, those men-of-war could reach out from the grave, launch their neurotoxic poison into your bloodstream, and, in a matter of minutes, pull you in. I wanted my research efforts to land me with the Nobel Prize for science, not in an iron lung.
10-11: Assemble and record subjects according to size and color of air sac, length of tentacles, and state of life or decay. Assemble tools to test them with.
11-12: Testing of subjects’ toxicity with various apparatuses: twigs, tennis racket handle, pencils, carrot sticks or chicken thighbone from lunch buffet, etc.
12-1: Lunch. If time, consultation with hotel encyclopedia.
1-3: Dissection. Experimentation with independent variables and control medications: rum, toothpaste, Psssssst, orange juice shot through a water pistol, Off!, Coca-Cola, etc. Record results in logbook.
3-4: Bury dead subjects that are starting to smell.
Will doubted my theory that a dismembered tentacle could be harmful.
“So you’re saying that even if those jellyfish’ve been dead for weeks, you can die if they touch you,” he said.
“The nematocysts can still discharge their toxins—sorry, poison,” I answered condescendingly.
“Yeah, right,” said Will, and he proceeded to systematically pop the bubblegum pink and blue bladders I had placed in careful rows in the sand.
Before he could destroy my camp, our mother arrived for a viewing. She stood there for a while, hands on her hips, surveying the lineup of jellied cadavers.
“Fascinating,” she deadpanned.
“Actually, it is,” I protested, and pulled out my logbook to show her. “See, that one there, for example—his name is Hydro—well, his tentacles started going crazy when I sprayed some Off! on them, but they didn’t when I sprayed deodorant.”
“Ducky,” she said, crouching down to get a better look. “I think it hurts them when you do that, poor things. Hey, move over a little, you’re standing in my sun. I mean, how would you like it if I sprayed you with insect repellent and poked you in the stomach with a stick?” She pushed her fingers into both Will and me and we giggled. Then she started in tickling us, something I feared more than her anger, because she tickled too hard and too long, and I always ended up gasping and purple and sobbing for her to stop.
One (obviously) boring afternoon, I was in the games room with Will. He was demonstrating his newfound skills at the dartboard. The darts back then looked like hypodermic needles from a James Bond movie interrogation scene, and they assumed the weight of a hand grenade when wielded by the uninitiated. Will threw a few, and missed. He threw a few more, and managed to hit the black outside circle. It might have been the most boring five minutes of my life. I told him I was going to the beach, and headed for the door.
“Waitwaitwait!” cried Will. “One more. I’ll get it this time, I swear.”
He took careful aim, did a few back-and-forth motions with his shooting arm, and then let her fly—just as a man wearing nothing but muscles and a Speedo walked in the room. While the victim writhed in astonished agony, his eyes fortuitously clamped shut, Will and I escaped.
We hightailed it down to the pool, to where we knew we’d find our mother. But all we found was her empty deck chair, a towel, a can of Tab, a pair of “boy watcher” sunglasses, several plastic bottles of tanning oil, and a copy of The Carpetbaggers. I started thumbing through the thick paperback, looking for the bedroom scenes.
The cute lifeguard saw my brother scanning the horizon as if he was the mother, and she was the lost child. Like a big zoo cat he oozed down from his white throne and made his gorgeous way over.
“Hey kids,” he said in a Beach Blanket Bingo way. “You, like, lookin’ for your mom?”
“Yeah,” we said, blinking at him with stars in our eyes.
Was it mere coincidence The Carpetbaggers lay open to page 459?She came down into his arms, her mouth tasting of ocean salt. His hand found her breast inside her bathing suit. He felt a shiver run through her as the nipple grew into his palm, then her fingers were on his thigh, capturing his manhood.
I think not.
I was seized with an epiphanic understanding of all that was catastrophically wrong with my body, from my white eyelashes, to my concave chest, to my Wise potato chip middle straining against the gingham of my one-piece bathing suit, to my moon-co
lored thighs and their faint blue road map of Scotland, my unbecoming heritage.
“Wull, your mom’s like over in the Tiki bar, on a long-distance phone call to Chile,” said the lifeguard.
Will and I looked at each other. We knew Haiti, we knew Acapulco, and Nassau, and San Diego, but Chile?
“Okay,” we said in unison, and tried to look like everything was hunky-dory. After giving us a friendly, if quizzical assessment, the lifeguard went back to his station, and I started planning how best to hit puberty. Either that or kill myself.
I began walking toward the ocean, conscious for the first time in my life of my thighs rubbing together.
“Hey, wait up!” Will pulled alongside of me. Yanking off his T-shirt, he said, “You wanna go swimming?”
“Uh-uh,” I said disdainfully, “I’ve got work to do.”
“You do not. Sticking things in jellyfish is not work.”
I reluctantly agreed to go swimming. I loathe swimming in the ocean. It takes the poison of a black widow spider a full hour to take effect, that of a Gila monster fifty minutes, a rattlesnake fifteen, a cobra five. But run into a stingray, a Portuguese man-of-war, a scorpion fish, a blue-ringed octopus, or a box jellyfish (something you can’t even see whooshing your way), and you start to croak immediately. And if the flora and fauna don’t kill you, the undertow will.
I followed my brother down the beach to where the lethal briny lapped.
“Race you!” Will yelled, galloping into the waves.
