Sand

I followed this morning’s coffee with a beer chaser. If it were a mimosa at a brunch with ladies from the Art + Vision Complex, it’d be charming. I’m not sure what this is, but charming it is not. I know what he’d call it. Anxiety makes him resentful. It’s why we can’t have pets; they always side with me, sitting against my legs until the volume goes up, then retreating behind my chair even if I’m the one yelling.

“They’re malleable,” he said. “Not loyal.”

And “You know it’s not your fault, we’ve been over this a million times.”

Maybe it’s his fault. I’m still at the blaming stage, he says.

“I’m past that,” he says. “It was an accident. You didn’t realize he couldn’t steer without the training wheels. Hell, neither did I. It’s not your fault.”

He says it often and at unexpected times. “You looked pensive,” he said, after saying it last night. I’d been lost in the menu, wondering if the blackened tilapia was better than the chicken with avocado-mango salsa. I ordered a margarita fish bowl instead. “You can’t drown your guilt feelings,” he said. Watch me.

We’re staying at his parents’ time-share condo on the Gulf side of Florida. He bought a jet ski. Just one. Said I can ride with him if I can hang on.

I don’t want to hang on.

I scramble over the low wall behind the condo’s manicured lawn, landing in sand still cool from the morning shade. The ocean is eating the beach. There’s a drop-off just a few feet from shore that I suspect is manmade, as they try to put the beach back. The ocean holds the sand in its deep embrace, the men come with track-hoes and gouge the sand under the tide and dump it back on the beach. I wonder how many times the same grains of sand have been beach, then under-wave, then beach again.

The beach is thinly pierced with umbrellas. It’s early and it’s been chilly, the ocean is cold. The fishermen watch me as I walk past them, the urgent sea gulls and the yellow-footed egret waiting for their usual hand-outs. I’ve been on the beach every morning this week, walking, picking up shell pieces, dropping them a few feet on to pick up others. I could load my pockets with rocks and walk out into the waves like a tragic heroine. Or, there’s a beach bar about a mile up. I could chase my morning beer with lunch-time tequila.

I find a place to sit on the sand and stare at the horizon. Back home, the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes are named for a mother bear, desperate to leave famine behind in Wisconsin and swim across Lake Michigan with her cubs. She lost first one, then the other cub. When she reached shore, she lay down, mourning her cubs and waiting for their return. She is still waiting, underneath all that sand, so many miles from this sand, for her babies.

A young woman is setting up an easel and bringing out watercolors. She beckons, so I get up and walk over to her. “Let me paint your picture,” she says, setting out a turtle-shell bowl with a couple of dollars weighed down by a piece of sea glass. I sink onto the sand, facing slightly away from her to watch the horizon over the ocean. “Your hair is the same color as the beach,” she says.

“Paint me as a bear,” I say. I feel her hesitation.

She rummages through her bag, comes out with a charcoal pencil. “A bear on the beach,” she says. She starts talking as she works, she has a patter going. “Why does the bear sit on the beach, what is she waiting for? What does she see?”