At Least They're Committed

Stuffing my hand into my beach bag, I pull out my phone, blow the sand off the screen and check my cryptic notes before starting this blog. It’s over, I’m home. I’m typing this naked (ALONE!) with sticky brown dye streaking through my overwrought, sun-bleached hair, Biore strips running horizontally across my face and tiger stripes where my bathing suit abandon my flesh. (If you want my body, and you think I’m sexy, come on sugar let me know . . .)

I cried again on the flight home, just a little. The vacation was such an untangled, limp-digits, eyes-closed, under-the-umbrella, in-the-water four days of blissful oblivion that it was painful to think it was over.

Upon my arrival to Ellen’s lovely cottage home of pastel greens and blues and multicolored shells and seahorses, she asked me if I’d brought a novel to read. No, I said. I figured I’d borrow one of hers. 

Long walks on the beach, Ellen snagging peach and pearl seashells on the shore, her asking every few minutes how my hip was. Good question. I didn’t push it, but I didn’t need to worry.

Turns out, all of her books are academic-type texts. 

Between squishing white sand beneath my toes as we moseyed a mile or three and treading water for — no-kidding — hours at a time in the rising tide, nature afforded me intense, organic (hate that word, can’t think of another) physical therapy . . . complete with a view.

I picked “They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor” by Regina Barreca, because, well, it looked like it could be funny. 

Ellen was leaning back in her chaise lounge chatting with a former student on her iPhone; I was floating in the waves, pushing my palms down and body upward when the peaks came in, all the better to roll with them as opposed to letting them fill my eyes and lungs, which I’d found early on hurt.

It was funny at certain points. Once, she recalled a slumber party where a friend had absconded her brother’s condom and the girls were trying, by the shape and texture of the rubber, to visualize what the real thing looked like.

I glimpsed a shadow in the water a few yards out, first here, then there, then disappearing, then reappearing. Kelp? Odd. It was “floating” often counter to the current. The water was clear, so I kept a close eye on my toes, which were pointed skyward as I bobbed, to ensure nothing bit them off as I “sat” in the waves (the benefit of having a large ass . . . no flotation device necessary).

Finally, the author filled the prophylactic with water. She presented to the group something 3 feet long and a foot wide and the girls screamed and squealed and I, sitting in the shade, laughed out loud, open mouthed, with my head back — which evidently was at that point hardly allowed. 

The ATLANTIC ocean was alone except for my company and that of two elderly couples who were chatting several feet away. I heard one say, “Shark?” And another say, “Is it?” And the third say, with uncertainty, “Shark.” I was transfixed, unfazed of course, because they were closer to the apparition and they’d be eaten first.

The book was intriguing for a while, but it kept repeating itself, obsessed with the “Good Girl, Bad Girl” image prevalent in TV shows such as “The Patty Duke Show,” “Bewitched” and “I Love Lucy,” and movies such as “Gone With the Wind” and “Grease,” with women always asserting their individuality and ideas, then ultimately learning their place.

The shadow was drawing near the quartet, I could see it clearly. The fourth in the group, a man, recognized it for what it was. He gasped in delight and dove under the water. The mass, six feet long, wasn’t flat and broad like a shark or round-bodied and front-heavy like a manatee; it was elegant and lithe, graceful as it arched through the water like the dark, gleaming eye of a quarter moon.

Readjusting my chair under the umbrella to be shielded from the sun, turning the page, I was thinking overall that, hey, that was cool, because in junior high I’d thought I was a freak, that there was something wrong with me for being overtly wholesome but inwardly playful and perhaps naughty.

Oh, wow! It was a dolphin (not pictured below, that was another thing). Three in the group of elders stood in awe as the fourth touched her and went eye to eye with her, running his hand across her belly (I didn’t see this, I only saw him go under and then later heard him tell the others).

But then I heard the Eagles’ “One of These Nights.” “I’ve been searching for the daughter of the devil himself, I’ve been searching for an angel in white. I’ve been waiting for a woman who’s a little of both and I can feel it but she’s nowhere in sight.” That was me, so, that quickly, I no longer thought of myself as an aberration, but actually, possibly more desirable than the stuffy girls who acted shocked and appalled when I made snarky remarks and put the boys in their place. I mean, if Don Henley said so, it must be true.

I stopped floating, motionless, and stared at her, at them. I was chest deep in the water, my arms slightly floating in front of me.

According to Barreca, women fall into a trap when faced with insulting, sexist humor wrought by men, whether meant to offend the ladies, test them or both. She said women either are prey to these chauvinistic tactics by getting flush, red faced and outwardly offended, or they try to be one of the guys and laugh, head back, loudly at something that isn’t funny, selling themselves out. So I’m thinking, wow, yeah, I’m glad I wasn’t in the workplace when that was going on!

Was this a common phenomenon? With the dolphin, that is? I mean, I’d heard they were smart and friendly, but maybe I had been naive about just how friendly they were. As if in answer, I glanced at a crowd gathering along the beach (except for Ellen, who was still in the throes of chatting with the former student). The congregation was motionless, quiet; whispering their oohs and aahs. When after nearly a minute the dolphin’s curiosity was fulfilled, she swam out of the man’s reach, he watched her go, following her path, as she glided past me less than a yard out of my reach. He then turned to his friends and said, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” They squealed in delight. (And let me tell ya, old people squealing in delight is quite the sight.)

Those poor women! Obviously much had changed in the workplace since I’d entered. I mean, when I started in newspapers, I’d get the crude jokes, but I’d grimace, roll my eyes and shake my head and often counter with something even more shocking, turning it back on the guys. We’d all laugh. 

I was mesmerized. Watching the shadow skim past me with such beauty and grace was an ethereal, even religious experience. I felt so honored to be so close to her; as if there was something so much greater and wiser than us out there, and it was what she embodied.

Oh, wait. This book was published in 1991? Hell, I’d been working at the Rocky since 1986 among mostly men, the majority of whom treated me with great respect . . . to the point I wish they’d relax a little. I am my daddy’s girl after all, and I can hold my ground.

I stood in the ocean for another hour, watching for her, willing her to come back. She never did.

Were men really that repugnant in 1991? Well, I sure as fuck must have been a trailblazer, a true phenomenon, or the answer is no. There are a lot of piece-of-shit men out there, for sure.

What a moment; I’ll never forget it.

But this book lumped them all together and made assumptions that they were all out to subjugate women and keep them in their place. Wasn’t that doing to them what she’d claimed they were doing to women? Aka, reverse discrimination? Come on, ladies, that wasn’t the case then; it isn’t the case now. 

Rats! I’ve again sprayed hair dye on the counter and the walls. Yeah, I’m home but my soul is still cast away, adrift, trying to breath in the juxtaposition of land and sea; life how I know it and life how it could be.