Blame It on the Sea

The summer I turned twelve, the big game was to ask my dad things like: “Where’s Colleen? Isn’t she coming to dinner?” That was the summer she ran away with her girlfriend, Samantha, but I asked him anyway because I liked to see him gawp and flounder.

“I told you. She’s sleeping at the damn beach,” he said, his tie stuffed in his shirt.

“Yeah, but why?”

“How should I know? Some little prick’s idea of romance to hump in the surf.”

Mom made her foul-language face and the Pink Princess, who was better and eating regular food again, let the meat fall out the back of her taco with a plop.

Dad preferred to forget no pricks were involved, but the rest was true. They did hump on the beach sometimes, Colleen and Samantha, even before they went to live there. Colleen told me about it before she left.

“But how exactly do two girls hump?” I’d asked her.

“Well, it’s nothing like in the magazine hidden under your bed,” she said, so I’d stop pestering.

For Christmas that year, back before the Pink Princess got better and Colleen ran away, I asked for a hunting rifle. A lot of boys in our northern New England town had them. I got a telescope instead. I brought it out to the driveway to show Ronnie and Donnie Todd, the neighbors across the street. They’d gotten matching .22s with scopes and cases and orange earflapped hunting hats. The rifles were locked in the gun case, but the hats were on their heads.

“That’s stupid,” they said when they saw my telescope.

“You can’t shoot anything with that,” said Ronnie.

“All you can do is look,” said Donnie.

“What are you gonna look at anyway?” asked Ronnie.

“Us, probably,” said Donnie.

“Fag,” said Ronnie.

“Definite fag,” Donnie agreed, and they went back inside to oil their guns. I know because after I got the focus right, I could see them from my driveway, their rags and little bottles of oil, their furry, orange hats still on their heads.

It hadn’t occurred to me to use my telescope for peeping until Ronnie and Donnie said it, but since then I’d gotten pretty skilled. I unscrewed the big blue cylinder from the stand and brought it out to the wooded hill behind our house where Ronnie and Donnie and I had made makeshift hunting blinds from old Christmas trees and rotten lumber. From there I could see wrinkly Mrs. Cassidy vacuuming in her bra. I could see Ronnie and Donnie’s dad, Cliff, stirring his drink, his skin television blue. And I could see Ronnie and Donnie in their underpants, pink from fighting and hanging their asses off the top bunk to fart on each other. When I had one of them centered in the eyepiece, flushed and heaving, I’d say “pow!” Just softly. I don’t know why.

Eventually, Dad decided on a foolproof strategy for answering all my questions. He blamed it on the sea. First, the sea got him transferred to the company’s frozen fish plant, just when things were going well in Chicago and he’d almost saved enough to put a rec room in the basement. Then the sea tried to take his daughters.

“Why’d we get sent to Fish Sticks again?” I’d ask him, partly to understand and partly to rub it in.

“Because now omega-3s cure every damn thing,” said Dad. “People can’t get enough. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

Then, a few months later, when the sea gave the Pink Princess cancer on her leg, I said: “How come she got it, Dad? Why is she the one?” I asked because I was curious. Not to rub it in.

“I don’t know, David. But don’t believe that mumbo jumbo about salt air being healthy. If you want to meet your grandchildren, find yourself a nice farmhouse in downstate Illinois.”

Mom made her don’t-be-insane face. The Pink Princess was still in the hospital...