Beyond the Water’s Edge
by Mary Ann McGuigan
The blankets on Orchard Beach, especially near the shoreline, are jammed end to end, and swimmers jump out of the waves, get their feet covered in wet sand, and deposit it all over our blanket on the way to their own. Then the sun dries it into a lumpy coating. Kids kick up even more sand, running wild from every direction like they’ve spotted sharks or free ice cream. My sister Kathleen, she’s nineteen, has her portable radio on, just like everyone around us, but the sound of Chuck Berry is nearly drowned out by the syrupy songs of Pat Boone and Connie Francis and Frankie Avalon, so “Johnny B. Goode” doesn’t bring much relief.
I try to block out the sounds, focus on my book, but nasty grains of sand crunch into the pages and I feel like I’m trapped in a desperately slow hourglass, like the day will never end. Mama loves going to the beach. That’s because her black Irish skin never burns. She and my twelve-year-old sister Irene are the only ones who tan. The rest of us require thick slimy layers of sun block to keep from turning into roasted chickens.
Seven of us are on two blankets today: me, Mama, Kathleen, Irene, my little brother Kevin, and my two teen-age brothers. Kathleen’s husband usually drives us, but he didn’t feel like coming. He stayed home with their kids. So we took the bus to get here. No one, except maybe some numbskull who’s tried to cross the Sahara and was left for the buzzards to pick at, can say they understand how dreadful the journey to Orchard Beach truly is. We leave our apartment on Mapes Avenue, near Tremont, at the crack of dawn, and crab and moan our way to Southern Blvd.—a fifteen-minute sadist safari—loaded down with coolers and beach chairs and umbrellas and blankets and pails and shovels.
The walk takes us to the first bus ride, a short one, but the struggle to board with so many carry-ons turns the bus into a clown car. Getting off is like a Three Stooges movie, because my brothers will goof around until Mama winds up slamming one of them in the backside with a plastic shovel. From there, it’s another mule walk to the Orchard Beach bus. If the god of Bronx beach lovers is merciful, some windows will be open and maybe a bit of a breeze will come through, diesel fumes and all.
We arrive at the beach early enough to spread out two blankets and foolish enough to delay lunch, forgetting that by one o’clock, the peanut butter in our sandwiches will have captured enough sand to fill every cavity in our teeth. I eat only the peaches, burying all but the sharpest edges of the pits in the sand along the edge of our blanket, determined to bring pain to unsuspecting runners as they hurry by.
I don’t want to go into the ocean, but I’m not asked my opinion. Mama is an excellent swimmer, has no clue why I don’t enjoy four-foot waves smashing into my face, so I struggle to follow her beyond where they break. When she was a kid she spent her summers at Manhattan Beach, in Brooklyn. Her family lived on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, and her father worked for the city, so they had money to rent a bungalow every year. They drove there by car, even during the Depression.
Mama knows I don’t like the water, but she’s paranoid about leaving me alone on the blanket, convinced some escapee from Bellevue will come along and do me harm. My ten-year-old curveless body is covered in a faded one-piece skirted suit, the straps tied together behind my back with a shoelace so it won’t fall off. It’s a hand-me-down from Kathleen, who had breasts before she was twelve, so on her it looked like a bathing suit instead of a half-filled sack of chicken wings. Mama doesn’t think that’s enough to discourage escapees.
I manage to shorten the water torture, claiming Kevin wants to build sand castles. Given the high quota of escapees on the beach, Mama wouldn’t want him to do that by himself. For a time, I stay on my knees, avoiding the thin waves that reach this part of the shoreline, but eventually I sit, take the castling more seriously. It’s kind of nice. The breeze is cool. The voices around us blend into a distant hum, muted by the waves crashing just beyond us. The sand mostly cooperates here. It’s muddy and shapeable. The castles we build are tall and seem strong, but I dig a moat around them, even though they’ll be gone long before our calamine lotion dries tonight.
Kevin finds shells to line the moat and I stand up to stretch my legs, move closer to the water. A woman stands at the shoreline. She looks at me with a kind of surprise, as if I’ve materialized from some other realm. I look away, but she says hello, and “It’s a beautiful day.” I guess so. But I don’t say that. I nod. She asks my name, but I can tell there’s something else she wants to know. Maybe why I don’t have a proper bathing suit, one that fits. I want her to go away. But she doesn’t. After all, she was here first. She digs her toes into the wet sand. They’re polished, pink and shiny, and the color reminds me of my sister Nora, the oldest. She’s married now but she used to stink up the kitchen with the smell of her nail polish, Wild Pink Petals. The lady’s hair is blond and long but she hasn’t tied it back the way Mama insists we tie ours at the beach. She lets the breeze lift it up. She asks if I like the water and I tell her I don’t. That makes her laugh. “I don’t either,” she says, smiling.
I decide I like her then. “Are you here with your family?” I say.
“No, no family.”
“So you came by yourself?”
“Yes.”
This seems so strange that I have to look at her all over again. She’s wearing a thin sleeveless cotton top long enough to cover her bathing suit and holding a thick book in one hand. Hanging on a chain around her neck is a little gold crucifix that catches the sun when she moves. She looks normal. But a woman by herself at the beach?
“So you drove here?” I say.
“Yes.”
Kathleen drives by herself but never very far. I’m sure she’s never driven all the way to Orchard Beach on her own. “Do you live far?”
“It’s about an hour,” she says.
I try to do the math. She must live at least as far away as we do.
“Are you here with your family?” she says.
I nod, motion over my shoulder. “The striped umbrella.” Mama and my sisters and brothers are a few yards away, standing wet now from their swim, towels tucked around their waists.
“Big family,” she says. “That must be fun.”
“Sometimes,” I say, because that’s not exactly the word that comes to mind when I think about them.
She laughs again.
“Do you have a family? Sisters and brothers?”
“I have a sister. She’s younger. She has little children.”
Something tells me I shouldn’t ask if she has any, but I can’t help it, because there’s something mysterious about this lady, something that doesn’t fit right. “How about you? Do you have children?”
“I suppose I do.”
Suppose? I never figured having babies was something you had to guess at. She sees I’m puzzled. “I teach fourth grade. So I have lots of children.”
“Oh, I see.” But I really don’t. They’re not hers. She must know that. She doesn’t have to feed them or figure out how to get money for their clothes. It’s not the same thing, even if she’s with them all day. She reminds me of one of those people Mama says are not in the real world. They wouldn’t know a problem if it landed in their soup. She must have money, probably lives in a big house with lace curtains and flowery wall paper like Mama did when she was a kid. “I have an aunt I really like. She treats me like I’m hers,” I tell the lady, thinking maybe that’s what she means by kids that are hers but not hers. “Her name is Peggy.”
“What a lovely name.”
“She has children of her own, though. Six of them.”
“Such big families. So blessed.” She looks out at the water.
That’s when I think maybe she is in the real world, the one where you don’t get everything you want. She says the word blessed like maybe she’s not.
I want to tell her that big families aren’t as great as she thinks they are, so she won’t feel like she’s missing out. “We fight a lot.”
“Children do that,” she says, as if she knows all about it. But I bet she can’t even imagine the kind of fighting that happens in my family, the kind where one man always wins.
“I don’t mean my brothers and sisters.”
“Yes, grownups say the wrong things sometimes. They don’t mean it.”
“I don’t mean words.”
She glances over her shoulder toward our striped umbrella, like maybe she should get a better look at all these blessings of mine. “I’m so sorry,” she says. And she places her hand on the top of my back, takes my pony tail into her hand. My hair is still wet and I can feel the breeze on my skin when she lifts it away. I have all of her attention, and it feels so nice, so different.
“My mom gets hurt sometimes.” I’m not sure why I tell her that, except I’m half-wondering if it will make her run back to her blanket. “People don’t know about that.”
She puts a finger to her lips, as if this is just between us. “Don’t worry. It’s okay.”
I’m sure she means it, but people talk about us, families like mine. They act as if there’s no excuse for the kinds of problems we have, as if happiness is our own responsibility, like getting enough sleep and eating the proper foods. That’s nice if you have money for food and if nobody staggers in to wake you up. I know I’ll never see this lady again, so it doesn’t really matter what I tell her. But I don’t want to say any more, make her uncomfortable. “I think I’m getting sunburned,” I tell her. “I better go back under the umbrella.”
We head home in the scorching heat. The return trip is always more excruciating, when the palefaces in the family, like me, the ones genetically unable to escape sunburn, wince and cry from the cooler straps and the sand stuck in every crevice of our burnt bodies and damp bathing suits. On the bus, I focus on reading my book, but it smells of ocean and wet sand, and my mind wanders, wondering if the lady near the water has already arrived home. I imagine her behind the wheel, sitting straight and cool and free, on roads that can’t really limit where she’ll go.
I want that. And even though that kind of freedom seems to be against the rules, the kind where you don’t have a huge family to feed, the kind where you don’t have to stay with someone who hurts you, I see now that there really is such a thing.
I don’t think the lady at the beach knows how lucky she is. I wish I’d talked with her some more. As I turned away, she asked my name again, but I pretended not to hear her because something about her, the kindness maybe, made me feel like crying. No one ever remembers my name anyway.
BIO
Mary Ann McGuigan’s short fiction has appeared in The Sun, Prime Number, North American Review, and many other journals. Her collection PIECES includes stories named for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. THAT VERY PLACE, her new collection, published in 2025, was praised by Kirkus as “a literary tour de force.” Her creative nonfiction is published widely—SmokeLong Quarterly, Brevity, The Rumpus, andX-R-A-Y. The Junior Library Guild and the New York Public Library rank Mary Ann’s young-adult novels as best books for teens, and WHERE YOU BELONG was a finalist for the National Book Award. She loves visitors: www.maryannmcguigan.com.
