Wild Earth
At Indian Rocks Beach, we stay in an oceanside ranch house. It is small, flat to the ground, and the walls are painted sea green. The living room is covered with sandy, shaggy orange carpet. We are vacationing with my dad’s family: his parents, his sister, her many, blonde children. Absolute chaos.
My brother is a toddler. On the way home, there is screaming from him, whining from me, and my mother says, “not worth it” over the radio turned loud to drown us out. My dad, thick layer of sunscreen smeared over his nose for protection even for the drive in the car, says “never again.”
After this, we take infrequent trips to the beach. “All that sun just isn’t my idea of a vacation,” my dad says when I beg him to go.
Most of my friends from school travel to the beach two, three, four times each summer. I am not aware of the privilege bound up in all these vacations. I just envy them and their tanned faces. I listen to their stories of hours shopping at the outlet malls as they show off new Tommy Hilfiger blouses.
My dad readjusts the perpetual band aid kept on the tip of his nose. Basal cell carcinoma. “We went to the beach each summer when I was a boy – and look how that turned out for me!” He takes frequent time off work to have skin from his face removed.
I long to return to school on that first day in August, legs tan, hair highlighted from the sun, and when our English teacher asks for a narrative – how did you spend your summer vacation? –I want to list the things everyone else seems to include. The beach. Amusement parks. Camping.
My summers are not empty. I spend twilight hours running barefoot through the backyard. The horizon twinkles with fireflies. I catch them with cupped palms to transfer to glass mason jars. A natural nightlight. And then, as the stars appear, I unscrew the vented lid for their release. Back to wild earth.
I head home to the coolness of my house, sticky with the humid West Virginia air, balls of my feet black and coated in grass shavings. I shower. Then, fresh and towel-dried, my mother and I sit in the living room to watch Nick at Nite. We drink milkshakes from tall glasses, chocolate chip, the same flavor my mom ordered often when pregnant with me.
We watch The Wonder Years, and it makes me nostalgic for the teenage years I have not experienced yet. I am almost a teenager.
In one episode, Kevin Arnold goes on a beach vacation to Ocean City. He arrives bored by his childhood best friend and frustrated with his family. On a walk by the water, he meets a girl. She, too, is in a similar predicament. They find solace in one another. In her presence, the waves take on significance, the pier poignancy. At night on the sand, they kiss. It is magic. The next day, she leaves to travel home with her family. They promise to write but never do, and even this – the loss – was etched in my mind as beautiful.
This spontaneity, pleasure, and freedom is what I could have sought in my summers – but instead my imagination is captured by Winnie Cooper. Kevin Arnold’s dream girl. A shy brunette, quite similar me. In one episode, she is described as weighing seventy pounds. I am a few milkshakes away from triple digits. I desire for someone to care about me the way Kevin longs for Winnie. Shortly after watching this episode, I make shrinking my primary preoccupation for summer.
Diverted, I stop begging to go to the beach. My friends still return from their many trips tanned with stories and discounted shoes. And though the envy remains, I learn to replace this emotion by feeling smug.
I evaluate my friends upon their returns from vacation. They are thin, but they are growing, a new curve or two each year. It will catch up to them eventually. I, however, am getting ahead of the problem. I am not going to wait for the mess.
When I feel jealousy rise in my chest as Lori describes meeting a boy by the ocean, exchanging numbers, an afternoon together at the condo’s pool, I envision her eating dinner at a seaside restaurant. The breaded shrimp and buttered rolls, a fruit smoothie, maybe some key lime pie. I take comfort in the consequences. Someone should, after all, owe something after that much indulgence.
Still, as much as I covet a new body, I also fantasize about an expanded life. Sometimes I reflect upon my childhood vacation to Indian Rocks. The car ride, the family feuds, and the outdated homes do not occupy most of my mental real estate.
I remember, instead, a drive through a quiet beach town. It is about two in the afternoon. The babies are at the house napping. The tide is high. Sunburns are likely. The Camry needs more coolant. Hot air blows past my sweaty thighs. My grandfather and I stop at a small shop for ice cream.
“Pick out whatever you’d like,” he says to me as the bell chimes upon our entrance. The store is empty. The walls and counters and chairs and tables are all a stark white. I survey the bright line of desserts and say, “that one,” as I point to something pink with many colors.
“Bubble gum?” he confirms, and I nod my head yes.
I do not remember if he orders ice cream. I do not remember if we eat together in that cold shop, or if he watches me eat. My future memories will log this information, the consumption of others, but not here. Here, I am in my own pleasure. Pink ice cream with wads of gum I cannot decide if I should chew or swallow. I swallow. It is delicious. I have not had any since.
There are evenings on the beach. Sunsets with seagulls. I chase them with my cousins, and we stop only for dinner: bologna on white bread chilled over ice.
And then, the mini golf at dark, putting beneath waterfalls and plastic alligators with chipped paint. We win prizes for playing, the sort of trinkets found in a grocery store’s gumball machine. We leave sweaty and sandy. Home in the dark, we sit at a lamplit picnic table to eat ice cream sandwiches from a cardboard box. I eat two.
-Anna Rollins
Anna Rollins's creative work has appeared in NBCNews THINK, HuffPost Personal, Insider, and in other outlets. She is a faculty member in the English department at Marshall University, she lives in Huntington, West Virginia with her husband and two young sons.