Our Turquoise Ocean

We felt so uncomfortable in our bathing suits that summer. Our bodies had turned 14, turned awkward. You were so tall and so thin, and your limbs hung from you like linens on a clothesline. I was the opposite, I was so fleshy and round. I would try not to sit up too fast, making sure that my midsection would remain flat, so that my thighs remained firm. I had a waist that caved inwards and hips like parentheses, very unnecessary to me. I did not like it when the dirty men would drive past me, honking their horns, making their animal noises, with their windows down. My Aunt, my dad's very passionate sister, would say to me, “Baby Lucia, those hips are good, they are just something to grab onto! You are beginning to look like a woman.” But my own mother started giving me these eyes, the eyes that said “Don’t eat that, watch your figure,” the eyes that said “You don’t look beautiful with your body showing.” I would diet in the house, at the kitchen table, but down at the ocean, we’d eat together. You’d bring me all of those colored Mike and Ikes, in their green box all bright and sweet. I’d hold them in my palm, and the colors would get sticky, and they’d melt like paint on a canvas. We would compare palms and wash ourselves clean in the water.

I had met you when I was very young, maybe four or five, our parents were friends and we had summer barbeques together. We had been eating Mike and Ikes together for many years. We used to sleep outside on the balcony of your rented apartment and we always felt so old together. We talked about heavy things, things that meant a lot to us. I told you about my parents and I told you about the way I hated my skin, and you would hold me for a while, and we would play a game of cards and we’d sleep. Our parents let us parade alone, down at the shore, the boardwalk, they always told us to stick together, and we had no trouble doing that. You only knew me in the summertime, but you knew me more than any school friend had before, we were summer soul sisters we said. I would bring us sliced lemons for our dusty colored hair and by the end of the summer our roots would be singed by the sun, brighter, but so broken, much like our skin, which would brown so deep. We never wore sunscreen. It was just us and the sun.

We were always very happy during the summertime. My parents rarely fought when we were there and when they did I didn’t have to be there to hear them scream, I could always be with you. I could always swim real far out, until I got too tired, and turned around. When my body was under the salty water, when it was so immersed that no one could see any part of me but my bobbing round face, I felt safe, I felt really good. You always loved to swim, you liked racing and moving your muscles, and I’d race you a few times, because you liked me to. I really just liked the way my body felt when I was perfectly still, when the ocean took charge, when the salt kept me buoyant. You always understood, and you kept watch, swimming circles around me, not letting me drift too far. You always stayed close, because you understood my silence.

In August my parents locked up the summer house for good and we piled all of our things into the station wagon and we drove back into the city, and at every stop light we lost a bit more of the ocean scent, a bit more of the salt fell away from us, a bit more of that careless nature left us. In the city, it smells like routine and time, everybody is rushing. My dad sped past the dashed white lines while cursing the yellow taxis, and my mother started yelling again, cursing him for cursing. He said something about leaving her, leaving us, as he drove, but I didn’t listen, and I should have. After that summer we never came back.

I have missed that ocean shore so many summers since then, and I think of you when I smell the ocean’s salt. I think of you often, really, I wonder if you have kept all of my teenage secrets, because I hope you have. I keep a picture from that last summer in my desk drawer, it is blurry, out of focus, and the paper has aged, but the water still looks turquoise, and the ocean and the shore look like watercolors, blending to be one with another. I am a real woman now, with three children who I wrap in a blanket of sun tan lotion May through September. We are so many miles and years away from one another, but I still feel so close to you. I still keep you in the filmy layers of this photograph. Maybe we are swimming in the same ocean today.