the wanton wind.” In their sun-paled plaid maternity bathing suits, the pregnant young women. Tugging behind them the toddlers already born, like dinghies. We moved out of Boston to a town with a beach in ’55: my first promotion, Nancy’s second childbirth.
Coming along the water’s edge, heads higher than the line of the sea. The horizon blue, sparkling, severe. Proust and the “little band” at Balbec. Yet more fully in flower than those, bellies swollen stately. Faces and limbs freckled in every hollow, burnished on the ball of the shoulder, the tip of the nose. Sunburned nostril-wings, peeling. The light in their eyes stealing sparkle from the far hard edge of the sea. Where a few sails showed, leaning, curling.
They would come up to us, joining us. Laughter, lightweight folding beach chairs, towels, infant sunhats, baby-food jars, thermoses chuckling in the straw hampers. Above me, edge of maternity skirt lifted by touch of wind, curl of pubic hair high inside thigh showed. Sickening sensation of love. Sand-warmed wind blowing cool out of the future.
They would settle with us, forming a ring. Their heads inward with gossip, their bare legs spokes of a wheel. On the rim, children with sand pails each digging by the feet of his own mother. The shades of sand darkening as they dug. The milk smell of sun lotion. The way our words drifted up and out: sandwich wrappers blowing.
Katharine, Sarah, Liz, Peggy, Angela, June. Notes of a scale, colors of a rainbow. Nancy the seventh. Now, in the Seventies, two have moved. To Denver, to Birmingham. Two are divorced. Two still among us with their husbands. But all are gone, receding. Can never be revisited, that time when everyone was pregnant. And proud of it.
Our fat Fifties cars, how we loved them, revved them: no thought of pollution. Exhaust smoke, cigarette smoke, factory smoke: part of life. Romance of consumption at its height. Shopping for baby food in the gaudy arrays of the supermarkets. Purchasing power: young, newly powerful, born to consume, to procreate. A smug conviction that the world wasdoomed. Beyond the sparkling horizon, an absolute enemy. Above us, bombs whose flash would fill the scene like a cup to overflowing. Who could blame us, living when we could?
Old slides. June’s husband had a Kodak with a flash attachment (nobody owned Japanese cameras then). How young we were. The men scrawny as boys. Laughable military haircuts: the pea-brain look. The women with bangs and harshly lip-sticked smiles. We look drunk. Sometimes we were.
Jobs, houses, spouses of our own. Permission to drink and change diapers and operate power mowers and stay up past midnight. At college Nancy had not been allowed to smoke upstairs, made herself do it in our home. Like a sexual practice personally distasteful but recommended by Van der Velde. Dreadful freedom: phrase fashionable then.
Had we expected to starve in the Depression? Be bayonetted by Japs when they invaded California? Korea seemed the best bargain we could strike: extremities of superpowers tactfully clashing in distant cold mud. The world’s skin of fear shivered but held. Then came Eisenhower who gave us the
status quo ante
and a sluggishly rising market and a (revocable) license to have fun, to make babies. Viewed the world through two lenses since discarded: fear and gratitude. Young people now are many things, but they aren’t afraid and aren’t grateful.
Those summer parties. Should remember them better. Sunlight in the gin, the sprig of mint wilting. The smell of grass freshly mowed coming in through the evening screens. Children wandering in and out with complaints their mothers brushed away like cigarette smoke. What were we saying? The words we spoke were nonsense, except the breath we took to speak them was life—us alive, able.
Katharine’s husband Jerry had only one eye, the other frosted by a childhood accident. No one felt sorry for him—too healthy, hearty. Born salesman. Jerry saying
Coming along the water’s edge, heads higher than the line of the sea. The horizon blue, sparkling, severe. Proust and the “little band” at Balbec. Yet more fully in flower than those, bellies swollen stately. Faces and limbs freckled in every hollow, burnished on the ball of the shoulder, the tip of the nose. Sunburned nostril-wings, peeling. The light in their eyes stealing sparkle from the far hard edge of the sea. Where a few sails showed, leaning, curling.
They would come up to us, joining us. Laughter, lightweight folding beach chairs, towels, infant sunhats, baby-food jars, thermoses chuckling in the straw hampers. Above me, edge of maternity skirt lifted by touch of wind, curl of pubic hair high inside thigh showed. Sickening sensation of love. Sand-warmed wind blowing cool out of the future.
They would settle with us, forming a ring. Their heads inward with gossip, their bare legs spokes of a wheel. On the rim, children with sand pails each digging by the feet of his own mother. The shades of sand darkening as they dug. The milk smell of sun lotion. The way our words drifted up and out: sandwich wrappers blowing.
Katharine, Sarah, Liz, Peggy, Angela, June. Notes of a scale, colors of a rainbow. Nancy the seventh. Now, in the Seventies, two have moved. To Denver, to Birmingham. Two are divorced. Two still among us with their husbands. But all are gone, receding. Can never be revisited, that time when everyone was pregnant. And proud of it.
Our fat Fifties cars, how we loved them, revved them: no thought of pollution. Exhaust smoke, cigarette smoke, factory smoke: part of life. Romance of consumption at its height. Shopping for baby food in the gaudy arrays of the supermarkets. Purchasing power: young, newly powerful, born to consume, to procreate. A smug conviction that the world wasdoomed. Beyond the sparkling horizon, an absolute enemy. Above us, bombs whose flash would fill the scene like a cup to overflowing. Who could blame us, living when we could?
Old slides. June’s husband had a Kodak with a flash attachment (nobody owned Japanese cameras then). How young we were. The men scrawny as boys. Laughable military haircuts: the pea-brain look. The women with bangs and harshly lip-sticked smiles. We look drunk. Sometimes we were.
Jobs, houses, spouses of our own. Permission to drink and change diapers and operate power mowers and stay up past midnight. At college Nancy had not been allowed to smoke upstairs, made herself do it in our home. Like a sexual practice personally distasteful but recommended by Van der Velde. Dreadful freedom: phrase fashionable then.
Had we expected to starve in the Depression? Be bayonetted by Japs when they invaded California? Korea seemed the best bargain we could strike: extremities of superpowers tactfully clashing in distant cold mud. The world’s skin of fear shivered but held. Then came Eisenhower who gave us the
status quo ante
and a sluggishly rising market and a (revocable) license to have fun, to make babies. Viewed the world through two lenses since discarded: fear and gratitude. Young people now are many things, but they aren’t afraid and aren’t grateful.
Those summer parties. Should remember them better. Sunlight in the gin, the sprig of mint wilting. The smell of grass freshly mowed coming in through the evening screens. Children wandering in and out with complaints their mothers brushed away like cigarette smoke. What were we saying? The words we spoke were nonsense, except the breath we took to speak them was life—us alive, able.
Katharine’s husband Jerry had only one eye, the other frosted by a childhood accident. No one felt sorry for him—too healthy, hearty. Born salesman. Jerry saying
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