The Lifeguard

by Mary Morris

  Then they’d come home, two weeks later to the day. My mother always seemed exhausted, a bit subdued. She said the car trip made her tired. She stayed clear of the sun for it freckled her face and she seemed to return paler than when she’d gone, even though her black hair and white skin always made her look a bit like a ghost to me. Still, there was something about her that came back altered, at least for a time, as if she’d had a dream that she kept pondering for days on end. My father returned bronzed, golden, though much less relaxed than before he’d gone away, for bills had piled up, something had always gone wrong. He moved through the house like a bull, pounding on pipes, checking the things that hadn’t been tended to while he was away. On the surface they returned much as they’d gone, yet I always felt something had transformed them, that during the annual journey to Florida something had happened that excluded my brother and me further from their world.

  We wanted to know everything. We wanted to hear everything. But first the car had to be unpacked, things put away. Mail and messages had to be gone over and discussed. Then sometime in the evening my parents assembled us in the den, where my mother handed out the requisite gifts—a box of citrus fruit, the T-shirts we’d outgrow before it was warm enough to wear them, a bag of pearly, shiny shells, a pencil case, souvenirs.

  Then my father would tell us about the trip. He wouldn’t just tell us incidents. He would tell us everything that had happened to them—where they stopped, what they ate, who they met, what they saw. Their faces would light up as they talked of these things, the fatigue would leave their eyes, and I had a sense of what a wonderful time my parents had without us, how happy they were when they were away.

  ———

  The year when I turned thirteen and was on the brink of discovering boys and my brother, who was ten, had just joined a basketball league, my parents suddenly decided to take us with them. My mother, dressed in a flimsy nightgown, her hair piled on her head, came into my room one night as I was already tucked into bed. She patted my foot and I scooted over. “Well,” she said, “how would you like to go with us this year?”

  “Go with you?” I said. “Where?”—though I knew full well.

  “Why, to Florida,” she laughed with her head thrown back in a way I’d never seen her laugh before. Then she patted my leg again. “You’ve always wanted to come with us. Why wouldn’t you like to come now?” I thought that because of my age, I had reached the point where I was old enough. Yet I’d also reached the point where I didn’t really care. Already I was moving on to other things.

  Later I passed my brother in the hall, where he was bouncing a basketball, which was strictly forbidden. “You don’t want to go either?” I asked him. He just shook his head. “But, of course,” I said, “we’ll go.” He nodded as he dribbled toward his room.

  One frozen winter’s day not long after that, I packed a swimsuit, some shorts, my summer dresses into a bag and we tossed our luggage into the trunk, but not before my father rearranged it so many times that finally my mother said, “Dear, we’re all going to the same place. What does it matter whose bag is on top of whose?”

  My father did what he always did in those moments, which surprised me because this was supposed to be different, because we were going away. He pursed his lips, his eyes turned red. “Do you want to stay home? Do you want to forget about this trip? Then let me pack the car.”

  No one argued when he spoke like this. In the house we had learned how to drift off into our various directions. My brother to his hoop, me to my books, my mother into her sewing room, my father behind the newspaper and the television. But now we were to be stuffed for three days into this car and the reality seemed to be sinking in. In funereal silence, we took our seats, seats we would assume for the entire journey, never once vacillating. My father in the driver’s seat, my mother in the passenger’s. Me and Sam crammed into the back, his basketball between his legs, my mother’s sewing and a small duffel of books and magazines which I’d flip through over the course of the next three days between mine.

  We got onto the interstate and drove straight, only pausing at the oasis along the highway to eat or at a Holiday Inn to sleep, then back in the car again. Every few hours we stopped at a service center or convenience store, where we’d wolf down a hot dog or grab a Coke and a bag of chips. Then we were back on the highway again. Sometimes we squirmed or begged to be let out, but my father always said, “Just a little bit longer. I want to make Lexington by night.” Legs bent, knees to chin, my brother and I stared blankly out the window as a dreary winter Midwestern landscape passed, waiting for the trip to begin.

  At the Louisville oasis toward the end of our first day as we sat at a window table, peering down at a six-lane highway and miles of snow-covered farmland with miserable cattle dotting the fields, I turned to my parents and said, “When do we get to see the horses and the plantations? Where are all the birds?”

  “Oh, they’re not on the highway,” my mother said. My mother was not very young then, having married late. She was in fact the age that I am now as I write. She had thick black hair, beautiful pale skin with freckles that I loved to poke at when I was a child. She hated many of the features of her body—her skin, her nose, her breasts—but I thought she was beautiful like a Renoir model. My father was handsome and older as well, with silver hair and dark skin.

  “You want to get there, don’t you?” My father spoke, an exasperated look in his eye.

  “But all those cards you sent …”

  “You want to see Florida, or don’t you?” My father didn’t always talk to me like this. It had only been in recent years. He used to come into my room every night and sing me a song and tell me a story. It was the way I went to sleep. He’d sing in his slightly discordant tenor voice “Count Your Blessings” or “Over the Rainbow.” My mother would blow kisses from the doorway and say, “Did you catch it? Roses on your pillow.” But my father sat at the edge of my bed and crooned.

  “Oh,” my mother laughed, “those cards.” She ran her hand over her face as if trying to hide her shame. “We always bought them right here,” pointing across the Louisville oasis.

  At the newsstand where my mother bought the cards of the places she’d never been, an old woman was at the cash, She had no teeth and yellow fingers, a beanbag ashtray full of butts in front of her. Her sticky pink hair stood up high on her head. She smiled as I picked up candy, turned the postcard turnstile.

  “Where you going, little girl?” she said in a raspy voice.

  “Florida,” I replied.

  “Florida,” she laughed. “Oh, yeah, Fountain of Youth. Can I come along?”

  “There’s not much room in the car,” I said, almost taking her seriously.

  Then I found what I thought I wanted. A plastic key chain with a thoroughbred racehorse dangling from it. The horse was jet black with white feet and had won the Derby several years back. He was on a stud farm somewhere in Kentucky, a place whose name I have forgotten, but I knew at the time that it wasn’t far from the interstate where we drove. I had money, but as she rang up another customer, I tucked the key chain into my breast pocket. Feeling it safe there, I said good-bye to the old woman. “Have fun,” she said. I kept the key chain for a long time until I had rubbed off all the information about the horse taped to the back—his name, his sire, the races he’d won, where he’d been put out to stud.

  In the car as dusk settled and my mother dozed and my father drove intently, eyes set straight ahead, I showed my brother the key chain. I opened my palm and just held it as if it were a chalice, a piece of the Holy Shroud. He looked at it, then looked at me, his dark eyes widening. I put my finger over my lips. “I stole,” I whispered. His eyes lit up for the first time on the trip.

  Sam and I shared a room. There had been some debate about this, my mother suggesting that “the girls” sleep in the same room, but my father always used the same threat. “If you don’t want to go,” he’d say, “it’s fine with me.” So my mother de
ferred, though she worried about this. “Will you be all right, sharing a room with your brother?”

  “It’s all right, Mom. We’ll be fine.”

  Each night we stayed in a Holiday Inn in a different-colored plaid room. Our first night out, the night I stole the key chain, my brother and I got a room that was orange and green. It had two queen-size beds and a big TV. I took the bed by the window and the TV, Sam got the one by the bathroom, because I was oldest and had the privileges that come with age. Once we were settled in our room, my brother said, “I want to see it. I want to see it again.”

  I handed him the key chain, the black horse standing proud, dangling below. “How’d you do it?”

  “It was easy,” I told him. “I just took it.” I’d never stolen anything before, but I was surprised at just how easy it was. I, of course, had no cause to steal it. My parents would have given me anything I’d wanted. But already this was getting into my blood. “Just take things that don’t matter; take what you don’t need or care about.” Already I found myself starting to sound like a petty thief. “Take little things,” I told him, “like souvenirs.”

  That night as I got ready for bed, I stood almost naked while my brother watched a game show on TV, but suddenly I felt his eyes upon me. I turned to him sharply, covering my growing breasts, my sparse pubic hair with my nightgown.

  “What are you looking at?” I shouted at him.

  “Nothing,” he said, looking back at the TV. “Just you.”

  The next day was the same as before. Same interstate, same oasis, same highway food. We did stop for breakfast at a trucker’s stop to vary the pace and ate from a buffet of mashed potatoes, scrambled eggs, pork patties, and grits. Sam and I stuffed ourselves, piling our plates high under my father’s disapproving eye, then we sat miserably in the backseat, wishing we’d never eaten at all. At one point Sam spoke despondently, “When’s it going to change? When’re we going to get there.”

  “Oh, just wait until the warm breeze blows,” my mother said. “You’ll see.”

  As we drove and thoughts of Florida entered her head, I watched my mother let her hand drop along my father’s shoulder and she ruffled his hair. He smiled and shook his head and it seemed to me he was shaking her away. “Well,” she said, “we’ll be there soon.”

  “Are you watching the maps?” my father said. “Keep the right maps.” My mother kept the maps open on her lap, not that we ever needed them because mostly it was a straight drive all the way, but my father wanted the maps ready, just in case.

  He was an executive for J. C. Penney and worked downtown in Chicago’s Loop. He had helped build the company from the ground up, but he’d had dreams of doing other things. A pilot, a surgeon, a professional golfer. There were the things he claimed he should have done with his life, if he’d been able to do it again. But these dreams all seemed silly to me for he was a man who didn’t really like travel or the sight of blood and whose golf game would never improve, not in all the years he lived with us.

  Sometimes my mother sewed. She made little needlepoints of butterflies or birds that she’d make into glasses cases to give to her friends. Once in a while they’d talk, though I can’t remember much of what was said. Often it was gossip, little things about people they knew. Sometimes it was about the trip. How they hoped the Ponce de Leon hadn’t changed. How they were looking forward to corned beef sandwiches at Wolfies. Sometimes they talked to us. Usually it was to tell us to do or not to do something.

  Sam and I sat in the back and at each convenience store, while Sam stood guard, I stole. Key chains, pencils with mementos on their heads, little plastic toys—trees, oranges, birds. Sometimes I took candy or gum, but mainly I took things that wouldn’t perish, things that would keep.

  ———

  On the third day the weather changed and we got our first glimpse of the sea. It was off in the distance, some miles from the interstate, but its promise was there, vibrant, blue, lapping the shore. When we crossed into Florida and stopped at the oasis, we bought our first oranges. Sam and I cut ours open, sucking the pulp. My father peeled his carefully, tugging off the skin, then splaying the orange in neat sections like a rose. He handed a slice resting on a paper napkin to my mother, then had one for himself. “This is how you eat an orange,” he said, munching on a little section while Sam and I sucked greedily at the pulp. Here I procured my first paperweight—a beach scene with bathers, palmettos inside. When you shook it, a shark came out of the water.

  We drove along the coast now on I-95 until we were almost at Miami Beach, the causeway in sight. My mother fumbled with her maps, but this time my father waved her away. “I know how to get there from here,” he said. In the end we got lost and drove all the way to Key Biscayne, the beach eluding us as we circled around and around.

  The Ponce de Leon Hotel was on the west side of Collins Avenue, known as the Miracle Mile, but I was surprised it wasn’t on the ocean side. I was also surprised at the traffic, the shops. I had expected hanging vines, rosy-billed birds. Our rooms faced the business district, not the ocean side. My mother, sensing our disappointment, suggested we change rooms. We wanted at least to smell the salt air.

  “Dear,” my mother said gently, “the children want to change rooms. They want to face the ocean.”

  “What for?” my father said. “They’re never going to be in their rooms. They’ll be outside all day. And those rooms along the Strip are noisy. I think we’re better here.”

  “Oh, Dad, come on,” Sam said. “Who wants to look at a bunch of stores?”

  In the end he relented, but reluctantly, for those rooms cost more and he was right in fact about the noise. We could hear the sound of traffic all through the night.

  As soon as we were settled in our rooms, Sam and I put on our bathing suits. With our parents trailing behind, we ran across the street, racing to the shore. Then we dove into the ocean without looking back or thinking, our parents in hot pursuit, and for the first time I tasted salt water on my lips. I plunged and rose from the waves while my father, in slippers and socks, shouted to us from the shore.

  “Come on in, Dad,” I yelled, hoping he would, “the water’s fine.” My father was afraid of the ocean. He had always been afraid but more so since a few years ago when he was attacked by a Portuguese man-of-war. He was attacked because my mother told him he was the only man she knew who went to Florida every year but would never put his foot into the sea. So one day he did. He went in up to his knees and a Portuguese man-of-war wrapped itself around my father’s legs. Then he fell down and the jellyfish wrapped its tentacles around my father’s chest.

  Now my father wore shoes and socks on the beach because he was afraid of the men-of-war and he wouldn’t set foot near the sea. Instead, as I swam, I could hear him shouting: “Don’t you see the flags? Be careful of the current. Don’t go out too far.”

  I thought I’d swim away as I saw him following us along the shore, while my mother buried herself beneath a beach umbrella, zinc oxide on her nose, a crossword on her lap. No matter what we did during those two weeks away, it seemed my mother always sat. She’d find a place and plant herself there. At the pool or the driving range, she’d find her place in the shade, nodding complacently as my father said over and over to himself, “Bend your knees. Keep your head down. Follow through.”

  So I decided to swim away from them. Not out to sea, but along the shore. I swam as hard as I could, but all along I saw my father racing beside me, like a donkey pulling a barge.

  When I got out of the water, breathless and exhilarated, my father rushed to me. “Just what was that all about, young lady?”

  “It felt great,” I said, shaking my hair.

  “Yeah, well, it won’t feel so great when a shark takes a bite out of your toes.”

  That night when I got into bed, after Sam was asleep, I took out the scarf where I kept my souvenirs. I had added a plastic flamingo nightlight, pencils in the shape of coconut palms, shells with stupid faces paint
ed inside. From the light of the street outside, I turned these objects over and over in my hand. I wanted my collection to grow. Sometimes I slept clutching them in my hand.

  ———

  We had been promised swamps, alligators, and Indians, and after several days on the beach and pleading by my mother, an outing was planned. We were to take a boat into the Everglades, where we’d see the aquatic birds of my parents’ postcards and were told an Indian would wrestle an alligator. I had envisioned a private boat, just the four of us, sailing through the canal of a swamp, manatees eating out of our hand.

  When we arrived at the dock, people were already lined up, but my father had purchased our tickets for the outing in advance. He had a small bag with him that contained a camera, mosquito repellent, candy bars. We took our seats near the back of the boat, the four of us lined up as if in a pew while a man with a bullhorn preached, revealing all we were going to see.

  It was hot and humid as we sailed through the canal, past birds who stood still as props, though they were the rosy, long-legged kind. Pelicans dove at the sides of the boat. We passed into swamps with dangling vines as the man with the bullhorn, a red bandana around his head, shouted at us the various sights. My father snapped pictures of the motionless birds. My mother took out a handkerchief and kept wiping her brow. I was hot as well, but I kept my eyes on the water, watching for elusive fish.

  Then we came to an island with thatched huts. Lethargic Indians with bare chests, black hair cropped square around their heads, helped us off. In a pit alligators dozed, mouths open, teeth bared. One of the Indians prodded an alligator, who seemed annoyed at being aroused, into a sandy ring and it moved obediently to its spot. Then the Indian went in with a stick, and while the alligator snapped one or two perfunctory snaps, the Indian flipped it onto its back, then rubbed its stomach as the alligator went to sleep.