Excellent books

I just finished a book that I probably won’t write much about, but just thinking about not writing about that book made me think about all the other books that I have been reading and not writing about, and I think it’s time to get caught up on my slapdash incompetent book reviews. 

*****

Miss Aluminum: A Memoir. Writer Susanna Moore had what would have appeared to anyone to be an enviable life. Think of a girl, so beautiful that she eventually became a part-time actress (this was the 1960s, when only beautiful women could aspire to be actresses) and a part-time spokesmodel (hence the title - she was actually Miss Aluminum for an aluminum trade group) whose father is a doctor in Honolulu in the prosperous middle of the 20th century. The very description suggests an enchanted upbringing; a beautiful, rich, and accomplished couple settles down in a tropical paradise, where they raise their five beautiful children in the freedom and wildness of early statehood Hawaii, with the added privilege of private schools and the social status of doctor’s children. It seems like a fairytale. It seems almost too good to be true. And it was. Moore’s fairytale girlhood was replete with monsters and dragons. Her father was neglectful and callous, her mentally ill mother died when Moore was just 12, and the stepmother who replaced her was monstrously cruel. Moore escaped by moving to Philadelphia, her mother’s hometown, where she lived with a doting Irish grandmother. She married a man who nearly beat her to death, and was later raped by a famous fashion designer who expected more from his models than a walk down the runway. 

Amid all this suffering and abuse, Moore lived a pretty spectacularly interesting life. She acted in movies (badly, if you take her at her word). She worked for a time as Warren Beatty’s assistant (unsurprisingly, he comes across as a bit of a jerk but when you stack him up against the other men in Moore’s life, he’s a veritable prince). She dated Jack Nicholson. She socialized with Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn. It occurs to me that anyone who is younger than 40 (and definitely anyone who is younger than 30) might either not know these names at all or might know them but not know how famous these people really were at that time. Trust me when I tell you that these are big names to drop, and Moore drops them as though they’re just names of people she happened to know. This is not false modesty. This is how she writes about everything, really; she writes about events in her life as though these are things that just happened. It’s almost like she’s an observer and not a participant. Another review of this book described her as “passive,” but I don’t know that this is the right word. The word that I think of is “detached.” There is a distance, a sense of separation between the author and her subject, although they are one and the same. This might be intentional; or it might be an unintentional effect of lingering trauma. But it doesn’t matter. Susanna Moore is a beautiful writer and this book is very much worth reading. 

*****

Invisible Ink, Guy Stern. Guy Stern, who is 100 years old, is an American hero. Born in Germany to a Jewish family, he escaped the Nazis and came to the United States with the help of an uncle in St. Louis, where he attended high school and worked in a hotel kitchen and fell in love with his new country. His family remained in Germany, where they were murdered by the Nazis. Stern joined the Army, was assigned to Camp Ritchie in my own home state of Maryland, and became one of the Ritchie Boys, the famous Army Intelligence unit where native German speakers became spies and POW interrogators. After the war, Stern returned to college, eventually earned a PhD in German language and literature, and became an academic. 

Guy (born Gustav) Stern has lived a rich and interesting life and he comes across as a lovely man, but he is not a writer, at least not in English. Parts of his memoir are really good (especially the war stories), but it’s very inconsistent. In fact, it’s probably not the writing that is at fault, but the editing. The invisible ink of the title is a reference to Stern’s father’s warning that Jews have to blend in if they want to survive. “You have to be like invisible ink,” his father tells him. Invisible ink is a great metaphor for assimilation, but he mentions it just once or twice at the beginning, and doesn’t really do much with the idea afterward. He also tells us practically nothing about his family’s fate, nor about why they were not able to escape to the US or to South America. This is understandable, of course, but I really wanted to know more about Stern’s parents and brother and sister. HIs stories about his time with the Ritchie Boys are probably the best part of the book - both dramatic and hilarious. He even got to meet and hang around with Marlene Dietrich, who was a tireless supporter of the American war effort. But most of the book covers his academic career and unless you are an aficionado of modern German language studies and the internal politics of university language departments in the middle of the 20th century in the United States, then it’s not especially thrilling reading. At times, Stern just recites biographical details and calendar events - he attended this conference or socialized with that person in that city on that day. I’m reminded of P.D. James’ Time to Be in Earnest, but Stern is not as good a writer and except for the war stories, he’s not quite as good as putting the events of his daily life into historical and cultural context. 

*****

The Lion Is In, Delia Ephron. This one was a Kindle recommendation selected because, I suppose, the algorithm believes that one Ephron is as good as the next and that if I liked Nora then I’ll naturally like Delia, too. And you know what? The algorithm was not wrong. If I’d read a synopsis first (three women on the run for various reasons end up stranded in a North Carolina backwater where they take waitressing jobs in a bar where a lion lives in a cage), I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole, but it’s much better than that little summary would suggest. The characters are funny and believable, the story is rather touching, and the writing is quite good. My only real criticism is that two of the characters are supposed to be from Maryland and other than frequent mentions of Baltimore and the fictional small town where the two grew up, there’s really no Maryland local color. But that is a minor complaint. Really, I liked it better than Heartburn. I prefer Nora’s nonfiction to her fiction, any day of the week. Delia is on my list - my good list. 

*****

So Sad Today. Melissa Broder. I don't even know what to say about this book, which is beautiful in spots here and there but is mostly shocking, in that sort of intentional, contrived, look at me, OMG I am so radically transgressively honest that maybe I’m a little too much for you normies way that seems de rigeur among millennial memoir authors. It might seem silly to criticize a memoirist for writing too much or too honestly about herself, but there it is. Because even though this book was frequently shocking, it was also much more frequently boring. Not every thought that a person has is worthy of expression, even if that person has a book contract. 

*****

I had to refer back to my list again to remember what else I’ve read that I haven’t already told you all about. I read a Jennifer Weiner novel this summer. And I had to just look up the title because I couldn’t remember if it was The Summer Place, That Summer, or Big Summer. It was the latter. To be clear, I like Jennifer Weiner. I like her stories, I like her characters, and I like her writing. It’s just that her novels tend to blend into one another, and by throwing “summer” into the title of at least half of them, she does not make it easy to distinguish one from the next. 

Big Summer is a comedy of manners, a morality play, and a murder mystery, all in one pretty entertaining novel. The main character, Daphne, is a Jennifer Weiner archetype - a bit overweight (but still beautiful, if you read between the lines), hard-working and talented and scrappy, making up for in sheer pluck what she lacks in wealth and privilege. The other main character, Drue, is also a Weiner archetype - beautiful, brilliant, and insanely rich and privileged. In some Weiner novels, the rich girl also happens to be a wonderful person (Maxi Ryder, the movie star second heroine of Weiner’s first novel, Good in Bed, for example); but in this case, she happens to be rather awful. And she ends up dead under circumstances that place Daphne, her friends, and her new boyfriend, under suspicion. I didn’t immediately guess who the murderer was; in fact, I was convinced that it was someone else, so the story works on the whodunit level. It also has a lot of not super original but still thoughtful and interesting ideas about modern relationships, wealth and privilege, and social media influencer culture. It’s definitely light reading but sometimes light reading is just the thing. 

*****

British novels of the mid-20th century, especially those set during the war or during the years immediately following, are always obsessed with food. Every few pages or so, a scene will center around breakfast, lunch, tea, or dinner. What to cook, what to eat, how much (always too little), what kind of bread, what kind of meat, what to have for pudding. Kippers, beans, eggs eggs and more eggs, biscuits and sandwich cake and toast with jam or marmalade or butter - all accompanied by tea tea and more tea. Weak tea, strong tea, stewed tea (bad), in mugs (rarely) or thin cups and saucers, with sugar and milk or one or the other or neither. Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Jane Howard and Evelyn Waugh, all writing during or just after the war, were probably always a little hungry. Sometimes their characters are hungry, too; but sometimes, the food just seems to make its way into the novel where it becomes part of the scenery. 

This is what happens in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, which I am just about to finish. The main character is constantly gathering food or planning, cooking, serving, or cleaning up a meal. All of this effort around food seems to serve as a metaphor for her life, a life of routines and tasks; a life of cleaning up one meal and immediately wondering what to do about the next one. Barbara Pym: I understand. I see you, girl. 

I’m not sure how this happened but until I found this book, I had never read Barbara Pym, a British author who wrote very observant novels about the English middle class in the middle of the 20th century. How could I have missed her? Anyway, now that I am almost finished with Excellent Women, I will immediately go and read all of her other novels. I think she wrote five or six. 

Excellent Women is about a woman named Mildred Lathbury, a brilliant name for a character; or rather, a brilliant name for this character who is exactly who you would expect a woman named Mildred Lathbury to be. Mildred is an English spinster in her late 30s in post-war London, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman who died and left a small income (another modern English novel trope - the character who either does not work or works very little, thanks to a “small income” left behind by a deceased relative) to Mildred, who lives in a small flat, goes on holiday every year with an old school friend, works part-time for a charity dedicated to assisting “reduced gentlewomen,” and is constantly taken advantage of by married friends and male acquaintances who assume that Mildred as a single childless woman will naturally have all the time in the world to run their errands, clean up their messes, and serve as their intermediary. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But it’s actually very funny and sometimes very moving. 

According to the introductory notes, Mildred is supposed to be a sad and pathetic character, with an empty and lonely life. But I find her interesting and lively. She is also the first-person narrator, sharply observant and wryly self-aware. She knows perfectly well that her neighbors and acquaintances and even her friends see her as a comically stereotypical spinster, and she cares about their opinions, but not very much. She knows that everyone she knows thinks that they know her, that they can guess what she is thinking and predict her future, and she doesn’t really bother to disabuse them of their perceptions. She just goes about her business and lets people think what they think. This seems to me a very good way to be. Mildred is a bit of a badass in her own restrained daughter-of-an-English-clergyman way. 

*****

Although Excellent Women is, well, excellent, it’s taking me forever to finish. I can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time right now. I get away with this at work because at any given time I have a dozen or more projects, and I just toggle back and forth between and among them. Same thing at home. Sometimes when I’m writing, I walk away in the middle of a sentence, fold a few garments, vacuum a room, cut up an onion or something (I spend a really unreasonable amount of time with a knife in one hand and an onion in the other) and then come back and finish the sentence. 

But I also hate to walk away from a novel that I love. I miss the characters, and I miss the author’s voice. A good novel is good company, and I hate to see it go. I’ll miss Mildred when I finish Excellent Women. 

*****

Well, I do wish that Mildred had politely told the insufferable Everard that no, she didn’t have time to index his dull book and no, she was not interested in proofing his typescripts (for free, of course), but I’m choosing to believe that eventually, she’ll stand up to him and to all of the other men who presume on the goodwill and helpfulness of excellent women like Mildred. 

Yes, I did finally finish the book. I will start another one later today and maybe I’ll report back in haphazard and piecemeal fashion; or maybe the next book I read will be one of the ones that I read on autopilot, forgetting about it completely the moment I close the cover on the last page. Watch this space. Anything could happen. 

Bibliography 2022

I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting my 2022 book reviews. A word to the wise: “Review” is a loose term. Lots of things could be called a review. Anything from an observation to a comment to a rumination could be described as a “review” vis a vis books. 

Normally, I write something about every book I read during a year but I didn’t quite manage to do that this year. And I started writing this post with a story about thinking that I had paid a bill then realizing that I hadn’t after fighting with the company whose bill I had neglected to pay. Because I did the same thing with a book, too. I started to write something about Cloud Cuckoo Land and then something about my own words seemed familiar to me so I searched my Google Docs and realized that I had already written about it, at some length. It’s only two things but I’m a worst case scenario kind of person. If I wasn’t, I’d probably laugh these two things off. I’d consider them unrelated incidents. But being me, I see these two occurrences as illustrative of my growing tendency to do or not do things and then to forget entirely the things that I did or think that I did the things that I did not do. It’s troubling. But I can still read and write, so here we go.

These are most of the books that I read in 2022. It is as always an odd and haphazard little collection, most of the books chosen for no reason other than that they happened to interest me for one reason or another. 

*****

Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier. I don’t know about this book, in several senses. I read it at the beginning of 2022, and I don’t really remember it that well, except for its rather urgent tone. Abigail Shrier is a journalist who became alarmed at what she saw as an epidemic of young people claiming to be transgender, especially young girls and women claiming to be trans men. 

I haven’t studied the science behind gender theory. And I won’t, because I’m not a scientist. Shrier’s assertion that it used to be extremely rare for children and teenagers to claim trans identity is certainly true. It’s also true that this is fairly common now, in the sense that almost everyone knows or knows of someone who is trans or whose child is trans. 

Here’s where her thesis breaks down a bit for me. Shrier believes that the recent emergence of trans children is a cultural phenomenon attributable to mass hysteria. One girl comes out as trans and a whole slew of others follow, like lemmings to the sea.  I don't think it works that way. 

*****

Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard. I read this early in the year, and it took me a long time. I remember sitting around on the pool deck at high school swim meets, reading a page or two during warm-ups. As with every other work of philosophy I’ve ever read, I retained practically nothing, and can tell you only what every Cliff's Notes explanation could tell you, which is that Fear and Trembling is an examination of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac, a story that has always troubled me. It is difficult to have faith in a God who would demand that a person sacrifice his only child, and that is why I have always chosen to take the story of Abraham and Isaac (and almost everything else in the Old Testament) as allegorical. Anyway, I read it very slowly, a little at a time; stuck with it until the end, and was profoundly relieved when I finished it. That’s probably what Kierkegaard intended. 

*****

Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr. A very memorable book. I have no idea how I could have written a whole post about it and then forgotten about it.

*****

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Rule of the Unruly Woman, Anne Helen Peterson. I never can remember the whole title of this book, so I think of it as the Unruly book. You can probably just read the title, and you’ll get the point. That is not to say that it’s a bad book. It’s very well written and very well researched. And I don’t dispute the premise that women are expected (still) to be thin and pretty and sweet and generally pleasing to men. I guess I’m just tired of thinking about this, having lived it for over half a century. 

*****

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel. The title story in this compilation of short stories is one that only Hilary Mantel could have written, an imaginary what-if story about a gunman killing Margaret Thatcher from the apartment window belonging to an innocent bystander who admits the assassin, who claims to be a news photographer, into her home. All of these stories, in fact, just like everything else Hilary Mantel ever wrote, could only have been written by her. I still can’t quite believe that she’s gone, and that there will be no more essays and stories and historical epics. The Wolf Hall trilogy helped get me through the summer of 2020. It’s been long enough now that perhaps I’ll just read the Thomas Cromwell saga all over again. I know how it ends but of course, I knew how it would end the first time I read the books and that didn’t stop them from being wonderful. Rest in peace, Hilary Mantel. 

*****

A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel. "You know how fear spreads? Danton thinks there must be a mechanism for it, a process that is part of the human brain or soul. He hopes that, by the same process, along the same pathways, courage can spread, and it can go out from him. Mme. Recordain sat in a high-backed chair and surveyed the opulence of the Minister of Justice's palace. She sniffed. They began digging trenches round the city walls."

This is Hilary Mantel, stirring and inspiring and terrifying in about 75 words. Danton is Georges Danton,  Minister of Justice in revolutionary France. Danton knows what the trenches are for; he just does not yet see their direct relevance to himself. He doesn’t yet see that the sans culottes will soon need a place to dispose of his body. Danton knows how fear spreads. He knows that courage can spread, too, but he doesn't know how. Courage can inspire more courage but it can also inspire fear in those who are already fearful, especially people in power. 

The end of A Place of Greater Safety was just like the end of Wolf Hall and the Mirror and the Light, reminding me that no one but Hilary Mantel could have made a foregone historical conclusion nearly unbearably suspenseful. Everyone knew what was going to happen to Anne Boleyn (Wolf Hall) and then to Thomas Cromwell (The Mirror and the Light), just as I knew exactly what Robespierre was going to do about Danton and Desmoulins. Heads rolled. This is well-documented historical fact. But Hilary Mantel made it page-turningly suspenseful. 

Suspenseful and sad all at once. Mantel takes us inside the still-attached heads of the doomed and makes us feel - really feel - their realization that the last-minute reprieve is not coming. We experience the fear and sadness of people who know with certainty that their lives will end at a known time, and that that time is very soon, and that the end will not be peaceful. Rest in peace, Georges Danton and Claude Desmoulins. Rest in peace, Hilary Mantel. 

*****

Rememberings, Sinead O’Connor. “All I wanna do is just sit here and write it all down and rest for a while.” What an astonishing book, and an astonishing life. Sinead O’Connor is one of the greatest pop singers of the 20th and 21st century. An outstanding lyricist (the quote is from “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” one of my favorite songs), she is also an outstanding memoirist. She had an incredibly difficult childhood, with an abusive, mentally ill mother and an absent father; and she has the kind of personality, colored by mental illness, that makes her constitutionally incapable of making things easy for herself. She is a fighter; the kind of fighter who throws herself into and up against any and all pain and injustice. The most famous example, of course, is the 1992 SNL appearance when she tore up the photo of Pope John Paul II. “Fight the real enemy,” she said, looking right into the camera. And then all hell broke loose. 

It’s hard to imagine now, but almost everyone was outraged at the “disrespect” to the Catholic Church, of all things. Note that I am a Catholic, but I wasn’t really in the Church at that time, and knowing what I did about the Church’s actions in Ireland, I cheered for Sinead. Shockingly, few others did. SNL banned her for life. Joe Pesci, the host of the show, threatened to punch her. Even Madonna took a potshot at Sinead, and Madonna’s work was far more transgressive and even sacrilegious than Sinead tearing up that picture. The Pope isn’t Jesus. I remember at the time thinking that I’d never thought one way or the other about Kris Kristofferson but I became a fan of his because he was the only celebrity who stood up for Sinead O’Connor. 

Possibly the most heartbreaking part of this book that contains so many heartbreaking stories and memories is Sinead’s observation that children of abuse tend to have a hard time with their siblings as adults. As a younger sister, Sinead knew that her older siblings wanted to protect her but they could barely protect themselves. As an older sister, Sinead was in the same terrible predicament with her younger brother; she is still guilt-ridden at what she considers her failure to protect him when she was only a child herself. Apparently, Sinead and her younger brother bore the worst of the abuse. By the time that Sinead’s mother’s mental state deteriorated to the point at which she no longer could or would control her violent temper and outbursts, the older siblings were old enough to fight back or to get out of the house and stay out. The siblings all share terribly painful memories and don’t see one another very often. And yet the most beautiful chapters are the ones dedicated to each of the individual siblings, whom she still loves. Heartbreaking. Highly recommended. 

*****

Bagman, Rachel Maddow. I had this on my 2023 list but that was a clerical error on my part because I read this when I was in Florida, and that was the end of December. 

Did you know that Spiro Agnew was possibly the most corrupt member of the Nixon administration, even worse than Nixon himself? I knew that he’d been forced out of office because of corrupt dealings but until I read Bagman, I really had no idea how corrupt. He was Mafia corrupt. He was Byzantine Empire corrupt. He was Trump corrupt. He was so corrupt that the Nixon Department of Justice felt duty-bound to force him out of office knowing that the President faced likely impeachment and possible removal from office and they believed that an Agnew presidency would be an existential threat to the United States. I won’t recount the details (not just because I don’t want to spoil the book for you but because I’m just not very good at recounting details) but this was as shocking as a 50-year-old political scandal could possibly have been, at least in our wide-eyed exceptional American experience. And it reads like a Rachel Maddow monologue - this is a feature, and not a bug. 

*****

Corrections in Ink, Keri Blakinger. For a few years, on the surface, Keri Blakinger was the epitome of white upper middle class American girlhood. A champion figure skater and a Cornell student, she was likely an object of admiration and envy for many people. But nothing is ever as it seems on the surface. Mental illness drove Keri to self-destructive behavior beginning with an eating disorder and spiraling downward into drug use, petty crime, sex work, and abusive relationships. It’s kind of a wonder that she lived to adulthood. She did survive, but ended up in prison for several years - Ivy League to incarceration, the ultimate American downfall. Happily, she came out of prison clean and sober and capable of using her considerable intelligence and brilliant writing talent to tell her story and document the injustices of the prison-industrial complex. She now writes for the Los Angeles Times, after a time at the Marshall Project, and is a tireless critic of privately run prisons, unjust (and unfairly applied) drug laws, and the death penalty. Her story is compelling and really well told - sad, sharp, and funny all at once. Highly recommended. 

*****

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith. I cannot imagine how I, a bookish girl who grew up in mid-century America, never got around to reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And I’ve been meaning to read it for some time. Caitlin Flanagan mentions it frequently, and even without her recommendation, I was conscious of this major gap in my reading. I finally picked it up and read it late last year and I’m so glad I did. First of all, it’s so very different from what I expected. I imagined Francie Nolan to be an idealized rosy example of innocent but brilliant girlhood - like an urban American Anne of Green Gables. And nothing against Anne, whom I love and always will love, but Francie Nolan is an infinitely more complex and nuanced and interesting character, whose early life is almost unbearably hard but whose intelligence and wit take her to places that I didn’t imagine were possible for a poor Irish-Catholic Brooklyn girl in the early 20th century. Betty Smith was an amazing writer, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is an almost-perfect novel. 

*****

Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino. Just the opposite of Cloud Cuckoo Land. I was sure that I had written something about this very sharp and funny book of essays, but a search reveals that I did no such thing. And I read this many months ago so I don't really remember much about it, except that the titular trick mirror has something to do with social media and how people create idealized and downright false personal narratives and how others judge their own lives against these false ideals. I remember being impressed by the writing, not necessarily the thinking, behind most of these essays, and that is not a criticism. Tolentino writes about important things; it's just that most of what she has to say has been said in one way or another. But she's a fine writer. 

*****

Hons and Rebels. Jessica Mitford

*****

The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman. Here's one that I did write about, at length and in detail, but what I wrote is not ready to publish. However, I am done with this book list for now, so I'm going to have to depart from my usual practice and publish a review in 2023 of a book that I read in 2022. In fact, it could take me until 2024. The thing is already five pages long, with a bunch of bullet points at the end, and I could very well take the rest of this year to finish it. I have a lot of feelings about the nineties. And the book was very good, by the way. 

*****

Cool, Calm, and Contentious, Merrill Markoe 
Poison Penmanship, Jessica Mitford. 

I wrote about both of these right here, for no reason other than that I finished them back to back. But Markoe and Mitford go together very well anyway. 

*****

City of Girls, Elizabeth Gilbert. A book that I read by mistake. 

*****

Miss Aluminum: A Memoir, Susanna Moore
Invisible Ink, Guy Stern
The Lion Is In, Delia Ephron
So Sad Today, Melissa Broder
Big Summer, Jennifer Weiner
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

Six books, one post. It's kind of a long one. 

*****

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin
Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, Sheila Weller
You're on an Airplane, Parker Posey
Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic, Emma Goldberg

I read this little odd grouping of books when I was on vacation in August, so I also covered them all in the same post. 

*****

I read a few others that I won’t bother to list. A few of these not-to-be-listed books were just not very good. Not every book is a literary masterpiece, of course, but just because I wasted the time reading a bad book doesn’t mean that I need to waste additional time writing about it. And then there were a few others that I know I read because they’re on my list and I don’t put a book on the list until I have finished reading it but I don’t remember a thing about them so I can’t write about them. 

And also because it’s almost the end of February for crying out loud and it’s time to finish the half-baked reviews of books that I read in 2022 and start on my incompetent reviews of books that I’m reading right now, in 2023. So mark your calendars for my next book list. Preview: Zadie Smith will feature prominently. It’s going to be a good reading year, I tell you what. 

Beach Week 2021

It's beach week! Or maybe I should capitalize that: It's Beach Week. It's Saturday, August 7 and we are in the car, heading north on I-95. We're about 15 minutes south of Baltimore and God willing and the creek don't rise, we will be crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge into New Jersey in about two hours. From there it's another two hours of driving along meandering secondary roads through the tomato fields and pine barrens of South Jersey. 

As always, I packed too much stuff immediately after.as always, resolving not to pack too much stuff. I'm nothing if not consistent in my lack of consistency. Next time though. Next time for sure I'm bringing one handbag, one jacket, two swimsuits,two pairs of shorts, some t-shirts, a dress, and some sandals. That's it. Maybe a sweater. Underwear and pajamas of course. Notebook, obviously, and my laptop. Books. Sneakers and socks. Some pants and a long-sleeved shirt because it gets chilly in the evening sometimes.

Well fine. Traveling light is obviously bullshit. Whatever. 

*****

It’s Sunday morning now, cool and pearly gray. The sky has a light blue tinge on the horizon and there’s a little bit of glow, a little hint of possible later sunshine; and the water of one of Stone Harbor’s many little back bays is greenish gray, no sparkle of sunlight, just a chilly dank channel that could be as shallow as a swimming pool or as deep as the Marianas Trench. A sea bird just skidded into a flapping water landing. I think it was some kind of heron. A neighbor across the channel is skimming by in a little outboard motorboat. I know even less about boats than I do about birds, so I won’t attempt to describe the boat any further except to say that it contains four people and probably could not accommodate any more. 

All of that is to say that it’s lovely outside, which is a nice contrast with inside. We’ve been lucky in the past to rent beach condos and townhouses sight unseen that turn out to be pretty nice when we show up with our suitcases and our linens. This one is a rare exception. There’s not really anything terribly wrong with it. It’s smaller and more cramped than I expected but we don’t need much room. And it hasn’t been updated in many years, a fact that also does not bother me. What does bother me is the hideousness of the Miami 1987 decor, shades of pink and peach and beige and pale gray on just about every surface. I’ll tell you about the “artwork” at another time, but suffice to say that almost every picture on every wall has a narrow chrome frame; and all of the pictures, without exception, adhere to the pink/peach/beige/gray palette. There’s a picture of two pale beige horses fading into a creamy pink haze. There’s a print of a beautiful woman dressed in peach and pink flowing robes, her beige-y blond hair cascading in waves down her back. If the “Miami Vice” detectives had been girls, this would have been their apartment. 

There’s also a “Relax” sign. There’s always a “Relax” sign at a Jersey Shore beach rental, but this one is the first pink one I’ve ever seen. Maybe the owner commissioned it. 

*****

I didn’t go in the ocean yesterday. This is rare for me, but it was cold on the beach, cold enough that I wore a hoodie over my suit and cover up, and I sat with a towel over my knees like a blanket. Getting into the water, I thought, wouldn’t be too bad. It was the getting out that I dreaded. So I sat on the sand on my tiny lightweight low-to-the-ground aluminum folding chair, and I read and chatted with my sister and ate a frozen lemonade and looked out at the ocean. My son and I gathered the first shells of the week. 

We’re particular about our shells. We favor small ones, but we won’t pass up a big one as long as it’s perfect. They all have to be perfect or nearly so. A tiny chip on an edge that does not affect the shell’s shape, we are prepared to overlook, especially if it’s a very nice shell otherwise. But as a rule, we’re looking for the best of the best. During the course of the week, only about 30 shells will make our cut. The rest of them will remain on the sand at the 82nd Street beach. 

Today, it’s sunny and clear at 8:30. The sky is pale blue and the only clouds are wispy, slightly pink cotton candy-looking things. The sun will be relentless at noon when it’s right overhead. I’ll swim in the ocean today, and then I’ll come back and swim in the tiny pool at our beach rental. 

*****

Later that morning, I rode my bike to the 111th Street beach in Stone Harbor, also known as Nuns’ Beach because 111th Street is also home to the retreat and retirement home of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. IHM sisters taught me when I was a student at St. John the Baptist parish school, now closed, in Philadelphia. 

The nuns’ home is scheduled for demolition, and a new one is to be built on the site, a bit farther back from the road. The sisters run a tiny makeshift shop selling Nuns’ Beach merchandise, and so I bought a hoodie. I asked the three dour old women sitting behind the card table on which the merchandise was displayed if they were retired sisters, as none of them wore a habit. The lady who took my money and handed me my Nuns’ Beach hoodie, who looked like every mean judgy church lady I’d ever avoided as a child, pointed to the other two, seated on folding chairs. “That’s Sister Andrew and Sister Michael,” she said. “I’m not a sister.” 

I said thank you, and told the ladies that the Sisters had taught me. Sister Andrew and Church Lady looked at me with uninterest bordering on disdain. Sister Michael said “OK, then, have a good one,” and returned to her conversation with Sister Andrew. 

I have a lot of distant and impersonal affection for the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Some of them were very good teachers, who taught me a lot. But the stone cold rudeness of the Stone Harbor nuns was also the authenticity test that proved the truth of their claim of IHM sisterhood. I didn’t ask, but I’d bet the house that they taught in Archdiocesan schools in Philadelphia. I was happy to buy a hoodie because I don’t want the old bats to go homeless, But I’m also very sure that I’d never hand a child of mine over to any of them. Fuck off, Sisters. You’re in my prayers, but only from a distance. 

*****

Stone Harbor and its sister town Avalon are among the whitest places in the United States. I’m talking about upper middle class preppy white, blond hair and blue eyes and deep tans and lacrosse and golf and sailing and flags and bumper stickers that proclaim homeowners’ and drivers’ connections with prestigious universities and private schools. It’s so white that my Korean husband and mixed sons nod in recognition to any non-white person they encounter. A few Black and Asian families venture here to vacation, but not many. Most of the people of races other than Main Line white people are here to work. People don’t notice them unless they look for them. I see sanitation workers in the morning, clearing the streets of last night’s pizza boxes and wine bottles before the morning dog walking and biking and golf-carting begins. I saw a group of Hispanic maids chatting together outside the Icona hotel and resort, animatedly waving their hands and shaking their heads and laughing and nodding in agreement with one another. They were fed up with something, probably their manager or possibly spoiled and unreasonable hotel guests. Maybe both. 

Early yesterday morning, I walked past a man who was hosing down the sidewalk outside a restaurant. He seemed surprised when I said good morning, but he returned the greeting. Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken. Maybe by greeting him I wasn’t recognizing his humanity, but intruding on his privacy, on the one moment of the working day when he was away from affluent white beachgoers and free to think his own thoughts as he worked. I hope he had a good day at work. I hope the maids have an easier day today, and that departing guests will tip generously. I hope the sanitation guys won’t have to deal with anything too disgusting. 

*****

Our condo is on the bay, and when I say “the bay,” I want to be sure to first disabuse you of any notion of a large coastal mini-ocean like the Delaware Bay or even the inland Chesapeake Bay. “Bay” at the Jersey Shore is a catchall term for a salt marsh, a boat harbor, or a back canal where people dock their boats and their jet skis and go paddle boarding and crabbing. The one we are staying on is bordered on three sides by houses and buildings on 96th and 98th Streets and Third Avenue. The fourth side opens up into a larger channel that feeds into a salt marsh that connects to another channel and bay that will eventually connect with the ocean at an inlet. 

Anyway, it’s a lively scene out there. Several restaurants and bars have decks on the bay, and the houses and condo buildings almost all have boat docks and walkways down to the water. Our building has a little pool with a big deck on the bay. The deck has a gate that leads to a gangplank that leads to a ladder that leads right into the dank chilly bay water. 

On Tuesday, my son was sitting on our tiny balcony, and he called out to me. “Mom! There’s an old lady swimming in the bay.” I came to look, and after explaining to him that what he was seeing was just a “lady” and not an “old lady,” I started thinking about how I needed to swim in the bay, too. Later on Tuesday, after the beach, we saw several other people swimming in the bay, and I resolved to jump in myself. After I swam in the very warm pool, I dipped a toe in the bay, which was very cold, and I lost my nerve. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow, I will swim in the bay FIRST, and THEN get in the pool. 

And that is exactly what I did. And it was glorious. I felt as free as a fish, swimming around in a still body of water surrounded by boat docks, facing a channel that led to even more wide-open water. I thought for just a moment about how I could keep swimming, right past the jet skiers and then past the crabbing boats heading toward the salt marsh. But then I began to panic a bit. Perhaps it was the opacity of the water--I couldn’t see my own body underneath the surface, so I certainly couldn’t see the bodies of any underwater creatures that might be swimming around me. A piece of seaweed brushed past me, and I shuddered. It was like an open water swimmer’s version of the “twisties.” I’m a good swimmer but all of a sudden I felt that I just couldn’t swim anymore, and so I got myself back to the barnacle-encrusted ladder and I pulled myself out. After a quick rinse in the shower, I jumped into the pool, which felt like a hot tub after the cold of the bay. My vacation goal, to swim in every available body of water, is accomplished. Check. 

It’s Friday now, the last day of beach week (sorry: Beach Week). It always goes by extremely fast, but especially when you’re working every day, which I did. Between several hours of work every day and entertaining my mom, who joined us mid-week, and keeping up with the daily minimum housekeeping necessary to make a small beach rental liveable for five people, it was really more work than vacation. I am trying not to feel bad about that. We had lovely weather, and I rode my bike every day, and I went to the beach every day, and I visited a bird sanctuary and a soon-to-be-demolished convent, and I shopped with my sons and bought them some nice things that they were going to buy for themselves, but sometimes you just feel like buying your kid a present, and that’s what I did. I swam in two different pools, the ocean, and the bay. So it’s been a fun week. 

If I had to pinpoint the thing that was missing from this vacation, and the thing that I crave more than anything else, it’s freedom. I am near desperate for a week or even a day when I’m not on the clock. I want to come and go as I please, with no need to account to anyone for my whereabouts, and no requirement to return by any set time. Maybe that is too much to ask. Most people don’t have that kind of freedom and I don’t expect it 365 days a year. But a day or two here or there would be nice. It’s been so long since I had an unscheduled day that I don’t even remember really when that long-ago day might have been. I suppose I’d have to check my calendar. 

*****

Quickly as ever, Beach Week is over and we're in the car winding along through the South Jersey farmland and pine barrens on one of several two lane highways that will take us back to the Delaware Memorial Bridge and back onto I-95. 

The last morning at the beach is a busy morning. I woke up at 7 and started to clean up and pack, stopping for a few minutes to have coffee on the deck. The bay was quiet. It was too early for boaters and jet skiers and paddle boarders and swimming ladies. The seagulls and herons and egrets had the place to themselves. 

My last day of Beach Week goal is always to go home with only one load of dirty laundry, to get in one last bike ride, and to make sure we don't leave anything behind. All of this, as well as packing the car and securing the bikes on the bike rack, takes three hours, and checkout time is 10 o'clock. My son dropped the keys off at 9:55, and there's one small bag of dirty laundry in the trunk. My last bike ride was a short trip to the 101st Street beach, and I gave the whole place a thorough once-over, and then did it again, just to be sure. A twice-over, if you will. Mission accomplished. 

101st Street, Stone Harbor, NJ.
August 14, 2021, 9:30 AM

*****

It’s Sunday morning now. I like the post-vacation weekend hours, even the unpacking and organizing and laundry and grocery list-making. Especially that part, if we’re being honest and I'm always being honest. I miss the beach but I don’t miss the tiny beach condo with its musty curtains and its dodgy carpets and mattresses. It’s roomy at home, and it’s clean. The couch in the family room has saggy cushions but I know where that sagginess originated from. I know exactly who slept on these mattresses and exactly whose feet have been propped up on this coffee table, the one where my feet are propped right now. 

We unpacked and organized as soon as we came home because some of us can’t breathe until everything is in order. And then I swam in the pool that had warmed back up to my preferred temperature during our absence. Today, it’s time to restock this place. I will shop for my family and for my old lady, who went a whole week without her chocolate milk and her whole wheat matzo, and then I will cook dinner for the first time in ten days. It’s Sunday, August 15. Back to work tomorrow.