The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach

  They were all gathered in the kitchen, Robbie and the twins picking at the dishes their mother was cooking before she could swat their hands away. A radio played on the counter, President Roosevelt talking about how each American could help the war effort. “Addie, we’ve got eggs!” Robbie exclaimed, excited about the dinner he once might have scoffed at. I ruffled his hair, noting Mrs. Connally’s pained expression over his head. With rationing it was hard to get enough food for four growing boys, and even the ordinary things had become occasional treats.

  Charlie sat at the table with his father, sharing sections of the newspaper. He wore a white T-shirt and his hair was still damp from his post-beach shower. Though I had seen him just an hour earlier, my stomach jumped.

  Charlie looked up and his eyes seemed to hold mine just a beat longer than usual. “Hello, Addie,” he said. Did I imagine the odd twinge to his voice? There were moments, just a few, where I wondered if he might like me as well. Like back in the city last winter, when I had gone with all of the boys to see The Wizard of Oz downtown at the Stanley. About three-quarters of the way through the movie, right about when Dorothy tried to go home in a hot-air balloon, something brushed my hand in the darkness and I lifted it, thinking it was a fly. Charlie’s fingers hovered just above mine, then settled on them lightly. I wondered if it was intentional, but he stared intently at the movie, seeming not to notice. I did not breathe for fear of interrupting the moment. A few minutes later the lights came on and he stood, leaving me confused. As we made our way down the street to Horn & Hardart for hot cocoa, I searched his face for an explanation. But his expression was impassive and conversation ordinary, so ordinary I might have imagined it.

  Things like that made me think that maybe he could like me, too. Why not? He was only a year and a bit older. But then he would retreat into his world of senior friends and dances and football, and I knew he would never feel the same way about me. He had spoken to me less recently, too, avoiding my eyes in a way reminiscent of Liam. I had wondered more than once if he was angry, though about what I could not fathom.

  “Sit, sit,” Mrs. Connally urged, setting a plate before me. Guilt nagged at me as I inhaled the savory bacon smell. My aunt and uncle kept kosher at home. They didn’t ask what I ate at school or with the Connallys, but I felt fairly sure they hadn’t contemplated anything so trayf. My stomach grumbled. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. I took a bite.

  “We’re going to the boardwalk while Mom and Dad pack up,” Jack offered. He’d gone a bit pimply around the chin, an awkward phase that the other boys seemed to have been spared. “I promised Robbie one last carousel ride.”

  “Two,” Robbie corrected.

  “Want to come?”

  “Sure.” I wanted to buy a box of saltwater taffy to bring back for Rhonda. We’d become friends in a way. I didn’t see her outside of school—she had a gaggle of five younger brothers and sisters to babysit and I was busy with the Connallys. But we sat together at lunch every day and partnering up for relay races in gym. The other girls had either grown tired of mocking us or simply stopped noticing.

  I took a sip of the juice Mrs. Connally had set before me, secretly studying Charlie as I ate. He was reading about a particularly difficult campaign that the army was waging in North Africa.

  “I should be there,” he burst out, slamming his hand onto the table with uncharacteristic frustration. He had gone to register for the draft, waiting more than two hours in the line that snaked around Federal Street. He had not enlisted, though, in accordance with his parents’ wishes.

  “Next year when I join the army—” Jack began. Gentle Jack was not a fighter, but he would do anything he could to be like his older brother.

  “Next year the fighting will be over,” his father interrupted firmly.

  “Please, God,” Mrs. Connally mumbled. “This may be the only time that I wish I had daughters instead.”

  “You’re lucky you’re going to college,” Liam pointed out. Charlie had been accepted at Georgetown on the full football scholarship, just like he’d hoped. I’d been helping Mrs. Connally plant her victory plot last April when he’d come home with the news. Mrs. Connally had always made the tiny garden into an oasis, roses climbing trellises stubbornly looking for sun in the shaded patch of green, honeysuckle giving off a fragrant smell. When the war had come, she had reluctantly dug out some of her prized flowers to plant vegetables.

  Charlie had run down the sidewalk, whooping. “I got into Georgetown.”

  “But how do you know?” his mother had asked. “There hasn’t been a letter.”

  “There will be. Coach found out.” He’d lifted me and spun me around. Then he’d set me down to hug his mother and I stood motionless, emotions cascading over me. His dream had come true, and he was going to school, not war. But I was still losing him. Charlie had talked about going away since the day we met. The neighborhood simply could not hold him.

  But his excitement about college had not staved off the fact that part of him—a big part—felt duty-bound to go and fight. “Maybe you can get a part-time job in Washington with the War Department when you’re at Georgetown,” I offered now, trying to ease his frustration.

  His face relaxed and he smiled slightly. “That’s an idea.” But I couldn’t tell if he meant it or was just humoring me.

  “Thanks, Addie,” Mrs. Connally said in a low voice as Charlie walked from the room.

  When we finished eating, Jack, Liam and Robbie spilled outside with their football, tossing it in the grass yard between the two houses. The boys were outpacing me now, I noticed. The twins were as tall as Charlie had been the day we met. Even Robbie’s shoulders now nearly matched my own. And Charlie... I looked back at the Connally house. Why hadn’t he come out yet?

  From our rooms above, I heard the scrape of a window screen and saw a curtain move. Aunt Bess had been watching me with the Connallys, her expression undoubtedly one of disapproval. Though I had been friends with the Connallys for over a year, it seemed to bother her and Uncle Meyer now more than ever. They were forever trying to push me toward Jewish kids back in the city. “There’s a dance at the Y,” Aunt Bess had said tentatively at dinner about a month before we’d come down the shore. “I thought that maybe you would like to go.” I had not answered. It wasn’t that I disliked the Jewish kids, but even if they would have accepted me, I didn’t want to go. I had the Connallys. I didn’t need anyone else.

  “You’re almost eighteen now,” Aunt Bess had pressed. “You need to meet some nice boys.”

  “And the Connallys aren’t?” I demanded. Uncle Meyer blinked in surprise at the forcefulness of my voice.

  “It’s not that. But being Jewish matters. After everything that you’ve seen, I would have thought that you would appreciate that.”

  I pushed aside my aunt’s disapproval and watched the boys play as they had done dozens of evenings this summer. But this time was different: it was the last time. Tomorrow it would all be gone. Swatting back a tear, I ran up the stairs to my room and grabbed the camera that Uncle Meyer had given to me as a birthday present. “I noticed you admiring it,” he’d confessed. It was smaller than the one Papa had let me use and not as new. But I didn’t mind; I took it everywhere, capturing bits of the city, like the shopkeepers beneath the sagging awnings at the Italian market and the old men who fed pigeons in Mifflin Park. I saved a bit of my allowance each week to buy film and had gotten permission to use the darkroom at school, rinsing the images until the contrast was just right.

  I stood on the stairs, snapping shots of the boys as they tackled one another, their hair and skin golden in the late-day sun.

  “Hey!” Liam scowled at the clicking sound. “No pictures.”

  I lowered the camera and walked down the steps. “Why not?” I challenged.

  “You gotta be careful with that. Someone might think you
’re an Axis spy.”

  “Liam!” Jack cautioned.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it.” His face flushed. But there was some truth to what he’d said: people looked at me differently since the war began. Even though I was an American citizen now and my accent had faded with time, my past meant I would never truly be one of them. I was an outsider, foreign once more.

  “I doubt the Germans would want a photo of you anyway,” Jack chided his twin, trying to break the tension. Liam did not answer but stormed off around the side of the house.

  “But, Liam, we’re going to the boardwalk!” Robbie could not imagine anyone passing up on that. His voice was drowned out by the choky rev of Liam’s dirt-bike engine, then tires squealing. Seeing Robbie’s face fall, I walked over and squeezed his hand, which was still a bit slick with bacon grease. Jack looked at me helplessly. Liam was so much moodier and more distant than a year ago. We had hoped that the summer away from the city, where trouble was so easy to find, would have done something to calm Liam’s wild ways. There were moments when he seemed his old self, playing with his brothers in the surf. But his darkness always returned.

  Mrs. Connally stepped from the house, shielding her eyes as she scanned the side yard. “Where’s Liam?”

  “Gone—on his bike. He said something earlier about meeting some friends at the beach.”

  Mrs. Connally’s face fell. “I hate that thing,” she said bluntly. The bike had been a reward—Liam was allowed to buy it with the allowance he’d saved in exchange for finishing the semester with no Fs. But it had backfired, allowing him to roam farther and longer than ever before. “He’s having such a hard time.” She seemed to be pleading with me to do something, though what I did not know.

  Before I could ask, Jack came to my side with Robbie in tow. “Ready?”

  “What about the others?” I asked, purposefully vague.

  But the point of my question could not have been more obvious. “Charlie’s got plans.”

  “A date,” Robbie piped up cheerfully.

  “Robbie, don’t.” Jack shifted uncomfortably. He had been trying to spare my feelings. A foot seemed to kick me in the stomach. I had seen Charlie talking to the girl who worked the concession stand by the beach a couple of times, a strawberry blonde a year or two older than me. But I had not actually thought he would go out with her tonight of all nights. It was our last night at the shore, for goodness’ sake. How could he waste it with someone he hardly knew?

  A few minutes later, the jitney came and we paid a nickel each to board. Our nights had changed since last summer when the whole Connally family had made the trek to the boardwalk on Saturday nights to ride the Ferris wheel and watch the lights twinkle along the hazy coastline below. On the Fourth of July, we’d crowded together on a blanket, sharing caramel corn as fireworks exploded above and an orchestra played on the pier.

  Now everything was different. Liam was off getting into trouble and Charlie was with that red-haired girl. My mind was flooded with images. Where was he taking her tonight? So those moments I’d glimpsed between me and Charlie had just been my imagination. How foolish of me! I had no right to stop him from dating, but it still felt like a betrayal—and it hurt worse than I could have imagined.

  “We’re here.” Robbie tugged at my arm and we climbed off, then walked the last few steps to the wide promenade of the boardwalk. The shops and arcades stood in a row beneath brightly colored awnings. The heady aroma of taffy and funnel cake and caramel corn, which I normally savored, seemed stifling now. Roller coasters and other amusements rose on the massive piers that jutted out like freighters into the sea. Across the boardwalk, a serviceman who had not yet shipped out yet stole a kiss from the girl on his arm.

  We walked passed the Warner Theater, its marquee alight touting a Gary Cooper film. Once the boardwalk would have come alive with twinkling lights even before dusk, but now they were dimmed out, lights covered with a special blue film in a precaution to make the coast less visible in case of an attack. “The Miss America pageant is coming,” Robbie announced as they passed a poster of a striking woman in a swim costume.

  “She sure is a dish,” Jack chimed in, but the words sounded forced and silly.

  “Hey!” Normally I didn’t mind the boys’ rough banter. “That’s rude to say in front of me.”

  “Sorry, Ad,” Jack said, chastened.

  But his apology did no good. My frustration, with Charlie and Liam and all of it, suddenly boiled over. The lights and merriment only seemed to amplify my sadness. I could stand it no longer. “I’m a girl, too, you know. Maybe it’s time you remembered that!”

  I turned away blindly. Ignoring the boys’ calls, I dodged through children licking ice-cream cones and the wicker rickshaws pushed by colored men. I ran south, my sandals flapping against the boards until the sound and lights faded behind me.

  Finally, I slowed a bit, breathing heavily. The sun was setting in great layers of pink, like wide swaths of strawberry frosting on a cake I’d once admired through a bakery window. The boardwalk grew quiet except for the cry of a few gulls and the rhythmic thunder of the waves. When I reached Chelsea Avenue, I saw a cluster of kids sitting around a fire down on the beach and Liam’s dirt bike propped against the side of the boardwalk. Before I knew it, I was going after him.

  I took off my sandals and then stepped onto the beach. The sand, still warm, grew damp and harder beneath my feet as I neared the water. About fifteen feet away from the group, I stopped. Seven or eight kids sat in the surf smoking and drinking out of glass soda bottles that I guessed contained something stronger. Liam was not among them, and for a moment I was grateful I had been wrong. Then a familiar whoop came across the water. Liam was almost fifty feet out paddling on a surfboard, scarcely visible at dusk. It wasn’t accurate anymore to say that Liam had no hobbies. He had the dirt bike and surfing, which he had picked up earlier this summer. He was drawn, it seemed, to anything dangerous. He rose up and the water seemed to dance beneath him. I momentarily forgot my fear of the water and stood transfixed.

  As Liam played to his audience, he scanned the coastline. Seeing me, he lurched in surprise. The board few out from under him and his legs went flying through the air. “Liam!” I called, panic surging through me. Seconds passed and I watched the surface, willing him to appear.

  A minute later he emerged in shallow water, his hair dark and slicked with water. As he saw me, a light came to his eyes and for a moment he almost smiled. Then his face seemed to close again and he turned from me, starting toward the group by the fire. “Liam, wait.” As he neared, I noticed an odd smell mingling with the salt water, and his eyes were glassy.

  “Hey, Ad.” He reached into his bag and held out a flask to me. His look was daring, sure that I would say no. “I didn’t think so,” he sneered when I hesitated. I took the flask from him and as I raised it, the acidic smell took me back to the glass of vodka Nonna always had before supper. Wanting him to trust me but knowing better than to sip, I took a swig, cringing at the burn.

  The others kids were packing up now and I feared Liam would follow, leaving me behind. I shivered. He pulled out a shirt and passed it to me, and I could smell the sweat and smoke and beer it had seen as I rolled up the too-long sleeves. He dropped to the sand and I followed, leaning back. There was a great white streak of cloud across the night sky, seeming to light it, as if someone had taken a piece of chalk and brushed it sideways. One of Robbie’s ceiling sketches come to life.

  I stared up at the sea of stars. “So much darkness,” Liam said. I turned in amazement. Was that really what he saw? “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  Running away, I thought. Just like you. I drew my knees close under the sweatshirt and wrapped my arms around them. There were moments when Liam and I seemed to get each other, like last February when snow had blanketed Second Street in fresh white. The boys had
built forts out of shoveled snow on either side of the street and it had been Liam and I on one side of the snowball fight, just the two of us against the world. “I was thinking about school this fall,” I said instead, trying to find a topic easier than admitting the real reason I had come.

  “School is really more Jack’s turf. Anyway, what’s the point? We could have had this conversation at home.”

  “Except you’re never there!” I accused. “Or when you are, you’re so busy trying to cover up the fact that you are drunk or whatever that you ignore everyone.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Wow. That may be the first time I’ve ever seen you lose your cool.”

  My irritation rose. “Don’t mock me. I’m serious.”

  “I’m serious, too. You’re always so composed. I may be screwed up, but at least I know I’m alive.”

  “This isn’t about me, Liam.”

  “The hell it isn’t. You want to talk, fine, but it’s got to cut both ways. You can’t just sit there like some kind of shrink and look inside me.”

  “Fine.” I decided to try another approach. “Truth or dare?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” I hoped he wouldn’t pick dare because there was no challenge I could think of that he wouldn’t do.

  “Dare.” He smirked.

  “I dare you to tell me what’s eating you. I dare you to tell me why you’ve changed.”

  “That’s a truth, not a dare,” Liam protested but then he answered. “Nothing. This is my life. What else is there to do besides drink and surf and sleep? My turn. Truth or dare?”

  “Truth.”

  “I knew it. You would never pick dare.”

  “Well, it’s my choice,” I said defensively.

  “Have you ever gone all the way?”

  I reared backward, shocked. “Liam!”

  “It’s a fair question.”

  “No, of course not.” I hoped he couldn’t see my face turn crimson in the dim light.