Susan T. Landry
The Beach
Americans and Chinese recall memories very differently.
Americans often report lengthy specific emotionally elaborate memories that focus on the self as a central character.
Chinese tend to give brief accounts of general routine events that center on collective activities and are often emotionally neutral.
—Qi Wang, Associate Professor of Human Development, Cornell University
My American Autobiographical Self
My wet feet leave dark stains on the steps of the candy store. The wood of the staircase and the landing are so hot that the watery foot-shaped impressions vanish as soon as I move beyond the moment. By the time I have pushed through the swinging screen door, by the time I have slid open the frost-sticky top of the ice cream chest, by the time I have selected a raspberry Popsicle, a salty ghost of a foot is all that remains. I deposit a handful of dimes, nickels, and pennies and I am out the door, down the stairs, leaving no record of my errand on the silvered wood.
The seaweed forms a ragged line along the beach, halfway between the shallows of the water at low tide and the cement barrier that holds the ocean back during hurricane season. I spend hours in the water. When I cannot stop shivering and my hair hangs in clumps and the skin on my arms is a puckered milky blue, I race up past the seaweed to the soft fine-grained sand along the seawall. I burrow on my belly, my arms and legs so deep in the warm womb of sand, all that can be seen of me is the rounded bottom of my bathing suit and my shoulders, poking out like the wing cartilage of a nested shore bird.
My mother sits with the other mothers in folding beach chairs. The group of women gathers in a half-moon shape so they can keep an eye on the babies, hand out tuna fish sandwiches from the coolers at lunchtime, fumble in their purses to find the dimes and nickels for the candy store, and still keep up their conversations. My mother has summer-pale hair and wears sunglasses, even when she goes in the water to cool off. She doesn’t go swimming or ride the waves. She stands knee-deep, cupping water in first her right hand and then her left, sluicing down her shoulders and arms, over and over. A final scoop of water to soothe her forehead and dampen her hair. Sometimes she stays in the water for a long time, with her hands on her hips and talks with a friend who stands near her, two women with their gleaming salt-licked arms and their sunglasses winking in the afternoon light.
When the women talk among themselves, I hear the murmur of their voices. Like the dull cry of the gulls, the slap of motorboat waves on the sandbar, the rhyming games of the younger children, these melodies rise and fall around me as powerful as the rhythm of the tides.
It is as though I float in the air around my mother and the other mothers at the beach, like the kite that children are flying further down, away from the clusters of women. I am the kite, the thin panels of fuchsia, lime green, aqua, and yellow, now sailing with a swift breeze, the string running from its reel of driftwood, spinning in a boy’s hands. Like the string that connects the boy and his friends to the kite, I am tied to my mother, a woman on the beach. I rise into the sky, ride the song of the ocean, and travel down the rivulets of sand and seaweed. I am there, but not there.
~
My Chinese Autobiographical Self
The summerhouses line the road and face the sea. Like trees in the forest, these buildings stand rooted to the land; solid, plain-looking relics of an earlier generation. A place by the water; people flock here from the city, seeking sanctuary in July and August. It is the women and children who come. The men stay behind to work. Some men take the highway, arriving late for dinner, rising before dawn for the journey back. Other men sleep in the hot apartments. In the city, the night sky is swollen with light.
The sea is indifferent. Families who come from the city and families who live here all year round; it makes no difference to the sea, to the wind, to the shore birds, to the grains of sand. The children take to the beach like sandpipers, skimming along the flats at low tide. They come with their buckets and their spades, and they go home without them. Their bright kites drift off with the wind, their tumbling beach balls are lost, hidden among the wild roses.
The women, too, come and go, in and out of the water, with towels and lotions, sun hats, and canisters of drinks. They settle into their chairs, facing the arc of the sun, and turn the yellowed pages of novels. They inhale and then release soft plumes of smoke, as though their cigarettes are tiny flares, signals to distant sailors. It is their dance, the coming and going. The moon sets the pace, and the women waltz back and forth, tethered to the rhythms.
One summer, a rust-darkened freighter balanced on the thin bar of the horizon. It inched forward along the bottom of the sky, a boat-shaped silhouette, like a tin marker in an arcade game. A sea accident—a sudden squall, or a fault line in the steel—sent the slow-moving barge to the ocean floor, releasing its cargo of footwear. For years, canvas shoes wash up on the shore, one by one, or at times in matching pairs.
Summer slips away. The men, the women, the children, and the birds scatter across the landscape like so many grains of sand. The ripples of the wind leave their marks on the beach, the stones are worn smooth. Memory is like that; traces of beauty, shoes tangled in a net of kelp.
Susan T. Landry has been an editor on several print literary journals over the years, devoted to memoir & creative nonfiction, in addition to founding and editing Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie. She has been published in several magazines, including Dinty W. Moore's Brevity journal and other online outlets, as well as print collections including Balancing Act 2, an Anthology of 50 Maine Women Writers.
