Week 2

The Jersey Shore. A term never used before the hit TV show “The Jersey Shore,” full of a cast that mostly hail from Long Island. When someone says, “I’d love to go to the Jersey Shore,” I get cranky. “It’s called ‘the beach,’” I say. “Don’t be such a Benny.” 

(A Benny is an acronym for obnoxious tourists from Bayonne, Elizabeth, New York, and those near such northern areas. When I was eleven, we moved to New York, but I refused to believe I was no longer from the beach.)

As far as I was concerned, Bennys, however obnoxious and prone to cut you off, visited paradise; I lived it.

I like to think I grew up exclusively on the sand and not thirty minutes from Island Beach State Park. My mom and I swatted the green biting beach flies and scrubbed our skin in the public beach showers, scrubbed with our fingernails the black particles of sand that clung on the hardest. I collected beach glass and scallops (not the large clam shells that are remarkable only for their size and ability to survive, compared to other, more beautiful shells).

My freshman year of college was difficult for me because I felt so alone and away from people who cared about me. I think the saddest moments were when I’d walk to my College Composition I class and, passing over the bridge over the creek protected by the state, I’d mistakenly think I could smell low tide. While not the most pleasant of smells, it was welcoming, and I was simultaneously afraid of breathing in air that did not smell like it anymore and of missing any more of the scent. 

It wouldn’t be there when I took another breath.

January 18th 12:35pm

I am trying to think warm thoughts as prepare to go outside. I put on the only pair of long, over-the-knee socks I have left.

“Do you want to climb out the window?” Mark asks.

He is already dressed; he has his hat, gray sweatshirt stained with slashes of red paint, cut-off-at-the-knee pants, pull-up socks, and moccasins. I have only my “post-fall but not quite winter weather yet” jacket. I anticipate the freeze, especially since I lost the most expensive pair of gloves I owned, costing me $22.00.

I tell him, no, not particularly, but if he’d like to do so, he was more than welcome.

“Then do you want to go out the front door or the bottom basement door?”

“Door in the basement, please.”

I am trying to be more adventurous, so I follow him to the basement, where he first inspects all the cracks in the walls. Pen in hand, I follow and focus on a webbed spider hole in the crack in the window. I linger and remember how I would pass by bushes, especially after rain, and look for such holes, the large, crouched spiders within. This particularly hole looks abandoned; its webs are covered in dust and plaster shavings.

We go outside, Mark already stomping through ice-crusted and snow-covered ivy. I can hear a distant neighbor’s TV, the vibrations and echo of the sound. I wonder if he even realizes how obnoxious it is.

There are sticks instead of bushes coming out of the ground, and I follow Mark as he pulls out his Tao Te Ching pocket book and sits down on the concrete steps that lead from the slab that divides his place from the neighbor’s.

I notice a green-painted iron railing that might have been for steps that would have gone further down. They leads my eyes to the large tree that has fallen parallel to the road. 

It is enormous. It looks like it has been cut, and yet at the end, there is rotting on the inside where I stare and see ivy has manifested in there as well. There are also unidentifiable bushes—or, more accurately, sticks that were bushes in the summer—that curve protectively over this dead tree. It’s remarkable to me how they are so thin yet they bend so firmly, unmoving, without any snow on them.

I suddenly feel conscious of where I am standing. I don’t know if we’re allowed back here, so I stay still and wait for someone to tell me to get off immediately. I look back at Mark; he is standing on the fallen tree and whistling at the trees, perhaps hoping to conjure interest for animals to take. The only reply he receives is the scraping off of ice from a nearby car.

I see a lone squirrel jump his run in the distant, but he is oblivious of us. I wonder if it’s true that squirrels don’t retrieve half of the nuts they bury.

Mark jumps off of the tree and walks up the lame set of concrete stairs towards me.

“Do you see that paw print?” he asks, pointing to a lone print in the snow, small and indistinct. “Is that a raccoon?”

I scowl at this. I wonder if one of the reasons he asks is an attempt to get a rise out of me. I hate raccoons. 

It all started when I was five and so easily taken advantage of by my mother and father, who one night decided to tease my narcissism and say, “Miss Kate, there was a raccoon last night who came up to the backdoor, knocked politely, and asked if you were there. But we had to tell him you went to bed, and he was very sad.” Naturally, I went around and told my kindergarden classmates and my teachers. Years later, I was told this never happened, and I was quite angry at them, embarrassed I was not told before I then told the world how special I was.

And it started again one night two weeks ago when I came to Mark’s apartment from work. As I pulled into the abandoned parking space, a giant raccoon raced into my view, darting from across the road and pausing near the door I had to get to.

Terrified, I called Mark.

“There’s a big fat raccoon outside!” I squealed. “He’s, like, huge! Can you come outside? I’m afraid he’s going to claw my face off.”

Yet simultaneously, I was impatient. I quickly grabbed my purse and started shuffling across the pavement, clutching my possessions to my chest and holding my phone out in front of me, the lame light shining on snow. As Mark searched, as he told me later, for an appropriate weapon, I thought I saw the raccoon and nearly fainted. Mark came to the door with a wooden spoon. It was just a bush.

Trying to forget this moment, I ignore the paw print in front of me and look above and try to catalogue the three distinct bird sounds. The nearest-sounding one, coming from the largest tree, is a constant, high-pitched chirp; then there is one that is a distinctly rhythmic three beat; the third one has stopped. I’ve lost it.

As Mark sits down again with his Tao, I slowly walk through further ivy and snow.

Looking down, I see that the largest tree is covered in a hairy vine, the kind my father used to hack away at with an axe.

When I asked him why was he doing that, he’d grunt, “No good for the tree.”

I look around and notice that all of the large trees, and some of the young ones—probably not even twenty years old yet almost as tall—are as well. The young ones that are not burdened by the weight of the ivy sway in the light wind, almost, I think poetically, rocking themselves to sleep. Some of the younger trees nearby still have dead orange-brown shrilled leaves hanging on, each one swaying at its own accord, jerky, twitchy; some leaves sway with the branch they are attached to, and others move on their own, still trying to wiggle off, independent of the tree itself.

I can’t feel my fingers now. Half of the time my pen works. I look up at the abandoned house and the windows on the top floor that are encrusted with ice even as they sit in the sun. I am jealous of Mark in his hoodie sitting on snow-covered concrete.

I walk back towards him and notice that someone has hacked at a thick pice of the vine near the house, but there are baby vines that slowly seem to crawl up towards the windows. Its leaves are black against itself, I notice, but against another object, I can better see the green.

“When the wind stops blowing,” Mark says, “do you notice how neutral it becomes?”

He’s talking about how cold it is, how I’ve complained several times about how I can’t feel my fingers. I tell him I’m done, and I walk back to the basement door without waiting for him. 

Inside the warmth of the apartment, he says, almost as if continuing the conversation I wanted left outside.

“What about Mr. Raccoon? Doesn’t he get as cold as you? His feet are smaller.”

“But he’s fat and has fur. I can’t help him anyway.”

“Well, who says you have to?”

I pause at this, but the tingling in my red fingers, signaling the blood trying to pump back through, is distracting. I look out at the backyard from the kitchen window. Mark says he thinks it’s supposed to reach zero again this Tuesday.

“Do you think all the birds die if they come up from migrating too early? I’ve been hearing a lot more lately. Do you think they’re going to die?”

I say, “Well, I used to hear some when it was snowing bad out like two weeks ago.”

“But what if those ones are dead?”

I don’t have an answer for him. 

“If you don’t like the cold, then how do you jump in the water? Do you?”

“You mean the ocean?” I say. He nods and waits patiently for my answer. “I do; I mean, I jump in that water. It just depends on my mood.”

“Then what’s the difference between going outside in this weather and going in the water?”

I think the answer’s simple: everything.