rodanthe record from a hasty livejournal post.

 

I’ve been meaning to put it all down so I don’t forget. We went on vacation, Elise, Quentin, Maria, Derick and I. Quentin drove the whole way, mostly without music, though we played games in the car and once got out to play soccer in a gas station parking lot, and we got to the house after dark, and the road turned from this bright run of outlet malls and highway into coarse brush-forest, dark, you could only see as far as the headlights, and after that green dimness, so that shapes were distinct but not their distance. We arrived in Rodanthe. The houses have so much more on the outside than I’m used to – there are verandas and whole staircases, and usually the structures are set on stilts, so that there are sometimes trellis-like bottoms, or makeshift garages, as is the case with our estate. Most are empty, but every now and again, particularly at night, you see a television screen flickering, or hear a hammer, or a yapping dog. Our house has only one level, really, natural wood walls, and four bedrooms, and two bathrooms, and a living room that bleeds into the kitchen, and a basketball hoop, and a porch that is best in the evening when the stars are out and the yard is not so distinct, and so the detritus in the underbrush (broken bottles and an unserviceable boat) is not visible, and a very Gatsby green light blinks in the distance. House colors tend to be a dead grey natural wood (as ours is) or within a sherbert palette, dreamsicle oranges and blush pinks. Plant life seems unfriendly and dry, piney, or spiney, or otherwise very nasty to find in a foot.

The first night we bought booze en route and started drinking straight off and ventured across the highway and various pieces of private property to the beach. The sea felt very immense unseen, but so close, and you could see the same stars that we’d pointed at on our porch over the water, and there were coy slats of sheen occasionally across the waves, so it wasn’t really totally dark, and if you clawed at the sand there was this brief flare of glow-in-the-dark somethings, perhaps plankton, that would fade immediately after exposure, and overall it was a perfect recipe for Maria saying, “Let’s take our clothes off and run in the water.” Elise later termed the boys ‘extremely rational wet blankets,’ but they were in full rational wet blanket swing that night, and Maria whispered very slyly to Elise and I that we should just do it, sforzando, and Elise demurred with a good-humored laugh, and I wanted to do it, but not strip in front of the boys, but the boys both said my name as a kind of appeal to reason, and it’s hard to navigate the two extremes in oneself, at times, because I love being the banzai girl at the edge of the dock, but I also love being the cold fingers in the crease of an arm saying Please don’t do it. Maria tore off her clothes and ran in, and I ran after her still dressed, ostensibly to haul her out, and the water was so very cold, and then Maria stood at Derick’s side and argued passionately that the remainder of the group should do it. We returned home, showered, went to bed.

It’s already hard to put the memories into neatly divided days. On Saturday, Elise and I went on a long drive in search of a grocery store, with varying levels of conviction in its existence as the trip went on, and eventually turned around and went to the store we’d bought beer from before. Played trivial pursuit. I think we went back to the beach that day, en mass, and strolled along it, looking for a legitimate entrance but found none and so just tromped back through somebody’s dune-y yard, and the whole time the sun looked so bizarre, as if the ocean had thrown up a mist and everything had blurred but not fogged, distortion without opacity. Sunday the boys played their wet blanket card again and stayed inside to study, and the ladies went off to the beach, and Maria and I waded out in the cold water until the waves could knock us under (even though we never went out of toe-touching depth), and it reminded me of a few summers back, when dad took my brother and I took Lake Huron, and the waves were also cold and strong from a storm, and my brother and I made a game of digging feet into the sand and weathering them, and afterwards we both slept for hours, because it’s much the same game, except there’s this sneaking undertow that has scared me more than once but not enough to not run right back out in a minute. We invented a game that evening called ‘Slap Tickle Focus Lotus,’ where we sat in a circle, with a foot extended, and would take turns closing our eyes with an arm out, and then guessing who had touched our arm, and then being slapped or tickled if we guessed wrong, or alternatively kissed if we guessed right. Monday we went to an abandoned theme park that we’d spotted on our grocery trip, and we climbed up to the top of a cracking waterslide, and naturally Maria started sliding down it, and there were mattresses nearby, eerily enough, perturbing if only because they had this bright hot air balloon print gone dingy with neglect and it looked as though something very childish and cheering had been dirtied to the edge of recognition. There was a mini-golf course, too, soggy, and covered in discarded pine needles; in fact most of the vegetation looked as though it was taking back its turf, the native plants letting down their hair, and the obvious transplants shrinking under the weight of self-reliance. The go-cart course had grey caking everywhere that didn’t appear to be garden variety dirt. The best part of it all was probably the vantage from the top of the waterslide, because you could see the arrangement of houses, all pink and grey. That night we drank whiskey (well I did) and I had that lovely firebelly buzz going and we all dogpiled into each other’s beds and tore the blankets off Derick’s. Today we went to the beach as a group, and Maria and I managed to coax everyone into the water, but they fled before acclimation to the chilly temperature. The water looked like cut green glass, crystal clear for the first forty inches, and I remembered digging under our front porch as a kid with my younger brother, and how we’d uncovered wavy lilac glass, and my parents had laughed hard at us when asked if we could sell our ‘amethyst,’ and the dogs had been very put out at us taking their spots there during the summer heat. Maria would float on her back in the water, and I would attempt to mimic it before being put in my place by the next cresting wave. She told me later the secret was to breathe in just as the next wave was coming, and something magical about buoyancy and your body would ensure you floated along the surface of the wave rather than being rolled under it. We walked down to the pier, and Derick and I talked about opinion versus knowledge, and then I went in the water one last time before we went home, and milled around before I went out for the milk. At some imprecise point Derick ran into the bathroom and video taped Maria and Maria charged out and pinned him. 

DERICK: MP3 Link.