West Gilgo
by Kate Carman
THE BAY
The shoreline was disappearing quickly so they put the house on a boat, and they took the boat West. Not far from Jones beach, they set it down on new muddy marshes that squished between your toes and cut the bottoms of your feet with shell shrapnel. When Uncle Rob accidentally burned it down (space heater) they built it back up again with big glass windows and a splintering wooden porch facing the bay. The bay is dark and deep, spreading far out into the tall pale green reeds of the marshes, past the tiny makeshift marina and out into the channel. There’s a weatherbeaten dock in the middle of the bay with a white diving board and a ladder covered in fossilized barnacles that will slice your leg clean open if you’re not careful. When you swim out to it, you’ll usually find about a dozen blue claw crab shells that have been dropped by birds to crack them open, exposing their soft salty underbellies. You’ll also find bird shit. When I was younger I would have dreams that I swam to the dock by myself in the middle of the night. The water, as black and endless as the sky above me, would pull me down deeper and deeper into the darkness no matter how hard I struggled.
OCEAN WALK
If you need a bike go to Granny’s house. Go at least at a brisk jog to keep the mosquitoes from completely swarming you. Full out run if you don’t want to get bitten at all. Go, on the hard pebbled sandy path, past the tiny library, no bigger than six feet wide on the inside, smelling of musky sun and beach battered books, past the post office, which is even smaller, past the church, then past the tennis court with it’s sagging net, and the plastic playground that’s too hot to touch midday and has a broken swing. This street is called Ocean Walk. Look for the house that used to be the biggest on the block, but now is only midsized, made of deep brown beach wood. If you are like I was, shy, and a bit scared of Granny, I haven’t called her Granny in a long time (only Judy now), you’ll try to sneak into her basement and grab a bike without her noticing. She’ll inevitably notice every time, and from the porch, popping her head out from the screen door, call out to you and your brother to come upstairs.
TENNIS COURT
Grandad would meet Judy at the annual summer block party cookout on the tennis courts. They’d get acquainted over paper bowls filled with creamy clam chowder and buttered lobster in soft hot dog buns. String lights hung criss crossed over the red clay courts, and people milled about holding beers from a big blue cooler filled with ice. A paper sign running the length of the net read “Happy Summer West Gilgo” in pink paint. As the sun went down, stray cats darted out from under porches and parked cars into the tall stalks of grass, hunting for mice. Crickets began their caphophy. A little ways in the distance there was the sound of the ocean crashing on the shore. They were both in their late forties and both divorced. Judy, from a struggling actor who had finally made it, then left her. Grandad, from a woman who wanted to be more than a housewife, and had since passed away from Ovarian cancer. They each had four kids a piece, all either grown up or away at college. After they got married, they’d split their time between Ocean Walk and a small apartment in Brooklyn where Judy would volunteer as a teacher at underprivileged schools, and Grandad would have an easy commute to the U.S. Court District where he’d serve as a judge until his early eighties. Together, they would travel to every continent on Earth. For Grandad’s seventieth birthday, Judy would rent out a big ballroom filled with circular white tables, a bowl of customized M and Ms (his favorite candy) on each of them. They would have more than twenty grandchildren at this point, and about thirty bikes in their garage. Judy got a red sweatshirt for each grandchild with a white number on it, ordering them from oldest to youngest. I was number fourteen.
NIGHTTIME
The sun sets slowly at the beach in the summertime. The house on the bay faces east, so we look behind the house to watch the sunset, towards the telephone poles lined with hundreds of sand sparrows and our neighbor’s window, which exposes the high def colors of his television. Bright reds and pinks give way to darker purples and blues. Then the sky is black, and the cicadas become noisy. If you stand on the porch and face the bay, to one side there is the tiny misshapen shadowy outline of Gilgo in the distance. On the other, there is a long flat stretch of highway and you can see the flashes of white headlights, and red tail lights as they pass. Both the woosh of cars racing by on the highway, and shuush of the ocean crashing on the sand are both faintly audible. The sounds are nearly identical.
EMPTY HOUSE
Before, there were six people and three dogs. A father who was a lawyer, a doting mother who dreamed of being a real estate agent, an eldest brother who was a stoic broad-shouldered swimmer, a sociable middle brother who was popular with the girls in school, a sweet full faced youngest brother who stuck to his middle brother like glue, and a youngest daughter, small and shy, just arrived from Korea. Two of the dogs were big, loving and dumb. One of them was small and crazy. Later, the father would become a politician and move to Washington, and the doting mother, after many screaming matches with the politician, would leave to make her real estate dreams come true. The stoic older brother would graduate high school and go to work on an oil rig. Soon after, the charming middle brother would pack a car and drive to college. The youngest small shy daughter would become chatty and artistic and even rule-breaking when she was sent to boarding school for most of her adolescence. The sweet full-faced youngest brother would stick to his older brother for as long as he could until he learned to cook meals by himself, and until he, too, left for college. The two bigger loving dumb dogs would die first, then the crazy little one. And then the house was empty.
GODMOTHER SANDRA
She’s a ‘Nova (Villanova) girl through and through. Tall gorgeous sorority girl with two sisters. An English major and philosophy minor from Plainview, Long Island. She failed the Bar on the first try, but on the second she passed, and met the charming middle brother who was popular with the girls. They got engaged after three months, and married within a year. People said it wouldn’t last. They were wrong. She let the chatty and artistic rule-breaking youngest sister, who now was a professional hair and make-up artist, chop her long bleach blond locks the day before the wedding into a chin length bob. Rumor has it she hated it and cried the whole day before the ceremony, but I’ve seen the pictures, and she looks timeless. Effortlessly chic. She worked for the Nassau County District Attorney's office as a criminal prosecutor, and then she worked against them as a criminal defense lawyer. Sometimes she is co-counsel with her husband, Uncle Rob, who burned down the house (space heater), which was moved from the receding barrier beach to the marshy bay that squishes between your toes with mud and cuts your feet with shell shrapnel. She had three lovely, crazy, gorgeous, anxious, smart, popular-with-the-boys, ‘Nova girls through and through, daughters, who are my cousins. At her annual Christmas party one year, around the time I was six, I asked her to be my Godmother. My mom said I needed a new Godmother because my first one divorced my other uncle and didn’t talk to him. Aunt Sandra wasn’t even Catholic, but it didn’t matter. I was shy so I put it in a card. When she read it, she pulled me into a hug, holding back tears.
THE OCEAN
If you were to ride your bike on the sandy pebble road, right of the bay, towards the highway, you’d find a tunnel that I know better than my own heartbeat. To this day, I pedal up to it as fast as I can, getting up to a full sprint, and then right at its entrance, I close my eyes. I listen to the familiar echoes of my own voice as a call out to my brother, or my dad, or my mom, or my cousins, or to no one, and the splash, splash, splash of my bike tires through the large puddles on the cement floor. I hear both the sound of cars rushing by on the highway above me, and the sound of the ocean crashing on the sand ahead of me. They sound nearly identical. At the other end of the tunnel is the ocean, the sky, and the sand. At night, with our flashlights off we let ourselves become consumed by the blackness of the atmosphere. We lay on our backs and become overwhelmed by the unwieldy galaxies of stars above us, far away and unreachable, and as innumerable, clear, and precise as the tiny grains of sand we lie on. My brother has always been scared of the ocean, running away from its tides like a sandpiper. I have always been wary, but anything more than that feels sacreligious. After all, that’s where Nancy’s ashes are scattered.
NANCY
She had three dogs: Bonnie, Alfie, and Max. Two collies, and a miniature Schnauzer. Max was short for Max-a-million-Spitz because, like the Olympic swimmer, he could keep himself afloat, which saved him as a puppy when he fell into a pool. She had four kids: Joe, Rob, Will, and Zoe. Joe was technically Joseph the third, Will was technically William , and Zoe technically wasn’t biologically hers, but she didn’t get hung up on technicalities. When the kids were young, at midnight on New Years, they all followed her lead, went outside, and ran around the house naked, their bare feet getting numb in the heavy snow. She was valedictorian at Saint Lawrence, and a wife a year later. She married a movie-star-handsome lawyer, who became father to her children, who became a politician, who she would pose with for campaign pictures, who would introduce her to Ronald Reagan, who would become a federal judge, who she would one day throw something sharp and glass at that would leave a scar on his neck for the rest of his life. The rest of his life, which would be much longer than hers. And she played the piano. She played it beautifully. So beautifully that her son Will, who learned to cook meals by himself, would tell his daughter, who dreamt of the dark deep bay pulling her under, about how talented his mother was, the valedictorian who dreamed of becoming a real estate agent, and his daughter, who had learned to step carefully on the barnacle covered ladder, and was moved by the long pale reeds in the bay, and the lights of cars passing on the long flat highway in the distance, would cry at the sound of piano music until she was six.