From the Beginning

Summer comes for the first time on a seaweed-strewn beach on the Cap Corse, the finger of Corsica that points, unwavering and unmistakable, toward France. (And Corsica, her storefronts striped with graffiti, her guttural dialect, knows exactly which finger it is.)

That morning, my friend takes a flight back to Paris and school and I take a bus up the coast to a tiny town with a beach, a half-moon of white sand cradling neon blue ocean. This would become, it turns out, my seasonal theme. But by June, summer has only half-arrived in the northern stretch of the Mediterranean. Drippy, late-afternoon rain still falls every other day. I wear a jacket and retreat to my room to watch dubbed TV.

The very last day, though, the clouds blow away and the heat settles, leaving the sky a suffocated powder blue. For the first time, I pull my bathing suit from the bottom of my suitcase. The bus ticket costs 2 Euro and the driver accelerates around the corners as though he’s playing a video game. Stomach still touchy from the flu, I close my eyes as we fly around the rim of the Cap—the coolest roller coaster ever. The one that falls over water.

My destination is a pebbly parking lot hemmed in by mountains on one side, green vineyards clinging to their slopes. In the center of the lot, looking weathered and out-of-place, stands a painted cement altar dedicated to Saint Anthony and the chapel that stood on the spot before it was bombed in World War II. The beach itself is serviced by only a ramshackle bar and café at one end, its awnings flapping the breeze. The sand is mostly empty, save a few scampering children and their weary moms, and picky gobs of seaweed that look like dish-scouring pads.

I hardly remember how to be on a beach, what to do on one. It’s been that long. I am early-season pale and soft from all those macarons in Paris and reluctant to stand around in a bathing suit, to make tanning-related pretenses while the women around me are mostly topless and brown already. (In Paris in the cold, where such things are easier to say and do, I boast of being topless all summer. In the actual Mediterranean in actual summer, I realize that certain parts of my body have never known direct sunlight and that the acclimation process could prove painful.)

I spread out a towel. I have no idea what to do. My bathing suit is a riff on a 1930s showgirl costume. There is no better way, in the Mediterranean in early summer amidst sleek black suits and skin without tan lines, to look like an American. It might have been more effective, maybe, to paint a target on my back in sunblock and let the rays do the rest.

He appears before my eyes in a clinging blue bathing suit that is vintage chic and worthy of the window display at Le Bon Marche, and so does the second theme of my summer. That I will be approached —in several different nations, situational contexts, and languages—by handsome men who bear, along with a certain sort of swagger that I will only call international, a single question.

“Are you traveling alone?”

The answer to this question changes depending on my mood, the exact contours of that situational context, and whether they guy seems, at the outset, like a would-be or even a seasoned murderer.

In this case, the suit whispers a tantalizing, “Maybe.” So does the ravishingly beautiful boy, no older than 19 or 20, who shares his beach blanket. As the man leans over to ask if I’d like a coffee, my eyes wander to the boy, whose dense curls—a lazy midday yawn—distract me and make me wonder if I am in a sort of real-world version of a Bond movie. Only I’m wearing a bathing suit with too much fabric.

I say no thanks to the coffee and he smiles.

“Do you want to swim?”

“Yes,” I say, “But I want to warm up first. I’m going to wait a little while.”

“Come on,” he says, waving me toward the water. I blame the language gap.

I follow because I am grateful for the company or maybe because I like swimming in Corsica with handsome men, two things that can get a girl killed in all sorts of situations. When I ask where he’s from, he smiles, reveals a row of gleaming teeth and says, “France.” Assuming that “No shit” won’t translate particularly well, I ask which city.

“Paris,” he says, before diving under the surface.

“No shit,” I say to the splash.

The cove at Pietracorbara is surrounded by high green cliffs that obscure the view to other parts of the coast. The sky is cloudless, the color shifting from pale to sapphire as your eyes move higher. The beach itself is rounded and white, a thumbnail edged by reedy grass. I take stock, float over the waves, prepare myself for weeks more of just this.

The man emerges from the waves and says, “Do you know what they are, les meduses?”

“Yes,” I say. “Jellyfish.”

He laughs at the word and we converse for a solid five minutes about my French-language education, my time in Paris, his “good friend” back on the sand, how much he loves Corsica, before he says, “Ah, there is a meduse right in front of you. So many in the water today.”

I arrive safely back on my blanket approximately four seconds later. My friend stops by later to check in, water still dripping from his hair. He asks again if I want coffee, and I thank him but refuse again, unable to grasp the idea of drinking coffee in a bathing suit. Later , he brings some back to the boy.

I flip. I read, but only a little. I braid the ends of grass. I watch a mother wrangle a kicking, squirming little boy into her line of vision. I wonder how I will manage my summer alone, how I will make my way down endless stretches of sand, vacation everywhere, the domain of the exhausted, all while knowing no one. I touch the clumps of seaweed to see if they really feel like scouring pads. They don’t. They’re softer in the center.

Of Libraries on Both Sides of the Atlantic

In Dublin, on a strange little back street near the cathedral, is a library that’s almost completely hidden behind a tall hedge. I visit on a day when the sky and my spirit are overcast with floating gray clouds, but this is how the sky and I tend to travel.

The man in the doorway smiles and welcomes me and hands me a piece of cream-colored paper and speaks in a voice that sounds like the ogre in a fairy tale, friendly and indecipherable. I figure I will get away with nodding and smiling until I realize, terrified, that he’s asked me a question. He repeats it three times.

“New York?” I say.

He smiles and waves me in. Presumably I’ve answered correctly.

I worked in a library once amidst books that were priceless and crumbling to dust, that were encased in little acid-free slipcases. Others that had escaped the eye and hand of the restorer were just left to crack and split, their leather covers coming off in flakes. Book dust smells a particular way—musty and sweet. The latter thing is usually the glue gone yellow and useless, the particles of it having abandoned the page for the air. It’s the smell of things dying.

This library—Marsh’s Library, named for the Archbishop who built it—in Ireland smells like my library, where we used to wander on the top floors in the summer when all the legislators were on vacation. It smells like a place filled with dark wood and low light and old books.

The shelves at Marsh’s Library are dark-stained and well dusted. Under glass in locked cases, illustrations of make-believe beasts, of dragons and person-sized bird, show you how your ancestors saw the world, all the danger they perceived but couldn’t see. Mostly, I want to sit on one of the window seats with a book—any book—and read. Because that’s the only thing I ever really want to do under gray skies. But the window seat is off-limits, blocked by a length of rope and a polite, hand-written sign. I want to make up things to study, invent for myself some kind of student status. Student of… wandering around. Of spending lots of money. Of letting the universe decide. Then I could weave between the stacks, step beyond the ropes, do more than just inhale and know the smell.

The Cold in Greece

At Paleokastritsa beach on the saddest day of my life, the water is freezing and no one knows why. Old men shake their heads. The tour guide, a freckled Aussie with very white teeth, nudges his mirrored shades up his nose, and frowns.

The swimming cove is the same shade as the sky and the beach crawls with Dutch and Norwegian tourists, their bands of yellow hair in thick braids. Children splash out into the waveless expanse of water and scream, wave their hands, splash back to shore as fast as their tiny legs will carry them.

The Aussie offers something that masquerades as an explanation. Something about a storm, or a kind of current that comes sometimes. A drift of freezing water that pushes into the cove, even at the height of summer when the sky is jewel-toned and cloudless. When the sand—not really sand but a pale, white-gray infinity of pebbles the size of insects and pencil erasers—burns straight through the skin, through the soles of shoes.

I have braved the early summer ocean in New England, where the water is the color of steel and sludge and is choked with slimy black seaweed. In June—sometimes even in July—it’s cold enough to sting. This water is comfort, a pillow, compared with the water at Paleokastritsa beach on a burning summer day on an island, closer to the equator than I’m accustomed.

I wade out but stop when the water hits my knees. The cold cuts to the bone, crueler because of the color. The color of a bathwater dream, of a postcard, of something you dive into headfirst, or like little kids do—a grand charge from the shore.

The married couple in our group—just married, days before—stands apart from the rest of us, almost silent. They make polite conversation, smile only at each other. The other girls, shrieking things in terrycloth sarongs, newly graduated, ask eager questions of the Aussie. They sit next to him at lunch. They love the mix tape he’s made for the ride. (Even I can’t resist, though, when a Crowded House song comes on. An album I haven’t heard in ages because it’s packed away in a storage locker in New York and because my iPod has finally decided bid the cruel world its final farewell. I sink lower in my seat, try not to hum along, not even in my head. Or do I sing like a bird released.)

I buy a strong ginger-flavored drink in an Alice-in-Wonderland bottle with a green label. I knot a shawl around myself twice when I enter the monastery, walk soft, take no photos. I enjoy vast panoramas. I buy a wooden bracelet , painted red, off a table filled with cheap plastic earrings and hair accessories encrusted with fake jewels. I try to remember the Venetian architecture, close my eyes. Pretend, just for a moment, that I’m in Venice. On the water.

In the park in town, the cicadas buzz and hum so loudly in the trees that we need to shout above them to have a conversation over our awful, price-included ham sandwiches. Sitting on the low wall, empty sandwich wrapper crumpled in a heap on my lap, I listen to the Aussie and the girls talk about nothing and out of the corner of my eye, I see one of them. A cicada. The things in the trees that I’ve heard and haven’t seen. Just a cloud of noise. It’s dead on its back, winged, and so huge. The size of my thumb. Bigger. My index finger. Bigger than the biggest roach that ever crawled out from under any cabinet in New York City. Big enough to introduce itself and ask about your day. And that’s when it occurs to me that the trees above our heads are alive with them, that they could fall, topple off their leaves, and land. On a lap. Tangle in hair. That they could die like that one did, of old age. Of buggy disease. And plummet into sight. And there are thousands. And thousands. Loud enough to roar, to fill the summer air with a sound like birds, a throbbing.

And here’s the thing. I can deal as long as I can’t see it.

That’s when I walk away. The Aussie does not inquire after me. I go back to the van, a human-sized oven, and sit. I close the door.

At Paleokastritsa beach, near the monastery where I covered my shoulders and bowed my head and offered my backwards Catholic sign of the cross and learned about a revolution, I pull off my clothes. One beach after the next, the sight of my own body in a bathing suit—tanned dark, lean and scary-strong from journeys up cliffs and across coves, a body I hardly recognize—is a kind of jolt: This is me, it turns out.

Except that day. One day out of the whole summer. On Paleokastritsa beach where the water could have frozen into blocks of ice, a new polar cap, if not for the air, I felt enormous. Lumpy as a sack of flour. I thought, please don’t look. Or maybe I thought, wouldn’t it be horrible if you don’t look.

The honeymoon couple sat by the shore, close to each other. And I took a picture. In the picture, they’re staring out toward the cove, toward a bowl of empty water where no one could swim because no one could stand it. I don’t know their names, or where they live. That happens all the time when you travel. You say you’re going to exchange these things, to pass along pictures, and you never do. But I always think. If they knew about this photo, they would want it. Or maybe I just think. If the photo was of me, of me and someone, I would want it.

Good News, She Said

Dear Reader,

I'm happy to report that The Beaches, about the extraordinary La Maddalena Archipelago, is featured in the January/February issue of Eclectica. It was originally published here, in a slightly different form, under the title A Day at the Beach.

Please grace the amazing Eclectica with your traffic and time.

New essays coming soon...

Laura