The beach

Mary & Martin reminisce about their honeymoon at a beach in Mexico.

I shouldn’t like to go there, I tell them. I’d get headaches from the sun.

M&M reply that their resort had large, thatched umbrellas. A person could sit under one of them and read all day long.

Even so, I object, the brightness would chafe at the corners of my eyes.

Don’t you enjoy the beach, John-Paul?

No, not really. I got plenty of it in Esmeraldas when I was a child.

(But then I qualify myself:)

I liked the Esmeraldas beach well enough. We’d go there in the afternoons, when the light was low. And it was a different sort of beach: It had garbage. It had sewage. It had stray dogs. The bathers were naked or in their underwear.

And there were jellyfish, says Mary.

And muggers, I say. A person had to be careful. And every ten minutes or so he’d have to leave the ocean and walk back fifty yards to where he’d gone in, or else the current would carry him out into the deep.

There were little dunes with vines on them, and broken glass.

There was a long jetty with a lighthouse at the end of it. We’d walk to the lighthouse sometimes, looking out for muggers because that place was so isolated.

You realize (says Martin), for most people, those things would diminish the value of a beach.

I do realize it. It was an interesting beach.

Sometimes I’m astonished, says Mary, at how boring so many others’ upbringings seem to have been.

(Poor Martin! He feels excluded.)

It wasn’t a pretty beach (have I conveyed this?); it didn’t attract many tourists; but during Carnival, at sunset, thousands of sand-covered bathers would walk past our house. The path up from the beach was lined with discotheques blaring salsa and merengue. I liked to peer in over the chest-high walls of the discotheques in order to watch the people dance. Then, at night, half a mile away, cozy in my bed, I’d go to sleep listening to the music.