The Back House

I. There’s this house in Wildwood, the second to last island on the New Jersey coast. It’s the second to last house on the block, with a shaded concrete porch that cools bare feet, even in the middle of July, and green paint that would look minty if it wasn’t stained gray from windswept sand.

My great-grandparents, John and Carmela Grande, left Philadelphia and bought this house in 1956. I imagine that was the year they first discovered the writing on the attic walls.

They spent their lives here, always waiting for summer. That’s when their grandson-my father-would visit. When he was little, he came only on weekends, or for a week in August when my grandfather took his paid vacation from his office job at the Naval Depot. In college, he started to stay all summer. Thirty years later, it became my turn.

II. I’ve never seen the writing on the attic wall, but my sister told me that it’s there, so it must be true. It’s from the boys who had what we have before we had it, and all it is, is their names.

It’s too hard to get up there. That’s why I haven’t seen it, because of the toaster oven and the step stool and the rusty table fans that block the stairs. Also, because the windows up there haven’t been opened in fifty years, the air is stagnant and hot.

My grandmother says that it’s from 1914, and she knows that because they wrote the year next to their names, these boys.

We don’t know who they were. They knew this house before anyone in my family ever came to the island, and the attic used to be their bedroom. There were four of them and they spent their summers here. I like to think that they wrote their names on the beams one night when the heat kept sleep away, as if to say, “This was ours.”

I bet the ocean was closer then.

III. My dad taught me how to ride a wave in when I was seven years old.

He spun me around towards the horizon, lifted me over the ripples, and helped me wait for the right time.

“Wait until the wave does that,” he said, a wave cresting with a white and foamy edge before us. He lifted me over it and resumed his lesson. Sticking his arms up over his head, he locked his elbows and folded his fingers together, palm over palm. “Go like this with your arms. Straight out.”

with your arms. Straight out.” He watched the next wave rise, and started to move with it towards the shoreline. “Run with it,” he called back to me while I bobbed alone in the surf. “When it breaks, leap. Watch me first.”

I pushed up on the wet sand with the balls of my feet, lifting myself up over the wave. I came down in time to see him dive forward, just ahead of the breaking wave. He took a few long strokes, and then the wave caught him and carried him smoothly to the sand. He sprung up, shook his head like a wet dog, and turned back towards me, smiling. “See?”

He waded back out and waited with me for the next wave, gripped me around the waist and helped me start to swim with it. With a few last minute pointers, he let me go.

He didn’t tell me what to do, though, when the undertow grabbed me, flipped me in circles, kept me in the dark and spinning. Don’t breathe now, don’t breathe now, don’t breathe now. Close your eyes. Salt.

And then, finally, the water dragged me, barethighed, over the crushed white shells and dumped me, with hair in my eyes and water in my nose, coughing and sputtering, on to the shore.

IV. You can’t drown on purpose because when you try to take a breath, you won’t. You keep thinking you can wait another second before you have to, and then you can wait another one, and another, until finally, you find the surface. Every breath after that is greedy and gulping and not enough. Your lungs are burning, but you suck down the air because it’s your reward for not letting yourself suck down the water.

Once you know this, you understand that you can make it through anything. If you don’t give in, relief will come.

V. Books with dog-eared pages and torn covers litter the small slivers of floor space between the unmade beds in one of the rooms upstairs. In the summertime, we read what we like.

I sleep in this room, in sandy sheets, with my three sisters. When I’m the last one awake, reading The Great Gatsby by flashlight in the middle of the night, sometimes my thoughts drift to the four boys in the attic, and I take comfort in what can be passed down.

“Can’t repeat the past?” Gatsby cries incredulously. “Why, of course you can!”

VI. When my grandmother was my age, she chopped fudge in the basement of the oldest store on the boardwalk. It wasn’t really the basement, it was just the room under the boardwalk. They used to have to carry trays of the stuff up the stairs, straining their backs so shoobies could rot their teeth.

My grandmother doesn’t remember the thing I told her two minutes ago. And, because of macular degeneration, she can barely see the faces of my sisters and me. But she tells us about this part of her life when we sit together on the porch on summer evenings.

While everything around her starts to go dark, these stories light her up and it relieves us all.

VII. For three summers, I came to work at 4:50 PM and read notes from the owner, written in Catholic schoolboy script, like this one:

The price of sugar has gone up. The price of chocolate has gone up. The price of milk has gone up. The price of cream has gone up

We have two choices. We can either raise our prices, or we can SELL MORE. The theme for this summer is SELL MORE.

Every night, teenage boys twirled cherryvanillachocolatepeanutbutter fudge ribbons high in the air in the store’s front window. It was a spectacle for the customers, something that made them come inside and ask for more. And when they came in (and they always did), I stopped chopping and let them scoop the soft, mushy candy up from my free sample tray with two fingers.

They all said the same thing: “It smells so good.”

VIII. Do you know that smell that hits you, even when your windows are up, when you finally make it here? It finds its way in, fills you, but it doesn’t last because you’re not allowed to stop on a bridge. It’s the one that I roll down the windows for (I want more) and pull deeply through my nose. Do you know the one I mean?

It’s low tide and dead fish and old seaweed and relief and home. It’s just the bay.

It smells so good. This means it’s the beginning.

IX. My dad’s favorite song is “Peace of Mind” by Boston. He listens to it on the two-hour drive to Wildwood, a trip he sometimes makes as many as three times a week, usually with a briefcase and laptop in the backseat.

My dad is a civil attorney with his own practice. He often wakes at five AM to drive back to the city for a court appearance, and usually makes it back to the shore by evening. Rarely does he stay overnight at our home in suburban Philadelphia.

On days when he can stay at the shore, he still gets up at dawn to walk our dog on the beach. When he gets back, he spreads his paperwork out on our kitchen table, with the windows open and the sunshine spilling in, and works by cell phone. When he finishes, he walks the two blocks to the ocean and swims.

Sometimes I don’t know why he does it, why he puts up with the early mornings and the long hours spent in the car and only seeing my mom on the weekends when she is able to join us. Sometimes I don’t understand why he gave up the bigger salaries and greater prestige that came with working for big downtown law firms.

Other times, it’s perfectly clear. It’s about digging his feet into the sand, staying here as much as possible, holding on to the summer before it slips away. It’s about escape and about peace. I get that.

X. My dad had what I have before I had it. Surf Lunch was this little place up the street, where everybody got hotdogs and Cokes and took them back to the beach in the afternoons. It’s where he learned that the beach is best in September. It’s when you can really find the peace that everyone comes down here looking for.

He met his friends there when he was a boy. They have their inside jokes and their rememberthat- times that existed long before I did. I think this may be why I am so tied to this place, because he is.

I have friends here now too, the children of my father’s lifelong friends. When I see them with their winter coats on, it builds up on the inside, the pain that comes with the thought that it’s not yet time to go back.

They’re the only ones I know who ache for this place, where warmth comes from so many other places besides the sun.

XI. My favorite song is “Why Georgia” by John Mayer. On May afternoons, when my shoulders are still clenched and the muscles in my back are still tight, I lie on a towel with my eyes closed and let the hot sand mold itself around me. And then I listen. Sometimes over and over.

I wonder sometimes about the outcome of a still verdictless life. Am I living it right?

XII. My dad didn’t tell me what to do when it is over. I think it might be almost over. Summertime ends the way childhood does: not all at once, but as warmth slips away and cold mornings make it hard to get out of bed. You know it’s over when the pressure builds up as deep as marrow, when a few steps into the wind make your lungs burn.

XIII. My grandmother calls me once a week in the wintertime, from her apartment in South Philadelphia. She can’t see the phone anymore, but when my grandfather dials for her, and she hears my voice, I know she hasn’t forgotten me.

“How are you, honeybunny?” she asks. “How’s school?”

I always tell her that it’s good, even when it’s not, even when I can’t breathe for the cold and the stress, when the pressure of figuring out a life feels like that rip tide that sucked me under the water when I was seven years old.

I don’t know when my next breath will come. “What will you do when you finish?” she asks. She knows it’s coming soon, even though she can’t remember exactly when.

“I’m not really sure yet.”

“Never do something you don’t like. Not even for a minute. You’re young. You have time. You go to Wildwood, that’s what you do. You’re like me. You’re like your father. You go home to the shore.”

XIV. When you come back to the shore, everyone asks, “How was your winter?” It’s like spring and fall don’t count. Anytime you are not here, it’s winter.

The answers to this question are all variations of the same sentiment: that wherever else you were is not here, that you’re happy winter is finally over.

XV. I run to the water like it was a long-lost friend, someone I lost touch with years ago and was not sure if I would ever see again.

I don’t wait for my body to adjust, for the goosebumps on my arms and belly to go away.Instead, I leap, headfirst. The water rushes around me, past my ears, through my hair, and when the sand comes, it washes everything away.

When I stand up, I laugh. I wipe my eyes, and look out at the horizon. It feels closer, even if by just a few inches. The next wave swells up, and hits me square in the stomach when it breaks. It rushes past me, and the current swirls around my ankles. I’m still standing.

XVI. I think Nick Carraway knows what I’m talking about:

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

Maureen Saraco is a 2009 graduate of Saint Joseph’s University. She is one of the Hassle’s Posse

*Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby