Your tender toes never felt so wet but once. Your tender toes will never taste –
but then after all –
but then – excuse me – you never were a very excessive or flagrant girl.
Always well grounded.
Always solid, feet on the ground to use a figure of speech, and your tender toes never felt such desperate licks and kisses but once. There you stood. At the edge of Lake Michigan. Down on the dunes. Up on the beach. You might as well have stood at the ocean's side, what, the way those slow gray waves rolled in along that midnight shore. Sand black and heavy. Air thick with an afghan fog. Wet like the core of a deadhead log. You never thought yourself sensitive to things like these. But the waves were persuasive. Am I right? Everyone has to have a moment. I am right. Everyone has to breathe.
I know by heart how your weekend went. First, nothing new. All recycled. You climbed in the station wagon when Bitty and Betty finished combing their hair. They thought maybe that Britney Spears and that Christina girl would commit suicide and reincarnate themselves in the skin of each twin. And Rodney? Rodney was all dressed up with two diapers: one on his bottom and one on his head. He drooled onto his stubbly chin. These three sat in the back.
Up front sat your mom and dad, not talking. You drew them in class sometimes. Your teachers caught you, smiled, and said "great work, a beautiful drawing." But you knew your parents were easy to draw. Children owned by parents with souls might run into the trouble, what, with the rendering of emotion and all.
You sat in the way back, sideways, seatbelt off, reading the finest of R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike because they built the range of depths and drains you plumbed back then. Your family screamed at each other but left you alone and you thanked God and read on in silence like your sweet Aunt Maggie taught you.
I-69 roped down, languid around Lansing, hooked into the cord of I-94 which ran the rim of Indiana and looped on into Chicago. But halfway down the coast, your parents left the expressway and drove to the Warren Dunes State Park. They paid five dollars so you could all set up a tent on the empty and apocalyptic parking lot on the beach. When the engine shut off even Bitty and Betty stopped talking, worn out from their hours of shouting.
"Will there be rats?" you asked.