Sebastian sat in the sand with his legs bent at the knees and his arms wrapped tightly around them. A candy-can colored umbrella shaking in the wind covered him from the sun’s fierce rays. Nevertheless he put on some suntan lotion. He rested on a towel. It was midafternoon and the tide was already coming in, but the waves did not reach him yet. Still, they were coming ever closer as the day wore on. He was listening to music on his headphones, attached to a discman, also sitting on his towel.
He loved to sit and watch the waves, a kind of meditation for him. He stared at the horizon and saw a few boats, mostly sail boats, sitting on the water near the horizon.
One of his two daughters, Anna, and the oldest at 15, snuck up behind him and put her hands over his eyes.
“Let’s see now,” Sebastian said. “I would say you might be Hazel,” his other daughter and youngest at 12. “No. Perhaps Carlo,” his son, 14. “No again, this could only be Anna, who likes to play silly children’s games,” he said.
Anna said, “Dad, you knew it was me from the start. You are just…” and she paused to change the word to “BSing.” She felt some drops of water on the palm side of her hands, from Sebastian’s face, and she figured the wind was responsible, putting some droplets on her dad’s face.
He tried to playfully grab her by putting his arms around to his back, but Anna, used to his ploys, stepped back before he could capture her.
“You can’t catch me. I’m faster and younger.”
“Thanks for that info,” Sebastian replied, feigning insult when Anna sat on the right, next to him.
He then looked to his left, and wiped the tears from his face.
When he looked forward again, Anna noticed his eyes were red, as if he’d been crying.
“Did you get sand in your eyes and rubbed too hard?” she said.
Sebastian took off his headphones, but he’d heard the question. “I wish, princess, I wish.”
The Samuels family took a vacation to Block Island for the first time ever, against the wishes of Sebastian. He had no excuse beyond complaining that only bikes are allowed on most roads on the small island. He would have to leave the car near the ferry station in a parking lot.
“It’s pretty and no cars,” said his wife of twenty years. I know why you don’t want to go. That’s ancient history now,” she’d say to him when they were alone. “But the kids really want to.”
He finally relented but what he had been afraid of began to hit him.
“Dad, you were crying.”
“Oh, that’s what it was, eh?”
“What was? Anna said. “Why?”
“Nothing, believe or not, I’ve been here before. Once. Needless to say, I did not have a good time. In fact, I had the worst time of my life, and many years later it still is.”
They were both silent for a few minutes. The waves were now tickling Sebastian’s feet, so they both stood up and moved the whole bivouac back a few feet in the sand.
Anna was wise beyond her years. “Some old girlfriend, huh?”
“More than a girlfriend before we got here, but ultimately less, much less. I found out the hard way.” Sebastian said, still staring forward.
“That’s what the drops on my hands were,” Anna said as a half question, half statement.
Again, there were a few moments of quiet.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Geez, you sound just like my shrink.” Sebastian said, laughing at the waves.
Anna ignored that. “Well, do you?”
Sebastian didn’t reply.
“Funny,” he said, “how I pay Dr. Schecter $200 for 50 minutes of therapy–from which I get very little solace–when I could get it for free from my very own daughter.”
“What makes you think I would not charge you? I still want a Vespa.” Anna said with a big smile on her face.
Now they both laughed and Sebastian kissed the girl’s forehead. “Take that up with your mom,” he said, full well knowing she’d put the kibosh on it, just as he would. “Fact is I don’t want to bore you.”
“You want to tell me, dad, come on. Out with it. My first session is free. No Vespa.”
Sebastian loved his first born, in some ways more that the other two. Anna was first and she is just like her mom, Pippen. Shy but sharp, very sharp. Shooting for Stanford in a couple of years.
“Well, Doc,” Sebastian said mock seriously. “I just heard a song on my portable here,” and he lifted the discman, “It’s just out, called, ‘Somebody That I Used to Know,” by Goyte and
Kimbra. Truth is it really made me cry.”
“Why?”
“First, I think the song is good. Second, what the song is about. It really hurts bad when someone you thought loved you then just completely cuts you out of her life, as if you don’t matter anymore. Like you’re just trash. And the same woman did this to me twice to me, the second time right here. Might even be the same house we are renting. I don’t remember the house, and it doesn’t matter.
“Tears were pouring out of me while I listened to it, as was the pain.” Sebastian said to the ocean. “And this happened a long time ago, before you were born, before I met your mom. Still hurts and that song touched me deeply. Brought up some memories, bad ones, that I haven’t thought about or experienced in a while.”
“Why, dad? Come on. It makes me cry, too, dad, and I’ve never had a real boyfriend, just boy friends.”
“Hearing that song makes me think about a former girlfriend of mine, more than a quarter century ago—did I just say more than a quarter century?–ago in 1984. Twelve years before you were born. God, I’m old.”
“Tell me, please,” his daughter pleaded.
He looked at Anna’s face, a child he loved so much and one he wanted to protect from all of life’s problems, something he knew he could not do. But she was already 15 and would soon bring home a boy. She needs to learn that people who love you, or say they love you, can hurt you the most.
“This song hits hardest, I think, if you know what he’s talking about and experienced it for yourself. You don’t have to keep it a secret from Mom. She knows about it. Told her before we tied the knot.”
Anna’s shoulder lowered, and she looked disappointed. “What about Carlo and Hazel?
“They don’t know so you can keep it from them,” Sebastian said.
That seemed to mollify her and even buck her up. Anna smiled and lay her head against his right shoulder.
“Ok, Dad. Go ahead.”
“Way back in 1984, I was seeing a woman, hmmm, let’s call her June. I’d met her at work that year and we hit it off. It was a good relationship, I thought. I was 25 and so was she. In the end, maybe that was the problem.”
“And,” Anna said. “Leave that to me, as you professional helper.”
Sebastian looked at his oldest with wide brown eyes open.
“I was of the opinion that this relationship was it, it was time, the girl I would marry.”
“Dad, if you had done that I wouldn’t be here!”
Sebastian loved that about Anna. She was of the age when she seemed an adult, yet every so often still a child.
“That’s right, Anna. So even though it makes me sad, having you makes me very happy.” He turned his head to her and silently thanked the gods he did not marry June.
“Well?”
“We saw each other exclusively that whole year of 1984. I thought we were a successful couple.”
Sebastian went quiet again. His eyes were red. He stared out at the ocean lost in a previous time. “I admit she was a strange girl, but in a good way. At least at first. Maybe eccentric is the right word.
“Truth is, she turned into—and I hate to use this term—a kamikaze girl.”
“Do you even know what that means, Dad? It’s misogynist.”
“Yes, I know, but you can’t erase the idea of someone who sometimes cries unexpectedly at the most unserious of things, and acts the age of a teenager, even though she is 25. Maybe it was her weight, a little overweight, which she was touchy about. She was buxom and I loved that about her. Never bothered me. Never ever did I even allude to it directly or indirectly. Never bought her clothes for that reason.
“I even brought her to meet my mom, who promptly put a quiet hate on her because the pecan pie June had made—June was from the South—for the occasion was “too fucking sweet, Seb.’”
June took me to meet her parents in Florida. They were very Catholic and we had to sleep in separate rooms, even though everyone knew what was going on. June was not very religious.”
Sebastian looked over at Anna and she seemed entirely rapt in the story.
“Anyway, I blame my own lack of religiosity on my twelve years of Catholic school.
“She broke it off suddenly, at the end of the year. I’d be lying if I said I was very upset. It hurt, sure, but it was the first of two, and I never understood why. She just said she thought we weren’t compatible, in the end. The second one was a suprise, and a nasty one.”
Anna showed some anger at this. “Well, I know you are not perfect but like what was her excuse for this?”
“Said she had to throw her life into her music and won’t give up time to a relationship when music came first….Anyway, that’s just it. I wasn’t a perfect match for her. She was looking for perfection, which is a sign a person is not an adult. She said a lot of stupid things and most were lies. I wasn’t a serious person. I wouldn’t understand her commitment to music. I was just a regular guy. She needed a fellow artist who would understand her strong commitment to music, not me.”
“Sounds pretty bad, right?” Sebastion said. “Fine, focus on music. See, she was into ‘sound sculpture’ when it was new. It was computer music. She was the sorcerer’s apprentice to a famous sound sculptor artist named Max something or other. Sounded German. Don’t remember his real last name, but he did sound “sculptures” for plazas, airports, stadiums, that kind of stuff. I would meet her at the studio every Friday night after work and wait until she finished working with Max. All I ever saw was that she was getting him tons of coffee. I won’t say she was sleeping with Max. If I did then you would call me…”
“A misogynist,” Anna said, half laughing.
Sebastian stood up for a moment.
“Where you going, dad?”
“Just exercising my legs.”
Anna could see more tears. Maybe he stood up to take his face further from his daughter.
Sebastian wiped his face with the back of his hand.
“What’s this all got to do with beautiful Block Island?”
“She was macrobiotic, too,” Sebastian said, not looking at his daughter but to the sea.
“So?”
“She turned seriously macrobiotic about halfway into our relationship. It was a story just to be able to eat meals with her. No artificial stuff. No meat, in general, nothing that doesn’t grow in your region. So no oranges, no kiwis, etcetera. I think she thought it would help her lose weight. But it didn’t. I still cringe when I hear the words ‘brown rice.’”
“When I found out the biggest exponent of this diet was a guy who chain-smoked and said he could do so without fear of cancer because his macrobiotic diet was a shield against cancer. Then I began to think that maybe June wasn’t very bright, or at least as bright as I thought.”
Sebastian sat down again next to Anna.
“What was the guy’s name, again?” she asked.
He didn’t respond. He really wanted to forget. The waves tickled his feet. They were moving closer again.
Anna rest her head against his right shoulder again. There were times when he felt that a father’s best feeling was when his children rested their heads against his shoulder. Something primitive and pup like about it.
“Oh, yeah. Michio Kushi. And between the noise she called music and the foolish diet she chose…well, let’s say I wasn’t deeply unhappy about the break up. I thought I loved her, but the love I have for your mother, who is a savage, is light years away from my feelings at 25 for June. Then I had to move out of our apartment.”
“You keep referring to Mom’s theatrical name, Sidney Savage. You know perfectly well that is not her name.”
“Another bonus to the break up, though it hurt, was that as a single guy I was able to land a rent controlled roomate situation in Manhattan. On my salary as a nouveau reporter was not adequate for getting an apartment in the city on my own.” Sebastian paused. “I think I was pretty cool back then. Then the walls caved in.”
“Dad,” Anna said looking at him. “I think maybe you are exaggerating.”
“Just what Dr. Schecter would say. You a well paid career awaiting you. I was just using a figure of speech to describe what happened to my soul, my psyche, my pride in myself as a relatively smart and likable person.
“Then, she calls me back in mid-1985, out of the blue. How she got my number is unknown to me but probably from one of my stupider friends, thinking it would be good for me to see her again. June says she’s sorry and it was all her fault. She didn’t know how good she had it. Blah, blah, blah, let’s get together.
“At first, I was resistant. Not that stupid. But she wore me down, and eventually after a few calls I gave in, making my friends and her happy. But not me.”
“You did give in,” Anna said. It was a lesson in the battle of the sexes for her.
“We began dating again. What a fool I was.”
“Dad, keep out the opinions and just stick to the story facts.
“O.K., doc.”
“I’ve seen boys do stupid things just to get a date with a popular girl,”
“I don’t have to explain the birds and the bees to you.”
“Mom already did.”
“Right,” Sebastion said. “My relationship with June was like the Catholic church and homosexuals.”
“What?”
“You know from religion classes that you are forced to sit through at St. Raymond’s Academy that God created gay people the way they are, so the Church says that the ‘state of gayness,’ so to speak, is not a sin, but the behavior is. Hence, love the homosexual but not the act. Pretty cute, hah?”
“Yes, I got the message,” she said.
“In the same way, I loved June but not her behavior.”
“Come on, Dad. You made this whole thing up as a lesson plan for me.”
“It is a lesson but I didn’t make this up. I wish I had. I wish I had never met June. But I learned from it. I want my mistakes to help you avoid similar ones.”
In 1986, I let June talk me into moving to Brooklyn with her, long before kids were hot about the borough of trees. I had landed a roomate situation with a penthouse so I was against it but acquiesed. It was so unpopular a place to live that if you got into a cab and said Brooklyn, the cabbie would throw you out. ‘How am I supposed to get a fare back,’ was the common refrain, believe or not.”
“What?” Anna’s mouth dropped open.
“See things you learn from your old Dad,”
“To return to Block Island. June, the bitch, I mean her behavior, says let’s go to Block Island that summer. I’d never been and thought why not, just a couple hours away and nice ferry ride. I go, not knowing her evil plan. We get there in my car, I park it at the ferry station, and the very day we arrive she tells me she wants to end the relationship. Again.”
“What,” Anna says with her mouth falling open. “What a bitch?”
“Now who opinionating? Anyway, you got it. I was both hurt and found it very darkly funny that I got caught in this bitch’s web twice. Losing her the first time was bad enough, but falling for her again was simply too much to bare. Like, I said, it hurt bad. So much so that when I’m sitting here on Block Island over two decades later, I heard that touching song, and I remember that the second time was truly foolish on my part.
“June was influenced by an old friend, a Brit and self-described cow. I’d met her on a trip we took to London in the summer of 1984. After June moved out of our apartment in Brooklyn, I found these notes all over her office in the apartment. All came from the cow whose name escapes me. ‘Leave him. He’s a drag on your ambitions. He’s not very talented and pretty ordinary. Just leave him.’ I also got to keep her cat since she was moving to an apartment where pets were not allowed.
Anna said, “Maybe you are blocking out her name.”
“Yeah, obvious pun but nice, doc. And so my dear one, this is why I have always nixed family trips to Block Island. Bad juju here.”
“Dad, we’ll make new and better memories. You will forget her name. The bitch will be blotted out!”
“Would that it worked so easy, Anna. I still look her up on the internet every once in a while. She’s fatter than ever. I’m embarrased to say I’m happy about that.”
“We will. You’ll see, Dad.”
It was quiet again for a few minutes, with both staring at the Atlantic. Anna gave her Dad a kiss on the right cheek. There were tears in his eyes. They both could hear “Someone I used to know” on Sebastians headphones, which he’d lain on the beach towel
“Dad, come on. You are lucky. Mom is much nicer than that.”
“You are right there. Maybe that’s why I’m crying. Perhaps from happiness? I know that I’m a lucky man. I dodged a big bullet.”
“Where is this bitch now, Dad?”
“Don’t know for certain. Been a long time and we haven’t ever contacted each other. I hear she followed Max to Seattle and now she’s working for Microsoft, if her Facebook page is to be believed. She’s some kind of weight expert there.” Sebastian began to laugh hard, so hard that he started coughing. “Max promptly dumped her after they arrived. I heard. I heard.”
“Dad, your crying and laughing could be cathartic. I prescribe listening to that song every day for the next month. It will cure you.”
“Little girl, she really hurt me. Funny, how that works. I still have the scars. I was so naive.” The a wide smile appeared on Sebastian’s face. Then he put his arms around his knees again. Anna lay her head against his shoulder.
Then came a loud voice from the house on the beach that the family had rented.
“Come on in for some snacks,” Pippa shouted.
Sebastian leaped up. “The savage calls to us. First one back gets control of the TV tonight. They both raced up the beach and Anna won.