The beginning of the ocean

An old black pickup moves west on Sunrise highway. Some­thing is loose in the bed, and it clanks loudly as the pickup races by. My parents ride in silence. He drives, she reads the pullout section of last week’s Sunday paper. I occupy the seat of honor—perched between my fathers legs, just behind the steering wheel and just before his stomach and chest. I hold his beer. I’m not supposed to let it spill, and I stare nervously at the sloshing liquid and will it to settle down. My gaze is so focused that when my father occasionally reaches for the beer, his huge, black-haired white hand seems like an intruder, and he has to smack my hands away when I cling too tightly. I am five years old.

Something’s gone wrong. I don’t understand yet, but people are talking about how summer refuses to end. It’s November, but the air is still hot, and filled with the scent of overripe citrus. Hot dog vendors line the highway. They sit outside their vans, fanning themselves with wilted newspapers. No­body knows what to do. At the beach, hurricane fencing borders the sand, but that’s the only human element defining it. No beach chairs, no gaudy umbrellas, no people. I walk a few steps away from my parents and turn around and around, feeling, for the first time, how big it all is. I’m not sure whether that should frighten or excite me, and I stand on my tiptoes in the sand and look to see how they’re taking it. My mother, shading her eyes from the world with her palm, says, “It’s enough to make a body do things.” My father just says a deserted beach is like being in your own home, and he drops his pants and puts on his swimsuit without even looking around. My mother opens her mouth again, but then she closes it without speaking.

Instead she snaps a sheet in the air, and white flashes: not just the sheet, but my mother’s belly, and her swimsuit, and my father’s butt. Then colors swirl in, mostly reds: my mother’s hair, my father’s chest and arms. He works construction these days, his sunburn comes from working outside without a shirt; my mother’s hair color comes from a bottle. My suit’s red too, from Kmart. It’s pale now, almost pink, but as soon as I splash into the water the color deepens, as if the water had refreshed the dye in the fabric.

It’s my fathers idea that we nap after we’ve been in the water for a while. “Naptime” is all he says, and then he sprawls on the middle of the blanket. Sighing, my mother sinks down to one side of him; she hasn’t swum but only waded in ankle-deep, still reading her magazine and glancing up occasionally to look at me. I lie on the blanket, on the other side of my father. He sighs now. It’s different from my mother’s sigh, contented. It registers his sense of balance: this is what a family looks like. I imagine I’m in an airplane overhead: looking down, I see the big mound of my father in the middle. The pale heap of my mother is on his right side, face and hair covered by a magazine. The small pile of me is on his left. I’m not as big as my mother yet, but my skin is tanned and my suit is wet and dark red, so I show up better on the sheet.

I fall asleep quickly in the hot November sun, and at first I think the ocean invades my dreams, that high tide washes over my mind. But as I wake up gradually I realize it isn’t the ocean I hear, it’s loud breathing, and as I wake up more I realize that it’s not mine but my father’s. I open my eyes and without moving my head I can see his stomach, falling until ribs show, rising until it seems like a pregnant woman’s. I try to sit up then, but without turning my father puts his left hand out and catches me in the stomach and pushes me back before I get halfway up. But I’m able to see over his stomach for a second, and in that second I see my father’s other hand low on my mothers abdomen, and I see that the bottom of her swimsuit is pushed down as well.

After that I lie with my father’s hand heavy on my stomach. I stare straight up and try to hear just the ocean, which is so loud, so clear with no people around. Still, I can’t help but hear my father’s breathing, and after a while I notice my mother’s too, heavy like his, but faster, and—though I try not to—I can’t help but picture her stomach fluttering under his right hand. His left hand claws my skin, but I know I have to stay quiet, so I bite my lip. I look down only once, and when I do I think I see my mothers fist pounding the base of my father’s stomach, but just barely—you know how it is when you look at the sun for too long—and I immediately look up, but the sun burns my eyes and I close them.

Then I fall asleep again, and this time the water does invade my dreams. I’m swimming, diving down, looking for the be­ginning of the ocean, but soon I realize I’ve gone too far, I have to head for the surface or I’ll run out of air. So I start swimming up, using my arms and legs, but even though the sun reflects off the water’s surface just above me, I can’t reach it, it seems to retreat from me. And just when it seems there isn’t any air left in my lungs, that I will drown, my eyes open and I feel my father’s hand pressing down so hard on my stomach that I can’t breathe. Then, just as I start squirming, my father’s hand flies up and he groans loudly. And I want to cry out too, but all I can do is cry in, as I suck, vainly, at all the air that his hand has forced out of me; and then, as I hear the sound of labored breathing coming from the far side of his body, something comes to me from my dream, some half-human shape crawls out of the dark water, and I realize that my father has been drowning my mother as well.