Becca at the Beach

 

The blue water in front of Becca sparkled in the late morning heat. She walked to the edge of the beach, took off her sandals, threw a tote bag down in front of her and shook an old Mexican wool blanket onto the sand. Two scrub oak trees floated on a hill in the sand to their left. Lee walked up behind her, balancing their six-month-old daughter, Analise, a small cooler, a diaper bag, and the leash of their dog, struggling to hold onto one without letting go of everything else.

Mountains circled them, the shaved slopes of Snowbasin Resort to the left. A ridge of green to the right stretching toward the small town of Eden, Powder Mountain. The winter’s snow was fully melted—though due to return any day now—but for today at least, green and blue replaced a landscape of white and grey.

Summer. Supposedly a happy time.

The small mountain town of Huntsville sat behind them, some thirty miles east of Ogden in the northern part of Utah. This beach wasn’t one you’d find in Hawai’i or even California, but it was nice all the same. The day was warm, now eighty-five degrees or so, but at least well below the hundred mark, where it had hovered for the last few months pretty much everywhere in the Southwest, sometimes climbing into the 120s. But, perhaps most importantly, they could finally see the sun and the blue, though somewhat hazy, skies.

People lounged in brightly colored inner tubes, paddling the water with their fingertips, seemingly oblivious to whatever disaster was happening out farther west and north. It was surreal, how so many people could still deny what was happening.

Now at the beach, Becca slung the bag she was carrying atop the blanket. Lee placed Analise on top of it and unclipped the leash from their dog, Denali—a sweet and cuddly, if slightly quirky, black Lab–pit bull mix—shaking with excitement. Analise was wearing the blue onesie with a buffalo on it they’d gotten from Yellowstone National Park last summer. Becca wore a beanie, slightly torn black jeans, and a black bomber jacket padded with synthetic down, bought when she was a vegan and abstained from all animal products including those found in clothes. Lee wore a five-panel hat, his favorite blue flannel, Patagonia shorts, and approach shoes.

“Watch the baby!” Lee shouted. “I’m going in!”

Denali sprinted for the water alongside him. Analise reached for whatever was in front of her—in this case, a water bottle and the handle of the cooler. She was teething and wanted to put everything in her mouth.

Becca observed that, for the most part, Analise was so happy in the mornings. This new creature that had grown inside her and sucked her dry and demanded everything of her over the last fifteen months, and yet, whose very being radiated a love and peace Becca did not know how to return. Everyone told her this motherly instinct would kick in. It hadn’t come.

Analise’s constant smiling made her depression worse. She was such a happy baby. Calm, peaceful. Barely cried. Slept well. Analise had small chubby legs, clear-grey eyes the color of smoke and granite, and a thick scoop of brown hair dolloped atop her smooth, pale skull like chocolate gelato. She was becoming more and more engaged every day. How could they have made something so beautiful? And how could she not care?

She sat down in the camp chair. Lee’s full name was written in sharpie on it: Lehi Smith. Becca almost always forgot that Lee was short for Lehi because he never admitted to such claims and had even begun the process of officially changing his name. Lee was even thinking of changing it back to a more traditional Colombian name, the country his mother was from.

Becca and Lee had dated in high school, back when he was a Mormon and she an Evangelical Christian, each thinking they could convert the other. Ten years later they ran into each other at a Pie and Beer party in Salt Lake on Pioneer Day. Becca had lived in Seattle and DC, and Lee had gotten married but was recently divorced. They’d hit it off and began dating. Before either Lee or Becca could tell what it meant, Becca had gotten pregnant. They couldn’t get rid of it—her, Becca guessed she should say. Perhaps old religious philosophies die hard. And now here they were. And Becca wasn’t sure how long she could keep up the charade of caring mother and loving wife. She felt the rage and exasperation bubbling deep within her.

Analise performed a few pulsing kicks on her back before rolling over onto her stomach. Becca let her squirm there for a few seconds before flipping her back over. There was still milk vomit on Becca’s shirt from earlier this morning. Now, in the sun, the smell was intensifying. Analise had spit up formula and drool and the combined consistency was like curdled milk, the smell something stale and putrid.

Becca crossed her hands over her chest to take off her shirt. She began pulling up the shirt but the stretch marks across the bottom of her stomach stopped her. She couldn’t believe this tiny alien-creature that had grown inside of her for nine months—lying dormant until the right time, expanding her body, bursting her vagina, then discharging out her body—was the cute being sitting on the beach next to her.

She’d delivered Analise all-natural style. A HypnoBirth in a home pool with a doula and a midwife next to her. She bled. A lot. And for weeks after. “Giving birth is like a tiny death,” her midwife had said to her. “A tiny death with a tiny resurrection.”

After birth, of course, came the latching. The word sounded medieval. Latching. Something that Becca didn’t even know you had to teach a baby how to do. Then the breastfeeding. Neither intuitive nor natural in the slightest. How had someone failed to mention to her it would be like razor blades slicing your nipples? Then the pumping. It had all just recently stopped. Now she fed Analise a combination of breastmilk, some pureed vegetables, and a scientific formula of nutrition that scientists had cooked up in a sterile, experimental lab somewhere and she didn’t give one flying fuck. Another reason why, for the most part, she steered clear away from other mothers when it came to the discussion of anything baby related. The judgment. “Fed is best,” though. That’s what the doctors had told her.

Becca pulled her shirt back down. She wasn’t ready for the world to see her like this. Analise stared up at her, smiling, pulsing her chubby legs. Her eyes like blackberries, lips like Indian Paintbrush.

Becca felt contempt for Lee as he waded into the water. Lee undid his belt, pulled his shirt off, tightened his Chacos, and walked into the water. Normally she might think of how good looking he was. How he was tall, lean, focused. Firm but soft. Like an expensive pillow. An ex-Mormon who was now, at least philosophically, an incognito Latin American revolucionario in the tradition of Ché, Bolívar, and the Zapotecs. Or so Becca liked to think.

But she didn’t think of these things. She only thought of how he had gone in the water first, barely even bothering to ask her if perhaps she might want to go in first.

Becca placed Analise on her lap, a loopy smile across Analise’s face, and began applying sunscreen to her head and face. The loopy smiled faded into a frown and Analise began to wail.

“Shhh, it’ll be over really quick, I promise.”

Why even apply sunscreen when there were wildfires and a Supervolcano about to explode? Was she starting to buy into Lee’s paranoia?

Yet Becca had no room for any ecological or apocalyptic thinking in her mind. She could think only of her unattractive body. Her recently exploded vagina. Her engorged breasts and painful nipples. How her stretched stomach hung below her belly like a fanny pack made by a serial killer with a skin fetish. All this for an accident she and Lee never meant to have.

God, childbirth was a motherfucker.

For the last six months, since Analise was born, Becca could keep nothing straight. Dreams melted into reality. Time slipped. She had never felt more in, or out of, touch with her body.

Becca watched Lee splash water on his body, shuffling slowly into the cold water with a half-smile-half-grimace on his face. His tattoos and brown skin glistened in the yellow sun reflecting off the bright-blue water. Beads of water then trickled from his hair—shoulder length, black, tied behind his head. Becca’s skin was like heavily creamed coffee at best, or at worst, the color of rotten milk, slightly brownish and lumpy. The rest of her family had skin like strawberry milk. White, pale, red. Prone to get even redder and paler after exposure to small amounts of sun or bright light. Becca’s hair was a knotted mess of brown and yellow, like the hills in August—dry, stringy, tangled (almost dreaded), like bundles of unkempt mountain grass.

Analise began to root and Becca reluctantly pulled out a bottle. Becca really loved Lee, and he really loved her; she knew this much to be true. But sometimes that didn’t make marriage any easier. Especially not coupled with the facts of the last year—her father’s death and an unexpected pregnancy. They were trying to make it work. They really were. It didn’t help that their relationship conversations now consisted entirely of baby talk and Lee’s occasional apocalyptic rants.

Now Lee was swimming. He did a few breaststrokes before floating on his back. Denali was swimming in the water near him with a large stick in its mouth.

Becca cracked open a can of beer and took a large sip, nearly downing the entire thing. God, she had missed beer. She swore to herself she would never go without drinking beer again. Becca then unscrewed the lid of the orange and white cylindrical prescription bottle and popped one of the white pills on the top of her pink tongue, swallowing with a swig from her water bottle. The prescription bottle stated, in bold letters: “DO NOT DRINK ALCOHOL WHILE ON THIS MEDICATION.” It made her slightly dizzy, but it was better than the two days she’d spent zoned out on the couch after giving birth to Analise. Since then everyone around her was now worried about her “tenuous” state of mind.

Becca stared at Analise. Sometimes she felt like she could stare at Analise for hours. Watch her tiny nose, eyebrows, lips, and forehead squirm in a myriad of expressions—frowns, smiles, doubt, confusion, peace, satiation—her eyes scanning the surroundings around them. Watch her tiny hands and fingers and toes move and stretch. Other times, when Analise started to cry or melt, she would feel a tightening in her chest and stomach and her heart would begin to race. No, she would think, please no. Please shut up. Please just be happy.

Anxiety would descend upon her. Evil thoughts hovering over her shoulder like a devil. She wished she could talk to her dad.

Lee got out of the water and walked toward her. A large cottonwood swayed in the wind, sweeping some dry green leaves across the shore.

“Drinking already?” he asked her with a quick smile.

“It’s three-two,” she said and shrugged. “Well, four percent now actually, I guess.”

“You know there’s no drinking on these beaches, right?”

Becca shrugged again and reached out her hand to Lee. He took it and sat down, cracking open a bottle of cold brew coffee. The two of them looked out at the water in front of them.

“This is nice,” said Becca, after a while. Lee nodded.

“We should do this more often,” he said. “Too bad it took a natural disaster for us to get some space.”

Analise clambered around the blanket in front of them, clapping her hands. Becca pulled out some apple slices, cheddar cheese, Wheat Thins, and salami. A white bottle for Analise. Denali swam. She wished she had a bottle of something else to sip on for herself, but she knew that Lee would not look kindly on such things so early in the day, so 4.1% alcohol content beer it was. Lee cut a ring of salami with his pocketknife, pulled the strip of white casing off, and popped the quarter-sized piece into his mouth.

“What are you thinking about?” Lee asked her.

“My dad, actually.”

Lee placed a slice of cheese and salami in between two crackers and handed it to Becca. “What about?”

“I don’t know. For some reason I can only remember the fights we had. Even though they were few and far between. I knew he’d be angry when I told him about the pregnancy. But I didn’t expect the same sort of anger when I told him we were getting married.”

Becca was now balancing Analise on her knee.

“He was just scared,” Lee said. “My dad wasn’t exactly stoked on the idea either.”

“At least your dad didn’t threaten to not come to the wedding if we didn’t have it in his church.”

Becca gave the bottle to Analise.

“Actually . . . he did,” said Lee.

“What?

“Yeah.”

“You never told me that!”

“I didn’t want to upset you at the time.”

“You should have told me.”

Becca took her eyes off Analise and Lee and fixed them upon the opposite shore.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“Nothing much, he just really emphasized how disappointed he was that we couldn’t get married in the Temple. And sort of implied—or questioned, in his passive–aggressive way—that he wasn’t sure if I was making the right decision.”

Becca pursed her lips and nodded. She didn’t want to get into it this early at the beach—they had been here what, barely a half an hour? She was disappointed Lee hadn’t mentioned this before. But Becca knew she had not been the most communicative person in their marriage either.

Analise began to squirm and crawled out of Becca’s lap. Lee picked her up. The two of them returned to their silence.

It was like Lee failed to include her in half of his life! Of course, Lee would never admit this; he would always swear he did tell her or that it was, for some reason, for her protection if he didn’t.

“Oooh! That’s rank.” Lee made a face.

“What?”

He pointed to Analise’s bottom and grimaced.

“Your turn,” Becca said and got up off the blanket, not wanting to deal with the changing of Analise’s diaper in the heat and the sun and the sand, her shirt still covered in milk vomit. “Make sure you wipe her well.”

“What? When have I not?”

“Just make sure you get the inside of her cheeks, otherwise she gets a rash.”

Lee shook his head at her. Becca turned toward the water.

“And front to back, remember. Front to back!”

“That was one time! At three in the morning!” Lee shouted as she walked away.

Becca walked into the reservoir up to her knees before stopping. She placed her hands in the water and brought them up to splash her face. The water warmed her at this shallow depth. Everything had a calming effect. The water, the sound of splashing, families laughing, boats in the distance, the circle of mountains, and yellow and purple wildflowers. She turned to look behind her. Lee and Analise were framed by the dying scrub oak trees, behind them a hill of sandy grass and weeds.

She wondered for a moment how she had arrived at this place (not that it was some profound mystery). She had made choices and dealt with them as an adult. But she couldn’t get rid of the fear and doubt in her mind about whether she had made the wrong decision: What if she had moved to New York instead, like she’d always planned? What if she had moved to Los Angeles and pursued acting? Hooked up with some cute barista who worked at the coffee shop down the street? What if her dad were still alive? What if they had used birth control?

These flurries of thoughts tumbled over Becca, day and night. They seemed to intensify in moments of conflict or distress, like this one here, as both an escape and a coping mechanism, as if proliferated by anyone’s suggestion, especially Lee’s, to stop thinking about them.

The soothing nature of the lake began to disintegrate in front of her as these thoughts washed over. It produced a jarring effect. As if her mind was leaking out strains of darkness into the beauty, as oil into water. She didn’t know how to reconcile the two. She never did. Becca walked deeper into the reservoir and then dove into the water, with her swimsuit bottoms and her milk-vomit shirt, and her mind emptied, instantly. The cold water stole the air from her lungs and she could think of nothing else. Not of marriage, family, religion, even Analise. The water froze her mind and, however briefly, purified her.