Fire Island — Zandy Hartig

I’m certain my mom pushed the idea of spending our summers in Fire Island on my dad. He was not a beach person. He hated the feel of sand on his feet. I’m not sure I ever saw him swim. He’d spend ten excruciating minutes slathering sunscreen on the front of his body and legs, make our mom rub it into his back and sit miserably for five minutes until he and his floppy hat trudged over to the water. He’d gingerly wade in mid-calf, scoop the Atlantic Ocean into his cupped hands and pat it, grimacing, on his knees and chest. He’d never submerge his head. Ever.

My dad was vain about his hair. There wasn’t all that much of it and he spent a significant amount of his time worrying about it. He’d count how many black hairs were in the sink every morning and give us an unsolicited report on their demise. He’d slick his hair back and poof it up to make it look thicker and fuller. My sister and I (and probably my mom) weren’t allowed to touch it. He always had a comb in his shirt pocket at the ready. In the mid-seventies he even splurged for hair-plugs. The procedure was fairly crude at that time and the recovery was arduous and painful. He wore a bandage like a mummy the first few days back from the doctor’s office and when my mom unwrapped him, the top of his head looked like pepperoni pizza. My sister and I were revolted but fascinated. When the plugs finally healed his hair looked exactly the same.

***

Five minutes after touching the salt water, my dad was done. He’d throw on his blue button down shirt, pick up his book and hop over the burning hot sand to the boardwalk where he’d rinse his feet with a hose so he could slip on his shoes and get back to our house as soon as humanly possible. Although he was distraught that we had no air-conditioning.

On the contrary, my mom became her full, happy self at the beach. She would rub Bain de Soleil into her skin and read her book, smoking exactly one Gitane. She threw herself under the crest of the waves and when she was just past them, floated on her back or swam in an unorthodox crawl. She had spent many happy summer holidays on the French coast as a girl, and she taught me and my sister to love the ocean too, one of the best gifts she could have given us.

I also feel whole when I’m by the sea. It both calms and excites me, looking at the line where the sky meets the water, imagining another woman who maybe looks like me but who has a completely different life on the other side of the ocean. Maybe she’s wondering about me too.

***

My mom discovered Fire Island through her friend, Phyllis. Phyllis had two sons who had been in the same playgroup as Meg and me. She and my mom had seen a spark in each other and frequently went out for coffee and talked while their kids, as her son, my friend Tommy Dog said, “ran toy cars through paint, or whatever.” Phyllis was quirky and sophisticated. On the surface, ethereal and fluttery, but underneath, smart, determined and savvy. Petite, with dark ringlets often peeking out from under a big hat, red lips and kohled eyes, she had a sense for what was hot. She created an iconic Pop Art ‘80s New York company called “Think Big,” which blew up common everyday objects like yellow pencils and tennis balls to giant sculptural size. John McEnroe posed with the tennis ball in a Think Big’s print ad. The objects were whimsical, fun, eye-catching and strangely moving seeing them from that different, larger perspective. Phyllis brought out my mom’s adventurous and rebellious side. She encouraged Mom to be up for anything. She was warm, real and non-judgmental, and she made my mom open up in ways that might not come naturally to her polite, British self.

Fire Island was the place to vacation in the 70s. We rented in Dunewood, a sleepy town where many other of our fellow Rodeph Sholom parents stayed. If you were a comfortably-off, Liberal, Upper West Sider, Fire Island was where you went for the summer. Or if you were gay, but that was on the other, less sedate side of the island, “The Pines.” Fire Island is only nine miles long, but the two groups were good at sharing. As my sister, Meg, and I were building what we called “drip-drop” sandcastles —we’d build a normal castle first and then take wet sand in a bucket and drip over it to give our structure an old, melted look, like mini Gaudi's—men walking in couples would pass us in tiny bathing suits completely unlike the unremarkable one our dad would wear. Meg and I had a sense of what being gay was even though no one had explained it to us. We were slightly curious but not shocked. Their foreignness merited only a glance up, no stares.

***

My dad had voice-over auditions during the week and came out reluctantly on the weekends. He made a good living. City life wasn’t as expensive back then, but paying for two girls in private school, a two bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive and a month-long rental on Fire Island wasn’t cheap. Since there was no air-conditioning and no movie theaters (with air-conditioning), he had to look for obsessions where he could find them. His was poison ivy. With poison ivy, he was Van Helsing if Van Helsing had run away screaming from Dracula instead of driving a stake through his heart.

To be fair, poison ivy and mosquitoes were two of the Fire Island secular Jews’ greatest tormentors. Nazi shrubs and insects, feasting voraciously on our bodies.

We had pocket-sized books about birds and mammals and plants. The only dog-eared page was the one describing the evil, red-tinged plant. My dad perpetually assumed he was on the verge of breaking out in an incurable rash. He saturated countless cotton balls with calamine lotion and spotched his body with the pink liquid. “Jenny, put some on my back. I can’t reach it. I feel it coming.” And the same with mosquitoes. He constantly worried about being bitten although he hardly ever was.

I’m not sure of the exact circumstance because it certainly seems out of character, but my mom told me Dad had decided to clear some brush in front of the house. A kid came by and yelled something to him. My dad couldn’t hear him because it was windy. The kid kept yelling. Annoyed, my father finally went toward him down the wooden-planked path:

“What is it?”

“Mister, did you know the stuff you’re cutting is poison ivy?”

I have no idea how a man as obsessed as Ishmael was with his whale couldn’t have realized what he was pruning. He ran into the house and jumped in the shower hyperventilating. He washed himself three times and spent the rest of the day and night inspecting his arms and legs for raised, angry welts to appear. They never did and he seemed almost sad.

***

One stormy, weekday night when my mom was by herself with me and Meg, I was rocking back and forth on a barstool next to the kitchen counter as Mom prepared dinner for us. She asked me to stop. She wasn’t usually a mother who was anxious about looming dangers, so I should have listened to her but of course I didn’t. I even felt a tinge of pleasure that I was annoying her. Attention is better than no attention. It was easy to get it from my dad, but my mom was more of a challenge.

So I rocked, hands on the counter to make sure I got the maximum amount of sway. I felt the stool tip. I landed on the ground, the leg of the stool inside me.

My mom dropped everything and ran to my side. I was shrieking and bloody. Meg, who was five, started screaming in solidarity. My mom was shaking. I strangely felt no pain but my mom thought I might be in shock. There was no hospital on Fire Island, so Mom had to call the fire station to send an ambulance and take us to the mainland, thunder, lightning and rain raging all around us.

Now that I’m a mom I can imagine what was going through my own mother’s head. The combination of anger at her child and desperate worry that she hadn’t been paying sufficient attention to keep her safe. The fear of being singly responsible for your childrens’ fate, knowing that she would be blamed by her husband, acquaintences and strangers if her daughter had been injured because of her *negligence*. Her British stoicism served her well in this instance; her emotions must have been roiling inside her but she made sure to mask them with deliberate calmness so my sister and I wouldn’t be even more scared than we already were. I try to follow her lead now with my own children when they are hurt or in distress. She was a good teacher.

The Bay Shore ER doctor examined me. I had stopped bleeding. I was holding my mom’s hand. Meg was curled up asleep on another examining table.

“Mrs. Hartig. Everything is fine. There’s no real injury.”

“But she was bleeding so much. How is that possible?”

The leg of the stool had broken my hymen. Apparently this sometimes happens when girls start riding horses but I did it in my own, typically dramatic way. I lost my virginity to a stool. I don’t remember my mom’s reaction at the time, but I hope she laughed and at least she got a good story out of our ordeal.

***

Meg and I loved Amy. Mom hired her to be our babysitter so she could sometimes have an actual summer break away from her kids. Believe me, now I completely understand.

Amy seemed like an adult to me, but she was probably just eighteen or nineteen. She was pretty, blonde and good-natured. She was from Long Island and, like us, she came out to Fire Island during the summers because her friends did also.

There wasn’t much to do at night save the occasional casual dinner party, so Amy mostly took care of us during the day a few times a week. She made us lunch, brought us to our activities or found us things to do on rainy days so Meg and I didn’t go stir crazy. She was good at Connect 4 and braiding my hair.

What what my Mom didn’t know, because Amy told us not to tell her, was that sometimes Amy would take us to her friends’ houses to hang out. Well, more like to watch Amy and her friends hang out. She didn’t ignore us. She’d let us stay in the living room with them, but the focus was definitely more on teenagers than it was on a five and seven-year-old. Their modus operandi was benign neglect and Meg and I didn’t mind. I had always liked loitering at the grownups’ table so being allowed to eavesdrop and try to understand what Amy and her friends were talking about was my cup of tea.

Amy’s boyfriend slung his arm around her tanned shoulder, his hand loosely dangling over it. Amy smiled, not looking at him. It might be the first time I grasped the concept of a boyfriend. They seemed to like each other because they kissed a lot. It was like practicing for marriage, I guessed. But my parents didn’t ever do that. I wondered why.

I don’t know where her friends’ parents were. Maybe her boyfriend and his friends were older and rented this house on their own. I remember the living room was dark and it had laminate wood paneling. There were wicker lounge chairs and all the furnishings were in various shades of brown.

Amy installed us on the couch while her boyfriend and about five friends would drink, play records and laugh and talk. It was the first time I ever heard the Rolling Stones. On the inside of one of Amy’s favorite albums, all of the band members were draped over a Medieval castle wall in what looked like jesters’ clothing. They looked pretty silly to me, like clowns or the non-scary monsters on Sesame Street. Amy thought the lead singer was handsome, but I had no idea why.

They smoked cigarettes. My mom loved her occasional Gitane, but these cigarettes smelled unfamiliar and they passed one around at a time, which I had never seen Mom do. I thought it was really generous of them to share them with each other.

Meg and I kept our word and didn’t tell my parents. But Amy overplayed her hand. One of her friends had a speedboat, and one day she took us on it. She put life-jackets on us, but the water was choppy and the boat bumped up and down and spray went all over us. I was scared, but Meg wasn’t and we both had fun being bounced around the boat cutting through the waves at rapid speed.

The day after, my mom noticed forming bruises on our bodies when she was giving us our baths. We told her that it was probably from the boat bouncing us.

“What boat?”

“The one that Amy took us on.”

Amy had forgotten to tell us not to say anything.

My mother was terrifying when she was angry. My father was a yeller but I wasn’t as scared of him. He was emotional, I was used to it. My mother, on the other hand, was like a cobra—all that English reserve coiled up and deadly, ready to strike. When our dad spanked us, he almost cried. When mom spanked us, it stung.

I saw that switch flip in Mom’s eyes and I was sick with worry for Amy..

She called Amy’s house and told her to come over immediately. Amy arrived. She had a giant bruise on her legs as well. It hadn’t even gotten to the purple stage; it was still red and angry, but it didn’t compare to my mom. She took Amy into her bedroom and screamed at her through gritted teeth. Meg and I stood in the living room, frozen. We couldn’t make out exactly what was being said, but we heard Amy wailing, confessing everything and begging for mercy. Amy soon ran out of our house, unable to look at us.

That was the end of Amy.

***

Jeff was a lifeguard and my swimming teacher. He was eighteen and lean, and his brown curls were tinged with blonde from being in the sun and seawater all summer. He wore a puka shell necklace that glowed white against his honey-colored skin. He looked like Apollo. Most of the moms had secret crushes on him but mine was blatantly obvious. I was a child who fell hard and often for boys, but my feelings for Jeff were true and deep. I would crawl into his lap and hug him at the end of each lesson. I wasn’t special; all the kids he taught were drawn to him.

For a teenage boy, he was preternaturally patient, gentle and kind. It was impossible not to be at least a little enamored of him. He radiated beauty and beneficence.

I was not an adventurous kid. I was pretty much scared of everything and learning how to swim was no exception. Jaws had just opened that June, and even though I wasn’t allowed to see the movie, I was nonetheless terrified of Great White sharks eating me. Never mind that sharks don’t swim in the bay where we had lessons, and that Meg and I would cast out rods at the end of the dock for two hours and only catch a couple of small snappers. I was sure that I was destined to become Bruce chum. I could convince myself that he would get me in the bathtub.

I was fine while I was in arm’s reach of Jeff, but when he told all the kids to jump off the edge of the dock and swim back to where he was wading in the bay, I refused.

“Come on, Zandy. I know you can do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. I don’t want to hear you say ‘can’t.’”

“I cannot.”

“Zandy, if you do it, you’ll be so proud of yourself. I’ll be so proud of you. Don’t be scared.”

I wanted him to be proud of me, but I weighed it in the balance with being eaten alive and it didn’t tip the scale.

He paused. He strategized. He sized me up. All the kids were staring, waiting for me.

“Zandy, if you jump off the dock and swim over to me, I’ll give you a kiss.”

When I was little, no matter what story I started to write, it always ended up being Cinderella. Cinderella was blonde, I was blonde. She liked dogs and horses and mice, I liked dogs and horses and mice. She loved her Handsome Prince, I loved Jeff. If I made it to shore without being swallowed by the mythical shark, he would kiss me and we would live happily ever after.

I jumped. My head went under. I swam fast, directly to Jeff, my lodestar. As I brought my head above water, I saw him beaming at me. I started to smile too. He held his arms out to me, picked me up, pulled me in and kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t stop holding his hand until after he brought me back to my mom and told her how proud he was of me for overcoming my fears and swimming to shore. I was proud of myself too. It’s amazing what the power of love can make a person do.

Judged by present times, I can see how a seventeen-year-old boy telling a seven-year-old girl he’d give her a kiss as a reward might seem suspect. This would not fly now. Jeff would be disciplined or fired. But in that moment back then I knew in my heart that his request and promise was purely strategic and loving.

One week that summer I came down with the flu. I had a fever and couldn’t do anything but sleep. Everything ached. I was hot and uncomfortable. I was too exhausted to take a bath and my hair was so dirty it hurt. I missed swimming lessons for over a week which of course was the saddest thing of all.

Jeff asked my mom where I was when he ran into her at the grocery store in Saltaire. Mom told him I was sick and wanted to make sure I was healthy before she put me back in class. He asked if it was okay for him to come over later to say hi. Mom was charmed and knew how happy it would make me so she told him yes.

I was overjoyed. I had mom wash my hair with Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears three times to make sure it clean and smelled good. I put on a fresh nightgown.

Before dinner, Jeff came over with a couple of his mom’s fashion magazines he thought I’d like. I was in heaven but also very shy. My mom was right there in the kitchen but I still felt I had him all to myself. I didn’t know how to handle my happiness. I could barely look at him. We sat on the couch with Meg although I hardly noticed her there. I just remember hearing jazz on the radio in the kitchen and knowing that Jeff was sitting next to me.

I felt vulnerable and exposed. I usually had a lot to say to him but I was tongue-tied. I think he sensed my discomfort and placed the burden of conversation on himself.

I had a noticeable gap between my two front teeth, which I called my “rabbit teeth” because they were so big. I became especially aware of my imperfections now that Jeff was so close. I felt like I had to come clean to him.

“I hate my teeth and also the space between my teeth. It looks so weird. I can stick spaghetti through it. I really, really hate them.”

Jeff looked at me and said, “Sometimes the little things you hate about yourself might be something that other people think are special. Like, the stuff that makes you ‘you.’”

He opened one of his mom’s magazines.

“Let me see if I can find something in here.”

He flipped through the ads in the front and found what he wanted.

“You see this woman? Her name is Lauren Hutton. She’s really famous. She has a gap in between her teeth like you do! And she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Jeff was right. She was beautiful. But more than that, she was special. Vibrant, stylish, bright, fun and unique. Something to work towards. I started smiling wide to show him I had understood his lessons both in and out of the water.

Jeff gave me his puka shell necklace, like the Prince gave Cinderella her glass slipper. His sweetness to me has lasted my whole life so far in my memory, so in a sense, we did live happily ever after.

***

Fire Island was and still is one of the safest places a kid could spend a summer. A tiny, narrow island where no cars are allowed and people know and look out for each other. There were lifeguards on the ocean, and the bay was calm. Deer, piping plovers, seagulls and butterflies were our neighbors. The worst thing that could happen to you was getting stung by a jellyfish or falling off your bike on the boardwalk path and getting a splinter and/or the aforementioned poison ivy rash. Meg and I would have hermit crab races we found in the bay. Parents would tell their kids, “Be back for lunch,” let them out the screen doors in the morning and not worry that any real harm would come to them. We spent all day going back and forth from the ocean to the bay. On rainy days, the volunteer firehouse would screen movies for the kids. Every summer Meg and I would look forward to going to Kismet, where the lighthouse was, and eating soft-shell crabs. Fire Island was both a few hours and a lifetime away from Manhattan. Its freedom and simplicity was a wonderful gift to give us as children. Thank you so much, Mom.

my son and his friend in Fire Island a few years ago