Are We Almost There

I met you first when I was six and you were in utero. You weren't there yet. I was six and a half and in Florida on my first vacation by plane. house airblown christmas In O'Hare Airport my mother gave me a spoonful of bitter yellow Dramamine and then held me up to the drinking fountain, and the icy metallic water got that bad taste out of my mouth. The medicine made me drowsy, but still I was scared. How will the plane stay in the air, I asked. How will they understand us in Florida—do they speak another language there. My father, a kind and peaceful man, talked with great faith about engineering matters. He talked as though he personally knew lots of engineers and liked and admired all of them. Engineers were great men, he seemed to be saying. My mother, who tended to scorn things, laughed at my other question. Of course they speak English, it's not another country, she said. Everyone knows that. These answers were pleasant, relieving—like that mouthful of cold water after the Dramamine—but fleeting. Everything was fleeting.
We took two planes. The first plane was big, and to be in it felt like being in a house. It was not really moving, apparently. I sat between my mother and father in a row of three orange seats and was given a strange pillow that seemed to be made out of paper. We got blue rubber headphones that felt like Gumby and we listened to Bill Cosby. It was odd. Bill Cosby was not talking out loud into the air, but separately to each one of us, only he was saying the same things. We weren't hearing him together and yet we were. We laughed into each other's faces at the same moments.
After that plane we took a very small plane that roared beneath us and seemed to be going terribly fast, just faster and faster, over water. I felt that I was trying to hold on to something, though I couldn't say what. It was getting harder and harder to hold on, the faster and faster we went. We're almost there, we're almost there, the grown-ups kept telling me, not only my parents but also other adults on the plane, their kind faces leaning in as we went faster and faster, We're almost there, we're almost there, and I tried to hold on but finally couldn't anymore, and as we rushed in and down to the runway, I threw up into a white bag someone held for me, and everyone forgave me, and I was given more water and everything went back to normal.
The motel overlooked a beach of seashells, and at the end of the shells was the water. No sand could be seen on the beach, only shells. This was rare, it was explained to me, something to be appreciated. Not too many people knew about this place, but we knew about it. Behind the motel was an endless hilly park with winding paths and regularly spaced white cinder-block structures that looked like identical, fierce little houses but which actually contained only pipes, my father explained; I was happy to hear that, because I wouldn't have wanted to live in one of those little houses. In the evenings, right after dinner, sprays of water appeared everywhere, crisscrossing and arching over one another, some tall and fine and waving like the tails of exotic birds, and some shooting relentlessly in one direction, feeding the green dips and rises. From our room's patio I looked, but it hurt a little—my eyes or chest or something. The color was so deep, so wet, the hills like mounds of wet green cake. I felt you out there somewhere, amidst all that green, but I couldn't see you, no matter how I concentrated. If I looked away, something would move in the corner of my eye, but when I looked back, you were never there.

But when I turned around to go back into the room there was a decal of a diving woman on the sliding glass door, right there at my eye level, strangely, as though someone had known I would be there to see it, and it let me know the door was closed and I had better open it or I would bump my head. The woman wore a pink bathing suit exactly like my mother's and the ugly white kind of bathing cap that strapped under her chin and covered practically her whole head. She was a little faded, peeling a little, as if she had been stuck on there for years, though she did not appear to be an old woman. Her back arched gracefully and her toes were pointed, still, after all this time.

After breakfast our first morning I couldn't wait to get to the beach; I must have believed you would be there, for I'd heard the way people talked about it all the time, the ocean, the ocean, as though it were the point of everything. But two men were playing jarts in the gravel parking lot of the Pancake Shack, which we had to cross to reach the path down to the water. Be careful, those are young men, my father said, as though that alone made the men suspicious, but they didn't look young to me—they were big men with long hair, far away and barely moving, and I had to get to you. Watch it, don't run across there, my mother said, jerking her arm out, but some kind of dark light shot through me and I got under it and ran. For a moment everything whirled whitely around me—I won!—but then something hit my head, hard, knocked me down.
Then the grown-ups were around me again, this time less sympathetic than they'd been on the small plane, saying Stop screaming, stop screaming, and my hands were pried away from my eyes, and the first thing I saw was my mother comforting the young men, who appeared devastated. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, they kept saying, kicking at the ground as though they were angry at the rocks and pebbles. What were they so upset about? I wondered. They didn't even know me. My father had me by the shoulder, his face larger and closer than I'd ever seen it before as he poked at the place between my eyes with the tip of his index finger. It hurts! I cried. Then stand still for once! he snapped. I couldn't believe he was so angry—either angry or sad, I thought. My mother was just angry; she had her back turned and would talk only to the young men, not to us. She's lucky she's not blind, everyone was saying. Close call, they said. We returned to our room without speaking, as though we had been watching a play and now the play was over.
That afternoon we went not to the beach but to the motel pool, where they could watch me. I wore a butterfly-closure Band-Aid over the bridge of my nose, importantly, though I was disappointed that the closure in no way resembled a butterfly. Some other children were playing in the shallow end, fighting over an inflated purple sea monster, but they were of no concern to me—some of them were fat and looked as if they smelled, even in the clean blue water, and the sea monster didn't even look real. It was smiling. So I took my raft to the deep end and played alone, whispering to myself as usual, and when the wave or whatever it was came up, I went under silently. One moment I was on top, the canvas firm and bouncy beneath me, the world around me hot and dry and sparkly with noise and light, and the next moment the ropes were sliding through my fingers, leaving me, everything fleeting again, and I grabbed but there was nothing to grab, no raft, no ropes, only the warm shapeless air—you weren't there yet. Then I hit the wall of cold and everything went blue, time and noise stopped, and I knew to hold my breath, but something was getting inside me, and this time I really couldn't hold on, couldn't hold on another second.