Without a Map: A Memoir

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without a map

Beacon Press

Chapter One

The day is warm, gray and damp. Early July, but the horizon between the sky and ocean bleeds. It is 1965; I am sixteen. Hampton Beach is almost deserted, with the crowds across the boulevard in the shops.

"Hrrr," a young man says, dropping down beside me on the old blanket. It sounds like a growl, or a low dark purr. "What are you reading?" He takes the paperback from me. I don't say anything. "Carson McCullers. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Mine is," he says, laughing.

He has black curly hair, dark skin, and a crooked nose. He wears shorts and no shirt or shoes. His legs and chest are covered in thick, black curly hair. The boys in my class have smooth skin still, and most don't shave yet. I am scared, feeling myself caught already in something dangerous.

"You don't say much, do you? You look really good, though."

I take the book back and open it again, pretending to find my place and read.

"What are you doing here all by yourself? I think you need some company." He makes that strange growl deep in his throat again, and smiles. "Talk to me." He takes my book and slides it under his belly on the blanket. "There. Now you're either going to have to talk to me or go after your book. I'm happy either way."

He is self-confident. I feel silly and young, unable to talk, to keep up with his flirtation. But I also feel a sudden rising power, a new sense of my body and my skin-a recklessness, as if I am slipping over a wall into something dangerous and intoxicating. I want this boy, this young man, to love me. I have been embarrassed to be alone on the beach. What sixteen-year-old spends the summer at the beach alone-day after day, whether it is sunny or not-reading books and watching the tide move in and out? But suddenly my aloneness is a commodity, a mystery, payback.

"Cat got your tongue?" he asks.

I don't like the cliché. I haven't smiled yet. It makes me feel more grown-up, sophisticated. I am on my side, my head resting on my cocked arm. I like the way my hip rises from my waist. I roll onto my stomach, then feel his hand on the small of my back. It is shocking-skin to skin. I can't speak.

"Hrrr, Skeet, look what I found," he says to another boy walking up to us.

"Nice one!" Skeet says. They laugh.

"What's a nice girl like you doing down here at the beach?" my boy asks.

I try to sound aloof, careless. "I work here."

"She speaks!" he says. "This is good. Where do you work?"

"Nowhere," I say, turning my head away.

He suddenly jumps up. "Let's go," he says to Skeet.

A bubble of panic rises up in me. I want to hold on to this time, on to him and his admiring eyes and confidence and black hair. I feel as if I have missed something important for a long time and here it is, walking away. I feel hungry, desperate for him to stay, to lie back down next to me and pull my book away and touch my skin again.

"In the casino," I say. "It's my day off." I feel the heat rise in my face and neck. I am breaking every rule. "At the candy store and miniature golf."

He purrs again. "The casino. I love miniature golf, don't you, Skeet?"

I watch him walk up to the boardwalk and across the street. He turns just as he crosses the boardwalk and yells, "My name is Anthony! Don't forget!" I spend the afternoon looking up from my book every few minutes, trying to find his black curly head and dark skin in the crowds jostling in and out of the shops and arcade. Seagulls scream and call, floating overhead, pure white crosses against the dark sky. The afternoon wind comes up. Two months from now I will be pregnant. I put my jeans and shirt on over my swimsuit and wait for my mother to pick me up.

Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, is a honky-tonk place in 1965. Maybe it has always been. For years my mother forbade us children from going there except once a summer when my grandmother drove my brother and sister and me down to "the beach" in her '55 Ford. We'd park in the sandy lot behind the casino and spend the evening walking with the crowd, stopping at our favorite stores. My grandmother spoke familiarly to Mrs. Junkins at the candy store. We watched the big old taffy machine pull and twist and braid the shiny candy and left with a big box for my mother, who refused to "do" the beach. My grandmother gave us dimes in the arcade to play skee-ball and have our fortunes told by the creaking and faded and beautiful gypsy doll in the big glass box. We ate hamburgers at Wimpy's, sitting on the heavy green bench on the sidewalk and watching all the other tourists wander by. They were mostly French Canadians, with very short shorts and white socks in their leather sandals. They were a big part of why my mother refused to let us go down to the beach. She told us that we were too good to be around these people, that we shouldn't even want to be there. That there was something cheap and ordinary going on there, and we were not cheap or ordinary. The beach meant day-tripping workers from Massachusetts, from the mill towns of Haverhill-my mother's hometown -and Amesbury and Lowell. It meant old ladies and men dragging their beach chairs down the boardwalk and onto the sand. It meant families eating sandwiches on striped blankets and playing shoulder to shoulder with strangers in the cold rolling waves. And it meant young people, kids, boys and girls with different rules from mine, prowling the beach for beer and kisses and secret dates somewhere on the mile-long sands. The beach was a playground of the old world: 1950s America, a relic of both innocence and hidden transgressions.

But this summer, 1965, is a threshold time. My mother comes to Hampton Beach, too, every day, with Peter. The editor of New Hampshire Profiles magazine and my mother's boss, Peter has asked her to work with him for the summer on a federally funded project. My father left our family just a few years ago, a devastating loss for my mother. Now she is in love with Peter, or at least with Peter's life-the music, the art, the artist friends, the late nights with their underlying beat of love and heat. Before she met Peter, my mother was president of the PTA and chair of the church social events committee. She polished our silver-plated forks and knives and carefully hemmed my skirts below the knee. But she has entered a new life and is intoxicated with it. She starts to write short stories, to read Sartre and Camus and Hesse and Rilke. She lets her hair grow out from her short and practical wave, and the handsome dark wool and gabardine dresses she sewed with such skill are pushed to the back of her closet. She wears slacks and turtlenecks and Mexican sandals. Finishing her duties as mother to her last child at home seems unmanageable, a commitment she resents and resists. Suddenly, I find myself accompanying her each day to the forbidden beach and spending long lonely hours before and after work waiting for her.

Peter and my mother do important work, work that justifies her drive each morning to the mildewed, sandy office of the Hampton Beach Riot Committee. I don't know how Peter's editorship of a small New Hampshire magazine, how his jazz and writing qualify him to head the riot study commission. I don't know what my mother, with her cool judgments of others' misbehavior, wants to bring to a study of youth gone wild. But for the summer of 1965, Peter and my mother work in the glass-wrapped office of the Hampton Beach Chamber of Commerce, right on the boardwalk along the white sand beach, building a report on the causes of the riots the summer before.

On Labor Day eve 1964, the huge crowd of kids gathered at the beach for the holiday coalesced into a rioting mob. The police and firefighters responded with force, driving the rioters across the beach and into the water. Each time, the crowd swept back into the streets, attacking the cops with rocks and Molotov cocktails. Finally, in the middle of the night, the governor called out the National Guard and declared martial law. The guard closed down all the roads into the beach and set up machine gun stations along the main road. It took them until dawn on Labor Day to contain the riot, with dozens of police and kids left wounded.

The Hampton Beach riots stunned the nation, which still clung to the passive, determined calm of the 1950s. The rioters were average kids from area towns, not troublemakers with a history. A year later, no one has figured out what they were all so angry about. Peter and my mother are charged with interviewing hundreds of rioters, finding answers and coming up with recommendations so this cannot happen again. They do a good job. The police receive extensive sensitivity training. Bongo drums and radios playing rock 'n' roll are finally allowed on the beach with no police action. Bikinis no longer earn a citation for indecency. My mother feels sympathy for these kids. At a moment of great transformation in her own life, she understands the surge of change that is gathering force in this seedy little summer town and is soon to engulf the country.

I feel the swelling energy, the inexplicable, restless hunger, rising in my own innocent life. I don't care at all about the music or the drinking or the gathering together of teenagers for fun and the thrill of belonging. But my father is gone. He has a new life, a new wife and daughter, and never calls or visits. I miss him badly. My mother is inaccessible. My older brother and sister have moved on to their own lives, leaving me very alone at home and on the beach while my mother works and plays with Peter. I feel lost, caught between my old life at home-a safe, small, family life-and the new life on which my mother has opened the door. A growing sense of dread, of confusion, of abandonment and desperation is starting to erase my childhood. I am hungry to be loved, and understand the rioters' anger, the eruptive release, the need to defy. I understand the pulsing impatience. I feel a powerful dark longing that throws me back into myself. Most of this I cannot name or explain. But as the summer slides along, I know one thing very clearly: I am drifting in over my head and want my mother to grab me out of the tide.

My mother was a guardian of the old rules until she met Peter and stepped into his world. Now, I teeter on a frightened edge between our two lives, understanding that I am to follow the old system, that I must be contained. I grew up with certain indisputable expectations for my behavior: I would dress modestly. I would never call a boy. I would never be alone with a boy. I would not lie or sneak. I would not talk back. But this summer, as my mother moves farther and farther into her new life, I spend more and more time alone. After her work on the committee ends late in the day and my work at the casino is over, my mother drives me home and then heads to Peter's house, up the coast five miles to eat, drink, make music and conversation with friends. She is happy and alive. Our house is very quiet.

The biggest change is that she suddenly allows me to date. My mother stops asking where I am going and with whom. She tells me to be home at ten, but she is not there to hear me come in. Suddenly, I am on my own to make up the new rules. Once, I told her how much I liked a boy putting his hand on my leg at the movie. She disapproved: "Meredy, never let a boy do that."

"Why?"

She was disgusted. "Because one thing leads to another." But she wouldn't tell me how to reconcile her expectations for my proper behavior with the new universe we both found ourselves in.

I spend the first weeks of the summer holding myself to the old rules. Then one day, I shop in the cheap little stores along the beach while I wait for her to get out of work. I find a bikini-white dotted swiss with big black polka dots and ruffles over the seat. I try it on in the cramped dressing room. I love what I see. I am thin, brown, mature. It confuses me, the good girl.

The next day, I strut all morning up and down the beach outside my mother's wall of windows at the chamber. Up and down, up and down. Only a few girls wear bikinis still, and I am the center of attention. Men whistle. Boys fall into step beside me and ask for my name, my phone number. I love their interest. I want them to love me, to hold me, to fill the vast empty space in my life that is starting to scare me so much.

I can see my mother bent over her desk on the second floor, answering the phone, walking out of sight and returning. Several times I wave but get no response. By the end of the day, I decide that this is going to be my new skin. I leap into a new life that afternoon, blind and alone, reckless. When I climb into my mother's car at the curb at five thirty, I don't cover up with a shirt. I wait, wanting her to draw me, to draw us, back to the safety of our other life, the life in which a father and mother hold ground. She looks sideways at me but doesn't say a word.

When I am back in the shelter of my small, sunny room at home, I fold my old one-piece swimsuit into the back of a drawer for good. I hear my mother's car pull back out. I close my door and stand in front of the mirror, studying my body. A trained dancer, I am strong and thin. The polka-dotted ruffles on my bottom look innocent, playful. I stroke the soft roundness of my breasts, the dark hollow between them, and the smooth curve at the small of my back. I have areas of baby-fine white skin on my chest and belly and back that need exposure, need to brown up in the open air. Except for that, I am ready. When Anthony puts his hand on my back that cloudy July afternoon, I am ready.

* * *

It is Labor Day 1965. There are no stars tonight. No moon. The beach is divided in two: the upper part by the boardwalk is a sad greenish-pink from the mercury lights overhead; the lower part is dark, with a silvery light from the wave crests rising and then seeping over the sand, rising and seeping. That's where Anthony takes me, over the line of light into the dark. The beach monument-a seated woman looking out to sea for her lost love-marks the spot where Skeet waits in Anthony's car. It has been exactly a year since the riots erupted and two months since we met. Everything at the beach is quiet, but inside I can feel rising something dangerous, a chaotic push and pull.

As we walk along the water's edge, Anthony laughs and teases me, as he does each time we are together, about how protected I have been, how naïve, how girlish I am. "Are you sure you're not afraid of the dark?" he asks. "Your mother must have told you never to let a guy like me take you to the beach on a night like this." Later, he says, "Don't worry. I'm here to protect you from the sharks." He doesn't hold my hand or put his arm around me. In fact, we have barely kissed all summer.

I have seen Anthony six or seven times since I met him. I have never been alone with him; he and Skeet are a team. They made their way to the second floor of the casino on a hot evening a few days after that first inflaming afternoon and found me at the miniature golf desk handing out clubs and balls to a steady flow of people. I was bored. When I noticed Anthony standing in line, I felt no surprise. I knew he would come.

The upstairs of the old casino is dark and musty and cold even on a hot, sunny day. The floorboards creak as people move around the cavernous room. Anthony and Skeet played three rounds of golf. Anthony has an athletic body and a confident, easy walk. He joked with me about the silliness of my job and the fact that I was all bundled up against the cold wind that blasted up the wide concrete steps of the casino. "Why aren't you in that cute little thing you had on the other clay?" he asked. "The thing with the ruffles." I was busy and didn't have to do anything more than smile back. By the time he and Skeet left, Anthony knew my name and how to call me.

Carl, a friend who worked with me every day, asked, "Who was that?"

"Just a guy I met," I said. I felt guilty.

"He's got to be twenty years old, Meredy. Why are you talking to a guy like that?"

"He's nice," I said. "Don't worry. We're not going out or anything."

"Does your mother know about him?"

"Yeah," I said. "She just said no cars." He knew I was lying. I had never mentioned Anthony to my mother, and she had stopped worrying about cars.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from without a map by Meredith Hall Copyright © 2007 by Meredith Hall. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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