Cape Fear
My parents celebrated their fourtieth wedding anniversary a month ago, and one week from today my sisters and parents are congregating in Boulder, Colorado for a family party. I'm going, kids in tow, and the heck with the brochures! Even Avon Ladies need vacations.
Have you ever had a childhood memory of something so horrifying in the moment that you remember wishing you were cremated and tossed into the wind, never to have that experience again? But some miles and many years from the whole event, you find yourself wishing you were there one more time, having one more good look and feel and hear and touch, because the memory of it feels so good and so damn bad in the same mental breath? Yeah. You know what that is. I know what that is, too, and its name is Cape Hatteras, 1979.
That was the summer I was awkward fourteen and my parents stuffed me and my four sisters into their rusted and sagging blue boat of a Ford station wagon and headed south from New England, two days on the road, to the beaches of North Carolina. It was the same summer I feathered my hair like Farrah Fawcett and wore painted-on jeans and the same white and red peasant shirt every day. I didn't want to ride in a station wagon with four little sisters and eat peanut butter sandwiches and camp out in a tent.
My mom hummed and searched for Crystal Gayle on the radio as my dad drove, a paper grocery bag of snacks and drinks between them. And I realize, now that I'm telling you this story, that this trip was my first Avon experience. Whenever one of us felt car sick, my mom passed around a little Avon sample tube of rub-on lemon fragrance, and the car soon smelled like peanut butter, lemons, and stale body odor.
We rode through freestone peach country in Delaware and stopped by the side of the road to gorge on sweet fruit and refill our milk gallon jug with drinking water. My sisters and I played alphabet with street signs and tormented my mother with petty fights over seat space and the last chocolate cookie.
Our destination was a long stretch of lonely island beach owned by the state. We pitched two dome tents - one for my mom and dad, one for us girls - and raced to the water in our sensible racer-back swimsuits. The waves carried us hundreds of feet toward open water, but our toes still touched sand. A woman in a black string bikini stood watch at the water's edge, staring into forever, her arms behind her back, a stripe of white sunscreen covering her nose.
We tired of the tumble of salt and rock and seaweed and made our way back to camp and watched my dad light a fire. He put small pieces of driftwood in a dented metal barbeque and lit matches, one by one, each falling silent in the wind, until the second to last match caught flame and we danced in a circle, celebrating the fire, with whoops and butt slaps and laughter. We didn't see the dark skies beyond the light house.
My mom laid hotdogs in a smart row on top of the grill. My sisters and I set out napkins and paper plates and buns. I saw the White Nose Lady pitch a small pup tent several sites away, next to her sporty coupe. She left a checkered red bag outside the door flap and went inside, zipping the nylon shut behind her. The zipper sounded like the crack of a whip and it called out to several circling seagulls, who answered with crackles and caws.
I don't know if it was the call of zipper or the sight of the white-nosed string-bikini'd lovely, or perhaps my mom's smoke signals as she turned hotdogs over to brown, all I know for sure is that the birds morphed from three lone gulls into ten thousand gulls, in the blink of my eye, and they cried out to the ocean, to each other, and dove for our food.
I ran for cover and grabbed one hot dog bun from the table. Birds dived within an inch of our hair, and my youngest sister started screaming and would not stop. My mom turned her face toward me, her hands still holding a fork and a pair of tongs at the grill, and her mouth turned down and open in horror. She dropped the utensils.
"Girls! Get in the car with your father! Now!"
My dad sat reading in the front seat. He didn't see us swatting white fowl and grabbing each other. My youngest sister's screams were nothing unusual.
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!"
We jumped into the car and slammed the doors shut. My mom held my youngest sister, and her screams filled the wagon.
"What the heck is going on!" It was more of a statement than a question, and my dad's eyes never left his book. They continued to scan left to right, left to right, an old fashioned optical typewriter.
"Look! Just look at our dinner!" My mom pointed a trembling index finger at ten thousand gulls on the ground, eating burnt hotdogs, eating buns, fighting, eating napkins and carrying the open bag of dribbling cheese doodles across hot sand.
My dad closed his book.
"Well it's too late to drive back into town. What do we have left?"
My sisters and I looked at each other. We were going to stay here? Stay with the birds? And no food?
"Hey! Birdie has a bun!" My middle sister grabbed my bun and threw it at my mom. She broke it into seven pieces, one for each of us, and passed them around. She gave my dad the biggest piece. I angled my head to look in the rear view mirror and tried to feather my hair.
And then the rains began, heavy rains, that soaked our tents and turned stray cheese doodles into orange puddles. The gulls rose into the air, some carrying hot dogs, and flew beyond the storm. Rain gave way to stark lightening and thunder, and my youngest sister began to scream again.
"Oh shut up." My middle sister whispered this, but my dad heard it and turned around to glared at her with dark Italian eyes.
"There will be no swearing in this car."
He opened his book and began to read aloud, the book version of the movie Rocky, about a street fighter turned professional, and though we couldn't say shut up or wear bikinis like the pretty lady, we listened to chapter after chapter of men pummelling each other and women of the night and words - bad words - we never knew.
My sisters and I elbowed each other at the good parts.
The next day we packed up the wet tents and drove straight home.
8:59:05 PM 
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