A Day at the Beach

by Valeria Berghinz

In the backseat of the car my hair sticks to the sweat on my forehead, a crown of moisture. An entity in itself, I can feel it live and breathe, dew drops collecting and growing and vibrating. It catches at the strands of my hair, this sweat, taking the curls inward and suffocating them deeper into my skin, a quicksand of wetness and cells. 

I thought, hoped, I would look pretty when we got to the beach. I would step out of the car and hover over the heat of the sand in my carefully chosen sandals. It’s not like I spent hours getting ready, I knew that the sea would quickly wipe all efforts off, that the wind and the waves would laugh at my naiveté. No, I didn’t spend hours getting ready. But I was still attentive about which sandals I was going to wear. I still sat in the coolness of my towel, wet from my recently-showered body, and stared into the abyss of my closet, thinking and thinking about which bikini he would like best. I once showed one off for him, jokingly. It was a particularly cold spring and any thoughts of discussing summer trips had been out of the question. How stupid, how embarrassing, to let him know that I thought we would stay together that long. Even though I knew it would be so, longer even, beyond summer and winter, past any change in temperature, through every imperceptible shift of the planetary axis. I knew, but I couldn’t say. So I put on a black bikini, one that I had purchased at a travelling market, so it was only mine, it was unique to me. I put on the bikini and tightened the strings so that they dug into my skin and held up my breasts. In front of the cold bathroom mirror, I divined a carefree smile, an ephemeral air about me that communicated look what I found in the back of the closet, my old bikini! I used to love this thing, I don’t know why. What do you think? A little too tight, maybe… He would crack a smile, not because he thought me funny, but because the sight of me would propel him into a frenzy of feeling that could only be communicated through the dumbness of his smirk. He would say he loved it, he would call me beautiful, he would hold me by the waist and throw me to the bed and kiss me for a long, long time. 

The black bikini is not the one I chose this morning, because it didn’t rouse him as I had hoped. I do not remember what he said, maybe a confirmation that yes, it is too small, cute, though. And that was that. So no, I didn’t pick the black. I went for a deep blue one, his favourite colour. I would arrive at the beach, hints of deep blue beneath my white dress, sandals hovering over the blazing sand. But now I was sitting in the backseat, hair moulding into my forehead, seeping into the crevices of my brain. I had to sit in the backseat because he was driving, and it was his friend’s car, so the friend got to ride shotgun. They’re talking to one another, but all that gets back to me is a distorted hum, a deep rumble of soundwaves echoing between their knowing looks. I try to catch any word, any syllable, that drags its tired body towards me, but if any approaches it is whipped back into submission by the relentless wind pouring in from their open windows. I toy with the idea of asking them to shut the glass, to think for a moment beyond that spark of pleasure derived from setting their forearms on the space where a window used to be and should be now, as we shoot down the highway. But how could they understand, how could they think beyond that caressing force of the wind, still domesticated when it streams into the space of the front seats before it rages into the cacophony it is now, here, in the back. Besides, I could ask them to close the windows, but I wouldn’t dare to have a follow-up request, and if the music kept playing this loudly, listening to their conversation would be as thankless a task as it is now. And no, I will not ask for one service and then a second one, they will not get the chance to hear complaint after complaint, a screeching child peering from the backseat, kicking her feet in protest, begging to be included, to be taken seriously.

So I sit there, sweating, sinking into the drum of the boys’ voices, my presence of mind anchored by the violence of the wind. There is a quiet dignity about it, I think. To be able to remain solitary, kept entertained by one’s imagination. How mature he must think me right now, unmoved by his distance. I imagine him catching glimpses of my reflection in the mirror, noticing the ghost of a smile as I look out of the window, trying to guess at what I’m thinking about, thrown into an embarrassingly powerful wave of want at the peeking corner of my deep blue bikini. I look out of the window so that he is allowed to play out his end of the scene. I notice that the highway is thinning out. We are almost there, anyways.