In every cupboard, towels with nautical themes are stacked neatly with labels indicating the size of towel and method of use: hand towel, body towel, beach towel, wash cloth. Tiny laminated instructions with filigree and smiley faces explain how to use each appliance; washer, dryer, microwave, dishwasher. Quiet coaches.
At first it’s charming, but eventually their naggy cheeriness begins to annoy. I know how to use a microwave. I know how to dry my clothes. I know how to wash dishes.
There is no way you can make a mistake here.
***
After two delicate attempts, Frank gives up on begging the children to temper their steps. Their excitement of having stairs and bunk beds overwhelms them and they rampage. I watch him watching them. His face is lit up with something that looks a lot like pride.
Anna gets on her belly and slides down the stairs, taking her little brother with her. Hands clasped around his tiny ankles, they bump — scream their way down the stairs. I think about stopping them, but I am unsure. They look like they might bite.
***
Every day I pack a beach bag of every possible thing: suntan lotion, rubber bands, whistles, scissors, a sewing kit, wooden stakes, magazines, floppy hats, Frisbees, throwing stars, kickstands, pencil sharpeners, parachutes, jumping ropes, courage, swizzle sticks, tweezers, and machetes.
I do my best to anticipate.
We bring towels that have been brought before and sandwich them between our bodies and the hot sand, symmetrical. I place the chairs just so. Frank pounds an umbrella into the sand. When he is finished, he stands back with his hands on his hips, surveying our setup. He is breathing heavy and I wait for him to see through me but instead he says, “Alrighty!” and then captures the kids in his arms and runs them toward the sea. I want to ask him how he knew to do that.
Their screams disappear into the waves.
I sit in a chair and watch the sea roll them around in its mouth.
***
At night, we twist loose, fighting silent blanket wars; each of us noiselessly willing the other to shut the windows that bring the cold night air of the sea to freeze our skin.
I, always the cold one, lose. I throw the blanket from his back, stand, stride, and slam the glass closed, faintly remembering just seven hours earlier how delicious the opening of that window was; the cool air quelling the sweat of my brow, the crevasses in my skin. I think about change and how suddenly or how gradual, it can happen, how it makes almost everything unreliable. I shiver.
I slide back in alongside him, surrendered. Fight forgotten, I snake my hands around him, taking his warmth for my own.
***
My son digs for sand crabs where the waves slick the sand dark. His bare feet make tiny tracks that the sea licks away at crooked intervals. It is like he is being tasted and savored.
My daughter plays in the water with her father. He brings her back to me shivering wet, face strangled with a clown’s smile, spread too wide and unsettling. He sets her down and she stumbles into my arms. Her fingertips grip my shoulders like pincers and I swear I can feel the press of shell against my skin.
My husband lies on the bright colored terrycloth, eyes closed to the fight of the sun. He doesn’t see me shudder and wince.
Anna whispers she wants to tell me a secret. She leans in and opens her mouth revealing a black green strip of seaweed. I pull on it and, like a magician’s scarf, it ribbons out into a small clumped pile crawling with tiny sand gnats. The last bit plops and I cringe at the noise. My daughter laughs a gurgle sound and skips down to the wet to help her brother with the crabs. Their heads touch briefly and I cannot see who they are for a moment, their forms black in front of the sun.
I look at the sky knowing that with my attention missing, there is a chance that something bad might happen. I watch a cloud change from a bird into a dragon into a skull.
***
It looks like a home but when you open a drawer it is empty. It looks like a home but anything easily moved is nailed down. It looks like a home but the cabinet under the bathroom sink has individually wrapped toilet paper, the kind you find in hotel bathrooms.
The home of this house is strictly a façade. It’s like I can see bone, blood, and skull through razor cuts in a perfect face: a whore in a habit.
I can feel the house holding heavy, threatening to turn inside out. I flip light switches with wishes and hold countertops as if I could stop them from folding and caving if they so chose. I take careful steps in case the foundation begins to lift, tilt.
***
We have been here weeks, days, months, hours. The roar of the surf is an unrelenting constant that takes away time. Everything is blurred together, spilled paints on a garage floor.
As the days tick by the front entryway fills with sand, plastic toys, and beach towels that never seem to dry. They lump wet in slumped shapes that wait to scare me when it’s dark.
Everything seems to be something else and I am finding it hard to keep track. I have begun counting the starfish on the wallpaper that lines the hallway. I know their number is 33. I pray they stay consistent.
***
Frank doesn’t see, but I do. He turns his head after they change or before. Whites come back to eyes, fins separate back into fingers, gills close and become skin. They continue their coloring, or reckless chasing or stuffed animal playing, looking exactly like our children.
I have given up trying to alert Frank to their changing; before I can finish my words, they revert back. Or never were? No. I see the salt they leave on their seats, in their beds and in the grime resting in the bottom of the bathtub. I can smell the depths they’ve come from. It slithers up from underneath them like fumes. It’s as though they are soaked in sea, bloated with black water that sustains the life of blind things.
Frank has stopped asking me if I am alright. He watches television, drinks a beer, reads the paper. He turns his head after I change or before.
***
I put their sandwiches on plates painted with suns and seashells; when their antennae detect the crusts, they click louder and louder until I cut them off. I use the sharpest knife and do it quickly. I set the knife on the counter. I give them back their plates. I back away. Toward the counter. Toward the knife.
When they growl I feed them grapes or crackers. I toss and run. They scramble, squirm.
I cannot watch them eat.
As soon as they are asleep Frank washes me in the shower. He covers me with soap and then uncovers me, taking his time with my transformation.
There are waves on the walls. The soap dish is a clamshell. Frank calls me his mermaid.
I panic and look down. I relax when I see my legs.
He dries me with a sailboat bath towel.