Saltwater Redemption

Chapter 4: Mummum’s Shore House; or, Under the Table and Dreaming I spend a lot of my time playing with McDonald’s action figures. There’s Ronald, of course. The Hamburglar. Mayor McCheese. The Fry Guys. Grimace, obviously. And the weird bird girl whose name I do not yet know. I talk to them and mix them inappropriately in battles with my G.I. Joes. My brother John plays with Garbage Pail Kids cards, which mom says are an “abomination” and which she also says I’m far too young to play with. John’s older now. So he rides his bike around Avalon and does a paper route and plays with new friends. Most of my day is spent underneath my mummum’s dining room table with my action figures. Spying on mom, my sister, dad, and brother as their feet occasionally shuffle by. The white, doily place mat hangs down like a ghost over top of me, leaving only a small space between its fingers and the carpet where I spy. Underneath the table is my fort, where no one in my family can ever find me except when mom runs the noisy vacuum under the place mat and pokes my feet and legs. I laugh quietly to myself when I hear mom or dad asking each other where I am. I don’t spy on mummum much because I prefer talking to her instead. And I always know where to find her. She sleeps and relaxes all day watching her programs and swallowing vitamins. All the programs mummum likes are in black and white, or feature a main character with silver hair. She especially likes the show “Matlock”, but thinks “Dallas” is trash. Mummum always seems sleepy and happy, and although she can’t walk or get around too well, she tells really good stories. She likes to repeat these stories to me every morning. She loves me very much and tells me I’m a good boy. The house is a very musty-smelling old shore house with a faint tinge of mummum’s perfume: C-h-a-n-e-l No. 5. It consists of two porches in the front and back, with creaky old stairs leading to their flaky-painted landings. The back porch is screened in and has a bathroom which smells like wet wood. The bathroom gets very hot in the afternoon. I often get locked in there when the door jams, and have to yell for help to get me out. Through the back porch door is a dark-lighted kitchen, with a shiny floor which smells of Pine Sol cleaning fluid and a small table where we eat breakfast. There’s also an old-fashioned refrigerator with a big metal lever you have to pull with strong muscles to open, and cabinets full of shiny glasses and mugs with tigers and bunny rabbits and little messages I don’t understand on them. I’m too small to reach and open the cabinets. But I can open the refrigerator. Sometimes when I’m feeling naughty, I steal a metal-wrappered Klondike Bar from the fridge’s freezer and eat it really fast before anybody notices. Hurting my poor head and getting chocolate and ice cream all over my face in the process. The refrigerator –“Frosty”, I call him - hums like a bumblebee when I keep his freezer door open too long. Last summer I thought it might’ve been an actual bee buzzing around for a taste of the honey mummum puts in her tea or for the fruit which she and mom call “honey dew.” But now I know better. I think. The kitchen adjoins to the dining room where no one but me really goes. This is where mummum has all her fine china and fragile dolls and a plate covered with little pink and blue shoes for all the babies born in her family, including me and my brother and sister, in a locked glass cabinet. I’ve asked mom many times where the key is for it, but she never tells me. I guess she thinks I’ll break all the fragile little treasures. (Come to think of it, the key is probably in the same place where mom keeps the Mad magazines and cap guns she confiscated from me). There’s also a door in the dining room wall which leads to a small room where mummum keeps her noisy old vacuum cleaner. I don’t like the vacuum cleaner. In fact, I hate it. I can’t hear the words I say to Grimace and King Cobra when mom runs it on the soft fuzzy carpet and its hard metal snout pokes my poor legs and feet. Mom also usually makes me stop playing and do chores for her whenever she turns it on. The only other room on the first floor besides mummun’s bedroom is the living room. The living room has a long green couch for mummum to sleep on during the day, two equally green reclining chairs, a fireplace which no one uses in the summer, a family of hermit crab shells encased in a glass and rope-outlined frame, and a wooden table with a TV Guide and big wooden elephants on it. The living room also has the TV: an “old RCA number” as dad calls it. Because the TV is in the living room, the living room’s also where most of our family’s indoor activities take place. Every day when playing underneath the table I feel more and more like there’s always some Beach Boys song running through my head. “God Only Knows,” “Surfer Girl,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “When I Grow Up To Be a Man,” and “Sloop John B” are my favorites by the Boys. The songs all make me think of different things and places when I hear them. Mostly older boy sorts of things like having a girlfriend or having a job or leaving the land on a sailing ship. “Surfer Girl” makes me think of a pretty blonde-haired girl standing on the beach watching me surf or swim in the ocean. My dad has a “Greatest Hits” tape he plays on our rides down the shore and the sounds of the voices and music really get in between my ears. I peek up my head sometimes from underneath the doily ghost-cloth which makes me invisible, wondering whose got the radio on in the other room. Before realizing it’s only the perfectly remembered sunshine harmony in my head. When I’m not underneath my table fort, eating my good breakfast of Kellogg’s corn flakes with banana slices and candy-tasting cantaloupe which mummum slices just right, watching programs with mummum, or playing outside around the yard, I go to the beach with dad. On the beach we play beach tennis and also sometimes run the bases if we can find a third person. One time while walking with dad to put our feet in the ocean, I tripped on a sand bump and almost drowned in the shallow water. Dad pulled me up just in the nick of time. I don’t think he really knew I was drowning or that he saved my life, but I was and he did. I was pretty scared, but still love the ocean. Its cool water feels very good when my skin gets hot from the sun. Not even my terrible fear of the giant shark from the movie “Jaws” can keep me away from it now. The beach reminds me of the new Madonna music video, “Cherish.” Mom doesn’t let me watch MTV either. But I watch it sometimes with my older sister, Halcy. I never know where Halcy goes during the days, as this handsome blonde-haired boy usually comes to pick her up in his roofless Jeep Wrangler early in the morning. But when she’s home, she’s usually watching MTV in mummum’s living room. Mummum never objects because she’s usually asleep or very sleepy. At least whenever “Matlock” or “Murder She Wrote” isn’t on. I love the Madonna video because I like how Madonna sings and how happy she looks in the ocean. I’d like very much to swim with her. Madonna has pretty eyelashes and big missiles, which I like too. I also like the little child who Madonna loves and the mermaids in the video, even though they’re men and everyone knows only pretty girls are mermaids. Because they all watch over the child which is important. When I’m on the beach I think of all the great songs I know and watch the low-flying airplanes with long advertisements on their tails (I wonder how they land with such long pictures and messages on their tails!) and listen to the beach’s own special music. There’s the “cawwwing” of sea gulls and tan people talking and the ice cream man shouting and the children splashing and lifeguards whistling. I used to run around the beach naked last summer. But this is the one thing mom says I’m too old to do now.