Free World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow Page A

address system announcements.
    Yet even after the train trip to the seaside there was a long walk in the sun through blocks of one-story bungalows and across streets half filled with sand.
    Rockaway might be overrun with sunbathers, the boardwalks jammed, not a place to lie down, but with my father leading the way we encamped miraculously enough in a space that hadn’t been seen as possible by anyone except us. And there we were on a ridge of wet sand, facing the Atlantic Ocean.
    My mother grew happy, the characteristic expression of concern lifted from her face, which now shone with a blissful contemplation as she tugged on her rubber swim cap and waded into the surf. It was as if she was alone, and not another human being around her. My father, who was more accustomed to relaxing and enjoying himself, reclined on the blanket and read his newspapers, interrupting himself every now and then to lie back on one elbow and point his face into the sun.
    The trouble was, I had difficulty with the idea of changing into or out of a bathing suit in public. My father swam way out past the breakers, and when he came back he thought nothing of letting his black wool tank suit dry right on him in the sun. Donald too wore his belted bathing trunks through many swims. But my mother insisted that when I was wet, if I wasn’t going into the water again, I had to change out of my suit into a pair of dry shorts.
    I didn’t understand the logic of this—that it was all right to be wet in the water but not on land. My father tried to arbitrate. “Why be uncomfortable,” he said. “You put this blanket around you and slip off your suit underneath, and put your pants on. Nothing to it, one two three.”
    I was not persuaded. I saw other children changing this way and I knew their shame when they saw me watching. My mother thought I was being ridiculous. Yet I had never seen her change her clothes in public, nor my father, nor anyone but another child. I had heard it said of a little girl I knew how silly she was to refuse to wear a simple pair of cotton briefs for a bathing suit. “You have nothing up there to hide,” her mother told her, pointing at her chest. “Nobody cares.” What could she have possibly revealed to the world but that she lacked what she was supposed to have? We were not equipped as adults; we were small and without hair. That was the reason for modesty. Yet our dreams and desires were great shadows on the sun, enormous looming fearful attacks of unnamed chaos of the heart. To be undressed was to seem to be a child, a degrading state.
    So I was taken to the public bathhouse behind the boardwalks—I suppose our bungalow was too many blocks away—and inthe hot still air of a box of dark wood, a rented key for ten cents on an elastic loop attached to my wrist, I hurriedly changed. The air was motionless, woodsmoked. I had latched the door but someone could get down on his knees and peek underneath because the door did not reach the ground. People were changing in the other cubicles. I heard voices from all directions. I peeked through the cracks to make sure no one on either side was watching me: I was looking at monumental square inches of naked flesh. I heard the snap of elastic. I heard distant giggling. I heard a slap. I heard an urgent female demand to be let alone.
    And then I found, stuck to my big toe, a flattened tube of whitish rubber. Instinctively repelled, I flicked it off with a shake of my foot.
    The beach at Rockaway in 1936: Monoplanes with enormous wings slowly pulled banners of the alphabet through the sky. Washed in on the surf were dead jellyfish and the shells of horseshoe crabs, upside down, like shallow bowls. In the cold dark sand under the boardwalk I came upon a veritable garden of those flattened rubber things. They were stiff, not pleasant to touch, they lay pasted together and they smelled bad. Everything from the sea smelled bad—bulbous oily pods of green weed, jellyfish, half-eaten