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

shellfish and those white rubber things under the boardwalk. I picked one up. “Don’t touch it!” my brother said. “Don’t you know what that is, you dope?”
    Oh what a roaring sun-blasted life on the beach! Tiny piping holes bubbling in the sand. Birds with legs like toothpicks scurrying in front of the wavelap. Gulls hovering in windplanes off the sandbank. Donald and I ran to the shaded precinct of the boardwalk arcades. Sea winds blew through the open game rooms. We stood in our bare feet and bowled wooden balls down chutes, we spun the wheel to make the miniature steam shovel in the glass case clutch the prize. We wanted the real penknife, the silver cigarette lighter. We got only the gumballs.
    Sand is in my crotch. I am turning red, the sun is inflating me. I eat sandwiches on the blanket, I drink cherry Kool-Aid, which is like liquid Jell-O. All speech is shouted, the surf crashes, I fear only two things, the water crashing up at my feet and the deserthordes of human beings among whom I may get lost. Crying children are walked by fully dressed policemen among the families on their blankets. Life is raw here; more policemen in their dark shirts and trousers and garrison caps, and with their heavy belts and guns, stand on the boardwalk overlooking the masses of bare bodies. Behind them big clown faces smile down from the false front of the amusement park. They are not fooled. Bad things are happening everywhere. Lifeguards bring in an exhausted child. An ambulance backs up to the steps of the boardwalk leading to the beach. I dig banks of sand around me. I create structures to support me, I bury my own leg to the knee. I am in the salt and the sun and the sea of voices. It all crashes over me, but I am not drowned.
    It seems to me now that in this elemental place, these packed public beaches in the brightest rawest light of day, I learned the enlightening fear of the planet. Everywhere I looked men stood on their hands or climbed to other men’s shoulders. Women of flesh slept ground into the sand. Beyond any name’s recognition, under the shouting and teeming life of the world’s public on their tribal Sunday of half-nude ceremony, was some quiet revelation in me of unutterable life. I was inspired in this state of clarity to whisper the word scumbag . It was as if all the sound had stopped, the voices, the reedy cry of gulls, the sirens and the thunderous surf, for that one word to be articulated to illumination. I felt through my fingers the sand pour of bones, like some futile archaeologist of a ground-up mineral past. I recognized the heat in the sand as some invisible power of distant light. And from the glittering blue water I took its endless motion and unimaginably frigid depth. All of this astonishingly was; and I on my knees in my bodying perception, worldlessly primeval, at home, fearful, joyous.

EIGHT
    I t must have been that summer or not long after that my little grandma’s mental condition worsened. She took to running away. I was outside the house one afternoon when the front door opened and down the steps she came. She cursed and shook her fist at me. Her hair was uncombed. I backed away, but when she reached the bottom of the stoop she wandered off in the opposite direction, giving me the distinct impression that she had cursed me only because I was in her line of sight. She turned the corner at 173rd Street and was gone.
    I ran and got my mother, who was at the laundry sink scrubbing clothes. She hadn’t even known Grandma had left. Wiping her hands on her apron, my mother ran after her. She found the old woman and brought her back, but that was only the first of several episodes in which Grandma, crying and calling curses down on our house, wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and ran off.
    In her curses she suggested that it would be a good thing if cholera were to kill us all. My mother numbly translated for me when I asked her what was being said. Another eventuality Grandma hoped