Free Vertigo by Joanna Walsh Page B

blink white: a défi —a challenge—to the ocean, which is dark. It is beginning to get dark—no, it’s not getting dark yet, it just feels like it might soon.
    From the jetty I can see the beach on the other side of the bay, which the sun still hits, but I cannot see what you are doing. I cannot see what the children are doing. On your beach, sometimes you choose to pay attention to the children, and feel worthy, and sometimes you choose to read a book, and feel interested, or engaged, or intelligent, or whatever, but, whichever you are doing, I know you will be having fun, because you do not worry that the children might be neglected. You never have to make the choice to neglect the children. For you to read your book is not to neglect the children because you know that if you do not pay attention to the children I will. I have the choice to pay attention to the children, which I may or may not find—but must give the pretence of finding—fun, or else the whole concept of fun, and the holiday itself, tips over. Or I have the choice to read a book. But I know that if I do not play with the children, you will not play with them, not unless you really find it fun. My choice to read my book necessarily involves the worry of the possibility of neglecting the children. While you read your book with the attention your lack of worry affords, information enters your brain making you more interested, or interesting, engaged or engaging, and intelligent, and so you become less like me, who, not lacking the worry about neglecting the children, does not become any of these. I can no longer see, from across the bay, which of these two things you have chosen to do. And this is why I swam the estuary.
    The children are, in any case, now getting too old to receive the kind of attention you are not willing to give them. They are losing their last childish things, their shoes and clothes have become bigger until they are barely distinguishable from ours. We had more children—more than one I mean—to preserve this childishness, and also so as not to have to spend so much time together. Had we liked each other less we’d have had four, five. There’s nothing like love’s dilution to keep things in proportion.
    At the end of the jetty, on my side of the estuary, a band is playing. Only children are dancing. The adults stare at the band as though music is something they had forgotten. It must be dispiriting to perform like this, afternoon after afternoon. One man nods the tune to his partner. She fails to pick it up. There are stalls selling snacks, and other things, but no urgency in the queue for anything. Everyone has enough money, more than enough money for food, and no one is hungry.
    There are hidden patterns in everything. I should be looking at the waitresses who come from somewhere else and who are not here for a holiday, for whom being here is only a step to being elsewhere. But I am not one of the waitresses. I am one of the holidaymakers, and, though my compatriots in fun disgust me I must not dismiss their feelings as unworthy by refusing to stay onside.
    All holidays are nightmares: you save up all year and what do you find at the other end but someone else’s house with all their own particular domestic nasties? They think you can’t see where they haven’t dusted; they think you can’t see the cracked tiles, the moldstains on the wall behind the fridge. Not able to afford an anti-home, a hotel, we make do with a para-home, with someone else’s cast-off furniture, with the unfashionable crockery, the cheap fill-ins from IKEA. By “they,” of course, I mean “I.” We too have built an edifice from which no one wants anything but escape. It will fade, like the hotel, and people will wonder why we ever chose to build there. It will outlast us, likely, though there have been instances of women standing in the ruins of their former homes, strangely triumphant. We could abandon ours, but we’re still mortgaged to it,