Free Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found by Allegra Huston

I can’t imagine Grampa doing anything so menial for himself. They covered great swathes of his room, which took up the whole of the upstairs. (Nana slept in a room off the kitchen, as far as possible from Grampa.) When hecame down to watch television, the coffee table and the floor around it, along with half the sofa, disappeared under drifts of yellowing newsprint.
    This was, for Grampa, pretty much what yoga amounted to: standing on your head and singing, and sitting in lotus position and spitting. It was, as far as I could see, more or less what his days amounted to; and he was as contented as a cat. Uncle Nap ran the restaurant in the city. Nana cooked his meals and did his laundry, and aside from that, she more or less ignored him.
    Every day, in late morning, Nana packed us all into her wood-paneled station wagon to go to the Beach Club. The house actually had its own beach, at the base of the cliff on which it sat: but it was a long way down—and up. It was solitary, too, and—though he never went down there—part of Grampa’s domain. The Beach Club was Nana’s. She would sit under a big umbrella in a folding chair, or wade into the calm water and float on her back. Nurse didn’t swim, just sat under the umbrella looking hot, with Reader’s Digest on her lap. Aunt Dani lay on a lounge chair in the sun, with the straps of her bikini top undone and pebbles wedged between her toes. There was something intensely feminine about Aunt Dani’s routine, as if she were doing something in public that ought to be private. I put it down to her being French.
    I’d been to the beach a few times in Ireland, at the cottage in Connemara and at the O’Tooles’ house in Clifden, but the water was so cold it made my teeth chatter. The Long Island Sound was a bath in comparison. There were no waves, except on stormy days. I could see Connecticut on the far side.
    Martine and Nancy—Uncle Fraser’s stepdaughter, the only girl among Aunt Rose’s seven children—taught me to swim out to the raft moored offshore. We jumped off in cannonballs, and caught little stingless transparent jellyfish and stuffed them down one another’s bathing suit. We did the dead man’s float, facedown, and pulled our bathing suits aside to compare our tans.Both Martine and Nancy had dark Italian skin, and I roasted myself trying to be like them. Every night I sprayed on Solarcaine to soothe the burn.
    When we were tired of swimming, or in the hour after lunch during which we were forbidden to go into the water, we’d walk up and down the pebbly shore looking for beach glass. It came from bottles thrown overboard from boats, we figured, but it was transformed by the gentle, relentless action of the ocean into something mystical and strange: the hard surfaces sandblasted into a translucent fog of color, all jagged edges worn away so that the shards were rounded like cabochons. The pieces lay everywhere among the ordinary stones, the way you’d find jewels in an Enid Blyton story. Any pieces that weren’t perfectly smooth and misted over we threw back into the water as far as we could.
    Most of the beach glass was white, green, or brown. Occasionally we’d find a piece of blue, always tiny, as bright as a sapphire. We decided the blue had to come from Milk of Magnesia bottles, though it was hard to believe that something so rare and precious came from such lowly beginnings. Once I found a piece of red, about the size of my pinkie fingernail. I thought it was more beautiful than the ruby in the ring Martine wore sometimes, which had been found on the sink in the ladies’ room at the restaurant in the city.
    On August 26, I told everyone at the Beach Club that it was my birthday. One man replied that it was his birthday too, and he was seventy-seven—exactly seventy years older than me. I was amazed, almost, that it could be possible for the two of us to be there, in the same place; I felt the hand of destiny. Two days later, the