Florida Through My Years - Part 1: 1969

We flew to visit my grandparents who had just moved to Hallandale

from Watertown where they were old.  

My grandfather had gray skin,

my grandmother had a broken knee.

I was 6.

We left from Boston before the sun came up,

flying,

my first trip on a big plane.

It was Christmas vacation,

but I went to a Jewish day school,

so it was just vacation.

My grandmother always sent tote bags for presents.

She thought these made good presents.

They were plastic

and smelled good

and new

and each one had a decoration that was different

but they were all still tote bags.

I packed one for the plane

with Malibu Barbie and her wardrobe,

a gold dress

a pair of plastic pink high heels

and an ugly dress someone knit

left over from my sister’s Nurse Julia Barbie doll.

I didn’t love Barbie

as much as I had when I got her

since I’d painted Barbie’s nipples with brownish nail polish

and cut her hair

in preparation for our trip.

I sat in the window seat, Barbie sat on the windowsill

looking out at the clouds.

I colored and we ate our meal,

and my mother put the metal spoons and butter knives and plastic dishes

into her bag

and asked the stewardess for a deck of cards

which we didn’t play with,

that joined the utensils in her tote bag.

We walked down the metal steps of the plane

into Florida warmth,

breezes and bright sun

in our drab wool.

My grandmother was there

in her summer clothes

and a tan,

and the ride to their home was short.

My grandparents’ new apartment was on the second floor

of a building with only two floors.

The stairs to get there were outside,

like a motel.

All their furniture from Watertown was there

and a few new things

like the round glass kitchen table

with small chairs with white vinyl cushions

that were too cold to sit on in shorts.

I saw their beds and their armchairs

and the round table with the drawer

that held my grandmother’s sewing needles and thread

and the TV clicker.

My grandmother had emptied out a drawer

for each of us

in a long bureau

for our clothes.

I sat on the floor, opened the drawer at the bottom,

And pushed all my clothes inside.

My grandmother offered oranges and grapefruit

cut up in a bowl.

My parents sat and visited

and it was warm outside

where I wanted to be

at the pool

I could see from the screened in porch.

No one else seemed to want to go.

Instead they sat in chairs in the living room and talked

about the plane ride and

knees

and fruit.

In a half hour we'll go to the pool. You just ate,

she said,

even though I only had a piece of rye bread

with soft butter.

I opened my newly filled bottom drawer

to find my bathing suit

and ran to change

in the fanciest

and biggest bathroom I’d ever seen.

This one had a door that hid in the wall

and slid closed,

and a closet inside it with another door that closed the same way

where all of my grandmother’s clothes were,

so I could get dressed in private,

and when I opened the closet door

I was right there looking at myself in the huge mirror.

There was a light switch that turned on a million lightbulbs around the mirror

and another one for a red bulb over my head that made the room warm

and another for a fan that was loud.

The countertop near the sink was filled with lotions and lipsticks

and powder

and the floor was soft with shite carpet.

I changed into my suit

in the private closet,

ta-dah! I presented myself in the mirror.

I arrived back in the living room where no one had moved.

I stood there on the rug, in my yellow suit, waiting for a volunteer

to take me to the pool.

Grandma did.

I called her Lulu.

She got into her bathing suit

and covered it with a housedress

with big faded flowers on it,

made me put on

No-Name suntan lotion

and gave me a tote bag to put Barbie and my towel in.

She walked me down the stairs

and led me out the door to the pool.

We laid our towels on two long chairs

she told me were called shez longs,

tucking the ends in under the plastic slats so they wouldn’t blow away,

and I put on the bathing cap she made me wear.

It was hers,

and had rubber daisies on it that flapped in the breeze

and snapped under the chin,

and I felt silly.

We walked together to the edge of the pool.

My grandmother was cautious,

her knee newly mended.

a line of scar across her kneecap

like she'd drawn it on herself with a red pen.

She held the railing,

and I left her there on the steps

and slithered into the water

like a seal at the aquarium.

I crawled and dog paddled,

I plunged myself to the bottom of the pool

to sit and have a tea party,

then sprang to the surface for air,

Then dove in like a duck

To show off my handstand.

Show me how you really swim, she said.

I did. I was.

Flutter kick.  Backstroke. Handstand.

I stayed in the pool as long as I could

before she told me to come out.

Your lips are blue. Your fingers are like prunes.

Too much sun.
The tropical sun is much stronger.

I didn’t know what a tropical sun was

and if it was a different one that the one at home.

But I came out to lie down on my towel

and let the drips dry.

The bright orange from the sun

burned through my eyelids

and I saw patterns in my eyes

like the kaleidoscope in my room at home.

I listened.

The birds cackled and nagged,

old people walked past our chairs

and my grandmother told them

we were visiting from Maine

where it was so cold, they all knew.

Aren’t you lucky to have your family visit, they said.

I am, she said.

We headed back into the apartment

so my grandmother could make supper.

She sprinkled paprika on to pale pieces of chicken,

and then

took a sharp comb to my wet hair

and made a part with the end

and tugged my hair

into painful pigtails.

I went back to the moviestar bathroom

to change.

Then we had dinner,

long dinner.

Long dinner where no one talked to me

and I didn’t listen to their conversation

and I didn't eat pale chicken.

I left the table for the bathroom

where I knew I could stay

and no one would come look for me.

I slid the door closed,

lit the mirror,

sang Petula Clark from the closet to imaginary people.

I looked in all the drawers,

took a little Dixie cup Lulu kept stacked near the sink and mixed in

lotion and red nail polish and shampoo and toothpaste and mouthwash and foot powder

and stirred it with a stick my grandmother used for

something to do with her nails.  

(She called it an orange stick even though it wasn’t.)

Pink paste that smelled like minty flowers.

Then I threw it away in the wastebasket, hiding it under tissues.

I arrived back at the dining room table where no one had moved.

There was jello mold for dessert. Green.

With pineapple in it.

My parents slept in the new sofa that turned into a bed in the living room.

My brother got to sleep on the screened porch off the living room that overlooked the pool.

He could listen to the tree frogs and

not have any rules.

I slept on a small cot my grandmother borrowed

and placed in their room.

I had a windowsill next to me

for Barbie.

I slept alongside my grandfather whose eyelids had little bumps near his stubby lashes.

and flipped inside out while he slept.

Our vacation days were all mostly

the same.

Every morning I ate a Lender’s bagel in a hurry,

just wanting to go to the pool.

I sat in the small kitchen

in my bathingsuit

my thighs stuck to the cold vinyl chair

while my grandmother stood at the counter

and drank coffee from her percolator,

and pool time went by.

She said I couldn’t go to the pool without a grownup.

I waited for her to do whatever was keeping her from taking me,

talking to friends on the phone,

in the kitchen in one of the vinyl chairs,

twisting and untwisting the long phone cord,

drumming her painted red nails on the glass tabletop.

She dilly dallied,

taking a bite of toast,

looking into kitchen cabinets for things she talked to herself about.

She kept the kitchen door open

so her friends could stop by.

Mrs. Warshauer from next door,

Nettie Meyers from a few doors down,

Esther Levine who gave me a necklace and who painted.

They were all new friends she’d made in Florida,

they were all old and looked alike.

My father was somewhere,

my mother was elsewhere,

and I waited.

Every lunchtime, I wasn’t allowed

to go to the pool.

No pool in the middle of the day

because of the Tropical Sun.

That’s when we went to the fruit stand for bags of oranges and

grapefruit to send home,

or when we’d rest indoors in the dullness,

or we went to Nettie Meyer’s country club

for air conditioned lunch

or we went to Aunt Sara and Uncle Sam’s apartment

in a highrise with a balcony I wasn’t allowed on,

that looked down on a beach they never went to,

with a pool they didn’t swim in,

and sat inside

on their white furniture.

Some days my grandfather helped me wait out the no pool time.

He taught me how to play shuffleboard,

and he’d play Go Fish with me

and War which went on for longer than either of us could stand,

and he took me for a walk down the street in the heat

past other apartment buildings

where other people’s grandparents lived,

to the mall

for a cone of orange sherbet.

In the late afternoon,

finally,

my grandmother

would take me back to the pool.

I’d put on my damp suit

and she'd take her knitting

and sit with the other women under

the awning by the pool.

They all knit together and talked

and my grandmother knit

on small needles

with sequins.

She could knit without looking,

my lifeguard in a housedress,

and I went back in the pool

until my lips turned blue.

At the end of the vacation

we flew back home

in our drab clothes,

me with my tote bag filled with shells

Lulu had bought for me a the shell store

by the airport,

and some dead seahorses,

with their perfect horse heads

and spiral tails,

stiff like dried out raisins,

closed up in a sandwich bag,

and Barbie with her bad haircut 

looking out the window.