Chelsea Biondolillo

Seeing Seaside

In the not-quite dark, fingers of fog move across the road, curling out of the way of my grandparent’s blue Honda Civic. In the backseat, I am squinting at a crossword puzzle, trying to read the clues in the pre-dawn gloom.

“It is still too early for that, put it down before you ruin your eyes.” My grandmother the nurse, is very concerned about my vision. I have started to squint more and more. In two more years, my fourth grade teacher will send home a note and I will have to get my first pair of glasses.  I finger the edges of my book, willing the sun to rise faster.

We are headed to the Oregon coast, taking a route we know well. After spending a night in Seaside, we will head north toward Cannon Beach and Astoria, before looping back home again.

Except to eat and sleep, we rarely spend much time in town on these trips. Early mornings Grandma and I will get up from our lumpy motel beds and walk as far as we can down the beach looking for shells and photogenic sand patterns. We try to get past the line of damp cedar-shingled hotels and circling gulls. She will wear one of my grandfather’s windbreakers, her short brown hair whipping around her square glasses, a large Canon looped under her arm. I will have on the same pair of  shorts I’ve been wearing all weekend and the sweater  she crocheted for me out of yarn scraps. My lower legs will stay peppered with goosebumps until after lunch, when the weak Pacific sun has finally warmed the breeze. In the afternoons we may drive through a nature preserve looking for Sandhill cranes or beaver dams, or visit an obscure beach park famed for its shipwreck —staying as far as we can from gift shops and fast food restaurants.

But in Seaside, we will always spend an hour or so at the aquarium. My grandparents suffer its towniness perhaps because it is the only way we can look into the ocean. From our side of the smudged glass we can see a view that would be impossible from the car.

It disappoints my grandmother that the beauty of the fields does not capture my attention, though she never gives up trying to interest me in the view. She has steadfast opinions about what one should spend one’s time looking at: puzzle books keep me quiet, yet rob me of sightseeing—she resorts to threats of my impending loss of eyesight or debilitating carsickness to get me to stop reading. From the backseat jumble of guidebooks and pinecones, I circle words like ‘glower’ and ‘thumb’ while she announces a rare bunting or grosbeak. As the road brings us closer to the coastline, drooping hemlocks begin to outnumber the Douglas firs. I stare sullenly into the repetition of trunks, punctuated by occasional Oregon Grape before slowly sliding back down and starting a new wordsearch. Yet, once the countryside gives way to the familiarity of even a small town, I sit up out of my nest of coats and blankets and start looking.

The simple yellow AQUARIUM sign has been hanging from the side of the cedar plank and stone building over the boardwalk since before even my mother was born. I race ahead of my grandparents, anxious to feed the Harbor Seals just inside the ticket counter. The barking, so puppy-like at first, echoes loudly against the concrete floors and walls and quickly becomes a jarring sound. Then their musky ammonia smell begins to overwhelm us. We head for the tank room after quickly emptying a requisite bag of dried fish into the clamor of whiskered faces.

The aquarium was originally a swimming house back in the 1920s and the original pipe is still used to pump sea water into the fish tanks. Inside the tank room it’s dark and has a soft, oceanic smell. There are a couple dozen “displays”  around the room’s perimeter and touch pools in the center. This one room is the aquarium—we take our time walking through it.  I search out the octopus amid his coral, the seahorses from their shocks of sea grass. Unconsciously, I make the scowling wolf eel’s face face back at him through the glass.

“That’s some grin, eh kid?” Grandpa chuckles. I don’t remember him calling me by my name ever, only referring to me with it.

“Chelsea, come see this starfish.” My grandmother calls me by my name all the time. “Remember how we saw one like this at Ecola State Park? Next to the purple anemones?” We look and look and look.

When it’s time to leave, I insist on a visit to the gift shop. More of a nook really, it has the usual array of tacky beach-themed tchotchkies in the forms of bells, spoons, snow globes, and key-rings. I always beg for the polished shells and never get them. My grandmother chides, those cowries look Australian and that murex is probably from South America. What kind of nonsense is it to want to buy shells at the beach? Abashed, I move away to pet the expensive stuffed animals. Then I see the grab bags.

They are all different shapes and sizes, wrapped in simple white paper with their prices drawn on them in green marker. Some large packages are marked a dollar, while smaller parcels, five, and vice versa. I am not familiar with this concept, and ask my grandmother.

“They’re junk.” She doesn’t attempt to soften her disdain. “Things people won’t buy for the regular price so they wrap them up and charge too much for the surprise of opening them.”

The helpful young clerk mentions that actually, everything is worth at least five dollars and some packages are worth more.

“But how do I know what’s in them?” I ask my new ally.

“That’s just it, you don’t know. It’s a surprise.” That word surprise again, but the teenage girl behind the counter says it like present. I am enamored at the thought of the  riches waiting behind the impenetrable white paper. I suddenly want a valuable surprise more than anything.

My grandmother is unmoved.  I try to reason with her, appeal to her sense of value. I make unlikely promises to not ask for anything else for the whole rest of the trip.

“You don’t even know what’s in there, how do you know you want it?” She distrusts these things that she can’t see.  My grandfather has been waiting outside for us, but we have taken so long that he wanders back into the aquarium in time for the zenith of my performance.

“Please, Grandma please! It’s only one dollar and it’s the only thing I want at all!” I know better than to cry—it will shut down negotiations immediately—but my sentence ends on a high waver.

“What does she want?”

“She wants one of the grab bags for a dollar. I told her they are full of junk and she doesn’t care.”

“Oh for crying out loud, whatta dumb baby!” He doesn’t raise his voice but turns and grouses to the empty air about his misfortune with grandchildren. He turns back to my grandmother, “Let her have one then. It will be a piece of garbage, she won’t get anything else, and that’ll teach her a lesson.”

My grandmother sighs. She is perhaps not completely sold on the idea that giving me what I want will teach me not to beg for things. But I am hopping around, getting more and more worked up, and it is, after all, only a dollar…

“Alright. Fine. Pick out one of the one dollar ones.”

I am instantly as focused as a forensic scientist. There are several one dollar packages in the basket and I pick each one of them up and turn it around in my hands. I evaluate each of them based on size and weight and discard both the smallest and lightest packages. I am like a blind prospector, feeling for the gold among the lime with nothing but intuition to help me. There is no guile or argument to my search: I am trying to pick the winner. I finally decide on a package that I can’t easily fit in one hand but that fits well in two. Part of the wrapped shape gives under my investigative fingers and part is solid, dense.

Grandma gives the clerk a dollar and a long disproving stare. She tells me to wait to open it until we are back at the car. This tactic is most likely to protect the clerk from my inevitable tears of disillusionment.

I scramble through the stretched seatbelt as my grandmother holds her seat forward for me and hunker down into my coats and blankets in the backseat. I am holding Charlie’s chocolate bar, Ralphie’s last Christmas present.  I open it very slowly and carefully while my grandparents pull away from the aquarium and brace for the fallout.

“Ohhhh!” My voice is hushed and awed. “Grandma, LOOK!”  I hold the thing up between the seats so they can both see.

“Well.” This is a word my grandmother says often. She can stretch it into two syllables and it means she either doesn’t know what to say, or she does but has thought better of it. Grandpa looks at me through the rearview mirror from under arched eyebrows. My reverence has knocked the annoyance out of him like a breath and he is quiet.

My newest treasure is a small resin and wire assemblage, very cheaply made. The base is cast in one piece, in the shape of three pier pilings that are tied with ropes. From the pilings, three thin pieces of wire sprout up and are tipped with little plastic seagulls. The wire is flexible enough that they bob around as though they were flying, but resilient enough to keep them aloft. It is a perfectly representative piece of cliché beach faux-art, made in Taiwan by the thousands and sold in souvenir shops on every coast in the world. And I love it. I love it without irony and without vindication. I can’t wait to show my mom. I am going to keep it forever.

They drive a bit in silence, not knowing what to say. The “junkness” of my new sculpture, as I am calling it, cannot be disputed in their adult eyes. But I don’t see it and they don’t see any reason to explain it.

“Well.” She says it again, in my grandfather’s direction rather than to the car at large. “I suppose… it was a dollar well spent. I really wouldn’t have guessed it at all.”

“Whatta crazy kid.”

“You thought I wouldn’t like it, Grandpa. You thought it would be junk, didn’t you? It is a prize! It is beautiful!” I curl my hands around the pilings and hold it as though it were a bouquet of roses or carnations. I look out the car window as the small beach town rolls past like a movie I have seen before: soaped shop windows, arched street lamps, cedar plank signs adorned with surf boards and crab nets. But now I see boxes in the display windows, shopping bags being carried down the street—and every one of them is filled with treasures I can’t see. These things I can’t see become very interesting. The puzzle book is forgotten, jumbled on the floor with pieces of driftwood and crumpled park maps. I continue to watch as the brick walkways run out and are replaced with nodding sea grass poking through rocks overlooking the Pacific, as the sea birds dive into and out of the surf, as the world hides, and then reveals itself over and over.

~~~~~~~~

Chelsea Biondolillo has lived a lot of places, but likes places close to the ocean best. She received a B.F.A from the Pacific NW College of Art in Portland, OR and is seriously considering an M.F.A. Her work has appeared in the Rio Review, www.austinmonthly.com, and VenusZine.