A Teenager Down The Shore

 

 

 

When I was young, but when I had been in puberty for a few years, I was by necessity very inexperienced and yet very needy. I hardly knew what I was needy of, but of course I knew in general. What I was in need of was a girl. But not just any girl, or at least at first not just any girl. There seemed to be girls who were attracted to me, but that was not enough. I had to be attracted to them, but I also had not to be scared of them. In other words, I think I needed a good looking girl who was attracted to me but was friendly with me so I wouldn’t be frightened, nor repelled. It was a tall order.

In the summers we went down the shore, on Long Beach Island, in New Jersey, an 18 mile long skinny island just over a Causeway of maybe a mile from Manhawkin on the mainland. The Causeway – a word that was only used for this specific connection as far as I knew – consisted of three little trestle bridges and a longer bridge connecting Manahawkin to Ship Bottom via three little islands. Right off one of the bridges on one of the tiny islands was a restaurant called Dutchman’s where they served pizza with clams on it. A kind of exotic favorite, we thought.

Anyway, once you got to Ship Bottom, right in the middle of LBI, you hit a road that went end to end right down the middle of the island. if you turned right, there would be the bay – called Little Egg Harbor here – on your right, and the Atlantic ocean on your left, just over the dunes a couple of blocks away from the central road. There was enough breadth of the island there in the middle for there to be several streets parallel to the central road. Six miles down that road brought you to Beach Haven, the main town on the island, and probably the area with the most breadth. We went there in rented summer houses at first, before I was in puberty. Sometimes my mother would drop me at one of the docks on the bay side and I would fish for hours, with men standing around me. I can’t remember their talking to me, maybe some little jabber, and I can’t remember catching any fish, although I must have, I guess. The sun was comfortable, I hardly wore any clothes, and I had already tanned for the season.

Once wading in the bay I stepped on something, maybe glass, although I was sure it was a crab that bit me, I got a substantial laceration in the ball of my right foot. I was taken to Dr. Dodd’s office, a combined office and residence on the corner of a street in Beach Haven, and he stitched it up. As I remember it, the wound then became infected and I had to be taken back to Philadelphia where I was admitted to the Graduate Hospital for treatment with a new and powerful medicine, penicillin, delivered in crystalline form with injections that hurt like hell every four or six hours. My mother sat with me. She finally convinced me to stop bawling when the nurse came in with the syringe and just turn over to expose my rump, because, she told me, I’m going to get it anyway so I might as well cooperate. Imagine the nurse’s surprise when this change in behavior presented itself. I remember the look of shock on her face, and her saying, well, that’s a change! I suppose my grandmother and maybe some great aunts kept charge of my three younger siblings down at the beach house in Beach Haven while my mother was with me.

But if you turned left when you came off the Causeway, you would travel through Ship Bottom and Surf City – where Sam Alito now lives in the summer, to the everlasting shame of the island – and then through Harvey Cedars and, just before you got to the end of the island and the iconic phallic Barnegat Lighthouse, with Barnegat Bay on your left and the Atlantic ocean on your right, there was Loveladies, name for Sir Thomas Loveladies way in the past, so much in the past that no one could recite exactly how Sir Thomas’ family obtained their surname. Loveladies was at the skinny end of the island, where, after renting usually in Beach Haven and then one year in Harvey Cedars for the summer season, my parents bought a lot on the bay side and built a modern ranch style house, rather than the Cape Cod style houses elsewhere on the island, designed and built by the firm Ullman and Silvermaster, who it turned out were accused of being Soviet spies in the McCarthy era, although they were never convicted. The island was so skinny here that there was no room for roads parallel to the central road, so if you turned left you hit the bay in a couple hundred yards, and if you turned right you hit the ocean in maybe 400 yards over the dunes. My parents had the lot filled with sand that was dredged from the bottom of the bay, thus not only making the lot buildable, but also creating a deeper hole in the bay where you could have a dock with a boat and where you could swim. Then they had gravel put on top of the sand on the lot, and then a house built close to the bay with a big picture window looking out at ground level, with a new window product called Thermopane to look out from the living room onto the bay. Thermopane had two sheets of glass separated by air and it wasn’t supposed to mist up, which it usually didn’t. On the outside of the Thermopane window was a wooden deck, where you lounged on redwood furniture and from which you walked down to the bay if you wanted, and out onto the short dock that my folks had had built if you wanted, and if was winter you could walk out onto the dock and see loads of aboriginal horseshoe crabs with their metallic-appearing carapaces and ancient look scurrying about. There was a little spit of land just on the right of us jutting into the bay that had a house on it and telephone poles, where there were the hugest osprey nests, and where planes came periodically to spray DDT. The whole family marveled at the nature of LBI which we didn’t have much of back in Philadelphia.

My parents also built a black top tennis court between the house and the central road, the only tennis court on our side of the island, north of the Causeway. It must have been a landmark, because everyone on that side of the island had to drive past it all the time, but I actually never heard it referred to.

People used to stop by the house. My parents had lots of friends, mostly Jews from Philadelphia. In those days life was pretty segregated religion-wise. We four kids and my mother would be on our own during the week, while my father worked in the city. He would come down Friday night – much anticipated – and the pace of life would pick up over the weekend. There would be tennis, and the friends would come over.

Just the other day my sister Kathy recalled for us kids that periodically we would receive visits from the Bookmobile. Excitement! It was a traveling library, an RV back when they didn’t have RV’s to my knowledge, and book lover that my mother was, we were whipped into anticipatory excitement as the time approached for a Bookmobile visit. Imagine that.

So it was in this house in the summers that I first experienced puberty. It wasn’t a very insistent puberty at first, just pubic hair, and an enlarged penis, and erections. It was vague. No one said anything. I imagine I was watched. The oldest kid is always the first one to be experienced by the parents, obviously, and while it was a blessing to be the first, and in some ways therefore the most important one, it was also the one to be experimented on. So I guess they watched me.

Once my mother and father took me aside to tell me that one of the daughters of the friends, maybe her name was Stephanie, maybe, was smitten with me. I hadn’t noticed anything. My mother informed me, and my father backed her up, expressing some disgust that I hadn’t noticed anything. They told me to notice that she followed me around. Me, I didn’t feel anything about it, she wasn’t really very attractive to me although she seemed nice, and I didn’t know what to do about it, but I responded to my parents’ instructions. There was a group of us kids who usually stayed together in a group at our house or at the Finkelstein’s house and I asked this girl if she wanted to go off alone for a little, just the two of us, and she said no, and that was that.

Some years later, it must have been, a year or two anyway, other things turned up. The younger girl from next door put her hand down under my bathing suit when we were alone in one of the bedrooms of he house and felt around and said, what’s that? I was afraid to even tell her. Later on in the water out by our raft that we had all made together and that floated in the area the sand had been excavated from, she and I went to the side of the raft away from the shore and she ducked under the surface and looked between my legs and I pulled my bathing suit down as she wanted, so that she could see, but I was shy and pulled it down, but only so far.

Then one day there was Lucy. Lucy Solomon was tall and lean, with striking dark straight hair that she wore long and she was a bit distant, actually, but she was good looking and I heard my Aunt Bea tell one of her sisters that Lucy had a very nice figure, is the way she put it. She did. We kids nick-named her Looie, I don’t know why, but it was affectionate. She and I were alone in the car one day, as whoever the others were there with us were outside somewhere, and I proposed the Lucy that we make out or something. She was much more an equal than the other girls were, and she went to Baldwin School, and I think to Bryn Mawr later on, and she was smart and poised. She turned me down. She said that her mother, a very pretty lady herself, had told Lucy that once you start you can’t stop. I hadn’t heard that before. I just accepted it, although I thought that she probably wasn’t attracted to me. Good try. Lucy was not actually the daughter of her father, Irv, but as it was told to us, her mother had been married before, and Lucy was the product. I don’t know if they had actually been married, but in those days you didn’t say “a prior relationship.” I wonder what the connection was between Lucy’s origin and her mother’s advice. Many years later I heard that this beautiful woman died of breast cancer in her 30’s.

Then the next year another one of our friends, Judy Wolf, told me she had the perfect girl for me, Laurie Colwin, whose family was visiting LBI from Chicago. This one was younger, I think she was 13 and I was maybe 15, and I took her to the movies and tried to feel her up but she had hardly anything there. Her blond sister Lesley, who was maybe 16 or 17, was more interested and interesting and taught me to drive on gravel in a driveway by their rented house and told me that she hadn’t had sex with her boyfriend Steve and I intoned “good,” as though I were a judge. She shouldn’t have been teaching me just to drive. She really liked me and I really liked her. Later on, I went to the movies with Judy, who had tried to set me up, and I asked her if we could hold hands and she laughed at my awkwardness and said sure. As everyone knows, Laurie went on to become a famous writer and died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 48 in New York.

Then the next year there was this stacked blond girl from Rahway New Jersey who had a boat over at Loveladies Harbor near the Finkelstein’s house, and who wasn’t Jewish, and I took our 15 foot Correct Craft speedboat, The BuBob, and drove over there and picked her up, and we used her lightning class sailboat to race in the bay one Sunday and we almost won but I forgot to put the centerboard down as we tacked and we lost our place out front. When the Finkelstein’s were over at our house the mother, Leah, said to me, I see you have a new girl friend. I say murmured yeah and later my mother said she could kill Leah Finkelstein for saying something like that. Maybe that was the same girl that I went to a beach party with and she said do I want to take a walk and I went with her and another guy and girl and we were in the dunes and we made out. I might have tried something more and was rebuffed. I think Leah Finkelstein had some vicarious interest, actually, which was strange, because she was rather plain, but she was lively.

Then there was that time when I was out somewhere with friends and my mother called and said Lee Brown, an old friend of my father, was visiting and he had a daughter and her friend and could they join us. How old are they, I asked, Mr. Sophisticate. My mother said with her trademark sarcasm, kind of like Eve Arden with that intonation I hated, that the girls were “the right age.” When they came over I was bowled over with how sexy these two blonds were. And they were out for boys. Joanie was the friend, and she assumed I would be with Lee’s daughter and she said, where is someone for Joanie? She told me about how great Lee was, about how she could go around the house in bra and panties, and how she could tell in her high school classroom what the teachers’ reactions were to her when they stood up and had to use their hands to straighten out their pants. I liked Joanie, although she was maybe a little scary, and didn’t understand how I hadn’t been paired with her.

This is what they are talking about when they say, if I knew then what I know now. As it was, I knew nothing, I was interested but shy, didn’t have any good models to learn from, and was constantly frustrated, I guess, and I hadn’t yet learned to masturbate – I guess I wasn’t much of an experimenter. One day on the basketball court the subject came up, somehow, and my friend Ed looked at me with disbelief and said, you ought to try it.

Now, I think that our social order doesn’t match up well with our biology. Sex is a constant item of deprivation. In other societies, at a certain age they take the boys to the whorehouse to learn, to be taught – teach him, Madelyn, says the father. There are other ways that teenagers learn. Older men and younger women sometimes get together, for sure. Are there societies where older women teach younger men? You would think one of the mothers might say, hey, would you like me to teach you a thing or two, help you get started? I was talking to a friend the other day, and he recounted how his mother tried to teach him about sex, and what a fiasco it was. Me, my mother handed me two books to read and used the word “intercourse.” One night my father told me to always use a rubber. That was kind of it, before sex ed. Our social structures and processes don’t meet our biology, still, I think.

Long Beach Island was a beautiful island that I remember fondly. We would eat lunch and take the mandatory one and a half hour postprandial rest and play board games and read. I would underline some of the words I didn’t know, knowing that the college boards would be coming up. We went to the ocean with rafts to ride the waves. We went boating and waterskiing and sailing. That’s what we talk about now. The rest of it, being a teenager, we talk about in general terms. I kept a calendar on the wall, counting down the days until I would be 16 and would be able to drive and would at last be able to be alone in a car with a girl. I must have started with 450 days to go. I think the other three kids, being younger than me, spent their puberty years away at camp. So I guess their memories are different from mine. So many girls, so little knowledge.

 

Budd Shenkin