On the Beach

My mother, Mozelle, taught me the art of walking the beach, tutoring me on how to scan this world visually:  how to gaze at the sand for shells, driftwood or pieces of rusted iron from a ship of some sort; how to catch a glimpse of the horizon and turn a downward glance to watch a wave roll back out; how to study the wet sand revealed just in time to catch a perfect sand dollar, angel wing or Scotch bonnet.  Mozelle, the consummate beach walker, would reach down and gently pick up this gift from the gulf waters, moving the tips of her fingers across the smooth surface, gathering strength from and finding solace in her surroundings.    

The beach was especially important to her when she became a single mother in 1957.  Singleness was abhorrent in those days, when no-fault divorce did not exist, making it a cumbersome affair for a woman to go through the machinations required for a divorce to be realized.  But Mozelle did it quickly — and stealthily, I’m almost sure — because my grandfather had money, a good lawyer and a penchant for burying family secrets.  

 My mother’s finalized divorce papers – fresh as her favored red snapper, just plucked from gulf waters – had her yearning for the company of the beach, with its salty breezes that teased her taste buds and tantalized her sense of smell. The rustling and sometimes thundering sound of the waves graciously overshadowed her concerns and fears, allowing her thoughts and fancies to meander.  The beach had provided Mozelle with her sense of place as a young child, a young adult and now as a young single mother.  Somewhere in the back of her mind she probably had visions of finding a man to marry.

As you might imagine, the fears, the angst, the anxiety in her new life as a divorcee with children has a backstory.

 Mozelle had come up in the 1940s – enmeshed in a white patriarchal culture promulgating the nonsense that men were the be-all, end-all and that marriage and babies were required.  Like so many of the women of her generation, my mother drank the Kool-Aid, a toxic mix that crushed souls.  In her case, the soul-crushing began after she pushed back against the patriarchy by graduating from university with a degree in business administration.  Then she married, promptly got pregnant with me, and then my sister, around the time she realized that her husband could not hold down a job or turn down a drink.  Lucky for her, she had also graduated with a teaching license, which enabled her to quickly get a job.

Soon after the divorce and for the next several months, my mother began driving me and my sister to the beach every Friday afternoon when she returned home from her elementary school teaching job on the outskirts of Brownsville.  When summer came around, we had our choice of which days of the week to go on our road trip to Padre Island.  By the end of that summer, the trips had stopped – a  disappointment for me – and Mozelle had started socializing with friends I did not know and rarely met.  

Each time we drove to the beach, our mother ushered me and my sister into our two-door, blue Ford Falcon after we had put our beach necessities in the trunk – beach towels, swimming suits, buckets, shovels and a box filled with snacks like vienna sausages, Velveeta cheese, saltines crackers, Delaware Punch, vodka and bourbon.  The drive to Padre Island filled me with anticipation – the beach with its winds, sand and salt water nourished me, and while I couldn’t articulate my feelings at the time, I just knew how good I felt.  The beach also allowed me to be alone and in my head.

The three of us would always stay at the Sandy Retreat Resort Motor Hotel.  We just called it the Sandy Retreat.  It had two swimming pools partially wrapped by a collection of two-story buildings in the shape of a U – three rooms on top, three on the bottom.  The canted buildings – painted a dull red and topped off with flat roofs – faced towards the gulf waters at the opening of the U.  The building closest to the beach was my mother’s go-to, as it gave her a remarkable panoramic view.

 One of those late Friday afternoons, once we arrived at the Sandy Retreat, my mother sent me and my sister to the beach to play in the sand.  She admonished us to stay out of the water and away from the waves.  She remained in our second-floor room with its expansive view of the beach and the gulf waters.  Mozelle kept an eye on us as she sipped from a glass of Old Crow bourbon, water and ice, taking an occasional drag off a Camel cigarette. She often stood on the patio outside the room and stared out across the Gulf of Mexico, most likely considering a visit to the motel bar after we came back from the beach.  I’d wave at her and she would wave back.

At the time, I was seven, my sister barely five. Neither one of us could swim yet, or even dog paddle very well.  We were clueless about riptides, but confidently carried our buckets and hand shovels to the beach and sat down in the wet sand, positioning ourselves just shy of a wave’s finale… and its retreat back into the gulf.  

Sitting on the wet sand, my legs spread like a V –  like my last name, I thought. The cool salt water waves would roll across my calves, so, technically, I was staying out of the water, which did not mean we were out of the danger zone.  That territory of wet sand along the shore also belonged to jellyfish – blueish with long tentacles.  It was the rule of the beach to stay aware.  But, lost in play, I forgot, and my leg met up with a jellyfish’s tentacles. The sting was hellish.  

I kept my big-sister composure.  “Let’s go now,” I said with childish firmness.  My sister – we’ll call her Starr – looked up at me and shook her head no.  “Yes, let’s go.  I got stung by a jellyfish.”  I began pleading, desperately wanting to scratch the red welts on the calf of my leg, which would have been the absolute wrong response — you end up spreading the venom, and the sting.  

Starr finally gave in, reluctantly pulling herself up off the wet sand – a slow-motion scene suggesting she was resisting my request, a behavior she would master as she grew older. She was never very happy with me as her sister, and over the years she routinely showed how put-upon she felt by engaging in a spitfire of sarcasms and put-downs.  She showed similar behavior toward our mother, only worse.

I knocked on the motel room door and Mozelle immediately opened it, giving us her soft smile.  While my mother was a die-hard Texan, the one thing she did not do was talk like one — no soft drawl to go with her smile. She shunned all Lone Star slang, including the word y’all, of all things.  She was proud to speak proper English. 

“I watched you two walking back from the beach,” she said.  Her right hand on the door knob and her left holding a drink, she ushered me and my sister into the room.  She did not ask us if we had a good time or wonder what we created with the sand.  “I got stung by a jellyfish,” I told her, presenting my leg, and the red rash where the jellyfish collided with me, or me with it.   “It really hurts.” I was matter-of-fact about it.  Mozelle glanced at the wound.

“You weren’t looking where you were going, were you?”  Mother was never one to indulge her two girls with hugs or empathy.  Care, concern, and softness were rationed.   Love was awkward for her, a trait she would hand down to me. The rare times I felt her caring side (maybe there was some love there, too) was when we walked the beach together as adults. 

“Come over here with me.”  My mother gave me a soft smile, turned and walked to the bathroom.  I followed, asking the pertinent question.  “What are you doing?”  

Mozelle pointed to the toilet seat.  “Put your leg up here, please.”  I did as told while she reached for a half-full bottle of Smirnoff vodka on the bathroom counter, screwed off the top, and gently poured it on my jellyfish stings.  I held my breath against the searing pain, which lessened quickly, to my relief.  She took a sip of her drink, then a long, delicate drag off a cigarette,  leaving a slight imprint of her apple red lipstick.  She was wearing white cotton capri pants, flip-flops, and a sleeveless, soft blue blouse.  She had taken off her clip earrings, but was still wearing her platinum ring — a domed poinsettia flower inlaid with diamonds and rubies. 

“Are you sure this is all we can do?”  I knew there had to be more to it than soft splashes of vodka.  “I don’t have an answer to that, Kay.  The vodka should work fine,” my mother said.  Her arms crossed, she began tapping the toes of her right foot, signaling her impatience.

“I think maybe there’s something else,” I suggested.  We went back and forth a bit until I told her I wanted to go to the motel office and see if they had anything to help with the jellyfish sting.  “Okay.  Go ahead and go,” she said.  

Daily, my mother would task me with responsibilities, encourage my independence – leaving me to find consolation and hugs from others, like the woman at the front desk of the Sandy Retreat, whom I patiently waited for while she helped the folks in front, anxious to get checked in.  Finally, she was free to help me.  

The vodka was starting to wear off.  I wanted to jump up and down, thinking I could tamp down the pain, but instead stood still and showed her the stinging redness on my leg, mentioning that all my mother had was vodka.  “Sorry, honey. We don’t have a thang for those stings,” she said with a bit of Texas drawl.

On my walk back to the room, I was feeling lonesome.

I knocked on our room’s door.  Mother looked at me, tilted her head to the left and raised her eyebrows questioningly.  I looked down at the floor and sighed.  “They didn’t have anything.”  “I’m sorry.”  Then she said, “It’s time to go to bed.”  I got into bed with my sister.   Mother probably let us watch a little TV. Then she left us safe and sound in the motel room and headed to the bar.  I wasn’t sure why.  Her drinking wasn’t on my radar yet as a bad thing.   The next morning she woke up while we were still asleep and headed for the beach.

Beach walking was her therapy. It led her in and out of contemplative moments, moving slowly, her toes first to encounter the lightness of the soft, frothy waves that linger after the big waves are drawn back into the gulf waters.  When she walked the beach, she was usually barefoot. Rarely did she wear flip-flops.  She had them with her, though, flopping back and forth as she walked, dangling between the first two fingers of her right hand.

Mozelle usually walked alone, but sometimes enjoyed the company of one other person — but no more than that!  She reveled in the sunshine across her face, the rays tamed by a blissful sea breeze.  Her art of walking the beach is not something I caught on to as a child, but I did at that time feel and absorb her adoration of the beach.  It wasn’t until I was an adult – late thirties, early forties – that I started visiting my now-sober mother in Brownsville and that’s when I further learned from her this magical art. Because this place where water met land was her singular refuge, that made it safe for the two of us to talk – deeply and contextually.

In her earlier days, it was the bar that was her refuge.  On our regular jaunts to the Sandy Retreat, my sister and I often accompanied her.   Mozelle would escort us up to the bar and say a few words to the bartender while we saddled up on the bar stools. 

“They can each have a Shirley Temple and a few peanuts,” my mother told the bartender, who looked at us and smiled.  

“Yes, ma’am. Two Shirley Temples comin’ right up.”  The mocktail, named after a 1930’s child actor, consisted of sparkling ginger ale, a splash of grenadine, and a maraschino cherry.  They were delicious.  The peanuts were the piece de resistance.

But I became bored staring in the mirror and at the shelves of liquor behind the bar. And my five-year-old sister Starr was not much of a conversationalist.   I turned in the swivel bar stool and looked out into darkness.  It didn’t take long for my eyes to adjust, and I could make out dark tables and chairs, mostly empty. I couldn’t find where my mother was sitting, but it didn’t really worry me because I knew she wouldn’t leave us in that bar.  

The bartender kept my sister and me entertained with a second drink and more peanuts than my mother would have liked.  Eventually, she walked out of the shadows and up to the bar, where she smiled at us.  

“Okay, girls, let’s go back to our room.”  Along with her soft smile, she offered a bit of tenderness and touched my shoulder.  During these early days of her drinking, the alcohol made Mozelle a bit more generous with her rations of kindness. 

In retrospect, I think our trips to Padre Island suggest my mother was priming herself for the dating world.  She wanted to find another husband.  The culture and social norms required that.  In the years going forward, Mozelle dated a couple of men who were from our Brownsville neck of the woods, but I’m convinced she wanted to get out of town.  

By the time I reached the fourth-grade she would marry a man from Kansas, get a teaching job, birth another child and get a divorce before I turned 21.  After the second divorce, she returned to the Rio Grande Valley and moved into a stilted house on Padre Island, where she met back up with her refuge and reclaimed her beach walking. Her closest friend at that time was liquor.   For awhile, I would visit her in spite of her drinking and we would walk the beach.  But eventually I broke our ties after a night when she called me drunk as all get out.  I gave her an ultimatum to stop the drinking and suggested she try Alcoholics Anonymous.  It would be two years before we had any communication.

If you are finding my work valuable, meaningful, or the least bit inspiring, I’d truly appreciate your support with a paid subscription…

Read some of what I’ve already published by checking out my archives.