and is my body ocean

abigail ann gray

THE OCEAN, SHE’D ALWAYS THOUGHT, WAS NOT PRETTY. 

Pretty was something delicate, carefully crafted. Stagnant. The ocean was none of those things. 

Jamie rode her ancient blue bicycle to work every day that summer, even in the rain. Rocco’s didn’t open until eleven in the morning, but she’d never been an early riser, so as often as not, this was how her mornings began: fumbling with the bike lock outside her mom’s condominium. Rubber on concrete, asphalt, then the thrumming of wooden planks as she hit the boardwalk. Sand between tire treads. 

Off to her left, the sea folded in on itself again and again. 

She parked her bike around back like always. Inside, pools of artificial light on brown and beige tiled floors countered the blues and sharp sun of the June morning outside. 

Clocking in and getting ready for her shift should have taken about ten seconds, but she dawdled by her locker: checking the time, checking her purse clasp, checking the lock. The corner of her eye was trained on the kitchen doors. When they crashed open and Eliana came bursting through, belting along to the eighties station the line cooks blasted every morning, Jamie tried to peer past her through the swinging gap, then mentally shook herself. Stupid. 

It was a long shift of loud tourists and ignoring Brian’s text in her back pocket: ale house tonight? Not ignoring, perhaps, so much as postponing an inevitability. Of course she would go: what else was there to do? Still, there was the other, unspoken inevitability of afterwards. She let the clatter of dishes and voices press that from her mind, for now. 

Waiters and hostesses, bussers and cooks moved in concentric circles around the kitchen, the dining room, each other. Conversations took place in the seconds snatched between tasks, to be interrupted and then picked up again the next time your arc intersected with theirs. 

“Matt’s probably the oldest one here,” Eliana said as she grabbed a stack of menus from the hostess stand, continuing a discussion that had started twenty minutes ago in the kitchen. “He’s gotta be, what, forty? Forty-five?” 

“No,” Jamie said at once. “No way. Maybe forty, tops. And Deb is definitely older than him.” 

A gaggle of teenagers pressed their way to the front of the line. Numbers reeled through Jamie’s head as she calculated time: the minutes of the waitlist, the hours until she was off the clock. The years between one person’s birth and another’s. 

Seventeen minutes before she clocked out, she ducked into the back under the pretense of restocking the to-go boxes. She had just pulled out her phone to finally answer Brian’s text when the back door opened. Bright sun spilled briefly into the artificial light. Jamie glanced up and her breath caught. 

“Hey.” 

“Hey.” 

She looked back at her phone, stared at the display without seeing it. Matt was opening up his locker, but his eyes, she knew without looking, were on her. 

“Beautiful day out there.” 

She looked up at him. His gaze was steady.

Matt was, possibly, as much as twice her age. She’d never seen him wearing a ring, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything: she’d never seen him outside of work, and none of the line cooks wore their wedding rings in the kitchen. 

“You off soon?”

It was difficult to think. “Um...yeah. Yeah, at four.”

He tilted his head towards the door. “Try to get out there and enjoy it. Don’t think about the rest of us slaving away in here.”

“I won’t.” She smiled. “I mean, I will.”

It took a few seconds, but her brain restarted after the kitchen doors swung shut behind him. 

Forty. Forty-five.

She bit her lip, slid her phone back into her pocket. 

Her head understood numbers. No other part of her body did.

HER HEAD WAS SWIMMING. 

The night air rushed over and around and through her outstretched hand, and the stars were vaguely visible beyond the passing streetlights, and Brian was loudly singing along with his car radio, which was churning out the voice of whatever alt-folk singer he was into these days. She should have kept track of how many drinks he’d had, made sure he was okay to drive, but she’d been too busy counting her own. Five beers: spaced out enough so that she wouldn’t lose control, just her voice of reason.

Back at his place, she watched the ceiling fan overhead. It was spinning fast in the gray darkness, but she could still make out the individual blades. The gust of air that they stirred up raised goosebumps on her neck, her chest, her thighs. The sensation was something like what she was supposed to be feeling right now.

Her phone vibrated loudly on his bedside table, and she had to stop herself from reaching for it. Probably just her mother texting her good night. Jamie had told her that she was going out with her coworkers, that she might crash at Eliana’s: the latest in a string of unnecessary lies and half-truths she’d told that summer. 

A sharp pain brought her back to the present. She sucked in a breath. 

“Shit, sorry,” Brian whispered. “You good?” 

“Yeah, no, I’m fine. Just, maybe...don’t do that, I guess.” 

She lowered her head back onto his thin pillow with its thin pillowcase. The fan swam overhead. 

DAWN WAS GRAY AND CHILLY. 

Jamie pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down further as she walked from Brian’s mother’s place back to her own mother’s place. Both were a few blocks back from the beach, but sand still found its way into the cracks in the pavement here. 

She had the beginnings of a headache, and knew it would take a shower to rid the feeling of last night from her body. For now, though, the cool air against her skin was enough. 

Her feet were on autopilot, taking her down into the street to avoid the ongoing construction at the old yellow house, then back up onto the sidewalk again. Left at the corner of Fifth and Pine. Slowing as she passed the big gray house, so she could count how many cats were perched on the driveway today. 

Jamie had spent snatches of summers here for as long as she could remember. Any path she walked now was a retracing of steps. The only difference this year was the stretching of time: the whole summer in front of her, vast and unwieldy. 

The condo was quiet in the morning half-light. She hung her keys on the chipped mermaid-tail-shaped hook by the door, and went to refill her water bottle with the newly installed filter in the kitchen sink. 

Her mother was doing an admirable job of forging a home that felt permanent in a place that had only ever been temporary. Jamie was the one left struggling with the sudden warping of dimensions. This place was four times the size of the dorm room she’d just vacated. It felt four times smaller. She had come here after graduation in May, and planned on staying through the end of August. It felt like an eternity.

She stood in the kitchen gulping water, then filled her bottle to the top again. The reality of hangovers had evaded her all through college, but she was beginning to feel it creeping up on her now. 

The blinds in her room had been left open, so her clothes came off in the bathroom. She examined her body in the mirror for a moment. It looked much the same as it always did. Whatever it was that she was feeling—unsettled, uncertain—was invisible beneath her skin.

She turned on the shower head, hoping that the water pressure would be high enough today to pummel every strange feeling out of her body.

CLOSING SHIFT AT ROCCO’S WAS ALWAYS CHAOTIC. Tonight, hopefully, was chaotic enough that no one would notice how often Jamie was veering off her usual charted paths, taking any excuse to detour through the kitchen instead. No one, of course, except the cause of this sudden change in behavioral patterns. This was a test, and no matter how many times she ran it, the results were the same: Matt’s eyes would pick her out of any crowd instantly, and her knees would go weak. 

How could one person’s eyes lingering on her for a few long moments feel more electric than someone else’s body pressed up against hers?

The sixth or seventh time she wove her way through the sea of white shirts and clanging metal and sizzling dough, he finally said something. Casually, as though they hadn’t been playing this game all night. Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe it was all in her head.

“They treating you all right out there?”

Her pulse quickened, sea-foam blown along an empty beach. “Oh, you know. The usual, pretty much.”

“Lot of big groups tonight, as far as I can make out.”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah...we keep having to push tables together.” Her mind was stuttering over his choice of phrasing: make out. Coincidence? Intent? 

His gaze was unwavering, and there was something else in it now that she couldn’t quite place. Amusement? Kindness? 

“Take it easy out there.” 

“You too, back here.” 

She willed herself to keep moving, to not look back over her shoulder to see if he was watching her walk away, to keep her mouth shut so that everything inside her did not come crashing out at once. 

THE PULSING BASS WAS ALMOST LOUD ENOUGH to drown out the waves. 

Jamie was not drinking tonight and was very close to regretting it. All around her, people she vaguely knew were in various stages of Dionysian revelry, drunk on the bonfire and starlight and shit-cheap Four Lokos. 

“Your friend...” Eliana was not there, and then she was, an arm around Jamie, pausing to take another swig of her mango flavored hard seltzer. “Your friend. You said he’s older than you?” 

“Brian?” Jamie glanced across the bonfire to where he was, incredibly, attempting to play his guitar. “Yeah, by like two years.” 

“Oh, good. And he’s single?” 

What could she say? Yes, technically, he was available, but he always snored after he’d been drinking. Yes, but if you went out together and he ran into someone he knew, he’d never remember to introduce you. 

“Yeah, far as I know.” 

The guitar was completely inaudible over the thrumming of the speakers. It did not matter: he was already attracting a small throng of people. Mostly girls, their eyes enchanted. 

“Hmm. Sometimes I wonder if they’re single, what’s wrong with them, you know?” Eliana stared into the fire meditatively, then brightened. “But then again, I’m single, and there’s nothing wrong with me.” She threw her arms out wide. “I’m a delight!”

Jamie, having leaned back to avoid being smacked in the face with an empty White Claw can, couldn’t help but smile. She thought about asking Eliana: how do you do it? How do you inhabit your skin so easily? Can you teach me? Can it even be taught?

But Eliana was swaying now and singing along to the music, making up her own words since she did not seem to know the lyrics. Beyond her, stray sparks leaped from the bonfire. Beyond them, the ocean swelled in the darkness.

THE BOARDWALK HUMMED underneath her as she headed north.

Jamie did not usually come up this way, where the shops and noise gave way to houses with silent turrets and vast wraparound porches. Quiet, evidently, was something money could buy. Pedaling through it on her rusty bicycle was an adrenaline rush akin to stealing.

The boardwalk ended abruptly, forcing her up and to the left onto a sidewalk almost invisible beneath pine needles and sand.

This might be a life she could have, if she wanted it badly enough. Summers here in one of these current-day castles, paid for with the thousands of dollars she’d earn at any one of the jobs her degree might buy her—if any one of her thousands of hungry classmates did not snatch it up first.

In the distance, seagulls called out to each other. Here, sand crunched beneath her tires. Her eyes swept over the seemingly empty houses: waiting, no doubt, for their inhabitants to return from the beach.

She slowed instinctively while passing one of the neighborhood’s most recent additions. Something about it—the clean gray paint, the shape of its windows—reminded her of her father’s new place in the city.

How lucky she was, her friends kept telling her, to have not one, but two parents’ homes where she could crash during this vague gap between college and the rest of her life. If she tired of the beach, she could visit her father in the city. If she tired of the city, she could return to the beach and the restaurant and their family’s old vacation rental that her mother had received in the divorce settlement. 

She had visited her father one weekend, but she had not yet exhausted this place and its strange sense of skewed possibilities. Anything could change at any moment, here. Nothing ever did. 

The quiet deepened. When she could no longer hear the ocean, Jamie veered to turn the bike around in the middle of the street. The sky curved above her, an empty and endless blue. 

THERE WAS A DIP BETWEEN THE SAND DUNES, which shielded from the empty stretch of beach, and the scrubby pine trees, which barricaded against the houses beyond. From here, Jamie could gaze up into the night sky and wonder, not for the first time that summer, if something inside of her had broken. 

She had dated in college. She had gone through these motions before. The boys had been different, but she’d been attracted to them in many of the same ways she felt attracted to Brian. But at this very moment, Brian’s mouth was on her neck and Brian’s hand was inside her jean shorts, and she was looking up at the stars and thinking about how difficult it would be to get the sand out of her clothes later. 

Voices sounded in the distance—muffled by the pines, but drawing nearer. 

“Fuck.” Jamie pulled away from Brian, fixed her T-shirt, fumbled with her zipper. “We should go.” 

“Back to my place?” 

She was about to say no, but something inside of her urged otherwise. Not broken, evidently. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t care about her, she thought as the ceiling fan whirred overhead. They did care about each other, as friends. When they were in bed together, then, it was as if he saw her as his good friend, who happened to have a woman’s body, which was convenient for the present purpose. 

She did not feel convenient when Matt looked at her.

Afterward, she shut herself in the bathroom and sat on the cold tile, back against the door. Closing her eyes, she reached down for something—anything—and, predictably, found a gaze that held hers across the kitchen.

She pressed the back of her other hand to her mouth to muffle any sound, and wondered if he had imagined her in moments like this.

EVERYTHING FELT RESTLESS: the wind, the low-hanging clouds, the rain coming in fits and starts. Jamie hoped her bike wouldn’t accumulate too much more rust as it waited outside for her to finish her shift.

“The biggest parties are always on Labor Day weekend,” Eliana said, rattling her combination lock as if the movement alone would make her locker open. “You’ll see this year.”

“Yeah, I—” Jamie lost her thread of thought for a few seconds as the back door swung wide, admitting the light of a gray afternoon and Matt. “I don’t know if I’ll still be here then. I was only planning on staying through August. But then again, I wasn’t planning on being here at all this summer, and now...” She shrugged.

Eliana grinned at her. “Now you’re stuck here with us.” By some miracle, her lock gave a loud click and slid open. “Not how you expected to spend the summer after college, huh?”

Behind her, Matt went suddenly still. 

“Yeah, not exactly,” Jamie said, trying and failing to not be overly aware of his presence. “Not in a bad way, though.”

“You don’t have to lie to me,” Eliana said with a laugh. “But hey, if you change your mind and stay, we can always find something for you to do around here.”

The words bounced around Jamie’s head throughout her shift. She was leaving in August: this was the truth. Leaving, and going where? She was no closer to figuring out an answer to that question than she had been two months ago. And now here was Eliana, giving voice to something that Jamie had been trying not to think about. 

It didn’t matter, she told herself as she made her way through the kitchen, heading to the back to collect more menus. Matt was absorbed by the tomatoes he was dicing, the scent and sound both lost in the cacophony of garlic and clanging utensils and melting cheese and shouted orders. She was leaving. Of course she was leaving. 

And of course she wanted to stay. She could just work here forever, where everything felt like one big inside joke, and the pizza was the best she’d ever tasted anywhere in the world, and people like Eliana looked out for her like she was their kid sister but Matt looked at her like she was a woman. 

Jamie pushed her way back into the kitchen, a fistful of menus clutched in her hand, a feeling of abandon pulsing through her body as her eyes searched for Matt again. 

He was still not looking at her, she realized. He hadn’t looked at her all night. She felt insane trying to find meaning in this, but it had never happened before, so why tonight? Why... 

Shit. 

He’d heard Eliana earlier, heard her say that this was Jamie’s summer after college. 

The phone was ringing. Jamie tucked the menus into the hostess stand, went to pick up the call, her mind and body in two entirely different places. 

He hadn’t known. He’d thought she was older. And now— 

But I’ve known, she thought wildly, looking back towards the kitchen, wishing she could put the words into his head without speaking. And I don’t care. Shouldn’t that count for something? 

THE RAIN HAD STOPPED, but the café lights that Jamie’s mother had strung along the balcony railing still clinked gently in the night breeze. Jamie sat cross-legged in one of the deck chairs, a mug of tea in her hands. An upstairs light winked out in the house across the street. 

It could be Brian, she thought. It should be Brian. But the only sensation close to pleasure she’d experienced with him was the thrill of sneaking around. Take that away, and they were two kids fumbling in the dark.

The screen door slid open behind her. 

“What kind of tea are you having?”

“Peppermint.”

“Stomach upset?”

“No. Just thought it’d be soothing, I guess.”

Her mother sat down in the other chair, followed Jamie’s gaze out toward nothing in particular.

“I was thinking about getting some more lavender to put out here,” she said, idly reaching over to rub the nearest plant’s leaves between her fingers. “The smell is so relaxing.”

“That’d be nice.”

“This is what happens when there’s no one to tell me I’m buying too many plants.” Her mother laughed; a light, easy sound. “You know, I don’t know what he liked less—me spending money, or him having to do yard work. He must be so thrilled, not having a yard to take care of now.”

“Mmm. Probably.”

The lightbulbs stirred in the wind, chiming against each other like strange bells.

“He’s a good person, your father,” her mother said softly. “We just...Well, you know. It wasn’t—”

“I know.”

SMOKE TRAILED UP from the red glow of ashes in the cupholder, floating out the window past the blue glow of the dashboard lights. Jamie watched as it dissipated into the darkness where they’d pulled over—a dead end somewhere off one of the back roads that curved out from town. It was easy to disappear if you knew where not to go.

“Do you wonder sometimes if your parents were ever really in love with each other?”

She heard rather than saw Brian shrug his shoulders. “Never really thought about it. But yeah—I don’t know that they were, actually. Why?”

“Don’t know. Just...” She closed her eyes. “I wasn’t surprised when mine got divorced, you know? I think they were more surprised than I was. And I feel like that’s weird.” 

“Yeah, that is weird.” He was silent for a few moments. “Maybe they didn’t even know that they weren’t in love. Until it was too late, or something.” 

Jamie bit down on her lower lip to keep from following the conversation to its next natural question: but what does it mean to be in love? This was not a thing you could ask someone who’d laid next to you in bed without weight, without consequences. 

“I think—” she started, carefully, making sure that she could accurately translate her still-materializing thoughts. “I think that they cared about each other, and maybe they were even attracted to each other. At least in the beginning, at least a little bit. But I don’t think they were ever in love with each other.” She paused. “Does that even make sense?” 

Smoke and silence filled the air as Brian processed this. 

“Yeah,” he said at last. “I think it does, actually. I mean, not logically. One plus one should equal two. But...” 

“But there it is.” 

The flame from Brian’s lighter briefly illuminated his face. Outside, the star-filled sky seemed light against the tree branches that loomed beneath it. 

THE SKY WAS CLEAR AND BRIGHT OUTSIDE, but Jamie still blinked against the sudden harshness of fluorescent light reflecting off white tile floors. 

When she’d come to the beach with her family in summers past, the grocery store had been a near-magical place: the first stop when they arrived, grabbing deli meat for sandwiches and extra sunscreen for the beach and anything else they’d forgotten to pack or that wouldn’t have survived the four-hour drive. She would follow her parents around the store blindly, eager to return to the condo, to change into her swimsuit and head for the sea. 

Now, the wheels on the cart rattled in protest as she steered it toward the cereal aisle, glancing down at the list on her phone. Her mother had asked her to pick up some of whatever brand was on sale, which Jamie knew really meant anything that wasn’t Cheerios.

It took a few seconds for her to register that someone was already standing in the aisle, to swerve to avoid running into them. It took her a few more seconds to realize who it was.

She pulled the cart to a stop. “Hey, Matt.”

He nearly jumped at the sound of her voice, looked at her and then back at the cornflakes so quickly she was surprised he didn’t give himself whiplash. “Hey.”

“How’s it going?”

“Oh, swell.” He picked a box off the shelf to examine. “You?”

Jamie’s eyes fell on his hands as he studied the cereal box intently. A ring glinted in the too-bright light. She couldn’t pretend that it was a surprise, but assuming it was one thing, and seeing it was another.

“Yep. Same here.”

She gripped the cart handle, trying to think of an excuse to walk away, but he spoke again as he placed the box back on the shelf, his voice offhand.

“So you’re just with us for the summer, huh?”

“Oh. Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “I mean—I don’t know. That’s the plan, but I really...I have no idea where I’m going to go, or what I’m going to do after this.”

Matt nodded, his gaze on the floor somewhere to the left of her. “What do you want?”

You.

“I don’t know.” The one good thing about him not looking at her was that it felt easier to think. “Things I can’t have, mostly.”

At that, he looked up. She met his gaze, held it. 

Like the ocean, she thought with sudden clarity. That was how she felt when he looked at her: unfathomable, a force of nature. Beautiful.

“Yeah,” he said quietly, after a few long moments. “I get that.”

THAT EVENING, AFTER DINNER, she walked down to the beach alone. 

It was quieter at this time of day, but not fully empty. One last volleyball match, a couple strolling down the shore together. An old man keeping vigil by his fishing line, a girl trailing after her dog. The sky was turning pink. 

When she reached a stretch of beach that was less inhabited, Jamie made her way back up to the dunes, sat down in the soft sand between where the flat shore ended and the hills began to rise. 

She hadn’t come here to cry. She had done that already, many times that summer, her face pressed into her pillow so as not to wake her mother. Then, later, to her mother anyway, who hadn’t always known exactly what was wrong, but would hold her like she was a little girl again as her body shook with everything she’d been holding in. 

Jamie wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her chin there as she gazed out to sea, searching for patterns in things that could not be defined. Slowly, her racing mind stilled to the rhythm of the waves. 

This was forever, she thought. Not this moment, but the individual components. The sea would always be there: not directly in front of her, but it would always exist. She could find her way back to it. And this body of hers, that she held now in her arms against the wind and the setting sun, would always be with her. Constants in a world of shifting variables. 

What do you want? 

She wanted to feel this peace all of the time, wherever she was. She wanted to find her own way back to the sea. She wanted to be alone unless and until she could be with someone who looked at her the way they looked at the ocean: awestruck, mesmerized, tender. 

The waves fell against the shore. Inscrutable fractals, erasing and rewriting themselves.