05.19.23
Anytime I get off the subway at my stop and see that the next A Train behind this one isn’t coming for twenty-five-plus minutes, I feel like the luckiest person on Earth. I could win the lottery, and I still don’t think anything would give me that rush of knowing I narrowly escaped a long platform wait.
Today, I am coming home from Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where I just was on a whim with my friend Sam. His family has gone there every summer for ten thousand years, give or take a few generations. We got dinner two Sundays ago, on the 7th, when he mentioned this vacation to me for the first time. By the end of the dinner, I was invited, and by the end of the week, on the 13th, we were on our way to the shore.
I’ve been to the Jersey Shore in a few forms, covering a relatively wide spectrum of socioeconomic status. Wildwood, Ocean City, now Stone Harbor. Sam briefs me on the local lore — places we must go, places he has always gone — and his family, with whom we will be sharing a house — his mom, dad, sister and her boyfriend who she does not call her boyfriend, grandmother, great aunt, aunt and her husband, and cousin and her boyfriend. I find, upon entering the nine-bed/nine-bath house, that I am in the fortunate position of Lone Observer. Sam isn’t my partner, we’re just great friends. I’ve no need to try and wedge myself into this family, to try and feel like I am part of it. I can just watch.
From Saturday to Friday, a heroic feat in terms of family-vacation-length, I hang out with Sam and his family. Some people, myself included, spend some days working remotely, but for the most part we hang around the house, around the town. There is something particularly insular about Stone Harbor. It’s very nearly an island, connected to the rest of Scenic New Jersey by a long bridge on which you can only drive twenty-five miles per hour, and once they are there, they seldom leave for the two weeks that the house is rented, as if they are trapped. At one point, Sam needed to print out some sides for an audition we were going to tape for him, and told his mom we were running to Staples.
“Why are you going all the way out there?” she asked.
“I need a printer,” Sam said.
“Okay…”
This exchange made me think that Staples was surely at least an hour and a half away, that we were as far from civilization as one might be on the Appalachian Trail or in some remote parts of the American West. When we got in the car and put Staples into Google Maps, the length of the drive was eleven minutes.
Sam and I spend the week laying by the pool and listening to music and riding bikes with no gears up and down the island. I feel like a child, like I am fifteen on the high end, infantilized by multiple generations above me simply being nearby, by being among the youngest. We play an ungodly amount of games with his family, who are seemingly obsessed with playing games, all together, that require both too much rule-explaining and not nearly enough. Sam brings me to multiple ice cream shops, one of which has a Cookie Monster-inspired flavor called “The Blue One” — vanilla ice cream dyed an unnatural blue color, with all kinds of cookie dough, cookie pieces, and brownie mixed in. I tell him I would have called it “Bowling Alley Birthday Party,” as its flavor is eerily reminiscent of the low-quality frosting found piped around the edges of Friendly’s ice cream cakes, of other people’s birthday parties, of casually suggesting that we put the bumpers down. It evokes memories of lukewarm soda from plastic pitchers and Pixie Stix. It is almost sinister.
I try my hardest to be the chattiest, most charming, most engaged version of myself, even though six days is a very long time to spend with someone else’s family — it’s a long time to spend with your own family, even. But I make do, gauging personalties and finding the easiest way to win people over. I sit in silence next to Sam’s dad for multiple hours working on a puzzle together, and I think he is grateful that I do not try to force him into a conversation. I thank his mom emphatically and help to clean up when I have the opportunity to do so, and listen to her quietly gossip about her sister. I let his Aunt Mary reach the end of all her stories before I interject anything that might derail the conversation because I quickly learn that even if I do, she is going to nod at me and then just keep going with whatever she was saying. I observe their practices and personalities like an armchair anthropologist until I realize I am being too quiet and again toss my hat into the conversation with some joke or comment to remind everyone that I am here and listening.
When we are leaving, driving back to New York, Sam thanks me again and again for coming, for providing some respite from his family with a bike ride or walk on the beach, for opportunities to steal away for a while. I thank him, in turn, for the free vacation. He apologizes for his “crazy family” and I remind him that everyone’s families are crazy, that’s just how it is. I tell him the story of the first time my high school boyfriend met my aunt, her then-new husband, and my cousins — crying, screaming, fighting, the works. He says that makes him feel better. He asks my opinion on everyone’s dynamics, and we chat in the car about everything that transpired and everything we’ll be up to when we get back to the city. Sam and I have in common the excitement to return home after leaving — other people always tell me that they are desperate to leave the city, but we are desperate to get back. I have always wondered if this is because I’m most often talking to people about their distaste for the city after their trips upstate, and I am from there, so I don’t find upstate New York charming and quaint (which, as it were, I feel is elitist in and of itself, much like use of the word “townies”) so much as I find it isolating and racist. But Sam is from Maryland, so maybe we just both prefer to be in the city.
Sam drops me off on the corner of 43rd Street and 8th Avenue and then goes to 10th Avenue to fill up our rental before returning it. I take the A Train uptown, go home, and don’t talk to anyone for a few hours.
