Fiction: Eggs by Zach Edson

Photo Source: Flickr

“Got my egg basket,” mother-in-law said. She wore a black sundress over her bathing suit. We were taking her to the beach. Rather, she was taking us to her beach club.

“It’s sort of exclusive,” my wife had said in the car down to their summer home. “Like five grand a year. I think my parents do it mostly for the conservation.”

I didn’t know what an egg basket—it was a plastic grocery bag—had to do with the beach but I knew better than to ask. Mother-in-law would take all week to explain it to me. 

“Here, here—look!” mother-in-law seized my arm as we exited the house through the kitchen door. She drew me over to the alliums embedded in the carefully maintained rock garden beside the drive. “See? See what I did?”

I had no idea what the hell she did or what I was supposed to see. “Oh yeah,” I said. “They look nice.”

“Do you see it? The color?”

In the car I got her to explain it to my wife. “At first I thought I’d do green but that looks too much like vegetation, so I settled on blue. Aren’t they pretty? I spray painted them!”

“Mom, you can’t spray paint flowers. It’ll get into the watershed.”

“What? No it won’t. They were dead brown. Will it? Let’s ask the science man.” She made eye contact with me through the rearview. My wife was driving. I’d acquiesced shotgun to mother-in-law. “It’ll get filtered out, won’t it? By the dirt?”

“I don’t know,” I said. 

“He’s being polite, Mom. It won’t. Why would you do that?”

“They look nice.”

“You’re poisoning the watershed.” 

We pulled out of the driveway.

“I don’t think so.” Then she said, “Mel and Jack want to meet tomorrow. Don’t know what that’s about.”

“Mom, who are Mel and Jack? How would we know?”

“I thought you remembered them. That’s their house down that lane. The red one on the water? It’s still there.”

“I have never been to their house.”

“Dad and I went two weeks ago after the philharmonic. It was lovely.”

The car ride from my in-law’s summer house to their beach club is about thirty minutes. The parking lot was brimming. It was the first really hot, cloudless Sunday of the summer. 

“Two-hundred fifty members,” my mother-in-law said, taking a beach chair in each hand. “Looks like everyone’s here today.”

The driveway to the beach club was a narrow lane. Foxglove, and goldenrod and invasive wild roses and bittersweets, and a lot more plants I didn’t recognize overgrew the sides of the lane. The parking lot was a gravel field about five-hundred feet off the highway. We could have been on our own island. It was so quiet.

Beach gear in hand, we passed through a gap in the bracken onto a field. Short, only about a hundred feet wide. At the far end yard signs clearly read STOP. PROTECT THE DUNES. Dunes are little dykes of sand and all that’s keeping Rhode Island from washing away. Really what’s important are the grasses on top of the dunes, not the sand. 

“I’ll go sign in,” my mother-law dashed over to an ocean-bleached wooden pavilion, the kind made to look humble, but the size, the condition, the concrete foundation, all suggested a lot of money went in to keeping it looking that way.

“They make more than a million a year in membership fees,” I said to my wife. “The land’s probably paid for. I wonder if they have taxes on it if they’re a 503c or something. Jesus. We’re in the wrong business.”

“The old building burned down,” my wife said. “Like ten or eleven years ago. They think it was kids.”

“Arson?”

“Fireworks probably.”

My mother-in-law bustled back over to us. She was excited to get down to the beach.

A path led around the dunes—or rather, cut through them—and we emerged onto a beach. The sand was perfectly white. Rocks and seaweed were scattered around as though decorations. It was more crowded than I’d pictured a private beach club being. But once we’d staked out our spot and I had time to look around, to settle in, I could see there really weren’t that many people here.

Some were obviously here every day. There were the retired pros—the husbands wearing long-sleeve sunshirts, long trunks and Rainbows, reading John Grisham novels in the shade of their own umbrellas, their wives dwarfed under sunhats and playing games on their phones. There were the lifers—covered in cancer, gray hair warped like driftwood, floating in the ocean like corpses, getting out, toweling off, getting back in, repeating like the breakers. There were the young families—the young husbands pasty because they were normally in the office all day, with hair starting to grow in strange places, the sagging wives chasing after or alternately ignoring their children.

A lifeguard sat in a tower nearby. A sign on the pavilion up above said her name was McKayla and she was seventeen.

“It provides jobs for the local economy,” my mother-in-law said. She was talking about the beach club.

“Yeah, like eight jobs,” my wife said. “And they probably get paid minimum wage.”

“There are probably other benefits too.”

“Mom, there’s no way the beach club is giving them health insurance.”

“Maybe they get a sandwich for lunch.”

“That’s not much of a benefit. Also where would they get a sandwich from? There are no restaurants down here.”

“Free parking.”

“You have to let your employees park. That’s not a benefit.”

“Well you can ask Mel or Jack if you see them. They’re on the board.”

“Mom, I don’t know what Mel and Jack look like. We’ve been over this. Besides, aren’t you on the board?”

“We don’t go anymore. Too busy.”

In the distance on either side, where the lifeguard towers stood, I could see a drastic change in person density. We had a comfortable twenty feet between us and the next soul on the beach. But over there towels were laid out like patchwork quilts. 

“Is that a public beach?” I asked, nodding one way.

“Isn’t this better?” my mother-in-law said. “No loud music. I hate that. When they play music on those little speakers. Or on their phones.”

“That should be illegal,” my wife said.

“It probably is,” my mother-in-law said.

So my in-laws’ beach club was sandwiched between two public beaches. Occasionally, as we sat there, some brave fool would walk from one public area to the other, through our private area. No one stopped them. But everyone looked. Even the children.

I put sunscreen on my brow, my nose, my cheeks, my ears; the back of my neck, my collarbones beneath my shirt, my forearms, my pale upper arms; my even paler upper thighs, my knees, my shins, the tops of my feet. I cussed silently, I kept forgetting to buy SPF lip balm. I pursed my lips inward. 

“Do you need sunscreen?” I asked my wife.

She put a little on.

“Did you bring a book?” I asked my mother-in-law. She was an even more voracious reader than I.

“No,” she said. “I just sit here.”

She just sat there. I had known my mother-in-law for five years and I had never seen her sit still once—not at my wife’s grandmother’s funeral, not at Christmas Mass, not on the train to New York or in the theater for my wife’s graduation. 

My wife did too. She just sat there. I felt foolish for pulling a book out of my bag. Its dark cover heated under the sun. I just held onto it. Then, worried that the cover would fade, I put it away. I reapplied sunscreen to my knees, my feet, my forearms and the tops of my ears. I tucked my feet under my bag so the sun wouldn’t shine on them. I picked some sand off my shirt.

“Sunscreen?” I asked my wife.

“Already put some on,” she said.

Boats bobbed out at sea. Block Island was visible, about fifteen miles over the ocean. The regulars swam. The breakers rolled, brimming with sand and brown, and spilled up to our feet. A plane appeared down the beach, from somewhere, over the public beach. It was towing a banner.

Its engine whined louder until it flew directly over us. The lowness of its flight felt hostile even before we read the sign. RHODE ISLAND BEACHES ARE NOT PRIVATE it said.

My mother-in-law let out one chuckle.

“Is that directed at us?” I asked.

The plane’s passage broke the ocean’s spell. My wife pulled out her phone and started chewing her fingernails and my mother-in-law started sifting through the sand in search of rocks.

Some of them she would set in her lap and others she would cast aside. I studied her choices. She tossed off one in the shape of a triangular prism which I thought looked interesting, but kept one that was gray with black splotches and mostly round. She found one that was nearly all black and shaped like a fat pancake. “Too flat,” she said to me and tossed it. She plucked others, cleaning them carefully of sand and dried algae before accepting or discarding them. When she was done, she placed the dozen rocks, one-by-one, appraising them each again as she did so, into the plastic grocery bag, her “egg basket.”

“Got my eggs,” she smiled at us. 

That was, apparently, the cue. 

We packed up. We’d stayed for an hour. 

“I’m going to rinse off my feet,” my wife said. Apparently the pavilion up on the field had plumbing.

“I’ll sign us out,” my mother-in-law said.

I waited by the car. My wife had accidentally taken the keys with her.

My mother-in-law came over. We waited together. “You know,” she said after a minute. She was looking over the field, only a hundred or so feet wide, where the STOP. PROTECT THE DUNES. signs were planted.  Through the tall grass on the dunes we could see McKayla diligently watching the surf. “We used to have huge cookouts here. That field used to go another five hundred feet. Maybe a thousand, I don’t remember. But erosion is taking it away. Isn’t that too bad?”

My wife came over. She unlocked the car. The beach chairs and expansive blanket were shaken out and placed in the trunk. I brought my bag and my wife’s into the backseat with me. My mother-in-law kept hers with her. Her basket of eggs clicked as the car rolled over the rugged driveway.

Zach Edson lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife and their two dogs. He is losing a turf war against eastern cottontail rabbits and he teaches science to middle schoolers with learning disabilities. You can find more of his work at thestrangesttimes.substack.com