If you live in the eastern half on Pennsylvania and you had access to a car, you most likely spent at least a fraction of your summers at the Jersey Shore.
The water at the Jersey shore is an unappealing brownish-green color, but this was the only ocean I knew and was in awe when much later in life I encountered blue ocean like you see on TV. It’s not even (all) pollution, it’s just naturally kind of a gross color. That’s what Jersey felt like. Kind of gross, and like everyone knew it was gross but they were all pretending it wasn’t.
Being an only child is fine, but summer months are a constant struggle to see friends because otherwise you’re stuck alone. And before lots of video games or internet, it was vital to find kids to play with. Luckily, going down to the shore was something a lot of people did, and sometimes I could even get invited along on someone else’s family trip. One trip, we must have been 10 or 11, and my friend and I spent our vacation on the beach screaming at the Atlantic ocean.
“IS THAT THE BEST YOU CAN DO?”
“YOU CALL THAT A WAVE?”
“COME ON OCEAN, DO BETTER!”
I can’t know what prompted it, but to this day I do find it relieves stress to scream at the ocean. It’s big enough and loud enough that you won’t be disturbing many other people, and the ocean doesn’t care. It knows you’re just letting off steam. I spent a day in early November 2016 on a beach, screaming at the Pacific. The ocean doesn’t mind.
I don’t even like the beach. It was sunburn and sand in your everything. It was exhausting walks back and forth on the boardwalk. Sure, I was a fan of the cotton candy and saltwater taffy, and rounds of quirky mini-golf. But everything just felt a little dirty, a little dilapidated, a little desperate.
My opinions are not meant to relay a factual account of the state of New Jersey or its vacation spots if this particular account tends towards the negative. Not only am I just generally not a fan of sand sticking to me or being in the sun for extended periods of time, my associations with the entire state are based very heavily on the reason I’m familiar with it.
My grandmother was from New Jersey. Born in PA, but lived in Jersey since she was a baby. She had a middle school education and her first child with her first husband at 18, ending up with four sons, my dad being the youngest.
It’s hard for me to describe my grandmother without the use of hyperbolic, dehumanizing terms like “evil” and “monster” and “repressed hate-goblin.” While she may not have literally been those things, she was a mean old lady raised on American white supremacy who dealt with her own abuse by abusing others. She did not like me, because I “talked back.” A lot of terrible things have been done to women because they “talked back.” I’m sure she had been told not to talk back her entire life, and when she did, she was punished for it. No one likes a woman who “talks back.” That’s something you’re supposed to beat out of us at a very early age.
Grandma lived in a little suburban neighborhood of tiny ranch homes in central New Jersey. She had her living room ceiling painted with white and pink glittery popcorn paint (I have vivid memories of many ceilings from my pre-internet childhood. We stared at walls and ceilings a lot.), and had a vicious cat who would bite the hell out of you if you went near her because she had been declawed and had personal boundary issues. The cat was severely unlikable, but it wasn’t the cat’s fault. You’d be pissed off, too, if someone cut off your fingertips.
By the way, don’t fucking declaw your cats. What the fuck.
I did not like Grandma. I never had. But she was an early option for babysitting when my mother needed to be rid of me for extended periods of time to deal with whatever fucking nonsense my dad was causing early in their marriage. So sometimes for a week or more I was stuck with my grandmother in her awful house, with her awful bubble gum pink decor and her weird color-changing fiber optic flower lamp and her awful cat. The only positive was that she lived in a neighborhood with sidewalks and I was allowed to roller blade around a couple blocks.
Grandma on her own wasn’t actually that hard to deal with. You could just nod and ask her to show you her flowers in the back yard and she’d stop whatever old, racist thing she was on about and tell you about marigolds or some shit. But when she and my father were together, they would team up on my mom or me or both.
A typical dinner with Grandma would go like this:
My father would do something or say something to my mother. I would notice my dad was trying to push buttons. He would make a shitty comment about how much she was eating or how her diet was going. My mother would go quiet as my dad would get louder, trying to get a reaction from her. I would speak up and tell him to stop.
Well, what I probably said was “shut up.”
“Shut up” was a problem. Tormenting a woman in front of her family wasn’t a problem, but my “language” and “tone” absolutely were. So my grandmother would start in on my mom.
“You can’t let her get away with talking to her father like that. You’re why she’s like this, you don’t discipline her.”
Eventually I was sent away from the table. I spent a lot of time in my room (or whatever room was available) crying. The crying was never because I was sad. It was frustration. It was that powerless, futile sob you do because there’s nowhere else for the energy to go. The kind of crying that turns to kicking holes in walls when you’re big enough.
Grandmom’s first husband and father to her four sons had died in the 70s, and her second husband died ten years later. I was around four years old when the second one died, and I don’t remember anyone even talking about him much. That was another funeral that I wasn’t included in. And the only thing I know about my dad’s dad was that he was an abusive drunk.
I have even less care to cultivate sympathy for my grandmother than I do my father. There are millions of people who endure abuse and don’t turn around and do it to other people. It doesn’t mean they couldn’t have learned better. It doesn’t mean that they had no capacity to do good. But their victims don’t have to like them or forgive them or say nice things about them when they die. Don’t be an asshole, or people might not like you and say mean shit about you when you’re gone. Precautionary tale, that.