15. Jersey Shore #1

For summer vacations, we went to the Jersey shore. We usually stayed in Lavallette, near Seaside Heights. Seaside Heights was where the boardwalk was, with all the rides and games of skills and chance. Lavalette was quieter, really just a string of rental places and motels. There was an awesome beach, though, with great body-surfing waves and enough ice cream places to keep me happy.

Every year we did the same thing: packed up the car on a Saturday morning and made the 2 1/2 hour drive to the shore, then drove around looking for a place to stay. My parents never made any arrangements in advance and never stayed at the same place twice. My father had a theory that he got the best bargains by doing it this way.

We usually had good luck, and found a place and got down to the beach in time for a late-afternoon swim, but this year it was impossible. They were predicting a great weather week—it was in the nineties on this Saturday—and it seemed like everyone had chosen to go on vacation at once. Each time we saw a “To Let” sign, we’d stop at the curb and my mother would go ring on the doorbell. Sometimes they invited her in; mostly she just had a conversation at the door. Then she’d walk back to the car shaking her head.

We must have gone to twenty places. At about the fifteenth I made a joke to my brother about changing all the “To Let” signs to “Toilet” and my father turned around and glared at me. I hadn’t even been talking to him. My mother started talking about maybe turning around and going home and trying again next week, to which my father said something about it not being that easy to just change his vacation from one week to another, he had appointments and customers.

It was getting late. We needed a break so we went to dinner at a hamburger place. My father asked for a table near a window so he could keep an eye on our car, which was still packed up with all our stuff. It was a tense dinner, not much conversation, but at least the place was air conditioned.

“We’ll try until 7:00,” my father said, as we finished up. “If we can’t find something by 7, we’re going to have to drive back.”

It felt like a miracle. The first place we stopped after dinner, my mother came back to the car, so excited. “It’s an older lady. She says she has a basement apartment we can have, two bedrooms, 500 dollars for the week. Do you want to look at it first, or should we grab it?”

It was clear from my mother’s voice which she wanted to do. “That’s a little more than we wanted to spend,” my father said, but we all knew he was going to say yes.

It was a very cool place, probably the coolest place we’d ever stayed. Usually the apartments were so small you couldn’t walk across a room without bumping into things. This place was spacious, and the bedroom I had to share with Jeffrey had two beds. Usually, we had to sleep in the same bed, which I never liked although Jeffrey should have been the one to complain since I was famously a restless sleeper who kicked and clawed his way through the night.

Plus it was in the basement, windowless, which my mother didn’t like but I thought was excellent, like we were in a boat or something.

The weather cooperated. We spent our first few days on the beach and then at nighttime went out to eat and to the boardwalk in Seaside Heights. My mother and father many times remarked to each other what a find this apartment was, and how it had been worth it to spend a little extra.

Tuesday afternoon was when it all fell apart. At first, I wasn’t sure what was going on. We’d come back from the beach, and my brother and I were outside, washing off in the outdoor shower, when we heard arguing. I at first thought it was my mother and father arguing, but it turned out to be my father and the landlady, whose name was Mrs. Fontana.

We hadn’t seen much of Mrs. Fontana during our time in the apartment. We’d been trotted out to her apartment on Sunday evening, just to be polite. She was a small-ish Italian woman, with a tight nest of gray hair and a strong accent. Her apartment was a grandmother apartment, totally different than what you’d expect to see at the seashore. There was big yellow plaid and dark wood furniture and glass shelves holding pictures and religious items. She had a lot of religious items: crosses, pictures of Jesus, pictures of Mary. Right above her television set there was a poster with the Lord’s Prayer on it written in fancy writing.

“Look at you two sweetnessess,” she said to me and my brother as we stood in her living room. Then she gave us each a hard candy.

When we heard the arguing, my brother and I toweled off and ran inside. My mother was on the couch, crying. “What’s going on, Mom?” I asked.

“We have to leave,” she said. “Mrs. Fontana says we have to leave.”

I never got the full story. My mother was too upset, and my father too angry, to ever tell it completely. But what seemed to have happened was that Mrs. Fontana told my mother she’d “forgotten” she had some other people scheduled for the basement apartment for the next afternoon, and that we would have to leave by tomorrow morning.

My mother and father were convinced she’d tricked us: given us the room knowing full well these other people were coming, because it allowed her to get us to pay for an extra few days the room would have been vacant. She knew we never would have rented if we’d known we couldn’t have the place for the full week. It was why she’d never given us a rental agreement to sign, why she’d only asked for half the rental fee, saying we could pay the rest at the end of the week. My mother and father had trusted her, thinking she was a nice old lady.

My father came back from arguing with Mrs. Fontana and we went to dinner. It was even more tense than the dinner the Saturday before. I could see this was all eating at my father, like he felt he should have known something like this was going to happen, like he should have been able to give his family a nice week-long vacation.

I think my mother probably felt like he shouldn’t have let it happen, too. She was giving him the cold shoulder, providing one-word answers to his questions.

“Should we go to Seaside for our one last night?” my father asked at the end of dinner.

“We can’t, Jack,” my mother said with an exasperated sigh. “I have to pack everything up. It’s all all over the place.”

The next day was again gorgeous, but instead of body surfing in the waves we were dragging our stuff out to the car. We should have been grateful we’d had a few nice vacation days, but none of us was. We were all angry and resentful and feeling like we’d been gypped out of our vacation.

Mrs. Fontana came out. My father didn’t acknowledge her.

“I’m sorry, I really didn’t know…” she said.

“You knew,” my father said. “You knew. I hope it makes you happy, to have ruined this family’s vacation just so you could make a few dollars. To have robbed these kids of their vacation.”

Mrs. Fontana seemed hurt by the charge. “No, I didn’t mean to ruin the vacation. It was the book, I just hadn’t written it down in the book. It was an accident…”

“This was no accident,” my father said his most vicious voice. “God will punish you, Mrs. Fontana. God will punish you.”

We drove most of the trip back in silence. But then my mother turned to my father and said, “You got her, you know.”

“What do you mean?” my father asked.

“When you said God would punish her. I was watching her face. It just collapsed.”

My father smiled in spite of himself. “Really?”

My mother smiled back at him, a big airy smile. “It was the perfect thing to say.”

I watched all this from the back seat. My parents rarely talked to each other like this in front of my brother and me. They never smiled like that at each other. It made me feel kind of weird.