That vision hadn’t come to be—not the weekend house, not the lasting marriage, not the hobby farm, not the children. So there I was, on my own, riding two trains and a bus to get from Bed-Stuy to the Rockaways, still wondering just how and when I had let myself get so derailed. Once upon a time, I remembered, I had been a fabulous young girl about town, pursuing my own interests and dreams, feeling like I had nothing but options before me. Hadn’t I wanted to travel the world, taking pictures and learning and writing about this place and that, their cultures and their foods? Hadn’t I wanted to make documentaries and movies and television shows? Hadn’t I thought about becoming a real estate developer—or learning to sew and designing my own clothes? I’d had all those notions and yearnings at one point or another, but I hadn’t pursued any of them, and, as I molded my aims to Eric’s and tied myself down to mortgage payments and credit card bills in pursuit of a fantasy domestic life, I’d let them all wash away like the sands of an eroding dune.
Well, maybe I can’t have any of that, but I can still have the beach, I thought as the bus made its way along Flatbush Avenue, the sprawling commercial artery that runs like an enormous strip mall across Brooklyn to its southern edge on Jamaica Bay. I felt a kind of warm fellowship with the multiracial array of excited young people who surrounded me on the bus with their beach chairs, boom boxes, and coolers. Whatever our differences of origin, situation, or experience, we were all up early on a summer morning, chasing the joy only the beach can bring. And it struck me that I was taking full advantage of the one good thing about lacking a partner or child: I owed my time and energy to no one but myself.
As the bus passed through a forested stretch, I suddenly got a whiff of sulfur and realized with a start that we must be near the marshes and inlets of the bay. Moments later the bus began rattling over a bridge, the sound of its progress becoming a deep metallic hum as the wheels settled into the gridlines of the steel-grate surface. Coasting high above the water, I could see Jamaica Bay, that day a calm sheet of cerulean beneath us, and straight ahead the Rockaway Peninsula, running perpendicular to our road like the top of a T, with the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean just beyond.
The bus crossed over and wound down to Jacob Riis Park on the ocean side, long known as the People’s Beach, where it nearly emptied. Established in the 1910s and soon named for the social journalist who crusaded for the poor, it was largely built in the thirties in order to give city dwellers the same kind of access to the healing powers of fresh air and the ocean as their landed, car-owning neighbors in the suburbs.
As my fellow passengers and I walked through the grand art deco brick bathhouse, its cool floors rubbed smooth by the generations of happy, sandy feet that had come before us, I realized that I’d been there before, long ago, with Eric, under what I imagined were similar circumstances: deciding to get up some weekend morning and head out. Back then it had been early enough—both in the season and in the day—that the park was nearly empty when we got there. It was overcast, and as we walked to the damp gray sand we came upon a young couple lying on a rumpled blanket with a few empty tallboys by their heads. The woman rolled over and looked up at us with a scowl, eyes bloodshot and bottle-blond hair matted against her cheek, as if she’d awakened still drunk and we were to blame.
Now, years later, I was up early again at an almost empty beach, but this time it all looked and felt somehow different—brighter and more welcoming. I found a flat patch of sand near a dune where I could see the ocean. I laid out my towel, baked for a while, splashed and swam in the water, read about the latest in age-defying skin potions, leafed through the weddings and real estate sections of the New York Times. I stretched like a cat in the sun and it hit me: I was having a fine old time.
Around noon, hungry and uninspired by the hot dogs and nachos on offer at the concessions, I decided to leave and try to find Rockaway Taco, a hipster place I’d been hearing about. I recalled that my friend Bob, who produced political news at a local TV station, NY1, lived in the area, so I sent him an email. I hadn’t seen him in years, but the reply came quickly: his house was only a few blocks from Rockaway Taco, so I should grab my food and come over. After a quick Google search for directions, I was on my way. I rode the Q22 bus past the lavish homes and manicured yards of the wealthy neighborhoods of Neponsit and Belle Harbor, the weathered, wood-shingle siding and front porches of the Capes and Colonials edged in hydrangeas and tiger lilies, and the sun-dappled streets leading to the ocean as in so many beach towns. I got off about ten minutes later at a decidedly less bucolic corner in Rockaway Beach near an imposing brick building that, like several others on the peninsula, housed mentally ill adults.
I waited in line at the taco stand, surprised by the vibrant, eclectic crowd and makeshift cool of the place and its little outdoor dining area with brightly painted tables and benches, a rack of books and magazines, and a reggae soundtrack. I secured two fish tacos and headed around the corner and across the enormous oval parking lot that, along with a huge, pottery-encrusted whale statue, formed the gateway to Rockaway Beach. I climbed the brick steps to Bob’s house, a stately white three-story Dutch Colonial with a big wraparound porch overlooking the ocean, where a bunch of professional acquaintances I’d always liked yet hadn’t kept up with were hanging out.
“Hey, D, how you doin’?” said Josh, a former reporter who had just started an online news site, coming in for a hug as I reached the porch. “Nice to see you.”
“Hey! So glad you emailed—so good to see you,” Bob said, emerging from the house with a big smile and fistfuls of wineglasses. “It’s been so long!” I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen either of them, both dark-haired guys a little under six feet wearing T-shirts and shorts, but they were so easygoing it was almost as if no time had passed at all.
Josh’s wife, Iva, was sitting at a round white plastic table, her straight dark hair fanned over shoulders left bare by a white sundress, uncorking a bottle of roseĢ. “Come, have some wine,” she said in her soft, rolling Croatian accent. I took a seat next to her and soaked in the warmth of the greeting, the seaside-blue paint on the porch ceiling, the span of the ocean, and the way the whale statue glittered in the sun.
“That whale looks so familiar,” I said. “Like the one I used to see at the old children’s zoo in Central Park when I was a kid. But it wasn’t covered in mosaic.”
“It’s the same whale,” said Bob, who’d been living there for more than a decade. He explained that it hadn’t gotten the tile decoration until it had landed by the shore after the old zoo’s demolition. Whalemina, they called her.
I felt the tug of nostalgia—like a slackened thread tightening in my heart, connecting me back to a time when I was happy—as Iva poured me a glass of wine and I pulled my tacos from the bag. “Oh, we had some earlier,” she said, her pale-blue eyes going wide as her smile dimpled her cheeks. “Aren’t they great?”
Indeed they were, just like the wine she said she’d picked up at the liquor store on the boulevard—surprisingly delicious. Maybe Rockaway isn’t so down-and-out after all.
“God, these are good,” I said, relishing the crunch of the cabbage, radishes, and lightly battered fish topped with spiced mayo. “I got obsessed with fish tacos in California. They have them everywhere out there, and they were practically all I ever wanted to eat. But these are every bit as good as anything I had there.”