Circles

Circles

by Harry Buschman

In the summer the life guards separated the weekdays from the weekends at Coogan’s Beach. They separated the weekend family groups from the singles who came weekdays. The “regulars’ they called them.

The families arrived on Saturdays and Sundays with umbrellas, chairs, hampers of food and hordes of children, they lathered each other with sun block at regular intervals and shouted a lot. They threw frisbees and ate all day.

The regulars came weekdays. They were singles, and they came with a minimum of equipment. They tended to be brown and leathery and they sat well back of the water where the sun was most intense.

The summer I remember, two of the regulars stood out because they were not brown and leathery, they were flounder belly white. Even though they came every day, the sun apparently had no effect on them. One was a broad shouldered hairless man the guards called “Bullethead,” and another was a frizzy yellow haired woman in her forties who dressed in a black cocktail gown and spent the day writing in a notebook.

“Bullethead” was obviously unemployed – or a man of such independent means that he could spend his weekdays at the beach. He was a short man, somewhere between the height of a fire hydrant and a mailbox. In spite of his size there was something monumental about him, not in stature but in his bearing. He was as rigid and unbendable as a tin soldier. Rather than sitting, he stood bareheaded in the sun, unprotected from the moment he arrived until he left late in the afternoon. He never sought shade in the heat of the day, yet he was as white as a painted fence post. It was a refusal to bow to the elemental forces of nature.

The life guards who saw him in the water that summer would never forget the brave and personal battle he fought with the sea. Unlike other people who ran from the heavy surf or saved themselves by diving beneath the curl of the breakers, Bullethead stood hip high in their path – immobile, hands on hips, staring them down.

Time and again he would be crushed and tumbled like wet wash in a drier. When the surf retreated he picked himself up, still full of fight, but bewildered and looking for all the world like a prizefighter trying to collect his wits after having been floored in the first exchange of round one. He would turn quickly to the beach to see if anyone had witnessed the knockdown, then hitch up his trunks and face the sea once more. Down he would go again ... and again.

He would tire of the one sided contest in time and in a stiff martial cadence he would make his way to the safety of the shore. There were times when the sea would catch up with him before he got away and give him a good one in parting. His knees would buckle and down he’d go with an expression on his face of someone who has been unfairly attacked from the rear.

Accepting defeat in his skirmish with the sea, he would stand in front of the blond woman in the cocktail dress and flex his muscles, which grew no larger for all his flexing. He would take classic body-building poses he hoped would impress her. In turn she gave him no sign of interest or recognition and her heart shaped sun glasses remained focused on her writing. Although the life guards on the stand couldn’t hear him, it seemed to them that he spoke to her in civil tones and smiled in a gentlemanly way.

Her ice remained unmelted.

With a sigh of resignation, Bullethead would return to his small towel and sit cross-legged on it, staring alternately at the blond woman and the sea, trying to decide perhaps, which of them was the harder nut to crack. He seemed to have no other interests.

An hour would pass and the routine would begin again with the same results and by late afternoon, Bullethead, whose shoulders and knees were now red and raw, would look a little the worse for wear.

Some time in July, as the weather warmed and the beach grew more crowded, the blond and Bullethead were lost in the press of people. The guards on the stand had their hands full with lost children and the one-sided romance passed unnoticed. Had they been watching, they might have witnessed a climax on the boil, for Bullethead pulled out all the stops. Given the rigidity of his stocky frame, he displayed a similar rigidity of purpose concerning the blond in the cocktail dress. He made the decision that the enigmatic woman was the one for him, he put a full court press on her using the same technique he used in the surf.

Hoping to interest her, he redoubled his calisthenic routine after leaving the surf, executing karate like chops and leg kicks, throwing up sand in all directions. He often drew a crowd of curious children but his exhibition made no impression on the blond who continued writing furiously in her notebook. One day, red in the face and breathing heavily from his workout, he looked about him sheepishly at the crowd gathered around them. He turned abruptly and waded through the soft hot sand to the refreshment kiosk. There he bought a frankfurter and a coke and plodded back again, offering them to the blond woman as a token of his affection. He held them out to her and when she made no effort to accept them he placed them on her tarpaulin.

He might just as well have dumped them in the trash.

Her response was to stand and replace her notebook, pen and thermos in her wicker beach basket, kick the frankfurter and coke to one side, fold her tarpaulin and put it in her basket. She then carefully covered the hole in the sand next to her in which she had previously deposited her cigarette butts and rolled her black stockings back up under the hem of her multi-layered dress. She retied the sash under her broad black hat, turned her back on Bullethead and slowly walked up the beach to the parking lot.

and ... left him standing in the company of a crowd of curious people.

What emotions seethed within him? Rejection? Impotency? Incompetence? An ultimate awareness of his failure as a swimmer and a suitor! Was it any or all of these things?

He displayed his feelings to no one, he was as stoic as stone, just as stoic as he had been in his losing battle with the surf. He was belittled again and again by forces far greater than his own – the blond’s rejection was no less definitive than the power of the sea.

He looked down at the frankfurter and coke lying in the sand. He picked them up and deposited them in a nearby trash receptacle, all the while staring at the dwindling form of the strange blond woman under her broad brimmed hat as she made her way unhurriedly to the parking lot,. The mystery of this unresponsive female was unsolved all summer. She remained hidden behind her black glasses, her black dress and her black stockings.

The touching tableau continued. Her writing for instance, what was the secret concealed in her writing? A memoir? A chaste remembrance of a lost and gentle love? A lurid recollection of a checkered past?

Bullethead covered his ears with his hands. Only he could hear the sounds in his head, the strange whistling and occasional grinding sounds that reminded him of the IRT subway train he used to ride to the clinic as it ground its way past the local stop at 50th Street.

He could no longer hear the beach sounds ... and yet he had heard them only a moment before. Sea gulls, children, parents, and the metronomic crash of the surf – all was still now, and in their place was a noise in his head and a fuzziness in his vision that blurred the image of the tiny figure in black, walking through the sand. She reminded him of someone. Yes – it was the mysterious blond woman who rejected him, and it reminded him of someone else – someone a long time ago. She was dressed in black also, wrote constantly, drank heavily and never had time to talk to him. There was so much of life he wanted to know about, yet she would tell him not to bother her. “Get away from Mommy! Can’t you see she’s writing!”

He wanted to show her his homework – the area of a circle! With no help from anyone he had figured out the magic formula for discovering the area of a circle. He could march into school tomorrow morning with his head held high, confidant that when Mrs. Davis asked him to describe to the class how to compute the area of a circle he would step up to the blackboard, and .... “Ma, look .... all by myself. It’s so simple once you know how .... let me show you.”

But she wouldn’t listen. She turned her back on him and brought her left hand up to her face so she couldn’t see him. With her pen gripped tightly in her right hand she continued writing. He remembered her knuckles, white from her grip on the pen and the words appearing tortuously slow on the paper in front of her. He danced a nervous jiggle at her side. “Won’t you let me show you, just once Ma – please?”

If his father had been there, he would have listened. He would have been proud. He would have shaken his head in wonder and said what a brilliant son he had. He would be a scientist some day. But his father was gone now and he wasn’t coming back his mother said. She also said, “Good riddance.” There were times he wished his father had taken him with him.

The grinding noise in his head grew louder, and by now the blond woman in black had disappeared. Maybe he should have followed her, found out where she lived. If he knew her address he could write her a letter and explain; assure her that he meant no harm – he just wanted her to listen. If he knew her address he might knock on her door and come face to face with her, maybe even explain the mathematical principle that yields the area of a circle. But no. She was a woman and she too would have no interest in such things as the square of the radius. Like his mother and like every other woman he met since his mother, she would find other things to do. She would close the door firmly and leave him standing outside.

He turned abruptly and faced the sea again. Out there at least was a loving antagonist, one that would never ignore him. The sea would take all he had and give him more than he could handle in return. The grinding noise in his head was something like the shrieking of the wheels on the subway train on the curve just as it leaves 42nd street. He couldn’t hear the sound of the sea any longer, but he thought that, given half a chance the sea would shut itself in all around him it might drown out the noise of the train. It would be like cuddling in his mother’s arms – all quiet – all soft – all warm. The sea would listen to him as he slowly explained the process by which one might find the area of a circle.

The lifeguards continued watching the children.