troy pancake

On Miami Beach

I sat on Miami Beach atop a fraying striped towel, watching a barge sailing northward along the coast. Karly laid next to me on her stomach, possibly asleep, in a green floral one-piece swimsuit I purchased for her a few years ago. We were not exactly trying to escape from our children, but honesty demands I tell you that I enjoyed the illusion of travel, not only across space but also time, to when we lived alone and dined alone and watched whatever shows we wanted to watch and slept through the night uninterrupted. The wind blew off the ocean in the direction of our hotel and the restaurants marketing 36-ounce margaritas and the souvenir shop selling T-shirts screen printed with a gangster Bugs Bunny. To my right, a young woman in a pink bikini stood in front of the ocean and raised one arm to the sky and the other perpendicular to her body, like a clock at 3 p.m., celebrating her arrival at the beach. Her friend captured the moment on her phone, bending forward to achieve the optimal angle, her hands level with her knees. Number six. Karly and I had made a game of counting these women posing for the internet. Seconds later, we added number seven, for another woman took the first's exact place. This time the cameraperson was male, a husband presumably, who did not contort his body in pursuit of a perfect picture but simply stood quietly and tapped as she smiled in various poses.

I watched the barge struggle forward, rocking back and forth in the waves, nearly dipping its massive double-sided screens into the salty crests of water. The screens were digital billboards with alternating advertisements—a crypto-wallet, a vacation sweepstakes, various alcohols and restaurants along the Miami shoreline. I chuckled audibly and fished my tablet out of the beach bag to begin taking notes for an essay. I—an expert in melodrama—wrote at the top, “Is nothing sacred? I can’t even look at the ocean in peace.” Next to that, I wrote the word materialism. My fraying striped towel, now sprinkled with sand, was located only ten feet from a hundred empty lounge chairs I had inquired about renting: $30 per chair and $40 for the umbrella. We opted to lay on the towels we brought. Eventually, the billboard barge disappeared up the coast and I turned back over to take a nap but not before I saw a commissioned plane, tailed with a banner proclaiming “Sun’s Out, Rum’s Out” in service of a company whose name I failed to write down.

After I woke up, I finished Endo’s The Sea and Poison while the hot sun burnt the backs of my knees and young men walked around with backpacks hawking “frozen drinks, margaritas, pina coladas” like cotton candy at a baseball game. I tried to think about the sea, about its omnipresence, about its use as metaphor. A party crew had arrived nearby, listening to Cardi B on their portable speaker. I hummed along and awkwardly tried to avert my eyes from the bare bottoms of both the women and men wearing thong-style swimsuits.

Once, I thought, this coastland was barren of human exploitation. No hotels, no hawkers, no barges, no butts. Just the eternal cycle of the surf collapsing onto shore and the infinite heavens above. I imagined a young woman discovering this exact spot, an explorer of the undomesticated world. She emerges from the trees and saunters out toward the water, digging her toes into the tiny grains of the underworld’s detritus in wonder, sitting in silence under the vastness of God, letting the sun blanket her without any hint of lust or luxury or self-consciousness. I realized that I recognized the explorer’s face; it was the face pressed onto the towel next to me, relaxed in sleep, unencumbered by my penchant for pretension.

The water teemed with dead seaweed, vomiting it onto land, where it lay in a long heap, separating water and land. We stepped over it carefully, trying to avoid any possibility of encountering a hidden sea creature, and waded in to cool off. I held my hat above my head and sank down to get my head wet. Karly dove through a wave. We floated there for a few minutes in silence, shading our eyes from the sun’s reflection on the surface of the sea; I stared outward across miles of unknown. Legends about the beings that live in the deep remind us that what is unknown is terrifying. We create monsters—the Kraken, Job’s Leviathan, Godzilla—to inhabit our ignorance, to embody our fear of the unknown.

In the water off Miami Beach, I had known Karly for ten years. We married young and so we were still becoming who we would be together. Before Karly, I was  a different person, a child, still learning the world and myself, wandering into different personalities like bookstores. Conversely, the intervening years have compressed in my memory. I can travel the distance instantly, as if by wormhole. I can see her framed by the Christmas lights at the Clifton Mill, the night of our first kiss, wearing a puffy blue jacket, a cream-colored scarf, and a smile that must have been God’s direct handiwork. It’s a beautiful night. Perhaps we’ll go back to campus and walk around the pond, sit and talk in the student center by Rinnova, the school’s coffee shop.

And then I’m back on Miami Beach, where I close my eyes again and, when I open them, I see the ocean I saw on our honeymoon. That beach was in Playa Del Carmen, at an all-inclusive resort that we afforded only by way of a gift. We lay in a VIP cabana thinking that surely we must have reached heaven early. One night, we ordered a bottle of wine at dinner before looking at the price and giggled anxiously when we realized it was $280, repeating “it’s our honeymoon” as justification. Only when we checked out did we learn that it was 280 pesos, not dollars, so our luxurious extravagance was probably available at Walmart. Our first anniversary, on which rain trapped us in a small cabin in southeastern Oklahoma––where we read, talked, and I destroyed her in Scrabble––remains stuck in my brain as “a few years ago.”

After we’d been engaged for a while, she told me about her realization that she wanted to marry me. It happened on a drive to Aldi, when she took a wrong turn and got flustered and I gave her directions. I’m not exactly sure what marriage-criteria test I passed, but I don’t ask questions, and you shouldn’t either. The grocery store test was not long after the Correcting Incident, in which I had repeatedly corrected her about random trivia—grammar, inefficiencies, story details, etc. For instance, it’s not a “frigerator,” it’s a “refrigerator.” This culminated in a fight that included the following statement: “I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to know when you’re wrong.” I still wanted to prove my intelligence, without realizing that knowledge has many meanings, and some matter more than others.

The Scriptures say that Adam knew Eve and, nine months later, there was Cain. There is a generative intimacy in knowing someone. In the innocence of Eden, they walked naked and without shame until shame rained down like judgment. Then they had to find a way to unhook and unzip those animal skins in order to know and be known. It’s easier to keep our leviathans hidden in the deep of our souls. Yet—call it biology, call it spirituality, call it the law of attraction, call it courage, call it foolishness—we cannot help but keep trying to know one another. Either that or it’s the Wedding Industrial Complex. Whatever the reason, people choose every day, often against reason, to enter into relationships that expose the scariest unknowns of their souls.

In Miami, on a cordoned street lined with shops and restaurants, we stopped for paella at a Spanish restaurant. Karly was wearing a pink blouse and matching headband, which held her hair back except for two strands curling down her cheeks like dangling earrings. I was wearing a white shirt spotted with light blue flamingos. My son had picked it out specifically for this occasion.

“Are you sure?” The waiter was trying to upsell us on our paella. He looked down at her both literally and figuratively and said, “It’s better with chorizo.” She looked at me and I waffled, so we paid seven additional dollars and I ate all the chorizo. At the table next to us, some young women were complaining to the manager about their service while Karly eavesdropped and I waited. I’ve learned that it’s best to let her figure out what’s going on before trying to talk. The waitress brought out free drinks as an apology, but the girls took only a few sips and left. Karly and I resumed our conversation, talking too much about our kids, trying to shift to other topics but always being pulled back as if by an undercurrent. She asked me questions about my job, our future, and my writing, and I enjoyed answering. I didn’t have to hide, to position, to hedge, to filter. There was nothing to advertise because she already owned the product, knew its every function and dysfunction, and for inexplicable reasons, kept coming back for more. To be known and loved is a freedom like no other.

After dinner, we went back to the beach and walked in the thick sand with the awkward gait of toddlers, her hand curled in mine as the sun set behind the buildings along Ocean Drive. The sky above the water tinged from purple to blue and back again, and the wind blew along the back of my neck and under the hem of my shirt. Most everyone had gone from the beach by then. All the chairs and umbrellas were packed up; the hawkers were home with their families; the advertising barge docked somewhere. We walked quietly in the twilight, past a few small groups of friends still lounging in the sand. We were 30 then, on Miami Beach, and we’d been 23 in Playa Del Carmen and, God willing, we’ll be 63 in Cabo or Hilton Head. I’d even accept the trails next to Lake Lewisville, just walking and holding hands near the water, listening to the nerves in our hands and the vibrations of our souls.