My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [23]
Most of us live in different parts of the country and rarely get together, so the car’s alive with excited chatter as we make our way up the Long Island Expressway. If being together weren’t enough, today’s extra-exciting because we’re taking our friend Angie to see the ocean for the first time.
“I just don’t understand how someone can be our age and have never seen the ocean,” I say. I mean, I know it’s possible—the kids on Amish in the City—my second-favorite reality show ever50—had never seen the ocean before, but they’d also never ridden on escalators or tasted coffee or had zippers on their pants. Plus, Angie’s not Amish.
“I grew up on a Great Lake. Ask anyone in Michigan, and they’ll tell you it’s the same thing,” Angie replies. She doesn’t need to demonstrate on her hand where she spent her childhood because we already know she’s from the Thumb. Plus, she’s shown us a dozen times before. What is it with people from Michigan? They throw up their hands as often as a newly minted fiancée flashes her diamond. Is it because Michigan’s the only state shaped like something familiar? I wonder if Italian folks are always rolling up their pants to show you where they’re from on their boots?51
My WASP-y pal Poppy, who spent every second of every summer for twenty years on Atlantic beaches before moving to the Midwest, interjects, “It’s so not the same.”
“Do you feel like you’ve been missing something?” Wendy asks.
“How can I miss it if I’ve never had it?” Angie replies.
I can’t wrap my mind around this. “You haven’t even been to the Caribbean? Or, like, Florida? I bet you’ve been and you just don’t remember. You’ve seen it. You must have seen it.”
Angie frowns at me. “I’ve repressed my memory of the ocean?”
“Yeah.” I bob my head enthusiastically, agreeing with my own conspiracy theory.
“No.”
I persist. “But you just flew into New York yesterday. Did you not notice that big band of blue surrounding LaGuardia?”
Blackbird glances back from the driver’s seat. “Jen, that’s the Long Island Sound.”
“No,” I insist. “I’m talking about the other water around the airport.”
Blackbird raises one elegant eyebrow in the rearview mirror. “The East River? Flushing Bay?”
I deliberately switch tracks. “Angie, did you or did you not see the Statue of Liberty on your flight in?”
“I did! How cool was that? I can’t wait to tell the boys!”
“Aha! Then you saw the ocean that surrounds her!”
Poppy chimes in, “That would be the New York Bay.”
Wendy leans around Angie, who’s sitting between us in the backseat. “Jen, I thought you lived here. Shouldn’t you know this?”
Okay, so maybe I suck at math AND geography.
But not at life. I’m awesome at life.
“Pfft, that was thirty years ago. I’m allowed to forget. Anyway, Ange, you never felt like just packing up the family and taking everyone to the beach for a few days?” I ask.
Blackbird jumps to Angie’s defense. “Do you understand the amount of coordination that would take? That’d be tougher than a military strike. With all those boys, she probably counts herself lucky if they’re all wearing pants when they leave the house.”
“Yet you admit it’s kind of weird to be an ocean virgin at almost forty,” I counter.
“Oh, yeah, totally fucked up. But understandably fucked up,” Blackbird clarifies.
“How do you think you’ll react when you see it?” Wendy asks.
“Maybe she’ll cry,” I suggest. I remember when Mose from Amish in the City saw the Pacific for the first time. He waded in wearing jeans and got all emotional because the endlessness of the water made him even more appreciative of God’s majesty. I didn’t just cry when I watched that episode; I sobbed.
Angie shoots me a puzzled glance. “Why would I cry?”
“Because it’s kind of an emotional thing. You’ll feel way insignificant and you’ll question your place in the universe because you’ll have never seen anything so vast before.”
Angie’s having none of this. “Give me a break; I’ve never seen anything as vast as the laundry all the men in my house produce. One of the little guys