Chicken Pox!
This is installment #16 in my several-part series, Shit I Wrote a While Ago. This story is the first McCaig of 5th grade, and it’s actually a mostly true story about the time I got syphilis at the beach. From 1996.
Chicken Pox!
When I was six, my family went to New Jersey for a week in July. My mom has these two friends, Beth Ann and Emma, whom she went to college with. THey each had two kids. Beth Ann had Jake and Mandy, who were three and one at the time. Emma had Eddy and Shay, who were four and two. I went with Mom, Dad, my brother, Vinnie (3), and my sister, Amy (1). Amy and Mandy have the same birthday.
It took ten hours to drive from Detroit to New Jersey. I can’t say which city we were in, since I never really knew. We stayed in a one-storey blue beach house with white shutters. It was maybe a quarter-mile from the beach.
We walked to the beach the night we arrived. The Harrisons (Emma, Eddy, Shay, and Don, Emma’s husband) came with us. They were staying in the beach house with my family and me. The Abbates (Beth Ann, Jake, Mandy, and Joe, Beth Ann’s husband) were staying in a hotel by the beach.
There was a wooden boardwalk at the entrance to the beach. I took off my shoes before I even go to the sand. To me, the beach brings summer. Why waste it?
The sand was cool and dark, for it was dusk. I ran into the water, then remembered that I was in my shorts and t-shirt. I stayed at the point in the sand where the water only lapped at my feet. I stayed there, in the same spot, until it was time to go back to the beach house.
The next day, my mom said she saw a small red dot on my back as she was putting suntan lotion on me. Then she said it was probably a rash from my bathing suit (which, by the way, I had had on for five minutes).
I ran out through the sand to a bunch of rocks in the water. I climbed out onto one rock that sat two feet farther into the ocean than the others. I positioned myself on the rock and pulled my knees up to my chest. I wrapped my arms around them and watched the water. I saw two porpoises on the edge of the horizon. They swam for maybe a minute with their backs above the water before disappearing under the waves. I climbed off the rock and walked over to the beach umbrella Beth Ann had set up near the hotel. As I lay on my beach towel, I saw a number of red dots on my arms. This was strange. I’d never had chicken pox or measles, but I didn’t think it was possible to catch them at the beach. [ed. note: This would be the first of several other istances of my misconceptions about communicable diseases leading to my downfall.] I scratched a dot. It was extremely itchy. I read a picture book to myself until my brother and dad came over with a bucket. It was purple and obviously full because my brother was dragging it. I asked what was inside. Dad showed me. There were sand crabs in the bucket. I hate sand crabs. You could say that I am rather squeamish, and that is probably true. I hate worms, fish, snails, and sand crabs. I am not, however, squeamish about frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, snakes, or blood. I don’t really mind those things.
Anyway, I took a few steps back when I saw the squirmy little things. Dad laughed. Vinnie laughed, too, but I knew he had no idea why.
After the sand crab incident, I decided to stay away from the beach for a while. Besides, my dots were spreading. And, like I said, they were itchy. As I walked up the beach toward the hotel, I spotted Mom and Beth Ann. Beth Ann gasped when she saw me and ran to find Jake and Mandy. I think she is a bit overprotective of her children. Mom simply took me by the hand, and we walked back to the beach house. There she gave me an Aveno bath. I stayed home (or at least at the beach house) for the next five days. When Beth Ann, Jake, Mandy, and Joe came over, I had to stay in my parents’ bedroom. It was awful.
Soon after I was through with the chicken pox, Amy got them. She was a sight to see. After Amy was done with them, Vinnie got them. Then came the Harrison boys, Eddy and Shay. Jake and Mandy didn’t get the chicken pox until a few years later. I don’t know what Beth Ann was so worried about.
The End
There’s a very strange nouveau-realism quality to these stories, by which I mean that they are boring because I talk a lot about minutiae. Still, I guess that’s better than a whole buttload of purposeless dialogue. B-
