The Corpus Christi young adults group went to Coney Island Saturday, bus and train and supposed to rain. I had never been before, in all the years I lived in New York. On the long trip out, I got caught up on the parish news, talk of weddings and funerals and ordinations and baptisms, and retellings of the old stories about the time Renee’s hair almost caught fire during a potluck before the rectory kitchen was renovated, and the time the pipe burst in the ceiling causing a torrential downpour on Fr. Rafferty’s guests, and of all our decadent gatherings with Vespers group chantmaster Stan, who has a penchant for beer and wine and more wine and dessert wine. We discussed who among us had come closest to not making it home from a “church” event due to being too intoxicated. This ain’t no Baptist church group, said our leader, Dan (a PhD student in theology). There was the Mozart’s Requiem singalong, and the “Pews and Brews” idea we came up with at brunch one Sunday after Mass and then actually instituted, with tours of churches and pubs in different NYC neighborhoods every summer. I missed fondue and poetry night; apparently some of the poems people chose to read were quite steamy.
The times I’ve been out with men from church alone, it’s been so chaste that I didn’t know if it qualified as “dating” or something else. Maybe there are subtle codes to Catholic romantic behavior I never learned in my heathen upbringing.
We walked up and down the boardwalk. I had my camera out, looking for remnants of the old seediness under the new cheapness. Out on the pier, I sat down to photograph a fishtale, and remained sitting until a couple walked up and took the spot against the wooden railing next to ours. The woman had wild, orange curly hair, and looked lovely standing behind her boyfriend with her hands around his shoulders and her chin against his back. I slowly pointed my camera up at them, and asked if it was alright to take their picture when they looked down at me. The man said, “Yes, of course,” in a thick Russian accent, and after I had taken it I told them if they gave me an email address I would send them the photo. The woman with the curly hair went rummaging through her purse for something to write with, and finally borrowed a pen from me to carefully write her address, at gmail, in the margin of a 100-ruble note. Her boyfriend laughed at her for writing on “a dollar” (actually it’s worth three), but I thought it was a lovely souvenir of the day, along with the seabird feather I put in my hair.
I had wonderful stoganoff at a Ukrainian restaurant, and the honey cake with its tiny layers from the Russian market in Brighton Beach was divine. We didn’t make it to the small bottle of vodka we bought, after our two bottles of wine with dinner (it was BYOB), but took it out to the beach with us around 8pm. All day I had wanted to swim and finally I did, just as it was getting dark. A wave knocked me flat on my back as I was coming in, and I rolled around in the sand laughing. Dan was nervous about the night patrol, so we never opened the vodka. We just sat there in the sand watching the ocean and the fireworks over the amusement park area while I tried to dry off.
Luckily I had Mitsu’s backpack with me, filled with his usual emergency contingency gear, including rainproof jacket and pants I changed into for the hour-and-a-half subway ride back to the Bronx. I didn’t have a towel, and my swimsuit and my ears and my hair and my shoes were all full of sand. I sat down next to the stairs at the 125th Street station, waiting for my final transfer, and a tall, dark man came over to me, leaning all the way down to ask if I was alright. I said I was just tired from a long day, and he kept talking and talking to me about Africa and long days and suffering and how he did not see any difference between us, that I was his sister. He wanted to know all about where I grew up, and I tried to tell him. I thought he understood where Georgia was relative to New York, because he seemed know about Atlanta, until he said it was next to Canada, yes? I looked him straight in the eyes when he spoke to me, but felt nervous with my misfitting gym suit and my sandy hair and how close to my face he was putting his face. His tribal necklaces were dangling and he said “Africa” in that way people who know say it.
