This is a story about a girl on a beach in Maine during one of the hottest, most delicious days of July. It’s 1977 and a warm wind blows in from Seguin Island. The clouds are opalescent with little white ribbons trailing behind them, and the girl is beside herself to finally be turning 10. Double digits. At breakfast her parents give her a black Panasonic tape recorder from Radio Shack and a pair of red Dr. Scholl’s from Hallet’s Drug Store on Front Street in Bath, where she has seen the sandals on a rotating metal display rack near the ice cream counter. They are made of a thick, hard, pale wood, and when she opens the box and puts them on, she immediately feels stronger.
Six friends are coming to her slumber party tonight at the haunted cottage her parents have rented on Popham Beach for two weeks. Because it’s her birthday, she’s been absolved of her chores and is allowed to take the path down through the dunes alone. When she gets to the beach, she can feel the wildness of it. The crash of the sea, and the desiccated bones of the bluefish, and the miles of undulating sand. She thinks the power of the beach is somehow inside her body. In her arms and legs and hands and cells. It’s like she’s part of the beach, and the beach is part of her, and she will always feel this way. This confident. No one will ever take this confidence away.
She is not a petty arsonist, but last week she met two brothers on the beach, the 8 and 10-year-old sons of a US senator in the midst of a divorce, and the boys and the girl and the girl’s friend Julie roamed the high-tide line for three indelible days starting bonfires. Or really what they did was resurrect the bonfires that hadn’t been put out properly the night before. They used small pieces driftwood and dried seagrass as kindling, and each time the girl got a fire going without a match, she felt a little jolt of the power inside her, a small electrical charge.
The cottage that the girl’s family rents is an old, musty rambler with peeling wallpaper and a turret from the black and white postcards of Victorian England. In their real life, the girl’s family lives only 30 minutes away in the woods by the river, but their time at the beach is of another world. It’s as if they’ve gone to the moon. It’s so good and freeing that sometimes the girl hopes they’ll never go home. She thinks the beach will last forever. Or at least as long as her lifetime, which is basically forever. She hasn’t heard the words global warming, but last summer the ocean came and took two of the cottages on the beach away, and all she could do was watch.
She and her friend Julie sit on a log up near the dunes, waiting for the slumber party to start. There’s a clam house called Spinneys at the end of the road with Percy’s General Store next door and the fried dough the girl is obsessed with. The girls walk the beach to Percy’s now to get red licorice whips for a quarter. Then they head to the Fort at the mouth of the Kennebec and go inside, past the dungeon that smells like danger, up the backstairs to the roof where they dangle their legs over the side and feel invincible under the eye of the yellow sun. It’s the very greatest feeling.
The slumber party really gets going after dark when the girl and her friends lie in their sleeping bags on the living room floor of the haunted cottage and recite swear words into the tape recorder. They play the tape back and can’t stop laughing at the sound of their throaty, underwater voices. Then they sing very bad a cappella renditions of Fleetwood Mac’s hit song “Dreams” into the tape recorder. One of the lines in the chorus goes, “have you any dreams you’d like to sell?” And the girl loves this question. She doesn’t know what it means really, but she’s entirely hopeful that someday she’ll have so many dreams she could consider selling some of them.
She likes the two lead singers in Fleetwood Mac equally, but if she’s honest she wants Stevie Nicks’ long, feathered hair. And if she’s even more honest, she’s secretly hoping that the version of “Dreams” she just sang into the tape recorder will attest to her until-now hidden talent and that someone will hear the recording and ask her to consider giving up fifth grade in Maine for life on the road.
Forty years later, the girl will fly to Austin, Texas, with two friends, not the friends from the slumber party but other women to whom the girl has a magnetic connection, and they’ll go to a crowded Indian restaurant near the university to celebrate turning 50, where they’ll fight badly about the idea of power and if girls ever really have any. This fight will happen seemingly out of nowhere, when one of the friends takes a bite of red curry and says that girls think they have power, but it’s not true. They never really do. The other friend at the table says, no. Girls start with power, then some of them lose it and have to find it again.
It’s like being on the sidelines of a boxing match to witness this fight. The dinner doesn’t feel like a celebration anymore, but more like a lament. It seems to the girl that her friends are arguing about something else, while they argue about power. Something about what it’s meant to have things taken from them. A theft in broad daylight. My confidence, one of them says. Where did it go?
The girl has been thinking about women’s friendship and confidence and power a great deal, and she wants to write a novel about it. By now she’s come to see that much of the substance of her life lies in her friendships with women and their wisdom and wildness. Like a beach, she thinks. At times, she’s felt that the most important women in her life know her so well they must have been her friends for centuries.
She has a friend in Maine who poured her love into her two children, and when the children grew up and left, the friend was in a low mood and missed them keenly. One day the friend’s son called his mother from far away and told her that what she needed to feel better was 10 women friends. Ten, he said. The mother wasn’t sure where her son had gotten this specific number, but slowly she went about filling his prescription, and she got her power back. It was still burning inside her, it just needed kindling.
After the girls at the slumber party in the haunted cottage sang more rock songs into the tape recorder, it was time to eat the angel food cake the girl’s mother had baked. They rushed into the cramped, ancient kitchen at the very back of the cottage, where so many women had cooked food alone for over a century. You could still hear the roar and crash of the ocean back here. You still feel the wildness of the beach and imagine its soft-animal shape and its power. You could still dream in this little kitchen. I don’t remember what the girl wished for while she blew out her candles. Oh, how I wish I did. But if I could make one wish for her today, it would be that no one ever take her power away. She has many fires to start. ▪
