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Kelvey Marshall was a Marine. He was not what our family back home in New Jersey would call a "nice Jewish boy". But he and our Mom, Pauline, were dating.
He had a smooth, slow Southern drawl like nothing we had ever heard before. Kelvey was brush-cut, thirty-something, handsome and full of fun. He and Pauline loved to dance! They went out a lot. Kelvey liked us, and we liked him, too. Mom's other dates usually ignored us, or acted just nice enough to get to take Pauline out. After all, ordinary single women didn't have two pre-teen girls like my sister and me in the way.
We lived surrounded by normal, regular kids with families like you'd see on TV's Ozzie and Harriet. Those kids had a Dad who worked and who came home smiling to a happy housewife Mom. But we were a family of misfits in that normal neighborhood, and our Mom
was no longer a happy housewife. She was a widow. And she wasn't old, like widows are supposed to be. She was young and pretty with a movie-star figure. People said she looked a lot like Dorothy Lamour, that actress in the sarong.
My sister, Susie, was only nine years old; small and cute enough to get smiles from older folks. I think she was too young to realize how painful this was on us.
But I was eleven, just old enough to understand that we didn't belong. My stomach got knots if someone would ask, "Where's your Dad?" How could I answer, "He's dead."? I hated the way they'd look at me, I hated being different, I hated the silence that
fell. And I was no movie magazine, cute teen-type, either. Instead, I was a chubby size 13, awkward, and too tall. As some relative sitting shiva had painfully put it, "a big girl."
Now we were living in a place where everyone was a stranger. But I was on the edge of understanding Mom's effort to make our lives turn out O.K. again. That's why she moved us from New Jersey to Miami Beach. It was a new chance in a place filled with "possibilities". It was an exciting town where Mom's good looks might find her a job and another husband to take care of all of us. It was a place of shiny hotels with fountains, pools, and chauffer-driven cars. It was a place of wealthy men, and a place to meet a lot of Jewish people like us.
But then along comes Marine Sergeant Kelvey Marhsall, not quite what our relatives at home would have ordered, and just like a big kid himself. With Kelvey, Susie and I got included. His sense of fun made everyone want to play and laugh, a lot like Daddy used to. Marshall would bring us hilarious gifts like gigantic cans of fruit-salad or chocolate syrup; GI issue and stolen from the Marine commissary.
One day, he and Mom decided to get away from the routine of Miami Beach for a week-end of "leave" in the Florida Keys. So we all packed up and loaded into Mom's 1953 Nash Rambler. Marshall drove, and off we went, bopping along to the cha-cha on the car radio.
The Keys were an uninhabited, unspoiled string of islands perfect for a tropical getaway. There were no big Miami hotels with Cadillacs out in front. Way down in Key West a writer named Hemingway was typing about bull-fights and living with his six- toed cats. Past that, the scandalous island of Cuba pulsed on the horizon. There were whispers of smugglers and of real pirates who puffed fat, Havana cigars.
As we approached Key Largo, Route One narrowed. The ninety miles that started there was covered in pines, Spanish moss, and mystery. The shoulderless, two lane black-top carried us over shadowy tangled swampland that hid alligators and Seminole villages. Indian handcraft stands dotted the roadside. A kind of people we never saw in Miami were selling palm fibre dolls dressed in colorful rick-rack and scrap. You could buy weird dried alligator heads, and polished-smooth purses of 'gator skin. Long-haired men in rainbow-patchwork Seminole jackets flashed by.
The car travelled farther and farther away from our small, one- bedroom apartment. We bounced over rickety wooden bridges that connected the Keys, and disconnected me from home.
As we passed over the high, slender, Seven Mile Bridge, the view below was wonderful. We were suspended above shallow and crystal-clear waters. Coral, seaweeds, and even gliding manta rays shimmered beneath the transparent surface. This was nothing like the grey, opaque Atlantic where we had battled summer waves at the Jersey shore!
It was starting to get late, and the next place to spend the night seemed far off. So we turned around and checked in at a small motel that sat overlooking the water of Marathon Key. Kelvey took two rooms: one for Mom, Susie, and me, and one for himself.
The first order of business was to change clothes and to grab a freshening dip in the glittering swimming pool that was calling our names. We splashed and laughed until, suddenly, we were starving! So the next objective, under Kelvey Marshall's orders, was to find a restaurant.
He selected a palm thatch, odd piratish hut that hung over the water's edge. It was open-air in the front with no windows. Susie and I could throw bread down to the fish who hung around the pilings, waiting there just for us.
It was here that I got to order conch chowder; not the usual Manhattan clam chowder like Captain Starn's in Atlantic City, but Florida conch chowder. And I felt so cool about it! I had seen the hugh and distinctive conch shell, even back in boardwalk stores. That alluring, rosy-pink of the inner shell embodied all my dreams of exotic Florida. The conch held within its depths the color of flamingos, Key West houses, sunsets, and of female mysteries just out of reach.
Shortly, dinner was delivered to our wooden table on paper plates. Freshly caught grouper with lime, fries, and coleslaw was washed down with Cokes or rums 'n Coke. Looking out over the water I thought about home, where I had seen the sun rise from the ocean about a million times. But in the Keys, where everything was different, you could watch the huge and sizzling sun sink into the Gulf. And we did.
As the day turned dark, we were fairly worn-out and Mom got us ready for bed and gave us a kiss. She and Kelvey were dressing to go out for an evening of cha-cha at the Key's scandalous nightclubs, so don't tell grandma or grandpa! Mom looked tanned and gorgeous in a white blouse and capri pants.
Susie and I tried to wait up to hear about the music and dancing. But it got really late. I peeked out the motel door once, and it was quiet with no sign of Mom. The sky was filled with stars; more than I had ever seen. And with the water making little wave-sounds, and with the breezes rustling the palms, it just shushed us off to sleep. The sounds were kind of bewitching.
Mom was not there when I woke up in the morning. But shortly, she and Kelvey came to the door and hustled us to get dressed for breakfast. Well, in the Keys, "dressed" means putting on bathing suits and flip flops, because that's what they had on.
I had never experienced anything like this Treasure Island kind of place. You could eat your eggs and drink the sweetest fresh orange juice while sitting at pool-side. I felt so glamorous, this must be what movie-stars do!
We were all wild about being surrounded by the water. We had learned how to fish and crab during summers at the shore with our dear granpop, "Fishy" Rosenberg. So we were beside ourselves with delight when Kelvey suggested renting a motor boat for a day's fishing.
The weather was fair with calm seas. Everyone climbed over the rail and into the rental boat, catching Kelvey's high spirits, giggling and kibitzing. We carried rented fishing gear and box- lunches bought at a falling down little shop on the docks. With Marshall the Marine at the helm, the boat motored easily out into the rolling Gulf. Land disappeared. The colors of the water were an endless surprise, shifting to so many shades from aquamarine to dark blue. Shortly, the motor was turned off and we began a gentle drift. We threw baited lines over the side. And with little fanfare or waiting, I was the one who got the first bite!
I felt special; chosen! Everyone shouted! My heart was double- timing with excitement. I reeled, pulled, and lifted the line. But the line pulled back, heavy with the returning force of the Gulf and with the struggling fish trying to get back to its rightful home. My arms ached with the effort, but finally, into the boat plopped a neon-colored reef fish. The creature was an alien thing; a beautiful prize dancing at my feet. I belonged out here! I was queen of the seas.
With each fish that was pulled from the sea there was a round of laughing or bragging. We squinted in the sun and cooled down with cold Ballantine's beer or iced Coke. We were suspended in time and place. I had the feeling of a whole family again. Oh, what possibilities lay on that brink where the sky and water met?
We bobbed like messages in a bottle, free-floating on the tide. We imagined being washed ashore in far-off Trinidad, where Harry Belafonte sang songs about bananas and rum. We could live on the sand, go barefoot all of the time, and look just gorgeous in sarongs and flowers. Marshall would fight off invaders and protect us! No one would care about who we were, or if we had a Dad.
The afternoon lengthened out until time carried us back to the dock. But there, my message-bottle fantasy got smashed. We were shocked when the boat rental man became angry and scolded us. He said that we should not keep fish if we did not intend on eating them. The beautiful fish we had caught were dead. They should have been set free.
It was time for us to leave.
I had carried my wishes and hopes out to the Keys as surely as we had carried our suitcases. But the spell of the place was fleeting. Now, our car was retreating like film running backwards, crossing the bridges and bearing us home toward Miami Beach where the "rules" came back into effect. Home, to where I was no starlet at pool-side nor a pirate queen; only a stranger.
And anyway, how could a Southern, career Marine be husband to a Jewish widow-woman and step-father to two pre-adolescent girls? What would our grandparents say? Obedient daughters were bound by the rules.
Mom would date Marshall for a while longer, but he was eventually transferred out.
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