This morning my dog was issuing forth smells, as dog sometimes do. As you might imagine they were almost smells I would describe as “loud,” because they were strong. And, being a dog, they were meaty. And sudddenly they brought me back to summer at the beach when I was a kid, under the age of ten, I’m gonna say. When I was young my mother would take the family, usually my brother and I, sometimes my father, but always my grandmother, to Ocean City, New Jersey. My grandmother was born and raised there, the granddaughter of a Methodist minister, and she always missed it. My mother would rent a house there, or sometimes just one floor of the house, always the first floor, so my grandmother didn’t have to do stairs, and we would stay for one to two weeks, depending on what Mom and Grandmom could afford.
It’s kind-of amazing to me, when I think back over the food we had there, how standardized the menu was. Firstly, and the scent the dog’s gas brought back to me this morning, was lamb. My grandmother was as Irish as you could be, and she loved lamb. My mother also loved it, and my father hated it. So, the meal my mother and grandmother most looked forward to (with my father not around) was roasting a leg of lamb. They put a bit of garlic on it, and, as my grandmother was not one for a lot of flavor, this meal was remarkable also for that addition of garlic. They roasted it with potatoes and carrots around it. It was lamb dinner one night, and lamb stew the next. I loved it too, but it would be pretty difficult for me to dig into a leg from a lamb these days: lambs are babies! While I’m not vegetarian, I definitly lean that way more and more. It’s funny that the memory came to me on the stink from my dog, but it did, and, unlike most of his smells, it was not unpleasant as it brought back that memory.
In general those summer vacations were very full of smells that I can rmember quite clearly. First, like the lamb, the other meals. We had meatloaf, always, and my mother made it with bacon on the top, not ketchup or tomato sauce, so it was always pretty fragrant with the smell of bacon. And there were several mornings with bacon for breakfast too. On the day after meatloaf there would be bacon for breakfast, and mashed potato pancakes from the too many potatoes made the night before. My grandmother would form the cold potatoes into patties, and salt and pepper and flour them, and fry them in Crisco with some butter. One of the dinners there would also be fresh greenbeans, ends snapped by my grandmother, and boiled until they were almost soup. Another night the “green vegetable” would be lima beans, and to this day I don’t know, between the smell and the taste, why anyone ever eats them. One night there would be spaghetti and homemade meatballs from veal and beef, with a salad for the green vegetable. One night we would have the amazing Mack Manco’s pizza, and one night we would go out to Shafto’s restaurant, and I would have fried shrimp. And I’m pretty sure one night dinner would be breakfast: eggs and pan-fied sliced potatoes, and, if we were there for two weeks, boiled hotdogs (a big favorite of my grandmother’s) would be on the list, and on another night porkchops cooked on top of baked beans in the oven, so that one side was wet and beany, and the other side was curled up and dry, though my mom laid bacon over them too, which helped a little. Always breakfast was substantial: eggs, or pancakes, or jelly donuts, or huge bowls of oatmeal. Every single day lunch was a ham sandwich with Swiss or American cheese and tomatoes and pickles and Miracle Whip on white bread, and a cold peach from the fridge and kept on ice in the bag on the beach. They stopped along the road, on the drive down to the shore from Philadelphia, to get those peaches, and tomatoes, and corn on the cob too, from a roadside stand. Jersey peaches and tomatoes: you’ve never had better. Drive over the Commodore Barry Bridge and get you some.
I don’t remember ever drinking anything during the day because my mother always packed a jug of iced-tea, which everyone loved but me (I cannot… tea with sugar? barf!), but my mother just figured I should get used to it, and I don’t think we had a second jug for water, and, in my childhood, there were no individual thermos/water bottles or plastic water bottles you could buy at the store. All there were were gallon milk jugs filled with water, and I don’t think we lugged those to the beach. Ocean City water has a very strange taste. My mother said it was well water, and she loved it. She said it tasted like roses. I didn’t like it at all, but Philadelphia water tasted like exhaust back in the day, so they both were awful IMHO. Sometimes I’d get to go up on the boardwalk and buy a fresh-squeezed OJ, or sometimes I could get a popsicle (a Bomb pop) from the ice cream cart. But it is sort-of amazing to think of how much the food was important to my usually food-averse mother, and how they had these certain meals that they always cooked, and they were always so pleased with them. Dave makes amazing chicken cutlets, that Sophie and I adore, but aside from that, I cannot think of any meal that we make on a regular basis, and certainly none that I look forward to as much as those women looked forward to those dinners.
I realize now, looking back on it, that, while my mother was always thin, a size 4 or less, a huge part of this vacation for her and her mother (who was always fat, she wore a 22 short!), was the food. They spent a big chunk of change on food: at the grocery story, at the bakery for donuts and cookies and usually at least one pie, and we typically went to Shafto’s, which was pricey, and got takeout at least one night from the place that cooked seafood to go, Campbells. It was a huge storefront, and all they did was fry seafood and put it into boxes with lemon wedges and coleslaw, baked potatoes and corn relish, with big scoops of tarter sauce. It amazes me to think of it. I have always taken after my grandmother much more, in size and temperament, than my mother, and my mother always wanted to be thin, but she ate, and ate well, when she was at the beach, and the food was hugely important to her on her vacation. She and her mother liked all the same foods, and they got all their favorite things, and no one was stingy or frugal with money or portions. It was almost like an eating holiday. My grandmother would go to the beach for an hour or so each day, but she was as pale as a bedsheet, so she would soon go back to the rented house to snap beans or start cooking, and watch her “stories” on someone else’s TV in a house with all the windows opened and a cool breeze that smelled like salt water coming through the windows: so different from the row home in Southwest Philly where you could often smell the nearby dump burning trash, and there were no trees, just the brick line of houses and the cement porches and cement sidewalks and asphalt road. Ocean City roads were tar, and I walked to the beach without shoes, and the hot tar roads would be very fragrant and soft: I could almost leave footprints in them.
It was really a vacation of the senses, each summer in Ocean City. All the food, which I can still smell, and Ocean City, because it is a barrier island, smells distinctly of the salt water from the bay, and the scent of Coppertone, and the rose scent of the sink water, and the Noxema on my always present and very bad sunburn (I was also as pale as a bedsheet). My grandmother brought the sheets for the room she and I shared that always had two twin beds in it, and she used different laundry detergent than my mother, and the sheets had a clean smell that was her clean smell. Both my mother and my grandmother only bought percale sheets, and if you have not used percale (it is tough to find these days!) you do not know how crisp and cold sheets can be. My grandmother would cover herself from head-to-toe in Ponds cold cream at night. It sat on her nightstand, waiting for her, with a Harold Robbins novel and these:
which I always felt to be kind of terrifying, because they seemed so death-oriented to me, like the prayer I had to say in her presence which included the line, “…if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” In Ocean City, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to this day, I did not want to go to sleep thinking about dying before I woke. And because I shared the room with my grandmother I went to sleep when she did, and she fell asleep quickly, as the innocent do, and slept on her back, hands folded across her ample bosom like she was in her coffin already, and snored loud enough to hear from all the other rooms, and loud enough to reassure me she was still alive. Itchy and hot from the sunburn, I would lay there, just desperate to doze off, and unable to do so, and listen to her snore and snore. I loved her though, in spite of the snoring. She was a perfect grandmom: very sweet, very silly. And soooo unlike my mother in every way.
My brother was 9 years older than me, and I was 8 when my sister was born, and I remember the beach vacations as, primarily, and it will sound strange to say, lonely.
And it’s strange to me now, looking back, to think about how delightful the holiday must have been for my mother and my grandmother. My experience of them both is that they looked forward to this all year, immensely, and they thoroughly enjoyed themselves, the food, and all the same things they always did, without exception, year after year, as much as they must have done the first time they did it, before I was even born. They went to the Ocean City department store, Stainton’s, shopping on one day, and both bought a new dress. One night they spent at the Music Pier, sitting on the outside benches to hear the music without buying a ticket. One night my brother and I got to go on a few rides, and even my mother would ride the Tilt-O-Whirl and the Whip back then. My mother and brother and I would rent bikes and ride the boardwalk for a few mornings. When I was in middle school and high school we shlepped my bike down on a rack, and I road the five-mile stretch two or three times a morning to escape a little of the planned and slow-paced boredom and my ever-present loneliness. It’s tricky to realize that it was a lovely time, and I remember it very clearly, and miss it a good deal, and at the same time it was so lonely for me, and all I wanted was to get back to my friends and my own room.
My mother is tough for me, always was, and is even more so now. We are oil and water, which is funny considering how much more I take after my granmother than her, from my looks to my personality: I am also inclined to be rather silly and affectionate, and my mother is neither. I would have thought she would find me reminiscent of her mother, and therefore enjoyable, but all I can really think of is her looking for me to be more like herself (my mother) and seeing my differences as an affront. The shore trip was always a bit dangerous for me, I felt, because I could get out-of-step with her expectations, and she would be enraged. She was never able to extend the tolerance to me that she was to my grandmother. There was a lot of downtime. We never went to the beach until noon or later, and I was not allowed to go early, and when we came back cleaned up, and ate dinner, there were long hours of boring TV before bed, and I was not allowed to go to the boardwalk, or back to the beach, or even to the 5&10 by myself, so I read a lot of books, tucked out of the way on a dark porch as long as there was even a little light from inside the house to see by, and generally tried to be unseen, and therefore, unprovoking. It is strange to think how I could just look, I suppose, unmoored, or uninterested in their TV choices, and cause quite a bit of anger on the part of my mom, who would seem to feel that my lack of engagement was a judgement on her in some way. She could get amazingly angry over me doing nothing, so I had to be out of sight, and occupied. I don’t remember her reacting in that way to my brother, and I don’t think she worried as much about what my sister was doing, and my sister was better at making friends with kids from another vacationing family, and I don’t think I ever did that. It’s like the trip shone a light on my quietness, and my introversion, and that just was not something that worked for my mother, and it still doesn’t.
But all those many details of our Ocean City vacations are deeply imprinted in my mind to this day. And one of the more interesting things about smells is, in my view, they reinvigorate memories more than other senses do, even if those smells come to me from the back end of a dog.
Dianne Pearce Writes 