🎧 322: The beach was . . .

     The beach was a wonderful place. It offered the pleasures of sea and sand and bay and the entertainments of people at their ease who are dependent on themselves and one another for their amusements. The clammies welcomed the vacationers, since they were open-handed and their pockets were deep. They liked to have a good time and did. It was the prosperous and fun-loving Babbingtonians who bought shacks and spruced them up, or built new cottages. They enjoyed the insularity, the loose, unbuttoned life, and one another’s company. They knew the same songs, the same dances, the same jokes, the same bootleggers.
     Herb and Lorna and Garth and May spent a lot of happy hours at the beach. A couple of cottages away from May’s was one owned by a couple with a small boy called Tippy, who was two years older than Ella. He was spoiled, willful, selfish, and nasty. Ella fell in love with him. She and Tippy were together for hours at a time, and Tippy teased and provoked her relentlessly, but she always came back for more, and she pressed little gifts on Tippy — toys of her own, candies, kisses. Snapshots from those days show Lorna and May on a blanket, chatting, Ella dozing beside them, Lorna’s hand resting on the small of Ella’s back; May lying on the sand in the sun, reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey; Ella and Tippy building a sand castle, Tippy raising a shovel threateningly, Ella smiling; Herb, Lorna, and May sitting in white wicker chairs around a card table in the cottage, rain streaking the windows, anagram tiles on the table, condensation on their drink glasses running down in wandering droplets, Garth’s chair pushed aside, not to block the camera; May in a wide-brimmed straw hat; Garth striking a pose in a woolen bathing suit, saluting the viewer with his upraised glass; Garth with his arm around a succession of young women guests; Ella walking along the boardwalk between Herb and Lorna or between Garth and May; Lorna holding Ella in the surf; Herb holding Ella in the surf; Garth holding May; Herb holding Lorna; Garth holding Lorna; Herb holding May.

In Topical Guide 322, Mark Dorset considers Foreshadowing (?) from this episode.

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