I had a powerful reaction to this story, which only intensified as I read it again and again. In a sentence, this story is about a girl, Elizabeth, who spends a "nice" day at the beach with her parents, Dr. and Mrs, Halstrom, the niceness of which is threatened by an angry, hoodied teen boy who stomps across the sand.
For me, this is one of those stories that portrays a hapless child trapped within the psychic clutches of a controlling parent. Dr. Halstrom is a grade A jackass who demands total respect from and control over his codependent wife and daughter. Every exchange of dialogue reveals another brick in the prison that he has built for Elizabeth, and that she is now unknowingly continuing to build herself. He brings far too much reading to the beach, so that the books stack up like a pile of peacock feathers boasting his supposed education. Mrs. Halstrom and Elizabeth mirror this habit, while at the same time staying well below his number themselves. A book to be read and a book to show off to others that they are reading. Or that they could read if they wanted to. A felt preoccupation with that kind of an image: "well, I'm not doing that at the moment, but I have it here, and I could do that at any moment, which is just as good as doing it."
Elizabeth is reading "Dune." Dr. Halstrom teases her about this, which seems innocent at first, but the teasing takes on a sad tone when Elizabeth begins to tease herself the same way just to get a laugh from her father. Of course, she wouldn't dare tease him. She comes to the edge of distressing feelings just as she walks along the edge of the water, the itch of reality that the day may not be so nice for her as her father paints it to be and demands she parrot back to him. Her mother's soul-starved enabling predicts Elizabeth's sad future, if she continues to indulge her father's everything-is-in-its-right-place-and-I'm-on-top-of-the-world behavior by sacrificing her awareness of her own feelings.
Enter the rebel youth tearing across the strand in a storm cloud of adolescence. He stomps the sand, wears a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled down tight over his head, and peers out at the world that has shit on enough of what it had promised him in childhood. The beach goers gawk and pity and shake their heads. He looks at Elizabeth and, for a moment, ignites all the rage and fearful uncertainty with the world that her father has tried so hard to hide. Dr. Halstrom stews in a black rage, ignoring the boy and claiming that is only trying to get attention. All I could think of was how brutally he must have neglected his own daughter's cries of distress, which he still does, but she has lost so much of herself by this point that he doesn't need to do much to keep her eye away from herself. From earlier in the story: "'It sounds a little sad.' She felt sad. The poor child!" "Not at all, [said Dr. Halstrom]. It was a generous, noble, and beautiful thing to have done." Just stop it old man. No sympathy.
Elizabeth feels a surge within herself from seeing that boy, even if she does not see it, for just that moment: a way out. But how terrible it feels. How unpleasant, a feeling no doubt doubled by her father's enraged reaction. She might have turned to him, that hardness now in her eye, and said, "I see you! I see all these fucking books and your 'nice' fucking day! You make me walk on eggshells, you mock me, you keep me on a thread. Knock it off!" Of course, this doesn't happen. Instead, she asks him for help with a favorite memory of hers: "Oh Daddy...do you know I can't even remember what kind of bread it was? Isn't that awful?" "'Silvercup,' said Dr. Halstrom decisively." I wish that kid came up to him and kicked sand on his books.
This story reminded me of the 2005 film, "The Squid and the Whale," where Jeff Daniels plays an insufferable novelist and professor whose narcissistic detachment infects his son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) to such an extent that Walt performs Pink Floyd's "Hey You" at a school talent show and claims it as an original work. He justifies this claim (and, sadly, seems to believe himself) by saying that he "could have" wrote it. "I know," his father says.
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