Life's a beach

She shuffles over to the shade next to my lounge chair. "The police came, that's why I have nothing," she says, raising her hands to show me the missing stack of thin cotton cover-ups and box of costume jewelry she shops from hotel to hotel along this stretch of beach. She says she's hidden it, gesturing to a clump of mangrove. "Because you're not allowed to sell here?" I ask. "Because they like money," she deadpans. 

Her name isn't really Angelina, she confides, just a name borrowed from the English actress. It's Nirmala. She's from Karnataka, the state just south of here, where there's no beach, no jobs. Half the year she works in the rice fields, she says, pantomiming with a thumb and forefinger pinched together, lifting grains from the sand.

The other half of the year, she leaves her husband, her baby, her hard life with her family out of work, to come to Goa, to ply this strip, competing among a dozen women all brightly dressed in saris and baseball caps for the attention or pity of strangers, for a small amount of money. "You promised me," they all say, grinning and pleading. "Just take a look."

What I paid Angelina/Nirmala yesterday for the five pairs of earrings which she swears are all made of brass barely cover the bribes she paid today. 

--

I slip away from this world into the water, watching my fleshy legs flail toward the sun. The blurry heat, the thick green wall of palm trees, the balmy air that absorbs the smell of garbage burning each night remind me of Liberia. I couldn't save you from drowning. The words, the memories flash over me. As the waves clutched you and the current sucked underfoot, and the salt water lapped at your mouth and nose, I tried to calm you and coach you how to dive and duck beneath them. With my arm crooked behind your back, I tried to guide you to shore, but I wasn't strong enough - it was a shock to learn this. A lady with a lifesaver dragged you to safety. I didn't think your already pale skin could be any paler. I even remember the date: September 13, because later after we'd survived that terrifying afternoon, we went to dinner. You bought me a necklace for our four-month anniversary.

Years later, the story I told myself was that I'd saved you, but I hadn't. I couldn't save you from drowning. But in your flailing desperation to survive, you could have taken me under.