The Bubble

As she pedaled the three miles to Shepherd Beach, Stacy thought dolefully today would be pretty much the same as all the rest. She had good friends at work, and she loved to be outdoors, so it wasn’t bad, but sometimes the monotony got her down. The hoards of summer campgoers, the screeching mothers and whining kids, the acrylic-nailed New Jersey housewives ordering her to pick up garbage on the beach like she was the help in their McMansion…it seemed like the exact same crowd of people every damn day of the week.
“Hey guys.” Stacy said, stashing her peanut butter and jelly sandwich in her cubby in the life guard shack. She brought one for lunch every day but never finished the whole thing. Every day she felt guilty for throwing it the trash. She pumped some sunscreen into her hand from the indutrial-size communal bottle and started smearing it on her face. Rod and Andrew looked up from the cell phone they were hunched over, trying to read the tiny internet browser screen.
“Hey,” they said in unison.
“It’s supposed to rain.” Rod said.
“Sure.” Stacy said, making a face.
“There’s a thunderstorm like, five miles wide headed right for us.” Andrew said, holding up the phone and displaying a bright green blob on the weather map.
“No way, man.” Stacy shrugged, hanging her whistle around her neck and putting on her sunglasses. “It’s the Shepherd bubble.”
The beach, did indeed seem to be in some sort of meterological wormhole, a place that rain somehow never touched even when it was pouring everywhere else in all directions. It had been a rainy summer, and plenty of Stacy’s friends who worked at summer camps, golf courses or greenhouses, had gotten loads of days off. The lifeguards at Shepherd Beach had not had a rain day since…ever.
Stacy and Andrew had been friends for years, and didn’t need to talk much as they sat watching the beach fill up with families and kids in matching blue t-shirts from the nearby YMCA camp.
“Maybe it really will rain.” Andrew said hopefully, looking up at the darkening sky.
“Maybe.” Stacy sighed, watching a woman in a ruffled orange bathing suit and bad hair extensions muscle her children into their water wings. Storms threatened all the time, and passed right on by. The goddamn Shepherd bubble.
Suddenly, a woman broke away from the raucous Puerto Rican family who had set up for the day on the beach. She bolted for the water, and Andrew and Stacy sat up immediately. Every lifeguard knows that a mother running for the water means there’s a kid in trouble. Scanning the water, Stacy didn’t see any children struggling—and then her mouth dropped open. Seven or eight more women, all shrieking in Spanish, went running for the water in a blur of neon bikinis and jiggling flesh. Andrew and Stacy were both on their feet now, watching as the women began to scratch, hit, hair-pull and punch each other, all while waist deep in the lake. The other beach goers put down their drinks and held their Frisbees, watching dumbly, while the rest of the family screamed at the women in the water. (Whether it was encouragement or pleas to stop Stacy couldn’t have said.) Andrew’s eyes were enormous.
“What. The. Fuck.”
“Holy shit, what are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know! Jesus!” Andrew winced as a hank of artificial hair went flying. Thunder grumbled and belched beyond the far shore of the lake, but everyone’s eyes were glued to the action in the water.
“You have to go in there!”
“What?! No way!”
“Andrew!”
A cop had already arrived, and was standing by the water looking bewildered in his shiny shoes and carefully pressed uniform. Andrew jogged down the sand, and the two men in uniform looked at each other briefly before they began wading stoically into the fray. It was a losing battle from the start. As soon as they managed to separate two women, two others would be fighting again, and once they separated those two, the others would have returned to brawling while their backs had been turned. Stacy gasped through her teeth in sympathy as Andrew received a gouge on his chest, the kind only the fingernails of a New Jersey-ite in a size sixteen fuschia bikini could inflict.
Two other squad cars had arrived and Stacy was getting ready to wade into the water herself when it happened. With an earsplitting clap of thunder the nearly black sky opened, and water began to come down in sheets on the beach, the snack stand, the lifeguard shack, the campers in their blue t-shirts, the children in water wings, the mothers eating tuna fish sandwiches and the fathers sipping beers out of paper bags, the teenagers making out by the picnic tables and the sunburned girl flirting with Dave from the kayak rental shed, and on the knot of women struggling in the water, who slowly separated, stood up and straightened their swimsuits, and, still trading curses, ran for the beach. They gathered their things and joined the crowd running for the parking lot. Sheltered under the lifeguard chair, Stacy and Andrew watched as purplish clouds rolled in across the lake, sparking with lightening. They’d both have the rest of the day off. For the first time in recent memory, the bubble had burst.

Ellen Stuart