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  “Shoes,” my mother said, pointing at mine. I flopped down next to her, dangling my offending sneakers carefully over the edge, but she had closed her eyes and wasn’t watching. She had been this way the whole trip. Not like in D.C., where when she got home from work, she would fling open the backdoor and we would come running, Carol and I and our two dachshunds, Bertha and Gretel. Her two-legged girls and her four-legged girls, she called us. She came home full of stories, like the one about the two men named Apple who made the mistake of living on the same street, which, of course, thoroughly mixed up the delivery of their Social Security checks. She always gave Carol and me a Chiclet from her purse and asked how school was and what we wanted for dinner as she rubbed Bertha and Gretel on their long, wriggling stomachs. Already I missed the dogs. Locked in a kennel at the vet’s along with our cat, Lucky, they probably felt the same way.

  Carol filled one of the glasses in the bathroom with water. She took a taste. “Ugh,” she said, “this is awful.” My father took the glass from Carol, examined the yellow stain in the porcelain under the tap. He took a sip.

  “ Sulfur water,” he said, swallowing. He made a point of taking another sip. “Not bad once you get used to it.” My mother sighed and put her arm across her face.

  “Well, I’m going to brush my teeth with Coca-Cola,” Carol said.

  It occurred to my father that we had not eaten. “I just can’t get back in that car,” my mother said.

  “Maybe there’s something we can walk to.” My father opened the door of the room, letting in a damp wave of hot air, and looked out across the parking lot, across U.S. 1. “There’s a shopping center across the highway. Surely there’s something there.”

  “Take the girls,” my mother said, her arm still over her eyes. I could tell she was hoping we would all go away.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Bring me back something.”

  So it was my father who held our hands as we waited for a break in the traffic, which was mostly out-of-state cars like ours, but headed further south, to where there were probably real coconuts in the palm trees. My father held our hands as we walked, not ran, across the four concrete lanes. It was nearly seven o’clock, but it was as hot as ever, and the air was so humid it felt like you could grab a handful and wring it out like a wet sock. On the other side, we had to climb up a sandy bank and cross some railroad tracks to get to the shopping center. “Ouch!” Carol said. “Something stung me!” She pointed at the ground.

  My father leaned down, examining the furry plant and its white flowers with some care. “It’s a kind of nettle,” he said at last. “Let’s watch where we step.”

  So we watched. In spite of this, by the time we reached the shopping center’s parking lot our socks were covered with little tan spurs. When we tried to pick them out, they stuck in the skin of our fingers. “Oh, well,” my father said as he straightened, giving up on our socks. “Your mother will get them out.”

  He didn’t offer to take our hands again, so we trailed after him as he crossed the hot asphalt. The shopping center was green, too, like a bigger version of the motel. At one end was a department store, the name BELK’S spelled out above it in red neon, and, at the other end, Peebles Drugs. “I’ll bet they have a lunch counter,” my father said, basing this guess on some part of his life that predated us. No drugstore I had been in up to that point had ever had a lunch counter.

  He was right. As soon as we stepped into the chill of the drugstore’s air-conditioning, I smelled hamburger grease and cold bacon. We sat at the long counter that ran down one side of the store, and Carol and I took turns spinning each other on the high stools. My father didn’t tell us to stop, though we all knew Mom would have.

  Carol decided on a hot dog and a chocolate shake. To irritate her, I ordered the same. Dad ordered a BLT, asked for another BLT and a coffee to go, to take back to Mom. The waitress tried to pour him a cup, too, but he stopped her, his voice rising as he said, “No, thank you. I don’t drink coffee.” This was always happening. Usually he turned to my mother and said, I don’t know why they think every man on the planet has to drink coffee. But since my mother was not there, he didn’t. Carol got down off her stool. She was bored.

  “What can I get you then?” the waitress asked.

  “Just water,” my father said, but then, remembering how the water here tasted, he changed his order to milk.

  While the cook made the toast for the BLTs and the waitress spun the shakes around, Carol and I wandered through the store. The pharmacist in his white coat kept a careful eye on us from behind the prescription counter. The usual embarrassingly personal things were there, rubber mattress covers, pads for corns and even uglier body parts. But Carol found something good, a shelf of Florida souvenirs. I picked through the dusty display looking for something with Alan Shepard or John Glenn on it, but there was nothing like that.

  It was all orange blossoms and flamingos and alligators. Carol settled on a jigger with a map of the state on it. At eleven, she already had an impressive jigger collection. I picked out a postcard with an alligator about to bite a woman in a bikini on the butt. Across the top it read We Florida Alligators Would Rather Bite than Switch! There were still cigarette commercials on TV then, and I thought the one about smokers who would rather fight than switch was funny, if not quite laugh-out-loud funny. By choosing something smaller and cheaper than Carol, I figured I was improving my chances of actually getting it. Carol frowned. She knew I was trying to make her look greedy.

  We took our choices back to the counter with us. Dad had already finished half his sandwich, not calling or waiting for us, like he had forgotten we were with him. Our hot dogs were on the counter, but at first I thought the waitress had brought us someone else’s order. Our mother always boiled hot dogs in the same small aluminum pot she used for soft-cooked eggs, and she served them in hot dog buns, but here the hot dogs were split in two and grilled and served between slices of toast with mustard and chopped onion. Florida-style, I guessed. Carol scraped the onions off hers with one finger, making a face. When we were finished, Carol showed Dad her souvenir jigger and asked him to get it for her.

  “We’re not in Florida on vacation,” he said. “This is where we’re going to live.” Carol opened her mouth, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was, that this was news to us and probably news to our mother. My father had only been pretending he hadn’t made up his mind, that we would all get some kind of vote. I tried to imagine what living in Florida was going to be like, but all I had to go by was our room at the Rocket Motel. My father took the jigger from Carol, ready to pay for it, so she shut her mouth without saying anything. I gave him my postcard. Carol grinned at me. Her souvenir cost thirty-five cents, and mine only a nickel.

  “Can I have a pack of gum, too?” I asked Dad when we were at the cash register. He had his wallet out, and he let the woman ring up the Juicy Fruit. He didn’t even remind me to share it with Carol. She stuck her tongue out.

  Outside, it was almost dark, but no cooler. While Dad went into the liquor store, Carol and I walked the length of the shopping center, past a shoe store, a card shop. We were all the way to Belk’s by the time he came out. We heard him calling us. Carol held up one finger. One minute, she meant. She pulled open the glass door of the department store. A wave of refrigerated air hit us. The woman at the counter nearest the door looked up, startled. Or maybe it was only her painted-on eyebrows that made her look startled. Maybe she looked startled all day. She leaned over a regular forest of perfume testers. “Can I help you girls?” she said.

  “No,” Carol said, delighting in playing a small prank she knew we weren’t going to be punished for, “you can’t,” and let the door fall shut again. We headed back toward Dad.

  “She looked a little like Eve Arden,” Carol said, and I knew she was baiting me. Eve Arden was a sore point with us. Carol insisted we used to watch Our Miss Brooks all the time, but I couldn’t remember the show, so part of
me suspected she was lying, that we had never watched it. If I said yes, the woman behind the cosmetics counter did look like Eve Arden, I’d be admitting we did watch it. If I said no, she didn’t, I would be, too. Of course, probably we did watch it, only I had been too young to remember. If I said that, though, I would be admitting once and for all that Carol was not only older but wiser, and knew things I couldn’t possibly know.

  “She looked like Bozo the Clown is more like it,” I said.

  “Like Eve Arden playing Bozo,” Carol said, not giving up.

  Back at the Rocket Motel, Dad stopped by the office for a bucket of ice to go with the bottle of bourbon he had tucked under his arm. The bourbon was for my mother. She usually had a bourbon and water while she fixed dinner. My father rarely drank, and when he did, he drank Scotch.

  We found Mom already in bed, smoking. She didn’t touch the BLT or coffee. Carol and I got into the bathtub together, something we hadn’t done in a long time, something we were really too big to do comfortably. The water bubbled around us and smelled terrible.

  “God,” we heard our mother say from the other room, “even the ice tastes like rotten eggs.”

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, my father went to the office to telephone Dr. Henry. When he came back he told us that though the college was in Cocoa, the Holiday Inn where we were supposed to be staying was on Cocoa Beach. “It’s like this.” He held out three fingers, touching the first. “This is Cocoa on the mainland,” he said. He pointed to the space between his fingers: “Next comes the Indian River”—he moved to his second finger—“then something called Merritt Island”—he pointed to the space between his second and third fingers—“then the Banana River.” Finally he touched his third finger. “Then Cocoa Beach. After that”—he waved his other hand at the limitless expanse beyond his fingers—“the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “Where’s Cape Kennedy?” I asked.

  My father pointed at his knuckles. “Here.”

  2

  That first morning, we left the Rocket Motel and Cocoa and headed toward Cocoa Beach. In the years I lived there, I was to hear three different explanations of how Cocoa got its name, but I never found any of them particularly convincing. The most official was from the Federal Writers’ Project guide to Florida, which said that Cocoa was named for the “Coco plum which grows abundantly there about.” It sounds authoritative, coming as it does from the federal government, taker of censuses, maker of maps. Except no one I asked had ever heard of a coco plum. This was not an infallible test, since people who lived in Cocoa tended not to know much about Florida plants, so much like mad, giant houseplants, and so different from the Northern elms, hollies, and roses where they had grown up.

  This was in spite of the education efforts of Cocoa’s Today newspaper—A Full Page of Color Comics Every Day!—which ran recipes like PICKLED PALMETTO HEARTS. Edible! Delicious! Dig them out of your own back yard! As well as more cautionary tales, such as FAMILY OF FIVE DIES AFTER USING OLEANDER STICKS TO ROAST WEENIES.

  It also seems unlikely that coco plum is a typo for coco palm. For though I have often seen the name of the town misspelled Coco, coconut palms do not grow as far north in Florida as Cocoa.

  On this first trip to Florida, my dad’s boss, Dr. Henry, had the privilege of being the first person to give me the most popular explanation of how the town got its name. He said the early settlers had been sitting around the general store trying to come up with a name when someone looked over and saw a tin of cocoa powder. “How about Cocoa?” that someone said. So they voted, and that was that. Cocoa carried the day.

  This story is either too dumb or just dumb enough to be true.

  The last explanation is really a variation on Dr. Henry’s. In the old days, this one goes, when a steamboat went up and down the Indian River delivering supplies, the still-nameless settlement had been too new and too small to merit a stop. The inhabitants, made clever by necessity, nailed a cocoa tin on a piling in the middle of the channel so the boat could at least drop off their mail. The town became first the Cocoa Drop, then finally just Cocoa.

  That no one knew which of these stories was true makes clear how profoundly it was a town, a whole people, whose time in this place went back no further than the Mercury program. First there was a swamp, then there were space-ships. Cocoa in 1966 was a place where history meant remembering which of the practically new houses in our subdivision had been built first. It was a place on the map, an exit on the highway. And Cocoa Beach was Cocoa, add water.

  To get to Cocoa Beach that first morning, we had to drive in our Plymouth across a causeway, over two tall-humped bridges above two shallow rivers, rivers so wide that, from the middle, the shoreline was only the faintest green smudge. My father repeated their names in turn: Indian. Banana. Carol crouched on the floor of the car. The year before, she’d decided she was afraid of bridges and announced this every time we drove over the South Capitol Street Bridge back in D.C.

  However, these bridges were truly fearful. Each was so steep that my father unconsciously pulled back on the steering wheel as if he were a pilot trying to get the nose of his plane up, so steep they seemed to end in midair. I had a hard time believing that when we reached the top we would not just sail off into space. I thought about how long it would take for the Plymouth to fall, whether it would be better to open the windows on the way down or after we hit the water.

  As we reached the top of the second bridge and started down the far side, my father put the car into neutral, and we coasted like I did on my bike coming down a hill. Out the windows, all I could see was blue. Blue river, blue sky. My mother laughed for the first time on the trip. Below, a school of fish broke the surface, a fountain of silver splashes. Right behind them, a porpoise leapt into the air. “You’re missing Flipper!” I said, kicking Carol. The porpoise nosed into the water, and the fish jumped again, higher, trying to escape being breakfast. Carol stayed on the floor, looking green.

  On Cocoa Beach was another four-lane highway, this time lined by motels standing close together, as if these sandy lots were valuable in some way the sandy lots in Cocoa could never be. Fine sand blew across the highway, and the dividing line was so white in the sunlight it hurt my eyes. Even my parents, who were both wearing dark green prescription sunglasses, squinted.

  The Holiday Inn looked just like a Holiday Inn, and our rooms just like Holiday Inn rooms. A band of paper stretched across the toilet seat to guarantee it had been sanitized, and each drinking glass was wrapped in white, waxy paper. My mother took off her sunglasses and nodded her approval, obviously relieved, though the water still tasted funny. We went for breakfast and ordered off the standard Holiday Inn menu. During the two breakfast stops on the way down, I had tried to order Our Special Strawberry Waffle. At each stop, the waitresses said they were out.

  In Cocoa Beach, I asked and received. My father smiled at the waitress, told the story. “Would you believe this is the third Holiday Inn …” The waitress smiled.

  “Do tell,” she said.

  “Jesse’s our waffle girl,” my mother said. I nodded to acknowledge the compliment—that’s me all right. I was always asking her to fix waffles for dinner, something she did now and then. I did this so I could follow my father’s lead and have first a waffle with a fried egg and bacon and then another with strawberries—for dessert. I liked waffles for dinner because it seemed weird to be eating breakfast at five o’clock at night, to stand a day on its head like that. I liked the idea, but I was not really sure I liked waffles, which, at least as my mother made them, were always a bit heavy.

  Only when the waffle arrived, as big as my head and festooned with frozen strawberries and canned whipped cream, did I remember this. Carol looked at me and shrugged. I ate bravely away, and in a little while Carol and my father helped me. It wasn’t important that I, or even we, finish the waffle. We weren’t a clean plate family. Commenting on what anyone ate or didn’t eat seemed a bit too personal. I just needed to look like I enjoyed
it so it would make a good ending to the story of how I searched and searched until finally, in the place we were soon to call our home, I found my strawberry waffle.

  By the time the waitress came back for our plates, the waffle had been sufficiently mauled.

  I cleared my throat. “I don’t suppose,” I said, being more cautious, more adult in my approach this time, “there’s going to be a shot anytime soon? I suppose if there were, Walter Cronkite would be here.” The waitress leaned close, rested one hand on the back of my chair.

  “Not always, Sweetie,” she said. “Sometimes, with no notice at all, they send up one of these secret spy satellites. Your boyfriend or your daddy gets called into work one Sunday and the next thing you know, the plates are rattling in the cupboards, and there one goes.” The waitress straightened, refilled my mother’s coffee. “They’re kind of puny, though, as rockets go.”

  AFTER BREAKFAST, WE went to look at houses. Just to see what was available, our father said. He drove us to a neighborhood on Cocoa Beach that Dr. Henry had suggested. The houses were stucco, painted different dreamy pastels: aqua, pink, turquoise—colors I had never seen a house painted. Our house back home was red brick with black wood shutters, as were all the houses in our neighborhood, in all the suburbs that sprawled into Maryland and Virginia from D.C. On the wall by the front door of each Florida pastel house was a starfish or conch shell molded out of white cement. The lawns were bright green, with sprinklers sweeping back and forth across them. Rainbows hovered above the arcs of water. “Phew, smell that sulfur,” my mother said.