My girlfriend, Bella, and I saw an ad in the Baltimore Sun for a “Whirlwind Weekend” at a hotel in Ocean City, Maryland. $159 covered a room with a king-sized bed, a heated pool and jacuzzi, and a $30 dinner voucher valid at ten local restaurants. It was our only opportunity to squeeze in some semblance of a spring break from our work as teachers at the Maryland School for the Deaf, so we booked a room. Cheap deal, and cheap we got.
From Baltimore, we slowly crossed the four-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge past the western shores of Sandy Point State Park, where we often escaped for short hiking trips during the winter. One lane on the bridge was closed for repairs, which made it nerve-wracking to drive in two-way traffic. With no shoulder or emergency pull-off ramps, this was considered one of the most dangerous bridges in America. There was even a driving service where, for a fee, someone gets into your car and drives you over to the other side.
Once we reached Maryland’s eastern shore, I relaxed my grip on the steering wheel and began to breathe easier. From there it became a two-hour straight shot down Ocean Gateway to the Atlantic. Bella was making a things-to-do list, ticking off each item to me in American Sign Language:
“Thrasher’s French fries.”
“Fisher’s Popcorn.”
“Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
“Aladdin’s Lamp Fun House.”
I knew the first three by reading her signs using my peripheral vision while keeping my eyes on the road.
“What was that about a fun house?” I signed.
Bella leaned towards the dashboard to give me a better view.
“A-l-a-d-d-i-n’s L-a-m-p,” she fingerspelled.
“What’s that?”
“The name of the fun house.”
“Where?”
“At the end of the boardwalk—in the back, you know, where all of the old-fashioned amusement park rides are.”
“Thought most of those were old, boring, and dying out.” Then I realized I was basically regurgitating what she had been trying to tell me about our relationship, hence the need for this trip—to reassess, rejuvenate or whatever they call it to put relationships back on track.
“I read in the paper that they recently refurbished those rides—they’ll be open during spring weekends until Memorial Day,” she said.
We passed a large billboard: “Jesus is the answer.” I pointed it out to her. She gave it the finger. Bella hated organized religion. While growing up, her parents took her to different churches and faith healers in hopes of receiving divine intervention to heal her deafness.
“What’s with the eastern shore and all of its churches and religious billboard slogans we keep passing?” she asked.
“Billboard ministry. They want to make you feel like you’re getting a sermon on wheels.”
“How about you giving a personal sermon about us and our plans for when we get to Ocean City?”
I pushed a button near my armrest to roll down the window. Warm air smelling of salt marshes rushed into the car. I signed grandly, my arm reaching out beyond the confines of the car. “Ok, my fellow congregants. Please be seated and open your minds to my words about… ‘Enlightenment.’ When we get to Ocean City, we’ll check in, have a nice dinner, and go for a walk on the beach. And then—”
Bella jabbed a button to automatically slide down her window.
“Don’t forget happy hour!” she signed expansively out her window.
“Right, forgot that. Sorry!”
“Then tomorrow, we’ll go for a bike ride down the boardwalk and hit Thrasher’s, Fisher’s, Ripley’s, and what was the name of that fun house?”
“Aladdin’s Lamp.” She bowed forward from her seat and fingerspelled “S-a-l-e-m A-l-e-i-k-u-m.”
“What does that mean?”
“Peace be unto you, I think. Those words are spelled out on top of the ride.”
“Where was the funhouse again? It’s been years since I’ve been on the boardwalk.”
“Next to the Wild Mouse roller coaster. Remember the big genie with his head wrapped in an orange head scarf? Legs crossed, bows up and down all day long with his hands out like that.”
“Aren’t we a little too old for that shit?” I said.
“See? ‘A little too old.’ That’s an example of your attitude that I was talking about,” she said. “Besides, it was one of my favorite attractions growing up.”
“You’re 29 now—still wanna go inside?”
“Yeah, for old time’s sake. I love the floor challenges, the steep ramps, spinning tunnels, mazes, warped mirrors and psychedelic rooms.”
“If you really want to….”
“C’mon—shake things up a little. You always have the option of going out the chicken exit, if it’s out of your comfort zone.”
“The chicken exit?”
“Yeah, if the fun house is too much for you, there’s a quick exit to get out of the place for people who get overwhelmed.” She gave a silent-movie melodramatic gesture of patting the chest and holding the back of her hand over her forehead.
“Does it have a lion entrance?”
“I don’t know what that is,” she said.
“You’ll see when I go into that fun house.” I quickly took my eyes off the road, giving her a silent leonine snarl and a wink. Then we rolled our windows back up; it was getting chilly inside the car.
After crossing over the causeway, we arrived at the southernmost end of the island around 7 p.m., right at dusk. Our hotel was a hundred and thirty-eight blocks north on the Coastal Highway. Every other block or so had a traffic light that was not doing a very good job at moderating the flow of traffic. Up ahead, we saw a bottleneck caused by a road crew working overtime filling in potholes.
I thought most people flocked to Florida for spring break. What are all these people doing here? Maybe they read the same weekend deal in the paper that we got?
The hotel turned out to be a bit shabby but not so offensive that we felt the need to demand a refund and search for another place to stay along Ocean Highway. A sign in the lobby apologized for the current appearance. All the molding had been stripped. The walls had patches of spackle smeared here and there. The air was stuffy with the odor of sweat, cigarettes, and construction dust. It was a bland gray everywhere, even on the face of the desk clerk. Renovations.
After signing in, I asked for the “Deaf Kit.” Most major hotels have a few on hand, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act. The clerk gave us a phone handset with a built-in amplifier and a dangling cord. This drew some stares from the other people waiting to check in. What would you think if you saw someone handing an obviously Deaf couple a phone handset without the rest of the telephone?
On a piece of paper, I wrote to the clerk: “Usually a Deaf Kit includes stuff like a TDD…”, and off he went, almost too eagerly, to rummage through an unkempt storage cabinet in plain view of hotel patrons. He pulled out a TDD box, opening it to verify that the Telecommunication Device for the Deaf was indeed in there.
“Fine, but what about the smoke alarm, etc.?” I scribbled.
He held up an index finger like an amateur magician, tapped his temple with a knowing expression and went back to the cabinet, unlocking the doors again and displaying for all to see how untidy things were kept. He dragged out a smoke alarm from the pile of electronic gadgets and tangled wires on the cabinet floor.
I wrote, “Good, now how about the door light…” but Bella nudged me in the ribs, signing that we should forget it, “Hell, we’re not expecting visitors. Put your little notepad and pen away.”
Off we went, toting our luggage and the so-called Deaf Kit to our room on the third floor. We unpacked, and then took turns going to the bathroom to freshen up. When it was my turn, I noticed that Bella had put out some temporary hair dye for me to apply to my goatee and the hair above my ears, where a gradation of gray was emerging.
We created our own personal happy hour of vodka tonics and salted peanuts by a window overlooking one of the canals leading out to the bay. The water was still as glass. The rows of condos along the canal were mostly dark; only the globe lights along the common pier gave a feeling of life in the area.
“Where is everybody?” Bella asked, fishing an olive out of her drink.
“Most of the condo owners tend not to come down until Memorial Day weekend.”
“Like a ghost town, but good—we get the whole place to ourselves.”
“The silhouette of that construction crane over there looks like a giant praying mantis,” I said.
“Yeah, it does. You know, you look so dashing tonight. Younger. Dyed your hair, didn’t you? I wasn’t sure if you would.”
“Yeah, I did. To stay forever young for you, of course.”
Bella eyed me while chewing her olive, unsure if I was being sarcastic or not.
After two drinks, we took the elevator up to the top floor where the restaurant was located. At the entrance, we stopped and noticed the place was mostly empty except for an elderly couple at a corner table. We backtracked a few steps and looked at each other.
“I don’t trust empty restaurants, do you?” I asked.
“Where are we gonna go? We just got settled in. I’m not up for going back out and searching up and down the island for a place that’s lively with people.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“Maybe the chef will have extra time to give our food order more tender loving care,” said Bella.
Maybe the chef is also the Maître d’, the waiter, the bartender, the busboy, and the dishwasher, I thought, but pinched my hand not to sign that.
Soon an eager host-waiter appeared and welcomed us to a table by a window overlooking Ocean Highway. After ordering dinner, we looked out to the coastal road below us. For thirty some blocks, I could see traffic lights blinking yellow in synchronicity. An occasional car passed by.
“Where did all the spring-break traffic that we were stuck in scatter off to?” I wondered.
Bella shrugged her shoulders.
The food arrived, and she split her broiled mahi-mahi in half with a fork and scraped it onto my plate. The fish tasted as if it had been left in the freezer a tad too long. I excused myself to go to the bathroom. The appearance and smell were repulsive. More renovations. A urinal and a toilet were closed off with yellow “Caution” tape. Scum was on the floor, probably overflow residue from the dysfunctional urinal and toilet, and an illiterate who had to go. I started to feel anger well up. Renovations—really? Why didn’t they tell us when we called in our reservation a month ago?
Bella was wiping up her plate with a dinner roll when I returned to the table. “Where did all of the brown go?” she asked.
“What brown?”
She gestured around her mouth and sides of her head.
“Oh—down the sink,” I said.
“Why did you wash it off?”
“The vinegary smell was getting to me.”
“I’m sorry. Didn’t know it was that bad.”
“Is showing some gray in my hair really that bad? You’re gonna get old someday. Why be so obsessed?”
After dinner, we stopped back in our room to put on our coats, grabbed a blanket, and took a walk across the highway to the beach to work off dinner. It was around midnight. A cool, lonely wind blew steadily off the Atlantic. Bella wrapped her arms tightly around me, snuggling like a child as we walked along the surf’s edge, careful not to get our shoes wet. We kept walking until we were away from the amber illumination of the highway and on the darkest stretch of the beach.
Lying on our backs we looked up at the vast canvas of stars. I went on a mental voyage through the constellation in search of Orion. An apocalyptic feeling of being the only people on the planet came over me. This gave me chills, though not in a horror movie kind of way. It was something warm and spiritual, like being haunted by someplace desolate and beautiful, where some sign of civilization used to be: a cracked parking lot of overgrown weeds, a deserted drive-in movie lot, a western ghost town, a small island with a decaying duck blind, a boarded-up log cabin on a mountaintop….
Bella fingerspelled something in my hand for I could hardly see her in the dark. I asked her to spell again, slowly, so that I could feel each hand shape more clearly.
She said she just spotted her first shooting star.
Ah, so someone was indeed looking after us with the cheap weekend deal. This was worth more than $159. It got me wondering what Bella wished for after seeing the meteor. I knew she wouldn’t tell me if I asked. With the blanket up to our necks we cuddled for hours taking in the mysticism of a new night while everything on Earth advanced a day towards deterioration…or recuperation.
(All photos courtesy of the author.)
