It was a sobering epiphany I dismissed with denial that only adolescence can capitulate. I go to Tod's now in winter while my children are in school and in summer, when they are at camp. I paint the beach. In the summer, the air smells like hot dogs and cotton candy. The beach is filled with little girls in ruffled bathing suits, the kind I wore when I learned to swim.
Mothers kneel at the shoreline beside naked babies carrying heavy pails of water.
Older women sit together in groups, coated with oil. The straps of their bathing suits hang down their shoulders, tops drooping with the weight of their bosoms. I see the teenage girls in their bikinis, their bodies so smooth and firm, their even tans glistening the color of toast. They lie on sandy beach towels with their boyfriends whose stomachs ripple, a radio crackling beside them, their fingers entwined tightly as the sun beats down on them. In winter, the picnickers are older people, wrapped in rough wool sweaters drinking steaming coffee from thermos bottles that serve as weights for the day's newspaper, eating sandwiches wrapped in foil.