A Chain of Salps
The summer I first remember the salps arriving, I was eleven.
The sea grew thick with them. Overnight, illuminated by ripples of phosphorescence, the tide had pulled and spread the clear bodies along the Long Island coast. Jelly sacks the size of dimes, the waves piled them on the shore. I found them the next day and I collected them. I noticed each had tiny horns, or maybe prongs, on what could have been the front of their bodies and a tiny blue dot on their backs. But the sacks didn’t sting or bite.
Of course, at the time, I didn’t know they were salps—marine invertebrates that draw water in and out of their rubbery body. Instead, I had other ideas about them: Maybe they were jellyfish or eggs sacs, a dormant creature. One night, thinking the mystery creatures might be nocturnal, I took a flashlight down to the beach. My flashlight illuminated only the translucent bodies of crabs scuttling over them. Later, hearing they might be conch eggs, I put them in buckets with water and sun-hardened seaweed, hoping to keep them like goldfish. Hoping for some transformation. Hoping they would change or hatch, for a bold new form to emerge.
But none of them grew.
* * *
That same summer, I also noticed in my own body, almost overnight, a kind of quickening of flesh and blood that I hadn’t willed. Hard buds took root and grew on my chest. I almost hoped they were tumors at first— I hated how they poked the stiff cotton fabric of my t-shirts and would have been relieved to have had them removed. Hair, coiled like wires, sprouted in my armpits and between my legs.
I couldn’t hide my body on the beach, even if I wore a one-piece bathing suit from Land’s End made of Spandex that compressed the swelling on my chest. The other girls my age, who I had played with in summers past, now wore two-piece swimsuits. One girl wore a string bikini so loosely tied together a strong wave nearly ripped it off. Giggling, a group of girls, also wearing two pieces, swam around her so she could re-tie it, though she had nothing to hide. Her back was smooth and brown, scapula jutted out like tiny wings. My back was marked by a thick “X,” a mark, I imagined, of my own shame that I had something worth hiding.
I was further along into puberty than these girls, but I didn’t see that as a good thing. Instead, I felt like I was dangerously close to losing the toughness of the body I’d worn as a child—its sharp edges softened, familiar skin secreted away under hair. I envied the other girls— the flatness of their torsos, the straight line of their hips, the way their hairless legs dripped sea water like glinting jewels. They were lucky to be able to wear their own skins with such recklessness. I wondered how they managed to seem so confident, so in control of their being. They may have even wanted or been ready for their bodies to change, hoped to be able to fill out the triangles of their bikini tops, but at least could spend one last summer without the added weight of a chest.
One day after the arrival of the salps, I watched as two boys my age chased the girls in their two-piece bathing suits down the beach with a plastic shovel full of jelly creatures. “They’re aliens, here to snatch your bodies,” they said, launching them at the girls. The boys were tan and shaggy looking, the skin on their chests stretched across their ribs.
The girls shrieked back and took off, glancing back over their shoulders to make sure they were being followed. Soon enough, the plastic shovel was cast aside as the boys instead started to snatch at the limbs of the girls, a panting and tangled game of tag.
Feeling like I was watching a private kind of game unfold, I turned my attention elsewhere. The salps had washed ashore for two days now and showed no signs of stopping. I reached down and squashed one creature between my thumbs and forefinger. It crumbled into sandy bits of gelatin. I envied both the ease with which they floated to the shore as well as their bloodless exit. But I knew that most creatures in this world had to build up a rough body simply to survive—they had to grow a shell or teeth or learn how to sting. And I wanted them to survive.
* * *
Throughout my childhood, I had walked the beach when it was empty to collect the refuse tossed by the ocean on to the shore. As I walked, the air threaded with spray, I plunked my findings in a plastic bucket, turning them over in my hand. These tokens felt empty—a husk, a shadow, all that remained of what had been. I gathered mermaid purses, empty crab claws with joints intact, gull feathers, oyster shells, charcoal, driftwood so fine and pale it looked like a bone, smooth purple fragments from clamshells, shiny pebbles that lost their luster when they dried, once a sand dollar, another time a piece of emerald sea-glass worn so dark and smooth that it looked like a black rock.
When the light began to soften and the air cooled, holding a thoughtful kind of stillness, I took out illustrated guides on marine life and sat on the porch of our house, identifying shells and egg sacks, separating my finds into categories, the bodies of mosquitoes clinking against the porchlight. As the afternoon settled into dusk, I wondered how, exactly, a skate grew out of a mermaid’s purse, a small grain on a sand collar became a moon snail, how a juvenile snapper knew to make its way out of the marsh grass and into the ocean. Only when they were ready, would the juvenile fish make their way to the ocean. But what puzzled me most was how these animals knew when it was time to go. What desires and longings could possibly be strong enough to drive them from the amniotic waters of the estuary? I knew, also, that the journey out was dangerous, at times ending clamped between the jaws of a predator, their adolescent underbellies punctured.
In addition to field guides, I started reading romance novels that summer. From the way my mother sighed whenever she saw me holding one, I knew whatever was stopping me from emerging gracefully into my own body was contained within the pages detailing unconsummated longing, vows of chastity, and bosoms.
He was kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams, I read from one. In my boxy polos and knee length shorts, this was a world I didn’t know. My mother, still thinking me too young, hadn’t fully explained sex to me. What I had pieced together from nature guides described plodding, practical cycles. The romance novels presented me with a heaving wildness that inevitably left many characters bereft and brokenhearted. I waited, that summer, for a time when one of these two pictures of the world—one practical, the other volatile—would make sense. Sometimes I’d press my own lips to the back of my hand, trying to imagine what a kiss that would unearth my being might feel like. But to me, a sensation resembling any kind of stirring in the loins sounded unpleasant. Even the word loin made my insides twitch with repulsion with its sensuous earthiness, like the words “moist” or “squelch.”
These words made me aware of the body I inhabited—with all of its shape shifting, damp crannies, and, perhaps, desire. But all I could picture was the way the hands of the boys on the beach snatched at the legs of the girls in bikinis. If that was longing, I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted a shape that wanted no one — flat and airy, simple bone and sinew.
As my own body shifted toward adulthood, I also began to notice a similar fragility in the landscape and began to account for what was lost as the landscape changed. The narrow strip of land we lived on, edged in by the Atlantic on one side and the Long Island Sound on the other, was disappearing. Acting as a barrier, the land had turned the Sound into an estuary, allowing for calmer waters for the young to grow. But winds and warm seas cultivated hurricanes that churned the slate grey water, whipped up brown seafoam, and ate away the dunes. The receding coastline left fewer inches of black sand to burn the bottoms of my feet as I made my way across the beach. I lamented the loss of this land, of the protection it offered young creatures. One day, I knew, the estuary would be gone. Just like me.
* * *
That summer, when the ocean was thickest with salps, I would swim out until my feet couldn’t touch the ocean floor. I liked the way these formless creatures buoyed my body up. Afterall, my body had started to seem so heavy at that time, inscribed with genetic legacy, stirring hormones. I turned to float on my back, moving from crest to trough of the waves, following the undulating chains formed by the creatures. With my ears submerged, I only heard the gentle pull of the tide on the sand and rocks below. I breathed with it, watching the expanse of my belly rise and fall. Here you are in the world, I remember thinking. At that moment, I felt a kind of peace with the strange beast my body seemed bent on metamorphosing into.
But my bathing suit began to smell from swimming through the unidentified creatures—fish, salt, rot. I had to wash my bathing suit three times before the smell came out and became a little bit disgusted with myself and the wanton joy with which I let them brush against me.
From then on, I tried to conceal, or at least slow, my transformation from a girl to something more mammalian. I stole my mother’s razor and used a rusty can of berrylicious Skintimate Signature Scents Shave Gel I found in one of the outdoor showers at the beach. Nicking my knees, I washed bloodied cloudlike puffs of leg hair down an iron drain. Would that be enough to slow its spread? Would it make me a girl, delicate and smooth, like the others?
Just down the beach, unaware of my presence, the girls with the two-piece bathing suits sang along with a song playing on somebody’s wireless radio. I recognized the wail of the guitar. “I could change my life to better suit your mood,” they sang.
“Can’t you just tell Rob Thomas is hot from his voice alone?” I heard one of them ask. She was met by giggles. I didn’t know how I would have responded if she’d asked me—what was his voice supposed to make me feel? I felt nothing.
I waited for them to leave before venturing out of the shower. The salt in the ocean stung my new skin; the waves broke smoothly across my ankles. By the next day, my legs would again be studded with germinating hairs.
I wouldn’t recognize this for years, but adolescence had triggered a particular and delicate kind of fear that needled me as I peeled away from childhood, my body contorting into a new kind of animal I didn’t yet understand. I knew how to recognize stirrings around me in the smooth crests of a riptide or the way gulls flew low over the sea before a storm. I knew from collecting leftover casings of metamorphosis like exoskeletons and empty shells that bodies had to be shed or cast off in order for the animal to grow, for it to take its place in the world. It was harder to recognize the same pattern as it took root in my own body.
* * *
The creatures departed as quickly as they had arrived. The wind shifted and carried them south. Even the seagulls did not eat the ones left behind. Their bodies hardened in the sun, tangled in wreaths of bladderwrack and Irish moss, until the tide gently erased them all from the beach. I later learned after coming across a picture in one of my guides that the creatures weren’t conch eggs, though I had waited for them to grow. I’d hoped they might have been like us in their growth—mutable, young beings that started to find themselves tinged with the curse of flesh and desire. I had wanted to witness the next stage in their lifecycle, perhaps instead of my own, to bear witness to metamorphosis and a hardening of body and shell, the color of their flesh flooding them.
However, I didn’t know they were already fully grown and couldn’t have been less like us. They were salps—jelly-like creatures that, being both male and female, they reproduce asexually, desiring only themselves in this world. Their doubles join together, forming large chains called blooms.
What an odd place the ocean is, I thought, to be filled with clear, gelatinous flowers that grow and never wilt. I was jealous of them, of the way they got to exist in the world. They were so fully contained within their own being, free of blood and fat and secretions, just light and water. They didn’t, it seemed to me, desire anything other than what they already had, would never grow to be anything other than what they were, and as a result couldn’t be hurt.
* * *
A week or two before the summer ended, not long after the tide carried the chains of creatures away, I woke up to find that a damp brown patch, that also smelled dead and slightly fishy, had collected in my underwear overnight. I balled up toilet paper in the crotch of a clean pair and stuck the dirty ones in the bottom of the laundry hamper.
I knew what this was—not because I’d been preemptively warned by mother—but because I’d pieced it together from the nature guides and romance novels: the curse, the time of the month, moon time, secondary sex characteristics, gonads, gestation, fertilization. I remember thinking something along the lines of, this is all it’s about, then? I would have given anything to have opened my legs and found vines or feathers instead, something that would have removed me from the specific kind of pain I suspected came with womanhood.
Discovering my bloodied underwear in the laundry hamper, my mother would explain how to manage pain—the cramps and sore breasts. But she never explained sex’s physicality—the way male and female bodies fit together. The most she told me, beyond that it was how babies were made, was that it something you did with someone you loved. I was left with a gap in my understanding. And this was a gap that seemed beyond my imagination’s ability to fill. I couldn’t understand how it might happen.
The romance novels hinted at it, with metaphors of torn clothing. I sensed it lingering in the hands of boys on the beach. I recognized a similar force in spawning fish that would then collapse, dead, into sediment. And I was supposed to call it love?
Indeed, years later, I would find myself wondering why I would want somebody to move their skin inside and under my own, moving in and out of my being, to let them feel my blood pulse as if it were their own? Why would I want to feel the insistent pressure of a hand, not my own, on a thigh, traveling up? Why would I want a voice, sticky with beer in my ear to tell me how smooth my legs were and ask if other parts of me felt the same way? Shame filled the empty space I imagined gaping between my legs, wishing I’d left my wiry hairs where they belonged like a thicket of brambles.
* * *
Though the blooms came at the beginning of August every summer after that for years, they wouldn’t come back in such numbers or for so long ever again. Eventually, only a few chains would drift in with the tide. When they did wash up on shore, I would watch as the salps were met with disgust. Small children buried them deep under the sand at the water’s edge, thinking they were jellyfish. They would have been too young, too afraid of stings, bites, and blood. They would have not yet known they were meant to envy the power of those clear, symmetrical bodies tangled together.
Emily Boudreau is a middle school English teacher and writer living in Los Angeles. A former staff writer for the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s “Usable Knowledge” blog, this is her first literary publication. She is a graduate of Boston’s GrubStreet Essay Incubator program.
