Not quite yet the summer season. People still are wearing jackets, long pants. No incentive yet to display the body, to flirt; the chaperone, winter, is still around.
Funny sort of place this time of year. Not all the stores are open yet. Like tombs with stones in front of them, they wait the rising sun, the wallets with money like keys. Their boarded windows are like dour aunts at a cotillion, their blind stare reminding everyone just how much they cannot do, how fragile the idea of freedom really is, when freedom consists of the possibility to do nothing except what nothing gives rise to. They are the mote in the eye, the fly in the ideal ointment.
Kids are here, naturally. Clots of them collect outside the arcades, the fry dough places, McDonald's, along the pipe fences that leash the beach from the street. The girls, most of them, are nicely dressed, their hair done in almost the exact same fashion, slightly feathered, off the face, seemingly teased and infused with air so that it bounces and shines. No lank hair here, no bangs, just a simple helmet to let everyone know that they are from the same tribe, wear the same thoughts under the hair. They guys stand around cool, nervous, fidgety, outnumbered by the girls, not knowing how to handle the advantage, their inexperience squealing like an unoiled cog behind the smooth machines of their faces. You can almost feel the ache of these males, the edge they walk between risk and failure -- or, more commonly, between desire and unfulfillment. The girls can get away with more, act more silly, more clubbish, more hair-brained; guys must keep to themselves, be a pole for the May-ribbons.
At the apex of summer the place will be infested with youth, their sole reason for being at the beach to coerce out of their time there as much fun untainted by adulthood as possible. They will decide, usually non-verbally, usually without what would be recognized as thought, to flow with the action, to recapitulate in their restless touring up and down the strip the soluble rolling of the waves, wearing down time and expectation, they think, into a fine useless grit that will blow away with one restless breezy laugh of assent to the sun, their bodies tuned to the soothing circularity of day and night. They choose not to remember the coming first day of school, money obligations, perhaps college; they do not know that the grit they think blows away only recollects somewhere inside as the guts of the hourglass slowly drying out memories for the thick skin of adulthood.
For now they are unattached to the scheme of things, to history, children of a pleasant hiatus. But now, at early June, when the street sounds are only just beginning to be punctuated by the heavy gargling of a TransAm and the spiced blare of a tape deck, and the stores aren't all open and the hotels are just airing out the guest register and there's still the threat that winter will come back full of onerous necessities, they rehearse their summer in small groups full of staccato crossfire, trying out flirting with the passing cars, trying to look studly or bouncerish or proletarian, arranged on the strip like some barely coherent Morse code, dots of desire, dashes of hope, abbreviations in a cipher that promises good times for as long as forever will last.