Asbury


This past winter I drove to Manasquan with my friend, Taylor, to visit her cousin Daria. My friend's father is a lawyer, and has no respect for anyone who isn't involved in medicine or law as a career. When I told him I was a painting major in college, he said he had some rooms that needed a new coat of paint if I was interested. 

Daria's mother and Taylor's father are siblings, but in a mess of Italian family matters, Daria and her mother don't fit in. Meeting her mother was like seeing the opposite, kind half in a set of twins. Daria stopped going to college to work at a natural foods store and she's happy where she is; she's in love with Paris, her boyfriend who works with her at Nature's Corner, and she has a gift for astrology.

I remembered Tayor fell twice that day- once squeezing through the space between the passenger's seat of the car and a snow bank on the curb, and once while the three of us were sitting around in a cafe and she fell backwards in her chair. Daria told us about Ocean Grove, the historic, unsettling gated community that would remind you of a social experiment, and about the snow the past week that piled so high that people abandoned their cars everywhere. She drove us through and around Asbury Park. I've lived in New Jersey my entire life and I had never been to the beach in the winter before. There was something about seeing the few people that live there year-round, about the blue tint that settles over everything and the pink in the sky that was soft but sharp and cold, something I saw driving by that doesn't happen in the summer.

We watched According to Greta, an awful Hilary Duff movie that went straight to DVD, about Asbury Park and her miserable, teenage angst-y summer she's forced to spend there with her grandparents. Greta worked in a restaurant, and Daria was an extra in a scene. We rewound the tape to watch it over a few times.

To her family, Daria will be the extra for her entire life, but to us and those she keeps close, the best part of the movie was seeing her blurred figure with long braided hair walk through the shot three times to wait on a table.