Lynda’s Dream
By Bill Kelly
When Lynda VanDevanter finished her 3 a.m. – 11 a.m. shift at the Emergency Room of Shore Memorial Hospital she broke routine and went home – back to her room at Mrs. Nick’s Rooming House on Wesley Avenue even though she had her bathing suit on under her uniform. She had to get her beach bag.
Running up the steps with the spindle railing, past the “no vacancy” sign she stopped on the porch where Mrs. Nicks was playing bridge with three other ladies, and introduced her to them.
“This is Mrs. Waldman, the mayor’s wife,” she said, “and this is Mrs. Rundgren and Mrs. Croce, who is your friend Jim’s aunt. Mrs. Rudgren’s son plays guitar and I want him to meet my Stephene. Mrs. Rundgren spoke up, saying her son Todd was complaining about being hassled by the “Noise Police.”
Mrs. Walman said, “My husband was against that, and my daughter too, but the council overruled him.”
Lynda smiled and said hello to them all, and nodded when Mrs. Nicks told her that there were three young men in the room next to her, which made Lynda’s eyes roll as she continued on up the steps, knowing that three guys will be hogging the bathroom the occupants of four rooms shared. And sure enough, as she got to the top of the stairs a young man came out of the bathroom, said hello and introduced himself.
“I’m Joe and my band is playing at Tony Marts tonight, if you can come by and cheer us on.” Lynda just replied with a smile as she went into her room to get some things she needed to take to the beach.
Once she got down to the beach Lynda laid down on the blanket the nurses had set out earlier, next to her boyfriend “J.J.,” who was lying there sound asleep, a hard night at the Dunes, so the radio was off as Lynda began talking to the mayor’s daughters on the next blanket over, telling them she had just met their mother.
Lynda said she has a few confessions to make. When things quieted down, Lynda acknowledged she was a virgin, and the other girls giggled. Being a good Catholic girl, Lynda said she was proud of it, but was beginning to doubt her faith as she was in love with “J.J.” and the summer was winding to a fast close, and “J.J.” was being recalled by the Army early, so she was reconsidering.
That got the girls laughing softly, so as not to wake “J.J.,” and they only stopped when Lynda interrupted, saying, “And my final confession,” she waited until everyone was silent, “I enlisted as an Army nurse and volunteered for service in Vietnam.”
“No!” said “J.J.” sitting up, shaking the towel off his face, as he was apparently awake and listening the whole time. “No, don’t go to Vietnam,” he said with visible horror showing on his face. Even though he spent one of his 21 years in Vietnam “J.J.” didn’t talk about it much, and when he asked only replied, “It sucked.”
Lynda then began reciting some of President Kennedy’s inaugural address, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty…..”
But “J.J.” cut her off. “He’s dead.”
Then all went quiet on the 9th Street beach as Lynda put her head down on “J.J.’s stomach and put a beach towel over her eyes and fell fast asleep, exhausted from a long night at the Emergency Room.
When Lynda woke up on a blanket on the 9th Street beach a few hours after she fell asleep the other girls – two nurses and the mayor’s daughters were gone, and her boyfriend “J.J.” was still asleep. She looked around and most of the others on the beach were gone too, as it was late afternoon.
Lynda smiled as she thought about the most wonderful dream she just had. She was walking along a beach, holding hands with “J.J.,” the light surf washing up on their bare feet. It was night, and the sky was full of stars and just a sliver of a moon on the horizon. They stopped walking and kissed as their toes dug into the sand up to their ankles, and she remembers thinking in her sleep that she didn’t want the moment to end as the sound of the lifeguard’s whistle startled her awake.
She looked at “J.J.” asleep beside her on the blanket as he started talking in his sleep, yelling something about “gooks,” and as she shook him he was covered in sweat, he opened his eyes and suddenly jumped on top of her, put one hand on her throat and drew back the other hand as if to smash her face. Then woke up and realized where he was, stopped cold and looked around scared; Lynda was terrified.
“Is something wrong?” she asked. “Don’t touch me now,” he said. “Just a bad dream.”
Then she thought of the time at the gas station, when the attendant didn’t have any high test gasoline for his car, and “J.J.” as Lynda herself recalled, “got this wild look in his eyes and acted like he was going to kill the guy. He screamed obscenities, smacked his hand against the dashboard, and then floored the accelerator, leaving a patch of burning rubber and a perplexed pump jockey. He would sometimes come out of his depression with a bang and immediately begin partying like there was no tomorrow. He could be a wild bronco – unruly, loud and full of fire. But he was always gentle with me. I was sure I loved him, which was why, after I got the engagement ring, I told him that I was ready to make love with him.”
“J.J.” had been called back to Army duty early, and was leaving the next day for a domestic deployment he didn’t know where, probably anti-riot duty in some big city where they anticipated trouble like Watts. It was also just before Labor Day, so the entire Jersey Shore was packed with tourists. As Lynda herself related, “As soon as J.J. got over the shock, we began the search for a nice place. Unfortunately, trying to find an open room at the Jersey Shore a week before Labor Day is about as difficult as locating the Holy Grail. We started in Ocean City at seven o’clock. It was all the same all over – NO VACANCY. By midnight we had tried motels all the way down to Wildwood and the only thing we had to show for it was frustration.”
J.J. wanted to go back to Lynda’s room at Mrs. Nick’s rooming house, or do it under the boardwalk or in the car, but Lynda refused. As she later recalled the details: “We headed back to Anchorage to drown our frustrations in seven beers for a dollar. J.J. had such a sad expression on his face that he looked like a little boy who had just seen his puppy run over by a train. We sat in silence, both of us staring into our beers until around two in the morning. Suddenly, J.J. snapped out of his mood. He grabbed my arm, swung me around on the stool, kissed me and laughed.”
Then the guy next to J.J., who I recognized as being in the band at Bay Shores, interrupted us. “There’s an open room upstairs, ” he said. “So we walked up the steps to what must have been the all-time sleaziest room in the world. It had boxes piled all around, a dirty mattress without any sheets, and a single exposed light bulb hanging directly over the bed. Outside the window was a neon sign ‘The Anchorage’ that kept blinking on and off.”
The next day, after breakfast at the Point Diner, J.J. left to rejoin his Army unit that was being domestically deployed for anti-riot duty, while Lynda went back to work at the Emergency Room at Shore Memorial Hospital, wearing her bathing suit under her uniform so she could immediately hit the beach after work.
[Author’s Note: Lynda Van Devanter’s recollections from her autobiography “Home Before Morning – The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam” (Beaufort Books, 1983) from the chapter 4 – Dunes ‘til Dawn)
To comment on this story or series: Billkelly3@gmail.com
