‘Shark in the pond!
Just kidding

Robyn’s Hood
By Robyn McCloskey

The first time I saw the movie Jaws was during a family vacation in Ocean City, N.J. I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to let an impressionable 12-year-old girl watch a scary movie about a killer shark while vacationing at the shore, but let’s just say I didn’t step foot in the ocean for the rest of the week.
By the following summer I was able to pull myself together, realize it was only a movie and enjoy the ocean the way I always had.
My husband Chris, however, was profoundly more affected. Thanks to the imagination of Jaws author Peter Benchley and the moviemaking genius of Steven Spielberg, he has an irrational fear of sharks to this day. He believes it is his destiny to die by shark attack, which, I try to tell him, is a pretty preventable death. Chris is normally a very level-headed, phlegmatic kind of guy.
Except when it comes to the ocean and sharks.
He will go in the water but he always makes sure he is never the farthest one out, since, according to Benchley and Spielberg, sharks only attack the lone swimmer who is foolish enough to swim out past everyone else.
It’s as if the shark is punishing that person for trying to show up the other swimmers.
"See, I can swim out farther than anybody!" the swimmer shouts to shore.
The shark closes in behind him. Gulp! That’ll teach you not to think of others’ feelings.
I don’t even think about encouraging Chris to float on a raft on his stomach in the ocean. He won’t do it. As we’d learned in Jaws, as well as Jaws 2 and Jaws 3, that too can be a fatal mistake. He won’t even float on a raft on his stomach in a pool, just in case he forgets and absentmindedly does it in the ocean.
Sharks apparently are attracted to not just the lone swimmer bobbing on the horizon or the lazy floater on a rubber raft, but to the scent of blood as well — another handy tip from the movie that remains useful all these years later.
Every time we are at the beach my husband will promptly ask me if it’s that time of the month. If I tell him no, a look of relief smooths out his frown. If I tell him yes, the frown stays and he refuses to go in the ocean with me, fearful that a restless shark will smell blood and remove our limbs.
His irrational refusal ticks me off to the extent that I ask if he’s going to take a poll of every woman on the beach. Maybe he could convince the Ocean City Beach Patrol to post signs designating sections of the ocean for the fortunate female swimmers and the unfortunate female swimmers, which leads me to close my eyes and imagine some weird Baywatch scene where David Hasselhoff jogs across the sand in my direction and says, "Excuse me, ma’am, but I can see from the telltale pimple on your chin and your obviously dour mood that your monthly friend has stopped by for a visit. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to swim over there with the other bloated women."
To my dismay, the very first movie Chris ever owned on videotape was Jaws. He has watched it countless times, determined to confront his fears, but I’m convinced it has only served to reinforce those fears. Even worse, he has come to memorize every line of the movie, which makes it quite annoying when we happen to catch Jaws on American Movie Classics and I have to listen to him recite all of Chief Brody’s lines a split second before actor Roy Scheider says them.
Over the years I have learned to accept my husband’s irrational fear of sharks and the ocean — even doing my best to stop making fun of him, though sometimes I just can’t help it.
I guess we all have our little quirks. Lately, though, when we’ve been at the beach and he asks me THE question, I’ll tell him "no" even though the answer is "yes," just to get him in the water at least to his ankles.
So far, thank goodness, I haven’t seen a dorsal fin. ••
Robyn McCloskey’s column appears each week in the Northeast Times. She can be reached at crmccloskey@verizon.net