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Jerry -- younger, foreign, less practiced -- simply wants to feel accepted by them, as if this would somehow prove to him that he is nearing adulthood too. At first, these boys seem to accept him.
When Jerry’s mother decides to spend another day at their usual beach and he sets off on his own down to the separate rocky bay, he is seemingly happy to be alone. When he sees a group of older boys , though, Jerry is eager to impress them with his swimming abilities.
The story’s opening paragraph sets up Jerry’s relationship with his caring, if overly concerned, mother. They are walking along a path that forks in two: one direction goes toward the “crowded beach he knew so well from other years” and the other leads to a “wild and rocky bay.”
Jerry’s character presents the story’s central conflict as he continually negotiates between two primary, warring desires: the desire to remain safe and dependent versus the desire to take risks, find independence, and prove himself as a man.
“Jerry’s struggle is that of an individual trying to find his place in the world, and is thus about survival and the human spirit in an emotional, personal sense rather than in the larger sense of human extinction.” also distances him from his widowed mother who tries not to interfere with his life.
Jerry has no living family nor does he have a romantic partner, as he struggles to establish either sexual or interpersonal intimacy with other people. Jerry lives in a run-down boarding-house on the Upper West Side, and does not appear to be employed. He is a very physical person, not only behaving violently but also engineering his own suicide.
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While Jerry’s situation—in which he wants to pose as a girl in order to marry a millionaire for his money—is certainly not a straightforward union between two consenting male adults, it is an undoubtedly queer union, and evidence that Jerry is enjoying his drag persona more than he expected.
