Swell Page 10

  Sue waits for Dan to complete his riff, holding her pointy chin high, fisting the knife. Yeah, he probably went too far. She thinks he’s making fun of her. He is making fun of her, but—

  “Are there Jewish pirates?” Sue’s actually curious.

  “The Baums?”

  Sy’s been buying lock picks from Bob Baum for thirty-eight years and he’s golfed with the guy most of that time. You’d have better luck convincing Sy to switch allegiance to the Yankees. But Dan always tried. It was no secret that he was wary of Bob, wary of all the vendors for and employees of Glassman Locks & Keys. A family business has more in common with a kingdom than a company, and Sy’s reign was deviled with cronyism, backward and opaque. “Where’s our oversight?” Dan has been asking since his first proper postcollege day on the job. “Why aren’t we sending out RFPs for bids on our hardware? Installing window guards? Leading in electronic keypad locks? R and D, Dad! Innovate or die!” Now Sy has finally given him the power to change everything and it’s so much, too much. All Dan really wants to do is cook. Specifically, clams oreganata. Rose has agreed to share her secret family recipe.

  It’s too hot to think. Also too windy. Oh, but better look whom he’s talking to. Someone who’s thirty-seven weeks pregnant is always hotter, hungrier, more tired, more suspicious.

  “How could you instantly buy Rose’s story?” is the question that’s been bothering Sue. “Last night when she claimed Maureen and Bob tricked her into selling the house? How could you not at least wonder? Unless you know it’s true? Is that why you let her back in? Scared she’ll sue us?”

  The question shocks Dan so thoroughly, he stutters when he responds. Did Sue actually think him capable of conning a senior citizen? Not to mention of lying to her, his wife?

  “No. No.” Sue sounds almost disappointed. “You’re too worried about being liked to do that. Sy, though. Sy might.” Here she starts slicing at the ivy in double time, in sync with whatever’s streaming into her head from her iPod. “What is it?” Dan points at the device. “What’s on there?”

  Clearly put out, Sue retrieves the iPod from somewhere within her massive baby-primed cleavage and holds it up for him to read: “‘Disc two, Havdalah Prayers Made Easy.’ Are you fucking kidding me?” He’d assumed her playlist was eclectic, but—

  “Golden Hits of the Seventies would be funkier, it’s true.” This a reference to Dan’s bar mitzvah Bible in which he’d long ago scribbled the info to write away for the eight-track. He’d come across the book while bagging his mom’s things for Goodwill. Zero memory of defacing it but the music came right back to him. “War.” “Fame.” “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero.” Dan had played that shit till there were no more devices on which to play it and by then didn’t even care, so deeply were the songs grooved into his brain. “Who Do You Think You Are.” “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.”

  Aside from June, Sue is the one who can best appreciate this, precisely because she understands great music, which pop is not, so why compare? Pop is all about the hook and its ability to yank you at twelve, thirteen, forty-two, through some nasty shape-shifting murk. Dan physically cringes recalling his luck-of-the-draw Torah portion: Leviticus 15, the rules regarding menstruation.

  “I mean, what kind of sadist asks a kid whose voice is cracking to write and deliver a speech about that? Rabbi Larry Gutman, that’s who!” The same guy set to convert Sue tomorrow. “Hairy Larry, beware.”

  “I thought he was your golf buddy.”

  “Sy’s buddy. I just go along.”

  “You just go along,” Sue repeats, leaning back on her clogs to assess a little patch cleared of greenery.

  “Meaning?”

  “You just go along.” Her swollen calves resemble bowling pins. “Either that or you stay out of it.”

  Birds chatter explosively in agreement.

  “So, then.” She sighs. “Are we done? I think we’re done.”

  For a nauseated minute, Dan thinks she means them, their marriage. But then Sue swaps her knife for a hammer, and he exhales. It’s the ivy-cutting that’s finished. An empty planter holds the tools, the mezuzah kit, plus all her usual supplies—tissues and Fig Newtons, water and hat, the aforementioned Bible. Dan reaches for the book, astonished. In the few weeks Sue’s had it, she’s undone decades of pristine neglect.

  The spine is cracked. There are food stains in the margins. Dan had been about to toss it into the donation bag along with Estelle’s Scrabble dictionaries, inspirational gift crap, and back issues of Architectural Digest, but, naively, he’d thought the Bible might make Sue laugh, a real laugh, with her gums showing. If he got really lucky, she might even sing—a scrap of a Golden Hit in her golden voice. “If you don’t know me by now, you will never, never, never know me.”

  Fanning himself with the pages, Dan can smell the old leather and paper and, more faintly, his mother’s closet: suede, mothballs, an orange-jasminey scent she wore—Fracas. Just yesterday, he’d walked in on Sy crying into one of Estelle’s still-perfumed scarves. He had passed it to Dan, and Dan had smelled it deeply and passed it back and they had taken turns, trying to breathe her in, their grief a private, faintly unseemly thing in a neighborhood reeling from far bigger tragedy. Estelle had picked a bad time to die, Sy said then and not for the first time. Even back in Brooklyn Heights, where Estelle had started a food pantry, served as temple treasurer, and volunteered to teach adults to read every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, the meaning of her life was de facto minimized because it had not ended in either an act of terror threatening the entirety of Western culture or, second best, the second deadliest plane crash on U.S. soil.

  Sue wedges the hammer between her long, pale legs, inserts a tiny nail between her teeth, holds the mezuzah up to the door frame. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” Dan asks.

  “All set!” The nail bobs up and down between words.

  “ ’Cause you know it’s still your choice…in the end. When I urged you to do it, I didn’t realize—even my mother wouldn’t want you converting if…” It’s like the opening of one of Rose’s terrible jokes. A wife walks into the weekend as a secular humanist. Only there’s no punch line in sight. “I was thinking that it’s not too late to reconsider this whole…we do still own the apartment.”

  “But I love it here!” Sue says. A beefy dude passing by on the street halts at the sound. Dan salutes him as if to say, All’s well with us, move along, pal. Also because the guy’s pretty impressive, with two kids, a boom box, and two beach chairs strapped to his torso.

  “Rose is not getting her house back,” Sue adds. “Did you hear me? Repeat that.”

  “Rose is not—but Sue, what if it’s true and she was fooled into moving? Shouldn’t we at least—my God, what’s with that dude?”

  Superdad is still standing in front of the house as if in a trance, kids and beach gear hanging off him.

  “What dude?”

  Sure enough, the man vanishes the moment Sue looks over at the street. To hell with the oglers and with his linen shorts; Dan needs to sit. The air is too white or something, too moist, squawky with seagulls, not to mention the planes, big ones taking off and landing at Kennedy Airport all day long, small ones with banners advertising Z100, Hawaiian Punch, and ten-week-old fetuses courtesy of Go Pro-Life. In no time Dan finds himself worrying abstractedly about a pair of young moms pushing strollers and talking shit about someone named Pam. What is wrong with them? Dan can hear every word! What if Pam or a Pam friend is near? More treacherous still is the fact that their toddlers are barefoot while the street all-out glitters with glass, and the sand ahead is scorching. They are not thinking clearly, these women. Flesh is gathering under their transparent beach cover-ups. They are not having enough sex.

  No, it’s Dan who’s not having enough sex. The advanced pregnancy, yes. But Sue’s anger is even harder to work around. Obviously, Dan is not thinking clearly. In truth, he can’t tell whether he’s angry back at her or simply angry that she’s
angry. His mother would know. Dan reaches in his shorts for the phone—oh, right, he can’t call his mother anymore. Just as well. There’s no reception in Rockaway. And even if he could, calling Estelle would irk Sue even more than his calling his neurologist. Best to focus on his squirming unborn son (son?).

  Sue has “dropped,” according to the OB (last week), and the view of her from below is straight out of the aquarium. One, two frantic undulations, then the baby resubmerges. One, two ripples of her skin, and again a pause; like that. It occurs to Dan to blame the impending birth for his wife turning inward, away from him. It happened with their other kids, in a less extreme version. Yet so much else also seems to be conspiring against them—9/11, Judaism, the iPod, Sy, Rose, the house. Dan’s ghost sightings might have all turned out to be dust motes, but he’d still swear the place is…influential. Even now, craving connection with Sue, he can barely resist an urge to be back inside the womb of the kitchen. There, mercifully, Rose has offered to assist in all his party prep. “If you really want to know how to feed a crowd…”

  “Are we almost done? Sue? I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Your life?”

  “What?”

  “The middle of your life, Daniel.”

  “Daniel. Is that my middle-aged name?”

  “Biblical name. It means ‘God is my judge.’ Don’t look at me like that. I read it in the baby-name book.”

  Here’s the prompt for them to argue about whether it’s better to choose names before the birth (Sue’s opinion) or after, so as to meet the kid (Dan’s). But New Jew Sue doesn’t argue. Instead, she informs Dan of her own brand-new Hebrew name, Bat Sarah Imenu, and Dan surrenders to the fact that he has no clue what Sue will do, think, or say next.

  “Instead of putting up the mezuzah, I’m just gonna write God’s name here with a Sharpie,” she announces, adjusting her strained bikini top. “That’s the commandment, isn’t it? Write God’s name on the door? Whoever decreed we had to put it on a scroll in a box?”

  “Scroll makers?” Dan guesses. “Box makers?” Perhaps Glassman Locks & Keys should bring out a line of mezuzah security. Liturgical dead bolts. Judaica-inspired closed-circuit TVs. The little housed scrolls are, in his experience, just bait for the door-to-door Orthodox. In a moment of weakness, after Dan’s mom died, Sy paid a few of those black hats to pray for her soul, and they never stopped ringing his (“Send in the Clowns”) doorbell. Till he moved, they kept ringing. “Like stray cats you feed or—”

  “Rose?” Sue quips. “Just you watch. She’ll be coming back tomorrow and the next day and—”

  “Stop!” Fooled into selling the house or not, the old woman was born, raised, and lost her son here. “How can someone religious like you begrudge her a couple of visits?”

  “Why is everyone calling me religious?”

  By now Estelle’s soul, no longer buoyed by prayer, must be hurtling downward, mistaken for an asteroid. But she’s free, at least. It’s Dan who’s left to pay for all her sins. Her sins: dying before her “dying” husband, insisting Sue convert, insisting Dan make Sue convert, insisting Sy make Dan make Sue convert.

  The Sharpie talk was only hypothetical, turns out. Sue/Sarah steps back to admire the garish tube hanging on its sanctioned slant.

  “God bless,” Dan says, standing. “Now can I get back to my—”

  “Shhh,” Sue says. “Kiss.” She presses two fingertips to Dan’s lips, then touches the box.

  “Go ahead,” Dan says. “Give my love away.”

  Then, wouldn’t you know, there’s bald Dr. Mole, pretending to mist his morning glories but really setting up to tell the whole neighborhood that the Glassmans are getting very Jew-y now, very Old World, so don’t bother inviting them to any lobster bakes this summer. Mole takes Dan’s nod as an invitation to stroll across the driveway, spray bottle in hand. A frilly ocher guayabera accentuates his potbelly, over which his white physician’s coat blows open in the breeze. Mole forms his thumb and pointer finger into a gun, shoots Sue’s bandaged thigh, then plops himself down on the stoop next to Dan. “How’s the cranium, big guy?”

  “Still attached.” Dan tries not to judge the man on his too-tight sweatpants and PVC sandals. Unlike Dan’s big-shot neurologist, Mole listens carefully to all of his complaints and has, over these few months, offered not only standard migraine medications but a whole host of other strategies. Allergy testing. Acupuncture. Craniosacral massage. Even color therapy.

  “Did those last pills help?” Mole asks. “The blue?”

  “Helped a bit,” Dan says. Before he puked them up.

  “We could try something stronger.”

  “Like Cipro?” Sue cracks.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Just wondering why the mail hasn’t come yet.”

  Dan smiles down at his sneakers, trying not to laugh. Sue used to be this funny on a regular basis.

  “Am I missing something?” Mole asks.

  “Your son—”

  “Oh, by the way, I approve.”

  “Approve?” Dan’s still incredulous that a brainiac like Kenny would deal anything, let alone Cipro.

  “Approve of my son with your daughter. Hot stuff!” Mole turns to leer at Sue—the exposed abdomen, huge breasts. “I know all about you wild redheads.”

  Dan clutches Sue’s hand. “The oven! Excuse us!” He lets the unseen forces suck them back into the house. Shoulder to shoulder, they charge down the hall as if Mole were pursuing them.

  She’s smiling. No gums yet, but still. To be on the same side with her again, even superficially, feels so right, Dan can almost quash the image of his daughter with that zitty loser from next door.

  “That’s a major step down from Jake Leibowitz,” Dan says. “Am I right?”

  “Jake’s gay.”

  “I know. Too bad. Love that Jake.”

  “Did you invite him to the party?”

  “Party?” In the kitchen, he races for the oven, his bread crumbs. “What party?”

  “You’re really going to do that?”

  “Yes!” The blast of heat to Dan’s face feels like a blessing. Before him lies a crispy golden-bread-crumb landscape. Rose’s antique appliances have saved him from rubble. “Now for the clams!”

  “Clams? That’s shellfish.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your mother didn’t eat them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If I’m going to be Jewish, a kosher home might—oh!”

  Rose is here, sitting in the corner, her wheelchair backed into the shadows. She’s holding a boning knife; assorted other blades are piled in her lap.

  “Someone took my good French knife! I looked everywhere!”

  “Are you trying to scare us?” Dan asks.

  “You don’t need me for that.”

  This is true. Sue looks faint. “This is too…too—”

  Rose points her weapon at a tub of clams Dan’s pulled from the fridge. “Those’ll need a good scrub.”

  Sue grabs a rattling plastic bag off the counter and starts to flee.

  “Why won’t the clam share her lunch?” Rose says.

  As Sue brushes past, Dan sees that her bag is full of mezuzahs, mezuzahs for every doorway in the house.

  “Because she was shellfish.”

  * * *

  June has no buff hockey-defense boyfriend from her old school; Tim’s sure of it. There is no Jake Leibowitz who nicknamed her Swoon and gave her that fancy gold bracelet a grandma would wear. Maybe June has been inspired by her sister’s imaginary friend Ed. Or she’s bored, insecure, joking. But the other driver’s ed kids are buying it. As the car barrels down Newport Avenue, the questions fly.

  “What color eyes?” asks amber-eyed Regina. She’s in the backseat with June, yanking the new girl’s feral red hair into something called a fishtail.

  “Gray,” June says, wincing.

  Kenny drives into a pothole, then whomps on the gas to get out of it. Up ahead, a frightened power w
alker in coral velour leaps onto a nearby lawn. In the rearview, Tim spies June checking on the health-class egg in her backpack.

  “Is this Jake any relation to Dennis?” Kenny asks. “Dennis Leibowitz?”

  Turns out a last name like Leibowitz really ups June’s believability. Now there’s room to elaborate. Still ignoring Kenny (no way is Jake any relation to one of Kenny’s friends), she specifies, “Gray eyes.” (Kenny’s friends are all druggie science geeks.) “Walnut-shaped.” (Whoever drives after Kenny has to do all kinds of seat adjusting.) “Longish lashes.”

  Tim wonders if June’s in over her head.

  “Did you say walnut-shaped?” Regina presses.

  With the egg probably still in mind, June amends this to “Oval, you know, like…oval.” And asks about the rumor that their health-class teacher raises hens in a shack down in Arverne.

  Kenny laughs. “I’ll bet she grows the veggies too.” For in-class condom practice, there’s a choice of zucchini or cuke.

  In Tim’s day, the class was called Sex Ed. “No food props. Separate classrooms for boys and girls.”

  No one’s interested.

  Regina, who has already passed Health by safely hard-boiling, is moving on. “Jake’s hair?”

  “If it’s anything like Dennis’s, it’s humongous,” Kenny says, lifting his hands off the wheel to mime a ’fro. “Like a hedge.”

  Tim says Kenny looks like “some kid about to mow you down with his Big Wheels. Quit messing around, Mole-Kacy, I mean it.”

  “Big Wheels! I had those!” Kenny crows. “Big Wheels, Hot Wheels, slot cars, Go-Karts.”

  “Boys get comfy with all the vehicles young.” That’s June’s observation. She’s sure her dad wants a boy baby so he can “relive his childhood smashing toy planes into Lego skyscrapers.”

  “Not funny,” Tim says but wonders…about Dan. Personally, he’d be cool with a kid of any gender. Back when he was still hitting the bottle, his then-wife, Alicia, had an abortion without even telling him she was pregnant.