Swell Page 12

  “You try going through a tollbooth looking like me then say I’m off topic! I love this country!” Bibi’s on her feet now. One page of the newspaper sticks to her pants. The rest is falling, falling. “I’ve been to Gettysburg. Twice! Have you been to Gettysburg?” Bibi’s the taller of the two. “Have you?”

  “We’re talking about Rose.”

  “Oh, please. It’s hard enough to get her out of Rockaway, let alone to Getty—”

  “No, I mean—she can’t really think she killed her kid? That’s nuts!”

  Bibi sits back down, leaving the papers to the winds. A few sheets gust over and plaster themselves to the side of the hedge. “What do you want me to say?”

  “That’s nuts.”

  “Ah, but anything can happen when your child disrespects you. You should know all about that, Mommy. You just lose your shit, can’t help it. Before long you…I don’t know, say something you regret? Pick up a gun?”

  Sue squeezes the hammer. In the quiet, the beach noise reveals itself—waves and shouts, flapping fabric, radio static, all of it twining into incoherent sound strands that won’t match up with the orderly patterns of towels and jetties. The ocean, which can be so pacifying, now heaves and sighs like a pregnant woman who can’t find a comfortable position. Sailboats lean perilously. If you walked up close, you’d see the churned-up sand has streaked the waves brown. Above it all, clouds are strewn like shredded tissue.

  Blacky flattens himself onto the grass; he’s beat. Pony ride’s closed. Sage throws herself down next to him. Ed, presumably, next to her. Sue tries to vicariously enjoy lying belly-down too. Once you’re a parent, most of your deepest pleasures (and pains) are thus outsourced. But Bibi’s judgment overwhelms everything. Even though she’s in Sue’s peripheral vision, the aide is invading her consciousness. Impulsively, Sue turns and nails in the mezuzah, hard, hard. Her insistent hand, red and inflated, could belong to someone else. Stop. Done. The little box hangs for one, two seconds. Then, on the upbeat of three, it smashes onto the brick patio, a chunk of the door frame attached.

  “I told you that wouldn’t work, Mommy.”

  Inside, Sue heads for the chocolate pudding. Dan and Rose sit at the kitchen table with piles of vegetables, both cooked and raw, between them. “This blade isn’t worth the onion it’s cutting,” Rose gripes, still miffed about her best knife gone missing. “Maureen doesn’t even cook. I bet Bob took it.”

  Sue pauses in the doorway to consider and reject retrieving the knife from the planter on the stoop. “It’s hot in here,” she says by way of hello.

  Dan looks up. “Hey.” Registering the nasty feeling Sue’s carried in like a firearm, he wisely turns back to his roasted peppers (slimy, red slabs like internal organs). Neither does he attempt to stop Sue from opening the fridge though it’s stocked full of telltale party items: dips covered with plastic wrap, animal flesh floating in marinades, pricey cheeses.

  “Personally I love the heat,” Rose chatters. “Especially with the breeze…no breeze back in FH.”

  Dan peels the char off a pepper. “Forest Hills?”

  “Fucking Hell is more like it, excuse my Italian.” She’s down to her last onion; her eyes stream. “If global warming would just hurry the hell up, maybe my grandkids would come to the beach.”

  “You don’t live here anymore,” Sue reminds her, grabbing a chocolate pudding. “You just said so yourself: you’re in Forest Hills.”

  Rose shrugs, chopping, hand a blur. “This doesn’t feel right without my good, sharp knife.”

  Sage is crouched under the dining-room table. “Bibi tickled Ed till he threw up!” she tattles.

  “Tickled Ed? Or you?”

  Wrong question. “Mom-my!” Sage punches Sue’s feet. “Ed doesn’t feel well. See him!”

  “I’m trying,” Sue says. But no. There’s just one visible kid rolling around on the scratched tile in her underwear. Her limbs look Day-Glo red. Chalk one up for Tim, the sunscreen pusher. “I’m not a baby!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Ed’s a scared baby.”

  “Okay.”

  “He wants you to come outside with him.”

  “Thing is, I’m really happy in here,” Sue says, secretly a little scared too. Not just of Bibi but of Rose and those Mole-Kacy boys. Morning activities: Seeing who can stand the longest out on the broiling sand; sitting on the sidewalk with empty cans “playing homeless”; jumping off their house extension screaming, “9/11.” Here in the dining room, everything feels so much safer. “Go ask Daddy.”

  As Sage runs off, Sue decides to abandon the bag of mezuzahs. It did a good job of flustering Dan but utterly failed to make Sue’s point. Conversion, like changing your address, might start from a practical place but once you’re in the process, your heart starts interfering, then your conscience, then…Sue’s next move? Pretend to pray? Really pray? Shave her head for a wig? Oh, she’s sick of plotting. All Sue really wants is to sit here at this table with the view and her pudding, thinking about the good old days back in Babel when all the earth was one language, one set of words. But she forgot the spoon.

  * * *

  This is Regina getting ready or not to drive over the Marine Parkway Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. Beauty check: Bra strap showing? Bangs in eyes? Knuckle crack; one through ten, in agonizing slow motion. Deep breath. “Hail Mary full of”…it. And a fresh wad of purple gum.

  “She’s got a decent mouth when it’s not saying anything,” Kenny whispers, licking his lips. “Grape-a-licious.”

  Is he trying to make me jealous? June wonders, sliding across the backseat to the window so as to “look at the cars,” per Tim’s instructions. “The traffic, notice it, flow and weave.”

  “I’m giddy. You giddy, June?” Kenny says. He thinks having sex with her gives him the right to talk to her. June stares out at the bridge that connects Rockaway to civilization. She hasn’t left the peninsula since they moved in.

  “‘People are afraid to merge,’” Tim quotes from a famous author whose name he can’t remember. Not a big reader himself, he says. “But my ex-wife—”

  “Wife?” Regina perks at the word. June too, of course, but not outwardly.

  Oval wet spots have formed under the arms of Tim’s dress shirt. If he really is wearing it for some girl, then (1) June hates her, and (2) he should just take it off. June got an eyeful of Tim’s torso this morning when she finally made some headway on cutting the ivy from her bedroom window. Not enough, though. She had to come downstairs for the full view, then get in line behind Bibi. In the movie, the aide would be a gorgeous mannequin who springs to life to kill the old woman. Dogging Tim is the only time she seems halfway human, jaw hanging, her numerous gold fillings aglint. Rose stiffened upon seeing this. Midway through Dad’s lesson on which herbs to pick for the clams, Rose dug into her white pocketbook and pulled out a photo of her son.

  “You wanna gawk, Bibi, come gawk at my Gary!”

  “Already seen him.” The aide rolled her eyes, the big-lidded kind that never quite fully open. She bent over seductively, plucked up some herbs scattered on the patio, and handed them to Dad, asking sweetly if she could read the newspaper he was holding. Then she made a big show of sitting down to read it. As if Tim would give a shit about that! To get Tim’s attention, you have to show him some bug whose name you pretend you don’t know or ask something about U-turns.

  June joined her dad peering over Rose’s shoulder. In the photograph, a squat, thirtyish man stands on the beach with this house at his back. His arms are T’d, like he’s being crucified or measured for a suit jacket. Even more distracting than his gross black Speedo is the fact that he’s got “red hair!” June had never seen an Italian redhead before.

  “My favorite genetic mutation,” Dad said, touching June’s head. Rose just kept trying to get Bibi to come look.

  No go. “You can’t actually expect us to compare Gary with…Tim? An unemployed pharmaceutical salesman with…” Tim knelt in the dirt. You c
ould see his broad, tanned back, the way it narrowed at the waist, the elastic of his blue boxers poking up from his Levi’s. “Our hero?”

  “Hero?” Rose laughed at the word till the fringes on her shirt were quivering. “Timmy?” Clumps of spittle collected in her mouth corners. June worried that she might fall from her wheelchair or choke to death on phlegm. “Hero? Who told you that?”

  Bibi’s sleepy eyes narrowed as she jabbed a long purple nail toward June. “Tower two. That’s what she said.”

  “Well, someone else told me,” June mumbled uncertainly. Did they? It was one thing to make stuff up, but only a certified kook believes her own lies. When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, a block away from her school, June was standing at a bathroom sink. Only the fifth day back after summer break and already no soap? The impact vibrated right up through the porcelain.

  Dan was on the way to the subway.

  Bibi on line to vote in the primary.

  Rose was right here in the yard, minding the waves, monster swells from Hurricane Erin down south. Which is how she knows Timmy was surfing that morning. “Eyewitness…if you’re gonna live here, you need to be minding the waves, Jan.”

  “Dan,” Dad corrected while June said, “June.”

  “June? June? June!” Back in the car, Kenny interrupts, sliding up next to her in the backseat. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “No. I’m too hot.” June sticks her head out the window, intent on puzzling out Rose’s claim that Tim was surfing the day of the attacks. Tim was a hero! Rose doesn’t know shit. If his nose wasn’t burned off in tower two, then it must have happened in the plane crash aftermath or some other, equally staggering inferno. Frustratingly, neither Dad nor Bibi seemed at all troubled by Rose’s apparent intel.

  “Think he could teach me to hang ten?” was all Dad asked.

  Bibi, no longer starstruck, just turned her gaze toward the view.

  The waves were glassy, sparkling when the sun hit. They did their best to spit out the pale, invading bodies, already lots of them, though it was still morning, ten o’clock. Bibi pulled a tissue from Rose’s sleeve to dab at the tiny beads of pancake-makeup sweat that dimpled her otherwise perfect face. “Let’s bring our swimsuits tomorrow, Rosie.”

  “Tomorrow?” Dad gulped. June couldn’t tell what he feared more—Mom’s wrath or the sight of Rose in a swimsuit at his party—but he stood there with a clump of herbs in his hand looking petrified. “You know, tomorrow is kind of a big day.”

  “Sunday,” Rose concurred, patting her hair. The funny colorless puff made June think of a just-gone-to-seed dandelion. Make a wish and blow.

  June wished herself back in Tribeca with her real friend Jake Leibowitz, grieving for JFK Jr. in Socrates coffee shop or laughing at the bridge-and-tunnel girls in towering heels trying to navigate the cobblestones. But the neighborhood was now called “the frozen zone.” Cut in half from Chambers to Rector Streets, from Broadway to the West Side Highway, it was enclosed with twelve thousand feet of chain link. So June can’t go back or forward; she’s like a car idling, like this car, still idling.

  Regina is now cleaning the windshield—with June’s sweater! Uh!

  When the girl finally, finally gets back in the car, she tosses aside the balled-up cardigan and reaches for the radio.

  “No radio,” Tim reminds them, as if they weren’t just dancing to Pink. And reciting the list duct-taped to the dashboard: “NO RADIO. NO ROUGHHOUSING, NO INEBRIENTS, FOOD, TOBACCO, LIMBS OUT THE WINDOW, OR UNNECESSARY PROFANITY.”

  Regina gives Tim the finger. This would shock June if she weren’t so thoroughly bored. The list of sins should have included: NO IDLING FOR FIFTEEN FUCKING MINUTES WHILE YOU WORK UP THE NERVE TO CROSS THE BRIDGE. Kenny passes the time by snaking his egg up and up June’s leg.

  June allows this. Eyes closed, she recalls Tim this morning, his Adam’s apple pulsing as he gulped straight from his hose. It was worth putting up with Rose’s monologues for such sight lines. Here, in the car, the view of Tim is blocked with a lot of cheap beige upholstery.

  Years ago was how Rose started every one of her stories, years ago being geezer code for “better settle in.” So June tracked every little thing about Tim—his tongue running over his cute crooked bottom teeth, the rugged chin scruff, how lifting his arm raised his shirt, just enough for a peek at his flat, tan abs.

  “Years ago, before AC,” Rose droned, “hundreds of people would flock here from the city. Right over that beach wall, day and night, staring at us, jealous. If you were from Calabria, my father would let you use the toilet. Otherwise: ‘Dig a hole, buddy.’ In a real scorcher, we slept out here too, with protection.”

  “Protection?” The word made June think of condoms, Kenny’s glow-in-the-dark condom from last night.

  “Put on your thinking cap, Red,” Rose said. “I’m talking about a gun.”

  On gun, up jerked Tim’s head. June quickly turned back to Rose before Tim caught her staring.

  “On summer Sundays, between church and dinner, we used to hand out buttered rolls. Ten dozen rolls from Harbor Bakery. Guess who had to do all that buttering.”

  “You know how to butter?” Bibi taunted.

  “Maybe if you’d done some more buttering, you’d have a husband, wiseass.” That’s how Rose had met Vin, she told them. She’d offered him a buttered roll. He’d come from Italy only days before. He stood out on the sand, the only one in a suit, the only clothes he owned.

  “I thought you hated your husband,” Bibi said.

  Rose shrugged. “Not then. I was old. He was handsome.”

  Vin helped keep the masses from storming the wall, trampling Paul Russo’s precious herbs, his precious flowers. After Rose’s mother died in childbirth, the plants were all her father cared for.

  “Would have been different if you’d been a boy,” June guessed.

  “Yes.”

  Now it’s these same kinds of plants Tim hopes to find at a nursery across the bridge: castor bean, foxglove, lily of the valley, et cetera, plus the fungicide spray for the sick cherry. Still rhapsodizing about traffic, Tim trails the scrawled list through the air to mimic a car. June’s the only one listening.

  “Individual bodies operating individual machines weaving together as if they’re one single, smooth, flowing organism.”

  “Orgasm?” Regina free-associates. “Did you? Do it with Jake?”

  “None of your business! Yes,” June says. Then, not wanting Tim to think she’s slutty, adds, “Just once…before he died.” That last part just fell out.

  “Died? Whaddaya mean, died?” Regina squeals. The whole car, previously zonked, is rejuiced now. “Seriously? That’s traumatic! Ju-une. Why didn’t you say something? Is that… was that…in like…September?” Not even rude Regina has the guts to ask outright. And when Tim quietly whispers, “Christ!” June has to look back out the window so he can’t see her smiling.

  The sky’s a pulsing 9/11 blue too. The kind of perfect sky that now makes June (and the rest of the city) tense. Two poufy, vertical clouds hang motionless over the bridge, which swings slightly, which may at any moment just buckle, all the beachgoers in their cars plunging, clutching phones, hook-on mugs, linty trail mix, while polluted fish float past the childproof windows to the tune of garbled classical music, irate talk stations, or audio books: blockbuster thrillers, lite porn, Islam Unpacked, The America We Deserve, or How to Communicate with Your Ugly, Angsty Teen. Teach them to carpool!

  “Traffic is sociology,” Tim concludes. “Cooperate or crash.”

  So Kenny relents and reinvites them to his séance for Gary Imp, tonight, on the beach. They’ll get that ghost to leave June’s walls once and for all.

  Tim recommends hiring cherubim with a flaming sword “to ensure Gary stays ousted.” Not even June understands that.

  * * *

  In line at Bloomers nursery, Regina leans over with wet eyes to pluck at the gold bracelet she thinks the late Jake gave June. “It must
mean so much to you.”

  “Well…” June found it on her bathroom floor. With Regina still attached to her wrist, she maneuvers the massive shopping cart around a burly man hugging a banana tree. “Hey, Red.” The man leers, jiggling his tongue.

  Maybe Bloomers is to crowded garden centers what Scores is to strip clubs; Grandpa might like it. Girl employees wear frilly Bo-Peep undies, tight crop tops, big sky-blue hair bows. The guys behind the counter are bare-chested under overalls and have on fake-distressed straw hats. Tim has gone off to find fungicide while they wait. But the line moves quickly. Soon, there are only two people left between them and the register. Kenny grabs a stack of organic morning glory seeds from a twirling rack.

  “So, like, what are you doing after this?” Regina asks June, offering gum.

  Kenny taps his seed packet on June’s ribs. “Sorry. But she’s busy.” If June had known how popular a dead boyfriend would make her, she’d have killed him off from the get-go. “We have plans.”

  “Plants,” June explains. “My dad’s paying us to help Tim fix up our yard.”

  Regina pouts. “Hire me! Kenny’s already rich. And the fucker just raised his prices.”

  June asks if that’s so why he can’t afford a new windbreaker. Kenny wears that same ratty one every day.

  “Ooh, you hurt his feelings,” Regina teases. Maybe so. Kenny’s lower lip is sticking out. Regina puts her arm around him, pokes at the seeds. “Does this by any chance mean free product at the séance?”

  Kenny licks his teeth. “We’ll see.”

  June can tell he’s waiting for her to ask, Product? How can she not?

  And clearly Regina is bursting to explain. “Safe-n-Sound, that’s his drink. And Morning Glory, OJ…I forget what else.”

  “Security Blankets,” Kenny chimes in, petting June’s arm. “Cocoa, TLC, Teddy Bears.”

  Above the counter, the bank of TVs switch from the default magnified pansy to Channel 11, the pregame show—Mike Piazza and his droopy mustache times six. A couple of shoppers boo, others applaud. Still others yell for the checkout people to get back to work. A woman buying a stone mushroom shrieks right in June’s ear, starting a chant for the Mets to “Retaliate! Retaliate!”