Swell Read online

  “History in the making.” Kenny smirks, admirably uninterested. Up till now, June had chosen not to think too much about last night with and without him. But now she can’t help replaying the highlights: Message in a bottle. Kenny’s mysterious drug drop. Sex, new, peculiar and brief. Her mother and then Tim showing up. Finally, the silhouettes of all those kids at the fire, turning calm, holding hands—“Oh!” She gets it now. “That was a séance! On the beach last night, right?”

  Kenny affirms. “Everyone’s throwing them these days. There’s a big uptick in people to contact.” Then, out of respect for the deceased or simply because there’s nothing more to add, they stay silent until the line ends. “Howdy, y’all,” says the checkout guy, lifting his straw hat in an obviously scripted gesture. Sweat sculpts his hair to his scalp. One glance at the contents of their cart and good-bye, Southern accent.

  “Fucking A! Poison garden! Cash or credit?”

  “What?”

  “Cash or—”

  “Poison?”

  Checkout guy points with his scanner at the long line of people waiting behind them. He must think they know what they’re buying. Kenny pays for his seeds. After that, with no more money and no sign of Tim, they’re forced to step aside. While Regina and Kenny examine the newly interesting poisonous plants, June is happy for a reason to head off in search of Tim. Not in Pest Control—two whole aisles of skulls and crossbones. Not in Fertilizers or Floral Tools. June stalks up and down, pausing and misreading a sign for LIGHTING as LIGHTNING, though the nearby shelves are full of illumination options. Tim’s own beloved Malibu garden lights are featured in many assorted sizes and colors. Past the birdbaths and composting bins, she finally spots him—his feathery hair and checked tie first. He’s standing beneath a SAY IT WITH CUT FLOWERS banner, his face smushed into a mass of lilac.

  Something tells June not to startle him. He’s like a sleepwalker better left alone. She stands a few feet back, squirming as Tim sniffs, sways. With the sport coat and with his melted nose hidden in flowers, he could easily be a model for the display—multicolored bouquets and multishaped vases in which to put them. But for reasons June can’t articulate, she prefers him with his scars exposed, in his usual dirty shorts and T-shirt. When Tim finally looks up, his expression is serene, woozy. He holds the purple flowers up to her face. The perfume-y, air-conditioned moment with its faint ball-game soundtrack and fluorescent lighting rearranges something inside June so that long after she remembers why, lilacs are her favorite flower. When it’s over, Tim clamps the stems between his teeth and picks up a small can of fungicide.

  “Sure that bouquet isn’t poisonous?” June asks, but he’s already set off. Past the stakes and trellises—Nature Management.

  Back at the register, they discover that Regina and Kenny and a handful of other customers have been ejected from the store following an all-out Mets versus Yankees brawl. The scuffle overturned a large display of Stars and Stripes merchandise, leaving the Astroturf floor strewn with red, white, and blue glass gems and wind chimes. Which means, finally, finally, it’s June’s turn to drive.

  * * *

  Sy insists on watching the ball game on the kitchen TV. His suite, he says, still reeks of “pain, I mean paint.”

  “Interesting slip, Dad.”

  “Neither is good for a guy in my condition.”

  “The human condition?” Dan knows his father just wants company but is too stubborn to ask. Sy’s eyes widen as he passes the counter where Dan’s at work assembling an eggplant lasagna. Rose wasn’t lying; she knows how to feed a crowd. After the clams oreganata, she talked Dan through roasted peppers, stuffed artichokes, bruschetta, escarole, roast chicken, veal piccata, and three kinds of pasta.

  “This is not Jewish food,” Sy bellows. “Thank God!”

  Dan can relax a little. The old man is satisfied. And without a brisket in sight. He’s sure the Jews would have had a sunnier story if all their food weren’t brown or beige—matzo, kugel, gefilte fish. The whole twentieth century might have gone down differently if only for trippy purple eggplants, heart-red tomatoes, fresh green basil. “And it’s Rose, not God, you should thank, Dad.”

  “Noted.” Sy folds himself into what has become, overnight, his chair by the little TV. “But Sue’s right, for once; it’s time we ease her out.”

  “Ease her out?” For some reason, Dan pictures June’s hand the time it got caught in that giant-claw game machine.

  “We can’t have Rose here tomorrow when Bob Baum shows up at Sue’s party.”

  “Why can’t we?”

  Conveniently for Sy, they’re interrupted. “Doorbell!” “For he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow. For—”

  Dan’s just waiting for the chime to trigger his next migraine. “You answer it, Dad.”

  “A dying man hasn’t time.”

  Dan whirls a layer of sauce onto his noodles. Sprinkle the cheese, arrange the eggplant, start again, sauce, noodles; so soothing. “You’re not dying, Dad, you’re lazy, which nobody can deny, just a lazy—”

  The back door squeals. Footsteps across the dining-room tile. Here’s June, skidding into the room, her usual skirt replaced by cutoff jean shorts, carroty hair folded into a long, sophisticated braid. “Is the bell broken? I had to go all the way around back!” Then she talks too fast to follow—the garden center, Rose, poison…

  “Poison ivy?” Dan asks, debating whether to criticize her heavy hand with the eyeliner or compliment her on the braid.

  “Poison plants.”

  “Poisonous? But we just used some herbs in the clams.”

  “I don’t know! The guy at the store said—”

  “Wait. Is that—” The doorbell again ringing even though June’s inside.

  Sy hauls himself up from the chair—“Who’s lazy now?” He’s standing not for the door but for the national anthem. “Sing it, Junior!”

  June rolls her eyes. She loathes that nickname. Nonetheless, she slaps one hand across her heart and belts it out: “‘By the dawn’s early light.’” Like Sue, June can sing. So the question always is: Will she?

  Dan slips two fingers under her backpack strap and massages his daughter’s bony shoulder. “Do me a favor? Please don’t use the word poisonous in front of your mother.” Then Dan returns to his lasagna.

  “Skanky Yankee,” Sy hollers as the camera pans over Roger Clemens. “I heard you wear a skirt!”

  * * *

  “The door!” Sue yells from upstairs. “Someone!” For he’s a jolly good fuckhead. That demonic knell won’t stop. “I’m on the phone!” Sue’s waiting for Rose’s daughter-in-law, Maureen, to pick up (or not) and the two sounds—phone and doorbell—overlap and combine, making the bedroom feel even stuffier than it already does, even with all the windows wide open. She pictures her long-awaited daisies left to bake to dust on the stoop. “Hello? Hey! Anybody down there?”

  A series of by-now-familiar creaks in the fireplace wall join the various ringtones. These “haunted” sounds intrigue rather than spook her. Imagine if it were possible, if someone were listening? “Are you there?” Sue breathes, pressing her mouth against the cool plaster. “Who are you?”

  “Yes?” a brisk, nasal voice on the phone answers. Figures. Sue finally gets through to Maureen while she’s talking to a wall. “Who’s calling?”

  “This is Sue, Sue Ainsley.” So the conversation is now launched without a greeting from either party. Bad omen. “The wife of one of the Glassmans?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I get it. Go on.”

  Sue takes a porcelain dragon from the shelf over the fireplace. Red eyes, tongue stuck out. She throws it onto the bed.

  “Um, can we speed this up? I’m in Provence at a conference.”

  “In Provence at a conference,” Sue’s compelled to repeat. “In Provence at a conference.” It’s like the opposite of humdrum rhododendron but just as musical.

  “Excuse me?
”

  Sue adds a fan and a paperweight to the dragon on her pillow. She hadn’t planned to start collecting all of Rose’s Chinese knickknacks, but it turns out to be rather cathartic. She clears the shelves of lacquered boxes while she talks. “What type? Of conference.”

  “Vet,” Maureen says.

  “I had no idea—thank you so much. For your service.”

  “Veterinary.”

  “Ha. You must get that a lot.”

  “What can I do for you, Sue?”

  “I left a message—”

  “You and everyone else in that godforsaken house. If it’s the boiler—”

  “Someone else called you?”

  “Your father-in-law. And someone named Dan.”

  “That’s my husband.”

  “Don’t you people communicate?” Maureen’s brittle tone stops Sue from yanking down the strings of lanterns that outline the bedroom windows. Rose probably had to pay to have them hung. No way would this Maureen woman have done it for her. Down on the lawn, Rose appears to be rocking an imaginary infant, but by now Sue knows she’s just nursing her bad elbow.

  “It’s your mother-in-law,” Sue tells Maureen, though the boiler is also a faulty, antediluvian mystery. “She keeps showing up at the door—”

  “Don’t let her in.”

  “Not that simple. You might have mentioned the backyard’s a cemetery.”

  “Every backyard’s a cemetery.”

  “How so?”

  “This is why I hired Bibi.”

  “Bibi’s too busy flashing her boobs at the neighbor to even notice Rose is sitting in full sun. I’m watching them right now and I can tell you she hasn’t moved the umbrella all—”

  “All right.” Maureen sounds jaded. Sue can hear her knuckles cracking. “You’re telling me that five of you can’t figure out a way to evict a ninety-year-old in a wheelchair?”

  “When you put it that way…yes.”

  “Look, I know she’s a wacko bitch—”

  “Isn’t that a little harsh?”

  Maureen laughs. “Evidently, you don’t know much about my mother-in-law.”

  “I know you fucked her over!” Sue blows up. “I know you lied so she’d sign the contract to sell this house and that’s why she keeps coming back. I know that.” Of course, Sue didn’t really know or even believe that. But now Maureen’s silence all but proves it’s true. Holy shit! What a thoroughly repellent woman. Sue lifts the snaky-river print off the wall, flings it onto the pile.

  Massed together on the bed, the colorful objects take on a less insane, more thoughtful aspect. That Rose sought out rather than recoiled from all things Chinese after the tragedy could be a sign of strength, of owning it. For the first time, Sue lets herself imagine one of her own children dead or, worse, murdered. A wobbly, trapped feeling descends. She grabs the windowsill.

  Flash-forward a few decades and Sue could be the old lady alone in and defending this house. On the phone, June or some June relation will be the one calling Sue a wacko bitch, ticking off her many screwups—who says fuck you to her sixteen-year-old kid? Then again, by then, Rockaway will probably be underwater. (There’s a reason the city dumps its disenfranchised here, and it’s not to provide them with a view.) And the rest of New York? A police state, perhaps. Once all the gulls are gunned down, they’ll start lining up Muslims to shoot at Kennedy Airport.

  “What you did, that’s immoral,” Sue tells Maureen, but she meant to say illegal.

  “That doesn’t make it wrong.”

  A new shuffling noise starts up behind the fireplace. Sue hears it as the bass line for the baby’s solo kicking. She’s bored in there. Whoever’s in the wall is probably bored too. Both are getting ready to bust free. Soon.

  “I had to get her out of that death trap,” Maureen says. “She broke her leg. The stairs! It wasn’t workable.” Sue listens greedily for reasons that Rose can no longer live in the house but her conscience keeps overriding Maureen’s excuses. That poor woman! “When she started smoking cigars and talking nonsense—”

  “About her son?” Through the window, Sue sees, her own fuzzy children are busy with other people, real and imaginary. June passes a flat of flowers to Tim. Sage sprinkles brown grass on Ed (presumably). Ed chases her out through the beach door. Squinting makes all of them shrink and grow, appear and disappear. “Killing her son?”

  “That’s my husband,” Maureen reminds her. “I’m the widow.”

  “My condolences.” Sage turns back and sticks her tongue out at the invisible boy at her heels. Then she sprints toward shore. “Stop her!” Sue says involuntarily.

  “What?”

  “Not you.” With the phone still pressed to her ear, Sue lurches from the room and down the stairs. None of the adults outside seem to be paying any attention.

  “Look,” Maureen says. “I’m at a conference.”

  “A conference in Provence.”

  “What the hell is your problem? Never mind, I gotta run.”

  “No, I gotta run.”

  * * *

  The back door pops another hinge as Sue blasts out, a blur of orange braids, blue bikini, iPod cords. The noise levitates Blacky into guard-dog posture. As she makes her way out on the beach, the mutt barks so insanely Tim has to put down the tank of fungicide to run and grab his collar. Hard not to titter along with Bibi as Sue throws the phone onto the lawn and waddles over the sand after Sage. The little pirate crew have been running around on the beach since they moved in, when a layer of snow covered the sand. Sue has just picked today to notice.

  The dog is still barking when Sue returns, dragging the girl by the wrist. (For some reason, Sage has been in her underwear all day, bare limbs brown in places where dirt has stuck to the sunscreen.) Tim throws an imaginary Fresca bottle to send Blacky back through the hedge. The mutt’s as addicted to fetch as he is to protecting his friend. Before the girl appeared to cure the animal, he’d stare at the fetch object—bottle or ball—long after, hours after, it had ceased to move.

  “Do Ed now!” Sage squeals, thrilled with her mom’s attention. “Pull Ed too!”

  But Sue’s not playing. Nor does she want Bibi’s assistance in retrieving the beeping phone from the grass. “I got this.” With one hand clamped against her back and the other straight out in front of her, Sue very gradually squats. Reenter Blacky, charging at her crotch.

  “Jesus! I’m sorry!” Tim says, sending the mutt home again, this time with a sharp slap on the butt. “Bad dog!” Blacky has forged himself a nice passageway through the rhododendron. He barrels back and forth so carelessly that each trip digs a new scratch into his dingy coat, knocks a new flower onto the grass. The blooms blow around lightly—small, silent white bells that smell like root beer. When no one’s looking, Tim likes to stand around and breathe it in.

  Bells and cups, balls and tongues. The curves and scents of flowers calm Tim. One creamy gardenia had enough juice to perfume his entire hospital room. There are roses the color of bruises. Recovery monotony, self-loathing, the endless arrangements people sent to Ox, the firefighter in the next bed. Who knows what started Tim lusting after flowers. But right away, he was avid, driving around to plant nurseries, subscribing to gardening magazines. Soon he found himself fantasizing about frangipani, ogling orchids. It was flower porn, essentially. But it got him through those early post-surgery, post-9/11, post-plane-crash days without vodka, wife, best friend, dog, mom (she can’t drive and won’t fly now). His always absent father did show up in one of Tim’s greasy withdrawal dreams but since the whole nightmare took place on the ocean floor, there wasn’t any talking.

  To learn from the driver’s ed kids that much of Rose’s garden is potentially lethal concerns Tim on behalf of the Glassmans. Simultaneously, it’s thrilling. Unloading the flowers from the car, Tim grinned at the Asian lilies, throbbing orange with black, erect stamens, and the pink cyclamen, tissue-soft, wondering how their gorgeousness was tied to their danger and whether it was a misstep
to tell June his mom’s (finally understandable) theory that Rose “offed her awful husband with one of her delicious medicinal teas.”

  Once the car was unloaded, Tim had tasked the teens with removing and replacing soil, spreading compost, et cetera, and returned to the fungicide. The irony isn’t lost on him—applying poison to the only nonpoisonous thing in the yard. But Tim’s got no choice. If he balks, who knows? Rose might whip out that gun.

  Tim hauls the tank over to where Sue now lies on the grass, letting Sage and Ed line her tattooed arm with cherries.

  “Um, hi,” Tim says, carefully setting down the fungicide. To occupy his empty hands, he picks off a withered blossom fixed to a twig by a gummy mass. “Rose asked me to get this.” Tim bends over to read the label’s minuscule print. “‘Azoy-stro-bin.’ Dan and Sy both gave the okay.”

  “Spray! Go!” Rose rallies from the audience. “Why the big production?” Just sassing them. Rose knows full well you don’t use pesticides with everyone standing around. “So do something else, then,” Rose says, flapping her mottled hands. “Fertilize my lily of the valley. Or should I call it lily-of-the-help-me-Timmy-never-gave-me-any-water!”

  Tim ignores her, watching June saunter over with a cardboard box for Sage’s treasure. He can’t spray the tree until the kid and her loot have been safely relocated.

  “Are we going home?” Sage asks but June just puts the box on the ground and keeps walking.

  Tim makes the girls uncomfortable. Anyone would notice. June never, ever makes eye contact with him. And Sage all-out winces when he kneels down beside her. It’s the sight of his missing nostril so close up, Tim assumes. To the Glassman females (including Sue), it’s totally repulsive. Unless what offends them is his red chin, his copious sweat, bad breath? From the treasure pile, Tim picks out a piece of light green sea glass (ancient Fresca?) and chucks it into the empty box.