Swell Read online

  Sage fishes it right out again, holds it to her naked chest. Her own nose is so tiny, it’s more like two holes poked into her face. But she’s smiling. So Tim tries again, throws a water pistol into the box. Sage removes it.

  “What’s that?” Tim says. “Can you talk a little louder, Ed?”

  Sage giggles. “He’s not talking.”

  Tim leans in confidentially. “No, he’s whispering. A secret.”

  “Secret what?”

  “Better treasure. Over there.” Tim points down the lawn to where the beach and street walls meet. In that corner June and Kenny are digging a hole for some climbing hydrangea. “That’s the lucky plant,” Tim continues. “How you can tell is, its leaves are shaped like hearts.”

  Sage’s eyes gleam at the word hearts. She slowly places a piece of sea glass back in the box. Tim adds a doll’s arm, a seaweed pod, a busted FDNY key chain that must once have belonged to him. Sage follows with a broken pink plastic pail. It’s working!

  Sue pushes herself up onto her elbows. Braced for approval, Tim feels a dumb warmth spread through his chest. When Sue instead asks what he’s so dressed up for, the sensation shoots up his neck, covers his face. “Ah, you’re blushing; it’s a woman, then.”

  For a second, Tim’s actually tempted to confide in Sue. Maybe she’d like him more. She’d definitely offer her honest opinion about whatever it is he and Peg are doing. Nah, too chancy. Easier to turn back to the safety of children. “Sage, Ed, look here.” Tim shows them the fungicide. “This is tree medicine for the cherry—she’s sick. But it’s bad for kids and pirates. Really bad, like deadly, so nothing goes in your mouth. Stay away.”

  “Sage?” Sue asks. “Did you hear that?” The girl is following the progress of a huge ant across her hand. Tim knows everything there is to know about ants, which exist on every continent except Antarctica. But this is not the time, not with Sue getting to her knees, the homemade bandage around her thigh unraveling. “Say you understand what Tim said, baby.”

  Sage squashes the insect under her thumb experimentally. Her face twists as the creature stops moving and falls to the ground.

  Sue lifts her small chin. “C’mon, baby, say it.”

  “We are not a baby!” As proof, Sage and Ed gobble down a handful of grass apiece.

  “Spit that out! Now!” Sue shouts.

  Bibi’s flowing purple fabrics ripple in amusement. “Scolding a ghost! That’s a new one.”

  “Ed’s not a ghost.” Sage glares.

  But Bibi is still fixated on Sue, struggling to stand. “Oooh, look at you, puffy Mommy. Easy now. You don’t want to wind up like Cheryl.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s my sister. The doctor had to dislocate her baby’s shoulder to deliver. Of course, you’re a lot older than Cheryl, so the risk is even great—”

  “Bibi,” Rose says, “shut the hell up!” Then she thrusts her hand into the white pocketbook.

  Tim dives for Rose, yells, “Duck!” In his head (from the beach?) he hears one short toot—the lifeguard whistle for freeze. Then Dan explodes out the back door. That is, the back door is exploding, finally off its rusty hinges and onto the brick patio in a spectacular clatter of metal and wood. “What happened?” Dan yelps, jumping nimbly around the debris. “Everyone all right?”

  June and Kenny crack up.

  But Tim has laser focus. He hovers above the wheelchair. “Show me what you’ve got in there, Rose!” Tim’s palms clamp on the wrinkly fingers, damp and frigid despite the heat.

  “You’re hurting her!” Sue shouts. “Let go!” Tim obeys, reluctantly. Rose pulls a cigar out of her bag, to taunt Tim, he’s sure of it. She’s got a gun in there! He has to do something. But Sue’s berating him. “You should be ashamed, Tim.”

  “Yeah.” Bibi piles on. “Calling yourself a hero. I still can’t get over that.”

  What?

  Bibi pushes Tim aside, lights the smoke, unzips Rose’s sweatshirt. Tim’s extra-rattled to see the old lady’s got one of her late husband’s cowboy shirts on underneath. Some of the snaps are missing.

  “Oh my God, can’t everyone just leave her be?” Sue asks.

  Tim quickly backs away.

  “Wait!” Dan calls, kicking aside a piece of door in his path. “You can’t go. The garden! The party. You guys! Don’t fight!”

  Next it’s Sy in his boxers and black leather vest. “Woo-hoo! Mets won!” He appears oblivious to the fact that he’s standing where the door was (now a rectangular hole in the back of the house). Estes failed to hit Clemens with a pitch, Sy reports, but he did homer off him and “they won! Just came to say. Happy day!” Then the stick figure is reabsorbed into the house.

  Dan plasters on a beaming mouth. “Who here would love a piña colada? On a beautiful afternoon like this.”

  Sage raises her hand. Bibi too. “Yes, please.”

  “Drinks?” Sue mutters. “Really?”

  “Never mind! We’re leaving!” Bibi shoves the wheelchair so forcefully, she loses her balance. The entire top layer of her braid starts to slide past her left ear, her shoulder…

  “Hey! Your hair’s coming off!” Sage shrieks.

  Bibi rights herself, catching the extension. She tosses it onto Rose’s lap. “Time to go.”

  “No!” Rose flings the braid back at her.

  “Say good-bye, Rosie.”

  “Stop! I’m not ready.”

  And when Bibi won’t listen, when she keeps pushing the chair, the old woman turns and touches her lit cigar to the aide’s slender middle finger.

  Bibi leaps back. Her mouth opens, closes, opens. Daintily, she raises the injured hand and regards the small burn there. “You’re a sick woman,” she says quietly. “Tell Maureen I quit.” And, unable to resist a last jab at Sue: “Good luck birthing that big girl, Mommy.”

  “Oh no,” Dan says, sensing some peril at last. “You can’t leave without Rose.” Looking back at Sue, he mouths, Girl?

  “Bye-bye,” Sage calls. Bibi’s purple tunic balloons in the breeze like a jellyfish.

  At a loss, Dan Glassman once again turns to Tim.

  * * *

  “And how could I say no to him, to Dan Glassman?” Tim asks Peg not an hour later, pacing her porch. After Bibi left, Tim’s always-together neighbor began to crack. His linen shorts were covered in bread crumbs. A tiny splinter of door glinted in his eyebrow. Thirty people were due at his party tomorrow and he had no back door and four trays of possibly poisoned clams. Finally, he’d come around to his wife’s view that Rose might pose a threat. And Sue had decided that in fact the old woman was instead a victim who needed them. So who is right? And who is Rose?

  “Don’t know,” Tim says truthfully. Then he revealed to Dan (and now Peg) how much he actually feared the old lady—Scary Impoliteri. It felt great to unburden himself even of this, the smallest fragment of his story. But when Dan heard it, his broad chest caved. Turns out, the dude is not nearly as sturdy as he seems. None of the Glassmans, it turns out, are as sturdy. While Tim sprang into action, trying to herd Rose into his car, even Sue (the old lady’s new defender) just stood there, stunned and aging. In the end, Tim had no choice but to lure Rose with Sambuca, or the promise of it. Point is, he can’t stay long. Rose is outside in his car, anxious to hit the liquor store.

  Peg sits on a case of tuna and listens. At least she gives the impression she’s listening—head bent to reveal the gray under strands of her long, unwashed blond ponytail, chewed-up fingernails tracing a line down the thigh of her brown park ranger pants. Soon as Tim stops talking, Peg once again asks about her respirator masks. Don’t tell her he forgot to bring them a third time. And what’s he so dressed up for?

  “Trying to impress you,” Tim says, as if joking. He assures her the masks are in his trunk and gets up from the couch.

  Around the batteries, over the blankets, to the side of five-gallon water jugs, Tim forges a path across Peg’s living room, detouring only to kick at a pile of wetsuits by the
TV. Peg’s wetsuit hasn’t been worn since 9/11, when, like many, like Tim, she had risen early to call in sick and take advantage of the hurricane-grade surf. Now she vows never again to take another fake sick day. Now she stalls and stalls on the date for the memorial paddle-out. Tim would like to tickle and tickle her until she changes her mind. “Did it work?”

  “We’ll see.”

  By the door, three full backpacks sit, ready to roll. No, Peg’s not going camping. “Off the grid, then? I’ll miss you guys.”

  Peg laughs, follows Tim out to the car. All her emergency preparedness has, she insists, actually made the kids feel safer. And who is Tim to argue? How many other eight- and six-year-olds know how to use a desalinator and tie three commendable knots apiece? But the older child, Bridget, has developed a habit of compulsively smoothing her right eyebrow. And whenever aircraft fly overhead (several times a day), little Ryan still pinches his face and asks if it’s a good plane or a bad plane.

  Not wanting to introduce Peg to Rose, Tim steers her around the back of the embarrassing yellow Steer-Rite Auto School vehicle. She’s the one friend who hasn’t ever razzed him about his ride. Yet he’s amazed to hear her call the mess in his trunk “brilliant!”—wads of clothes, dog bones, fishing gear? Why didn’t she think of having supplies in the car, at the ready. “So clutch!” When the next thing happens and she needs to get gone—

  “I’ll come get you,” Tim says, touching her cheek with an open palm. “This is the first place I’d come.” Strategically, he should probably help the Glassmans first, but Peg comes before everyone. He’s just realized. (Better grab a mask to take home and use while spraying the tree, though.) “The flak they gave me at the firehouse for requesting these…you wouldn’t believe. We didn’t even use them at Ground Zero.”

  Peg grabs Tim’s hand and squeezes. “Hey, skip the liquor store? For me?” Her words might sound basic but they come at him like storm-surge waves made in deep water, intensifying as they head to shore, his ear. “Take the masks. I don’t care. Only don’t drink!” The kind of waves you both fear and fantasize riding. “This is important.” No one, not even his mother, ever talked to Tim in this way, so specifically.

  “Peg—”

  “Okay, we’ll do the paddle-out. Tonight. Let’s just do it. From your house…eight? I’ll call around.” Peg moves in closer. “Just stop looking so sad.”

  Tim is so sad but also elated, feeling Peg press herself against him and say, “Stick with me…you and me.” Over her shoulder, in the trunk’s sandy, dank recesses, he spies the lilacs he bought for her at the garden center and retrieves them, presents them.

  Years ago Peg took the firefighter test along with Chowder and Tim. And failed. But it couldn’t have been fair. There is nothing weak about her. And nothing about her Tim doesn’t desire—stale coffee breath, chapped lips, traumatized kids included. Two decades ago, on a cruise to nowhere, the two of them embarked on a brief, charged affair that healed Tim’s first broken heart. One decade ago, at the Irish Circle, they confessed to each other (knees pressed together playfully, drunkenly, under the bar) that they weren’t in love with their fiancés. Only ready to be in love, ya know? Ready to get going. Tim’s mate, Alicia, was, unbeknownst to him, pregnant (and soon to abort, without his consent). Peg’s fiancé, Chowder, was her best pal (and Tim’s too). Now, their romance feels as wrong and right as an icy Vodka Grapefruit. Tim longs to knock it back, hard and fast. Peg’s small braless breasts push against him under the pockets of her work shirt.

  Then Peg’s kids race up with their chocolate faces. You can hear the ice cream truck jingle recrank as the truck heads away, “Pop Goes the Weasel” fading. Chocolate also dots the part in Bridget’s nearly white hair, the inside of one elbow, and a thin wrist. But even as Tim cheerfully notes this, little Ryan’s cone is slipping from his chubby hands. “Uncle Tim, Uncle Tim!” the kid’s shrieking. “There’s a dead lady in your car!”

  When Tim makes a play for the pocketbook, Rose hawks up a glob of saliva. It misses Tim’s right eye, trickles down the bad side of his face. Talk about… “Nasty. Were you, like, pretending to be asleep?”

  “Trying not to embarrass you in front of your girlfriend.” Rose smirks and offers him a used tissue from her sweatshirt sleeve. Tim just wipes his face on his jacket and backs up the car, one last look at Peg before leaving. She is fixing the drips on little Ryan’s cone, the way his own mother used to do, circling around it with her tongue. A ruse to eat some, he sees only now after all these years. Ha!

  “Paddle-out. Eight. Your house!” Peg calls when she sees Tim watching. She waves the wilting bouquet and the ice cream cone, both. “Don’t forget what I said…”

  It seems as if Tim, not Peg, is the one receding from view. Not even down the block, he already, unreasonably, misses her. As Tim drives on, he tells himself she’s right. He should skip the liquor store. And wrong: Just a task. No reason to attach any meaning to it. The key is that Peg cares what he does or doesn’t do. Once he buys Rose Sambuca and gets her the hell home, the gun will no longer matter. Only then can they honor Chowder and move on.

  “Jesus Christ, ghost!” bawls the sole Licker Store employee, Flounder. So called because of his flat face and eyes disconcertingly far apart. Flounder holds a hand over his heart as if he’s about to say the Pledge of Allegiance. “Where’ve you been?”

  Tim shrugs.

  “I thought you were dead, man!”

  Was he kidding? How could this be? Of all people, Flounder had to have heard about Tim’s 9/11 alcohol-fueled disgrace. So did he hear and forget? Louie’s never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, not even before his jet-ski accident. But still…

  The man has tears in his eyes. Flounder turns away, to collect himself, or so Tim thinks, until the multi-tattooed arm reaches for the Stoli. Well, he remembers that.

  “Hold up, I’m not—I quit drinking,” Tim tells the thick neck. Eight months, three weeks, six days. “I’ll just take some Sambuca.”

  If Flounder notices the contradiction in the sentence, he’s kind enough not to mention it. His fingertips slide over to the shelf of liqueurs.

  “Um, the travel size?” Tim specifies. “Like a dozen?”

  Flounder squeezes his own biceps over his biggest tattoo. A skull encircled by anchors, some kind of Coast Guard symbol.

  “It’s not for me,” Tim adds, only making himself sound more pathetic. Mercifully, the mini-bottles are already bagged. Flounder says they’re on him, “for old times’ sake.”

  Tim knows he should insist on paying, but he needs to get out of this store. The guy is gaping at him like he’s some kind of apparition.

  “Great to see ya, Chowder,” Flounder calls over the door jingle. “God bless.”

  * * *

  The seagulls know best how to open a clamshell: drop it from a height. “I could have saved myself a lot of trouble,” Dan observes, swerving to avoid one of the many snacks raining from the sky. “This shit is dangerous.” Sue and Dan stroll slowly down the shore, swinging Sage, still in her pink underwear, between them. Forced to join this “family time,” June alternates between marching ahead and lagging behind.

  “When I was a kid, we used clams as bait,” Dan goes on. “Sy and I, fishing for stripers. My mother loved cleaning my catch.”

  “She did not.” Sue laughs, admiring the way a cruise ship slides along the horizon.

  “She did.”

  “Not.”

  “Well, she said so.”

  “No one likes cleaning fish!”

  Dan stops, drops Sage’s hand. Parenthetical wrinkles enclose his bright eyes. Of course that’s right. Of course his mother just said that to make him feel good. Dan just never thought about it.

  June groans. “You two should write an encyclopedia of all the most boring things to talk about.”

  “It’s not boring to us,” Sue says, but it is, kind of. Fish. If only Sue could think of a subject to interest her daughter, now making devil horns be
hind an oiled, wrinkled woman walking past in a string bikini.

  “Remember your play about the porcupine? The porcupine that couldn’t get comfortable?” June had won some contest for it. Fifty dollars and a plaque!

  June sighs. “I was eleven.” And: “You shouldn’t have let me blow all that money at the arcade.”

  Strike one. Sue joins Sage, who’s combing for treasure (there’s never enough, is there?). Unfortunately, the long strands of washed-up debris consist mostly of broken shells strangled in putrid black seaweed with the occasional pink tampon applicator or beer-bottle neck.

  “Your bottle with the message…” Sue thinks to try this on June. “It must be halfway to England by now. I mean, how storybook was that setting last night? Under the moon, the fire—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” June mumbles, reddening.

  “Ohh,” Dan teases. “Junie sent a love note in a bottle.”

  “No!”

  Sue imagines it was “probably more like a hate note. ‘Help! Help! Save me from my dull parents!’” Sage guesses, “‘Hello, mermaids.’ Did you put that, Junie? Junie? Did you put ‘Hello—’”

  “No!” June explodes. “I just wrote ‘Why?’ plus my e-mail address, and some perv already found it, like, a mile down the beach.” She motions vaguely eastward where blocks of housing projects seem to loom straight up from the sea. “‘Suck my big dick!’ they wrote back. That’s it. Okay? ‘Suck. My. Dick.’”

  Dan’s covering Sage’s ears.

  Sue’s hands are balled into fists. These reactions make June laugh, despite or because of her obvious anguish.

  “Vulgar boys,” Dan says. “Why do I even want one?”

  “How do you know it was a boy?” June scoffs.

  “Well…”

  June accepts an awkward hug from bulky Sue but her hands stay busy splitting her split ends.

  Sunset pink sheens the sea, trims the clouds. The day’s scorching temps have cooled and with them Sue’s rage. She admires the waves, polished by the offshore winds. But a fire never ends abruptly. Sue pokes at the smoldering embers: Bibi’s intense presence, Sy’s entitlement, and the tense phone call with Maureen. Someone has to do right by Rose, but why does it have to be Sue? It’s her house now, the only house in which she, a city kid, has ever lived. She can’t be expected to just give it back. Gazing from the beach toward the house’s ivied rear, viewing the blue pattern of tile and masses of greenery, you’d never imagine how badly the roof leaks, that the bricks need repointing, how hard it is for Sue to keep her piano tuned in so much salt and humidity. Solidity and refuge is all you see, a structure that appears somehow more real than the weathered wooden shacks, faux Mediterranean mini-villas, and dispassionate apartments lining the sand. Even the famous boardwalk, which starts two or three blocks east and continues for miles, might have been slapped together by the Mole-Kacy boys from two-by-fours.