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  “What a doll!” The aide exhales, clearly smitten. She scans Tim’s exaggeratedly V-shaped torso with a shiver. It’s the presence of a firefighter, even a past-tense one, that enchants her, enchants June, Dan, the whole country at this point, the free world. Which brings Sue to the question: What the hell? What exactly is she missing? It’s a familiar sensation, sitting grimly in an audience uproariously laughing, or the reverse, cracking up alone like a kook. That’s Sue. And though she’ll never admit it to her father-in-law, she suddenly longs to be back in the dining room, feet up, eyes closed, iPod cranked, listening to Shabbat Prayers Made Easy. Track five features a surprisingly versatile alto.

  “Maybe Rose would like to be alone with her thoughts?” Sue tries.

  “God forbid.”

  “Well then, anyone for a Fig Newton?”

  The aide reels back as if the cookies might infect her. Rose accepts one, then, while chewing, demands to be parked at the cherry tree. The strange hunched specimen was planted in memory of Rose’s mother, who died birthing her. (All eyes magnetize to Sue’s belly.) Sprinkled on top are the ashes of both her parents and her husband, Vin. And now—Rose interrupts herself, lifting her bifocals to diagnose “fungus.” As if Tim hadn’t just said as much. “We need the whoozit spray, with the yellow label—”

  “Spray?” Sue asks. Don’t they see that Sage is playing there? That’s where she plays every and all afternoon with her imaginary Ed and Tim’s incontinent dog. It’s an endless quest to find “the shiny treasure”—shells, sea glass, select trash. “Spray chemicals? There?”

  The aide reaches over and gives Sue’s bump another demeaning pat. “Don’t worry, Mommy. Human beings flourish on toxins. Like cockroaches.”

  Bibi’s the name. Not Indian but Guyanese, with a line from the Koran tattooed on her dainty forearm.

  “What’s it mean?” Tim asks as if he would really like to know.

  The aide dabs a tissue at a wet spot on her yellow linen. Already her matching espadrilles have been “decimated” by grass stains. “There are so many meanings.”

  Rose hoots. “Is ‘jihad’ one of them?” She blasts the tree with the hose gun. Sage leaps up and runs for Sue, hugging the big ketchup bottle she uses for comfort in lieu of the usual bear, blankie, or chewed-on thumb. “Another ginger! You’re lucky you’re not in Calabria. In Calabria, you see a ginger, you spit and cross the street.”

  Bibi drags a manicured finger across her throat. “Kill me, now!” You see what she puts up with, day in, day out from this jokey, paranoid senior? “It’s getting worse too.” Rose has been refusing her meds. Not to mention that she “parties like it’s the end of the free world.”

  “It is the end of the free world,” Rose says.

  “Well, it will be if you don’t mind your pressure.”

  Sue might commiserate if Bibi would stop touching her.

  Pat, pat. “Another girl, Mommy?”

  “Don’t know,” Sue lies. Dan insists on being “surprised,” as if a bloody five- to ten-pound creature squeezing out from your wife’s vagina isn’t shock enough. It’s a boy he wants. Or his father does, so Dan does. Even a second girl elicited sighs from the many Latino technicians employed at Glassman Locks & Keys. A third and they might send condolence cards.

  “See the way she carries? Low and pointy, that means girl.” The aide will not stop. “Has your belly button popped? A lot of pressure on your bladder?”

  “What?”

  “You have the heartburn?”

  Heartache is more like it. In nineteen years of marriage, Dan has never once missed following up a fight with daisies. All around them, the still-overgrown but newly watered garden drips.

  “If you don’t have the heartburn, it’s a baldie.”

  “Can we please not—”

  “Have a seat,” Tim says, having hauled down all the new furniture. A chair for Sue and Sage. A chair for Bibi. A side table for the Fig Newtons. An umbrella. And, unless he’s intruding (yes, but she can’t say so), a chair for Tim too.

  Tim compliments Sage on her Heinz. It’s from their old apartment’s fridge, a detail that seems to charm him. “People don’t think enough about condiments, do they?”

  Sage just looks. First at Tim’s stubbly chin, then higher up where the right half of his nose should be—a shiny red patch like strawberry fruit leather. According to June, it was melted in the North Tower. So Sue knows she should be grateful. Sue is grateful. Still, does he have to be so…present, constantly offering his sunscreen around like a joint?

  “I was a lifeguard once upon a time, so—”

  “We’re fine, thanks.”

  “You think that but you’re all so fair. That one especially.” He gestures with the lotion toward the beach and…June!

  Eyes off my daughter! Sue wants to say, wondering how long she’s been down there and why Tim knows about it. The teenager already seems overexposed on the windy shore in that short navy skirt without some weird neighbor guy watching. June sags under the weight of her red backpack. Her long copper curls blow around, tangling. Then her pointy elbow bends. She’s throwing something into the sea. “Oh no, not the egg!” Sue says. “Tell me my daughter did not just throw an egg.”

  Aside from taking her Regents exams, all June has to do to advance to the eleventh grade is pass Health at the local high school. That is (1) attend class, and (2) carry an egg (labeled with a pink number 3) for a month without breaking it. Alas, Sue failed to consult her daughter before brokering this deal. A single class, she thought, how bad could that be? Very bad, apparently. Extraordinarily bad. In hindsight, Sue admits she was wrong, over and over she’s admitted it. But June refuses to forgive her.

  “In hindsight!” June shrieked at Sue just this morning. “In ass-sight?” She dangled the egg out Sue’s bedroom window. (Her own being encased in ivy.) “I will drop it,” she threatened. “I will.” At issue, that “prison of a school.” Metal detectors and cops! The gym turned into a nursery for student mothers!

  Dan would have instantly let June skip the day, the week, the rest. (Thankfully, he goes to work early.) But Sue called June’s bluff. She knew the straight-A-minus student would not really risk it all. And so it was. The tantrum passed. June returned the egg to the nest of maxipads she’d fashioned for it in her backpack and rushed to catch the Green Line bus to school.

  Not to say Sue has any illusion this constitutes victory. June might like the break from her old school, Stuyvesant High (windows overlooking the Ground Zero rubblescape, EPA air testers chirping ominously in the classrooms). But that in no way guarantees she’ll finish the year here. What if even this one class is so awful that June would rather chuck the egg into the sea and be done with it? Has she? A bit nearsighted, Sue is forced to rely on Tim.

  “Not an egg,” Tim says. He attended and dropped out of that same local school when it was better but not that much better, then as now a tense meeting place for segregated Far Rockaway blacks, Rockaway Park and Broad Channel Irish, Belle Harbor and Neponsit Jews, and a smattering of bused-in Ozone Park Italians. Later, he took the equivalency plus the exact minimum of college credits needed to become a firefighter.

  As he tells Sue this, Tim becomes aware that she is inching away from him. Her arms cradle her belly protectively. This is the most Sue’s ever spoken to him at one time. He would go and tell her he’s a high-school dropout! Better not add that it’s a bottle June’s tossing into the water. Better not tag his new neighbor’s daughter a litterer.

  At least the girl can’t throw for shit. Even these mushy waves easily return the trash to her. Again and again, it washes up in the suds at her feet. Her beat-up blue Pumas kick the wet sand in frustration. No socks. Tim tells Sue he can offer June the extra spot in his weekend driver’s ed car, if she’s looking for an activity. (He could really use the cash.)

  Sue turns away, massaging one of her ankles. June can start the course tomorrow, Tim hears himself babbling. She’s hardly missed a thing. “Kenny Mole
-Kacy from next door is in the Saturday car so June’ll have a familiar face. Why not? Think about it.”

  Sue thinks. Sue thinks: Perpetually enraged daughter driving around with not one but two creepy neighbor males? Cue some eerie music—minor chords and screechy violins, unusual plucked instruments. It’s a soundtrack that also suits Rose, now calling Sue’s attention. Crossing herself with the hose gun, Rose mutters loudly in Italian. To the dead? The aide? The tree?

  At four feet tall or so, it’s clearly a dwarf variety, grown misshapen toward the sheltering wall, branches cracked from weather and salt. Slender leaves cocooned in fuzz. Nonetheless, hard clusters of fruit drip down in voluptuous defiance. The trunk bark glows a deep, dried-blood red. According to Rose, there’s no rational reason it’s not dead. “It’s a miracle.”

  This pronouncement hangs there awhile, no one daring to challenge it. Sue fingers the teeny bones in Sage’s hand. (Bigger ones have already grown inside her.)

  “Then again,” Rose adds, “ground bone is the superior fertilizer.”

  Tim laughs nervously. “When the time comes, I’ll be sure to sprinkle my mom back there on the rhododendrons.”

  Naturally, everyone turns to take in the hedge of shrubs and the houses that flank it: Sue’s ivy-covered brick square inlaid with tile; Tim’s small, white peeling Cape. Both structures are in total disrepair, but whereas his gives off a homey vibe—its back porch crammed with surfboards and fishing gear—hers could have acquired its haunted rep sans the murder. Every other window is strangled in ivy. The back door, left open, hangs on its rusty hinges. If these aren’t good enough horror-flick images, just pan out to the viny, neglected yard where a strange, wrinkled woman in a wheelchair intermittently rages, and Sue should want to run like hell. But the opposite has happened. The house belongs to her now and she, somehow, to it, bewitched by this ruin on the skinny peninsula between ocean and bay, Rockaway.

  The rhododendron in question is thriving even without the help of ashes, so furry with flowers it looks set to crawl over the lawn, past the new chairs, and out the open door to the sand. Sue’s not sure whether Tim was joking about tossing his mother’s remains on the hedge. What if crematory gardening is some kind of quaint, dark local practice?

  “Well, that’d be fitting,” Rose scoffs, raising her several chins. “Since your mother planted those as a fence to exclude us Impoliteris.”

  “You know that’s not true,” Tim argues unconvincingly. Scary Impoliteri.

  “I know it’s pretty humdrum, rhododendron,” Rose sniffs.

  Sage likes this. “Humdrum rhododendron,” she repeats, drumming out the rhythm on Sue’s thigh with her ketchup bottle. “Humdrum rhododendron. Humdrum—”

  “Of course, she never was one for originality, your mother. Take a chance, I kept telling her. All you gotta do is prune some, fertilize, mind the pH.”

  “Well, you know my mom,” Tim says. “She probably thought pH meant ‘pray harder.’”

  “Humdrum rhododendron,” Sage keeps on, as if hypnotized.

  “My mom prays harder than anyone,” Tim translates for Sue’s benefit. “Even harder than her sister who’s a sister, Sister Agnes. Since you’re also religious—”

  “Me?” Sue asks, following Tim’s gaze to the pocket of her dress. “Oh, this?” The little Bible she’d been reading earlier! “This is nothing!” She must have put it in there when the bell rang, in the fog of pregnancy. “I mean, I’m nothing. I mean, I am converting, but it’s nothing.” She pulls out the book and tries to Frisbee it onto the table for emphasis but it sails past, thuds onto the grass.

  Bibi gasps. “You just threw the Bible!”

  “Not intentionally.”

  “Says Miss Nothing!” The aide recovers and examines the book, pronounces it “vandalized,” and shows it around for all to see “the travesty.”

  On the inside cover, on the occasion of Dan Glassman’s bar mitzvah, the Ladies’ Guild of Temple Beth Shalom wish him an enormous mazel tov. Under and over this inscription, a green Magic Marker scrawl details the P.O. box, et cetera, to write away for Golden Hits of the Seventies on eight-track.

  Sue loves the image of young Dan scrambling to capture the address before it scrolls off his Brooklyn TV screen. (The Bible was evidently the only paper within reach.) But Bibi’s appalled; distressed, even. She clucks, shades her eyes.

  “You’re a Muslim. What do you care?” Rose asks. “If you had any Jewish friends, you’d know that lots of them are loose that way. My Jewish friends the Baums, well, Jewish ex-friends, they’re loose that way.”

  Bibi peeks out from under her hand to see if Tim’s watching her display of moral outrage. Sorry, babe.

  “Humdrum rhododendron,” Sage chants on. “Humdrum rhododendron. Humdrum—”

  “Shhh!” Bibi reaches out and tugs a pigtail.

  The freckles instantly bleach off Sage’s small face. Then they’re gone altogether, hidden in Sue’s dress.

  “Will the florist-delivery guy look in the yard?” Sue asks, hoping to lighten the conversation. Cremation, dead plants, religion, really? She is also curious. “There is a local florist?” Since Rockaway has no bookstore, shoe store, or movie theater, it seems a fair question. “I’m expecting some daisies.”

  “You can eat those,” Rose says, blinking furiously at the tree. “Daisies, nasturtium, sage—”

  The child looks up at the sound of her name. She and Rose exchange pouts.

  “Healthier than Fig Newtons?” Sue asks, stroking her daughter’s still baby-soft hair, the color of orange sherbet. “Is that what you mean?

  But Rose doesn’t seem to know. What she means, where she is, anything. “Che cosa? Che cosa?” Her voice has dropped a full octave. “Where is your mother, Timmy? Off with my husband?”

  “Tim. I’m Tim now. You’re not making any sense.”

  “The nerve of her, to call herself a Christian.”

  “Rose,” Bibi soothes. “You’re confused, Rosie.”

  Sue is too. The old lady’s face has gone all pinched and twitchy. Is she having a stroke?

  Bibi blames it on the medicine she won’t take. “Somebody please tell her to take it. I’d be—”

  “Take it,” Sage says.

  “That’s your mother’s house that you’re living in, Timmy. Where is she? Where did you put your mother?” Tim drops his mangled face into his hands but Rose will not stop. “Answer me, Timmy, where is she, Timmy, Timmy—”

  “Akron!” He finally breaks. “Since September. You know that, Rose. You all at the church had that good-bye thing right before she went home.”

  “Home?” In Rose’s trance, the word sounds alien.

  “Ohio.”

  Which is when Dan, in his plaid golf wear, appears, booming, “Buckeye State!”

  In slow motion, Tim rises and the two men shake on it.

  * * *

  Bibi’s Ford Fiesta is parked diagonally mid-driveway as if to take up the most space possible. Consequently, the rabbi’s station wagon juts into the street. Sy’s reaching over from the passenger seat and leaning on the horn. The continuous B-flat lifts Sue from her chair and around the house to the car. On the way, she reflects on the all-too-common scenario in which she tells a student to play a B but a B-flat keeps sounding.

  “Are you out of your mind, Sy? We have neighbors!” As if on cue, Kenny Mole-Kacy skateboards past, holding up his fingers in a peace sign.

  Sy clucks at Sue. “We’ve been waiting. What’s the matter with your hair?” He touches his own badly dyed comb-over. “We’re waiting ten minutes now. Didn’t Dan tell you?”

  “There’s a lot going on back there.”

  “Well, I wanted you to meet Rabbi Larry. Rabbi, Suzanne. Suzanne, Rabbi. He’ll be doing your conversion on Sunday.”

  “I know,” Sue says. “Hi again.”

  The rabbi nods. They’ve met before. You don’t forget a werewolf in a yellow crocheted yarmulke. The first meeting was only a few months ago, the setup th
e same, with Sy, in a car, post-golf. So why are they pretending otherwise?

  “Finally netted her, Seymour?” the rabbi asks through his mat of graying facial hair.

  “Took nineteen years. But, woo-wee, one goy down.” Then the two men actually high-five.

  “Don’t look so solemn,” the rabbi tells Sue, holding out a moist hand, furry all over, even the knuckles. “We’re just goofing around.” She takes his paw, invites him in.

  “Yeah, come!” Sy seconds, squinting at Bibi’s pristine Ford.

  Rabbi Larry taps his Rolex. “Thanks, but Mindy already calls herself a golf widow. If I hit any traffic on the Belt—”

  “A rabbi can’t spare five minutes for a dying man?”

  “Sy! You stop with that.” Sue helps her father-in-law out of the car. His cancer did leave a few range-of-motion issues, but the rabbi’s right. “This absurd insistence that you’re dying! It’s killing me!”

  The rabbi waves. “See you at Sue’s Jew party Sunday.”

  “Shhh.” Sy bangs the side of the car.

  “It’s a surprise,” Sue says, laughing.

  The station wagon backs up, turns into the street, stops. The rabbi’s arm shoots out the window with a sheet of paper. “Forgot to give you this,” he calls merrily. “Fill it out and bring it with.”

  Sue hurries over, forgetting she can’t hurry. Halfway down the flagstone path, she stops to let the baby finish an Irish step dance on her pelvic floor.

  “Never mind,” the rabbi says, rechecking his watch. “The form’s optional.”

  Enter Kenny Mole-Kacy. He zips over on his skateboard, swipes the paper from Rabbi Larry’s hand, and rides it smoothly to Sue.

  “Thank you?”

  “No prob. Tell June I said yo.”

  * * *

  Sue knows it’s useless to call but Dan can’t help it. Fridays are the worst. Nothing like that first attempt at weekend home repairs to stoke his sense that chaos is imminent. One mess with the caulk and he’s crouched on the far side of the bed, stabbing his doctor’s number into the cordless. In the background is the soft burble of the radio he’s kept on every waking hour since Bush color-coded the threat level (yellow). To “stay alert,” Dan feels, is his patriotic duty. But how alert can he be if he fails to notice his own hugely pregnant wife filling up the doorway not two feet from him?