Swell Read online

  “Grandpa’s busy,” says Sy, wresting his nine-inch TV from a cardboard box marked KITCHEN MISC.

  “Radio and TV?” Sue whines. Dan’s trusty transistor has been murmuring on the counter this whole time.

  Sy knocks on his liver-spotted forehead. “Call me superstitious but I’m gonna catch every second of this series come hell or high water.”

  “Hell is high water,” Dan points out, “in Rockaway.” And to Sage: “C’mon, babe, get dressed.”

  Sage shakes her unraveling pigtails and holds out a palm. “Money, please?”

  Candles, prayer, baruch atah. Sue wills herself to focus. All those Friday nights when Dan’s mother, Estelle, performed the ritual—where had Sue’s attention been? She’d like to say it had been on music—Stravinsky’s genius use of the bassoon, the autobiographical opera she planned to write someday, or even the slow progress of the concert band she directed at M.S. 250. But if she’s honest, back then, as now, her mind was probably on dessert. The warm, gooey Godiva inside Estelle’s architectural meringues; honey-cardamom apple cake, so light; butterfly-shaped crisps that dissolved on your tongue in a sweet, lemony mist.

  Perhaps if Sue herself had baked, the prayer would come back to her. She’d done her best to replicate her mother-in-law’s Sabbath table—silver candlesticks and kiddush cup, bone china, a braided challah, which she had to cross a bridge to find, under a square of heirloom velvet. But everyone refused to eat in the “haunted” dining room, and Estelle’s lace cloth, too big for the kitchen table, is puddled on the floor. Without owner or context, her mother-in-law’s possessions are fast draining luster. Estelle’s decorative whisk broom is nearly indistinguishable from Rose’s actual whisk broom. Her collectible tins blend a little too well with the rusty cans stamped with expiration dates going back to the 1960s. What were stylish antiques in the Glassmans’ Willow Place brownstone—the leather trunk, the china doll, the barber pole—have here all been subsumed by and demoted to clutter.

  On the open shelves, Rose has left chipped service for twenty, a glass for every beverage from malted to shot. In the cabinets, all manner of platters and pans are crammed in with molds, whisks, funnels, and skewers. Peering into a coffinlike freezer filled with mysterious cuts of meat, June swears she sees a pinkie. Can she please be excused?

  “No,” Sue says, loudly enough to drown out Dan’s “Yes.”

  Only the silverware is conspicuously absent. Sneaky Maureen must have decamped with it, just as Sy sold Estelle’s set before moving.

  “Oh, let him do it, the old miser,” Sue had said when Dan complained. “He gave you his entire business.”

  “And that’s somehow my fault? You’re saying it’s my fault?”

  “I’m saying let him sell the damn silver. Who cares?”

  Dan cares for the same reasons he’s crouched in front of Sage. Because silver looks more proper than stainless; clothes more proper than nudity. Because a boy is what you should want to get after two girls. Or so Sue supposes Dan thinks. Dan holds the miniature garment by the shoulders, jostling the phantom child inside. “No one gets paid for being naked here. Sage. Put this on!” Then to offset a sternness even he must realize is out of character, he adds, “Put this on and I’ll give you a quarter, sweetie.”

  “No!”

  “What about Ed?” June butts in, clearly out of boredom. “Is Ed wearing anything?”

  “Brown hair.”

  Ed too came with the house.

  “Well, maybe Ed will light the candles,” Sy grouches. Though free of its box, his TV is still in need of a working outlet. “Or how about you, Dan? You’re looking rather femmy over there by the stove.”

  Dan’s shoulders heave but, as usual, it’s Sue who reacts. “Did you honestly think I’d start cooking just because I agreed to convert?”

  “Worth a try.” With the heavy TV under his arm, Sy sets out across the room.

  June says, “Don’t worry, Sue. No one wants your food.”

  As if in response, the back door lets out its rusty C-minor chord and Bibi calls, “Hello? Hello? What’s cooking, Mommy?” Then there’s the creak and hum of the wheelchair traveling over the dining-room tile.

  Sue quickly lifts Sage into her arms. “We’re going for a ride. Where are the car keys?”

  “Now?” Dan asks.

  Sage invites Ed to come too.

  Sue: “We need milk.”

  “Now?”

  June’s on her feet. “Can I drive? For practice? I’m in driver’s ed as of tomorrow so—”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “No. I am. Dad said—”

  “Driving? On Shabbat?” Sy heaves in disapproval. As if he’s so devout! Lighting the candles two hours before sunset.

  “We need milk.”

  Sy regards Sue from his crooked height, head to toe, and, in the dismissive tone he’s perfected over years as the boss, says, “Well, I suppose you could use the walk, pudge.”

  June dives to the floor, scooping her backpack (the egg) to safety ahead of Sue’s temper. Sue is tamping the feelings down, down. The blob of rage settles in her sinuses, blurring the room, which now includes Rose, dozing, and Bibi, tilting her hat of hair leftward. “Feeling a little hormonal, Mommy?”

  That’s it. Even Dan understands that Sue must go. He extracts the car keys (and a fifty) from his khakis and places them, somberly, in her open palms. Then, over her own objection, Sue tosses them to June.

  * * *

  Parents aren’t supposed to mind about being liked. “I can’t be your friend and your mother,” Sue’s own mom, a divorced linguistics professor, had too often said. But their entire relationship has now boiled down to seeing each other for Christmas, every other Thanksgiving, and the rare NYU-area lunch. So fuck that—Sue’s minding. If this means letting June drive with her forearms down 116th Street, well…Rockaway’s main commercial strip is already like an outer-borough version of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Even a teenager can see you have to slow down or risk hitting something.

  Grizzly, bug-eyed heads pop out from SROs and Irish bars, sunbathers whoop and weave toward the A train, minivans loop the block as if on a track, their back windows open for panting retrievers, or closed, kids’ faces smushed against the glass. A tan panhandler sporting a puka-shell necklace tries to clean their windshield with his filthy Corona towel. The show has Sage, in the backseat, clapping, and Sue begins to sing.

  “‘Oh-ho-ho, a pirate’s life for me’! And Ed!” She’s tickled by her own analogy. And though they don’t actually need milk, who can resist a shop with the preggo-friendly name of Pickles ’n’ Pies? “That’s for us! We’re stopping!” Raspberry rhubarb for Sue and, while they’re here, chocolate chips, more Fig Newtons. Chocolate pudding.

  After that they really don’t require anything but to suck in the warm, sugary dusk streaming through the Camry’s four open windows. Sue was silly to worry. June’s doing fine. Oh, to be sixteen again and know everything. When every sentence starts with I.

  “I feel like I’m in a parade.” Sue smiles as they exit down the peninsula’s main drag, Rockaway Beach Boulevard. American flags festoon the median, the windows of homes, the street lamps and tree fences. “I feel like waving.”

  “You having some kind of glucose rush?” June asks, breaking the spell. “What number cookie is that for you today, Suzanne?”

  Deflated, Sue passes her half-eaten snack to Sage. Lashed to her car seat, the kid’s busy lecturing Ed on Miss Katy’s preschool dos and don’ts. “Friends and ketchup do stay in the cubby.” Sage’s magenta Barbie underpants are already coated with crumbs but she happily accepts the chocolate chip. When it refuses to balance on the Heinz bottle, she tries it on her nose, the top of her head, and so on, until it’s resting beneath the driver’s seat. (Six months later, when Sue finds it there, it will, alarmingly, still be as soft as today.)

  But for now, Sue can’t help holding the waxy bakery bag close to her face, inhaling. June’s con
firmed what Sy said—pudge. She’s a cow; it’s established. Delusional of her to think she’d be able to drive even five blocks without being reminded of that old man! After all, it was Sy who leased them this car (so Dan could be his driver). Sy who had the dream of living in Rockaway (near ocean, Shea, and his best friend, Bob Baum). It seems to Sue that Sy will have to die for Sue to get her husband back (if she ever truly had him). But what kind of person thinks that? Sue is waiting for her father-in-law to die.

  “Hands at ten and two, please,” she reminds June. “Safety.”

  “You’re not my driver’s ed teacher.”

  “Hands at ten and two.”

  “What you are is…” June glances at the place on Sue’s dress where the fabric pop-pops from the baby’s rhythmic kick. (This is what it must feel like to be possessed.) “You’re a professional breeder.”

  “June!” Sue covers her belly reflexively. “Was that necessary?”

  “Um…was it necessary to have a third kid because you couldn’t think what else to do?”

  “Oh, fuck you!” Shit! How could Sue say that? “I can’t believe I just said that.”

  Sue had quit teaching when they moved, vowing to finally compose StuyTown, her opera about growing up in Peter Cooper Village with its twelve playgrounds and encircling gangs. That Sue has so far written only half of one aria really makes June’s comment sting. Still, you don’t say fuck you to a kid, your kid, ever. “I am so, so sorry.”

  June shrugs her narrow shoulders. Huge tits like Sue’s, poor thing. Soon the backaches will start. Is she unfazed or numb? Hard to read. At sixteen, she’s nothing like the earnest pothead Sue had been. Nor was she ever like any of Sue’s Upper West Side music students—uncertain but diligent girls with blow-dried hair, mouths crowded with braces; greasy boys sucking on reeds, dreaming of blow jobs. At sixteen, June seems more like a twenty-five-year-old genius who just happened to find herself in jail.

  “Red light,” Sue says as the car bucks to a halt.

  “Ed threw up in his mouth,” Sage complains.

  Across the street, St. Francis de Sales sits on the corner with its sweet, yellow pentagonal face. Sue blinks at the silver cross atop the roof peak. At this distance it appears delicate enough to wear around your neck on a chain. Not that she’s ever worn one. (Her parents were lapsed WASPs, academics. The closest they had ever come to belief was a stint of proselytizing for Esperanto in the ’70s.) So why does the gory, concrete symbol resonate with Sue more than an abstract Jewish star? To review: There’s Sue’s favorite cousin, Dale, who became a pastor after gambling away his wife’s inheritance on fantasy sports. There’s her passion for chocolate Easter eggs nestled in bright green plastic grass. There’s tinsel—the word alone fills her with a shivery gladness. And the clean smell of evergreen. After that? Nothing.

  “I’m not having a bar mitzvah,” June says, following Sue’s gaze to the church. “Just to say.” Her aggrieved green eyes, ringed in liner, keep reminding Sue of two tiny flat tires.

  “Bat mitzvah.”

  “Well, I’m not. Did Jesus?”

  “What?”

  “Have a bat mitzvah?”

  “Bar mitzvah. No.”

  “You just said bat! Stop changing everything!”

  “I’m—”

  “If I didn’t have one when Grandma nagged me for two years straight, I’m not about—”

  “You loved Jake Leibowitz’s bar mitzvah,” Sue reminds her. At the ice-skating-themed affair, it snowed indoors and they all got chocolate trophies. “You went on about it endlessly.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You get chocolate,” Sage mimics, bribing Ed. “Stay in the cubby like Miss Katy says and you get chocolate. And presents.”

  June turns to squint out Sue’s window and on through the church schoolyard chain link. This is where they brought the bodies after the plane crash, said Sheila Kacy from next door. At the moment, the space is occupied by four middle-aged guys shooting hoops.

  “They look like Tim’s friends,” June observes dreamily. “Do you see him?”

  Sue laughs. “Like he ever leaves his backyard.”

  “He leaves! He leaves to surf, fish, grocery-shop, teach driver’s ed! What did he say about me again?”

  “That there’s room in his Saturday class. But I’m not sure I feel comfortable—”

  “That’s all he said? There’s room?”

  A three-pointer crashes through the rusty, netless basket. “That’s what I’m talking about!” says the shooter’s teammate. The two run at each other, smash chests, then loudly regret it.

  Green light. As the car leaps into action, a round fetal part—skull? heel? butt?—presses on Sue’s bladder.

  “I told you, Ed. Miss Katy said—”

  “Tim asked for me personally?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Can’t you just say yes?” June hisses from the gap between her front teeth. “Can’t you ever make me feel good?”

  “Miss Katy’s dos and don’ts —”

  “Screw Miss Katy!” June accelerates. “Screw that controlling bitch!”

  Actually, Dan’s admitted to having this very daydream while watching the young teacher’s pretty British tongue poke out from her thick wet lips to bat around a juice-box straw. Dan loves reporting these reveries, and no wonder—they’re inspired. After nineteen years he still excels at this, their secret game. In return, Sue often feels compelled to fictionalize. Faking a fantasy is way harder than faking an orgasm but sometimes easier than telling the truth: ice cream man.

  “Slow down, please.”

  As June veers onto their dead-end street; one wheel rides up and over the curb. Sue stomps on an invisible brake. The red backpack slides off the seat, onto the floor.

  “You know you look like a total spaz, Ma?”

  All right, Sue deserves this. For the fuck you. She deserves way worse. June’s right. She’s too old and nuts to be having a third child. There was midlife panic in her decision to keep the baby. Parenting has many downsides but it rarely feels like a waste of time. She stares into the red backpack, which the commotion has left partially unzipped. There’s egg number 3 (swathed in maxipads), a wad of gum-encased coins, a Fresca bottle.

  “Please slow down, please,” Sue repeats, trying to sound as nice as possible. “You don’t want to kill someone.”

  June laughs. “There you’re wrong. I’m gunning for a Mole-Kacy, or a Yeller, as Grandpa would say.”

  Through the open window, they can indeed hear yelling, a lot, followed by gunshots, more yelling, more gunshots. “Kenneth! Stop that!” “Stop that right now!” The Mole-Kacy parents stand between the morning glory–festooned pillars of their front porch. Dr. Mole, the bald dad, wears his white medical coat juxtaposed with tight cutoff jeans. Ms. Kacy, the taller and platinum-haired mom, sports a maroon-pantsuit-and-pumps ensemble. Though divorced, the two apparently still live and yell together. “Kenneth? Are you listening?” “Cut that the hell out!”

  Ignoring them, Kenny continues to pump BBs into the DEAD-END STREET sign. Only when he sees June behind the wheel does he drop the air rifle and salute.

  “Can we move again?” June asks, but the reckless way she swings into the driveway is obviously for Kenny’s benefit. She shows off further by leaning on the horn to blast away his younger sibs.

  Like Blacky and Tim, the Mole-Kacy boys are magnetized to the Glassmans’ home. When not ringing the bell and running, they’re using the property for a beach shortcut or falling (up and down the stoop, over the flowerpots, off their bikes), wailing, “I’m gonna sue! I’m gonna sue your daddy!” at poor confused Sage, who keeps thinking they’re referring to her mother, Sue.

  Tonight they’ve found a new game—dancing on the roof of Bibi’s Ford Fiesta.

  “They’re not still here?” Sue moans, hauling herself out of the car. “They’re still here?”

  The boys scatter, not understanding that it’s Rose Sue wants gone or why
their new neighbor has tears in her eyes. “They’re still here?”

  “Who’s that?” one of Tim’s friends yowls from the other side of the hedge. Sue immediately ducks. Those blockheads are back again? They just left! “Must be the ghost of Gary Imp!” A coughing fit drowns out the rest of his comments, something about “homeland insecurity.”

  Behind Sue, June also gets low, listening. Sage crouches behind June. The three of them creep the remaining length of the driveway, beyond the garage and stinky shower house, to the massive rhododendron.

  “We shouldn’t eavesdrop,” Sue whispers and June agrees and they move a little closer.

  * * *

  “I always despised that paisano Gary Imp,” Bean confesses between more hacking. “Remember when he beat up Barry Lowenstein’s dad in the schoolyard? The guy comes to—”

  “Let Tim talk!” Chris D. scolds. To Tim’s amazement, his friends (friends?) are really paying attention. Even the Mets game they fussed to watch via two extension cords has been turned low. It’s like the old days, before Tim got too drunk to be coherent. That is, just the right amount drunk, when he could hold a whole bar full of people rapt.

  “Listening to you yak about flowers is worse than listening to my wife tell me one of her dreams,” Chris D. said just this morning. But for some reason, he’s all ears when it comes to Rose and her aide. First they show up unannounced to visit the old lady’s cremated relatives. Next, they won’t leave. Finally, they’ve weaseled their way into the house.

  You can see them now, plain as death, across the hedge in the lit square of the Impol—no, Glassman—kitchen. Bibi’s curves get snaky as she cracks up at…another of the old lady’s redhead jokes? Something more sinister? Either way, Tim “smells danger.”

  “I called it!” Chris D. hoots, twisting his wedding ring around and around his finger. “Didn’t I call it? Bibi propositioned the Butterman!”

  “You called it,” Bean admits.

  “Give us the deets!”

  Tim’s disappointed. “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “A lovely tree. Long, with real juicy—”

  “Chris, peel your eyes off the aide for one sec? Now check out the grip Rose has on that bag.”