by Laura Tucker
That afternoon, though, I wished I’d thought to call it. That’s how mad I was: I would have voluntarily signed up to listen to Linda yammer on about aerobics classes and loft laws all the way out there rather than spend a single second longer with Alex the disgusting traitor. Unfortunately, the one time I wanted it, Maggie beat me to it, so I was stuck with him in the back.
Linda gave me a big, suffocating hug and told me in a bright, chipper voice to give my bag to Alex, who had taken over the loading of the trunk. Then she kept talking at me in the same voice she uses with Maggie’s friends, telling me all about how she liked to open the house before Memorial Day, so she could be ready and relax and just enjoy Memorial Day, like I knew when that was or cared about any of it.
She stopped talking when she saw the blankness on my face. Linda’s big on manners, so I made sure to say, “Thank you for having me,” in an automatic way, like everything was normal, like the invitation had been her idea, like she’d wanted me to come.
Then I saw the sadness in her face, too, and I felt bad.
I took my bag to the back of the car where Richard was helping Alex wrestle about twenty navy and white canvas tote bags into the trunk. I’d never seen anything in my whole life like those tote bags: all different sizes, but identical otherwise, with names sewn on the side of them. Two of them belonged to Alex. I knew they were his because they said so, right there on the side: ALEX, in neat, navy blue embroidery.
I’d sworn never to speak to him again. For this, though, I would make an exception.
“Nice tote bag,” I said, my voice dripping with mean. He turned away from me without saying anything, but I saw the ugly flush crawl up his neck. The cords stood out on his skinny arms as he shoved the big bag into the back. He didn’t look at me the whole rest of the time it took him to pack the car.
Fine with me.
It was time to go. Linda was in the front seat, checking her mirrors like she didn’t drive this car all the time; Maggie was next to her, rooting through the snack bag. Alex and Richard did a lackluster version of their secret handshake—their hearts weren’t in it—and then Alex went around the far side, got in, and slammed the door.
That left Richard and me on the sidewalk.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” I said, unable to keep the rage out of my voice. “We were so close. All we needed to do was call my dad. He would have helped.”
Richard nodded, unconvinced, and I’d almost given up on him saying anything back when it came, soft. “Some things are just too big, Ollie.”
He reached around and opened the back seat door for me, gentlemanly like a boy in an old movie.
I slammed past him into my seat next to Alex without looking at either one of them.
* * *
The inside of Linda’s station wagon is all black leather. It’s like Darth Vader’s bathroom in there.
Linda started the engine, then leaned over to help Maggie open a bag of yogurt-covered raisins from the health-food store, reminding her to offer them around the car before taking one herself.
I said “No, thank you” to the bag she held out instead of what I was thinking, which is that I would sooner lick a dog’s eyeball than eat a yogurt-covered raisin.
Richard was propped against the door of the building next to Alex’s, arms crossed, watching us go. Alex’s building might have been a freshly painted navy blue, but the one next door had peeling iron columns out front, covered with graffiti and posters. Linda put the car into gear and Richard raised one hand in farewell, but I didn’t acknowledge it, or him.
My other former friend sat next to me, staring out his own window, air-drumming against his leg, oblivious to the poisonous thoughts I was spitting his way. Then, right when I thought I couldn’t possibly hate him any more, Alex started to bounce his leg.
Already as far over on my side of the back seat as I could go, I turned my whole body away, pressing my forehead against the cool of the window as we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn.
REAR WINDOW
It troubled me, how quickly the streets I knew were replaced by ones I didn’t. My dad took me to Brooklyn sometimes for art supplies, but we always went the same way, and it wasn’t this one. I looked out the window as Linda’s station wagon climbed up from the grimy, grey city streets onto a highway that cut through them, with five- and six-story buildings on either side. The top floors were the same height as the road, so you could look right into the windows.
I kept my eyes peeled; in this Hitchcock movie my dad loves, Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly accidentally witness a murder through somebody’s window. But all I saw was a woman yelling at someone I couldn’t see while she was making a pot of coffee, and a guy by himself on a couch, watching TV and picking his nose.
Looking into those rooms made me think of my model bedroom, of the sound it had made when everything I thought I needed hit the bottom of Bill’s can with a hollow thump. I thought of the big room at home, the stale, abandoned feeling it had gotten when I’d stopped cleaning up. It was completely empty, now that I was gone.
The short, narrow buildings gave way to wide industrial ones, buildings that had once been factories, like mine. Some of them still were, but lots of the big windows were smashed and broken, and I watched a pigeon fly right in through one. Maybe I’d come home to find pigeons filling the big room, adding my discarded peanut shells and pieces of my mom’s sculpture to their nests. I imagined red-tipped matches twined into a tidy pile of twigs, lengths of knotted butcher’s twine lacing together a system of tiny branches, the embroidered tea bag flying on top of the nest like a ship’s flag. My mom would like that.
Alex was looking out his own window, checking out the graffiti scrolling by. Sometimes you could see how the artists had climbed onto a roof or scaffolding nearby; other times, the brightly colored scrawl looked like it had gotten there by magic. I knew that Alex wasn’t looking at the art, but figuring out how he’d get up there, finding foot- and hand-holds in the brickwork where a normal person would only see a crack.
Then I thought about the way I’d hit him outside of my mom’s room, and the hollow feeling in my gut got worse, as if I’d hit myself.
I turned back to my own view, suddenly restless. I didn’t want to climb, like Alex—I wanted to run, as hard and fast as I could, my lungs pumping furiously to keep up with my legs so I could whistle by all these feelings before the sour egg of anger and regret and guilt and fear in my chest made a permanent home there.
Except that I was stuck in the stupid back seat.
What was Apollo going to do now? Would my mom think that it was me, not Alex, who had told? Would she be angry? Would she get up? Would my dad come home? Could he?
After a few minutes, the buildings outside my window gave way to shabby little two-story houses, and then finally to trees. We were on Long Island, Linda said. It looked like the country. I watched the highway signs pass by, silently repeating the unfamiliar names of the towns we were passing through: Merrick, Wantagh, Massapequa, Islip. The words had a weight in my mouth.
I leaned my head against the seat back and closed my eyes, feeling the doorknob to my mom’s room in my hand again, the way it had refused to turn. But it’s too easy for tears to leak out when your eyes are closed, so I opened them again and looked out the window, watching the poles go by.
* * *
“Get a twenty out of my purse, Alex. I’ll drop the three of you at the terminal so you can buy tickets while I find parking.” Linda met my confused eyes in the rearview mirror. “We take a ferry over, Ollie. There are no cars on the Island.”
We got out of the car, and Linda and Alex unloaded that mountain of tote bags. I thought a ferry terminal would look like Grand Central or Penn Station, but it was nothing more than a couple of benches facing the water underneath a broken-down-looking metal roof.
Tired and distracted as I was, I
was curious, too. Maggie showed me everything she thought I needed to see: the little hut where you could buy clam chowder or an egg-and-cheese sandwich; the machine that squashed pennies into souvenirs; the ticket booth, like at the movies, with two bored teenagers chewing gum behind the glass as they pushed our tickets through the mouse hole.
The biggest surprise, though, was Linda. As soon as she came back from parking the car, she turned into a different person. The sadness and tension were still there in her face. But she knew everyone, the girls selling the tickets and some older people already waiting on the benches. While Maggie was leaning out to toss the Cheerios she’d brought to feed the ducks, Linda wasn’t yelling at her to sit quietly or telling her to be careful, even though the only thing between Maggie and the water was a skinny piece of rope. Instead, she sat on a bench with her eyes closed and her face tilted up to the sun. She didn’t even look like herself.
I’d never been on a boat before, but I didn’t say that to anyone. And, as committed as I was to having a terrible time, the boat ride was amazing. We sat up top, where the wind whipped the words right out of Maggie’s mouth once we got out of the harbor and started going fast. I tried to copy Linda by closing my eyes and letting the weak spring sun warm my face, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. There was too much to see.
Just when I had started to get used to the rush of the black water churning up white foam and the wind on my face and the loud motor underneath me, the boat slowed down again. We were coming up to a long dock. Little houses dotted the land behind.
Two little girls in pastel sweat suits were jumping up and down and waving at the end of the dock. Maggie wormed her way through the grown-ups to be one of the first ones off the boat, and we were still waiting at the top of the stairs when we saw her burst out from below. One of the girls pulled up her sweatshirt to show Maggie the turquoise bathing suit she was wearing underneath, even though it wasn’t anywhere near warm enough to swim, and then the three of them ran off, without Linda or any other grown-up.
Forgetting that I wasn’t talking to him, I looked over at Alex. When we were together, it was our job to worry about Maggie. Linda was there, but she was talking to an old guy in a tan vest with a million pockets.
Alex shook his head, exasperated, like I hadn’t been paying attention. “She’s fine.”
I stomped past him, down the metal stairs and off the boat.
A friend of Linda’s was waiting for us on the dock, holding the handle of a little red wagon. She was tan, with long hair, flowy blue clothes, and lots of silver jewelry, including a delicate toe ring on one of her bare feet. She hugged Linda for a long, long time. She smiled at me but didn’t introduce herself.
Alex didn’t acknowledge her, either, but she poked him in the stomach as he passed, and I saw him smile as he twisted away; ignoring each other must have been an old game between them.
It was cutesy and I hated it.
Linda and her friend walked ahead with the wagon piled with tote bags, already talking intently and leaving me with Alex. Even though he was mad at me, he was happy to be there, I could tell.
I was, too. This is why it’s hard to be a curious person. I wanted to scuff my feet, ignoring everything like a furious teenager on TV, but I couldn’t stop myself from looking around.
Since there weren’t any cars, there weren’t any roads, either—just narrow weather-beaten wooden pathways weaving their way through the houses. There were lots of greys in the washed-out wood shingles and the damp sand in the front yards, but they couldn’t have been more different from the greys on Greene Street.
I could feel my brain flooding with details. Drawing is all about details—the details you put in, and the ones you choose not to include, too. But everything I was looking at was so new, so unfamiliar, that I couldn’t sort through what to leave out.
Linda and her friend stopped the wagon and started to unload the grocery bags Linda had brought from the city. I knew I should help, but I was too busy staring in astonishment at the tiny house they’d stopped in front of, which looked like the kind we used to make out of construction paper in kindergarten: a triangle roof on top of a fat square, with a paned window on each side of the front door.
Alex grabbed a few of the bags out of the wagon and went up a little ramp to the front door. Even the doorknob was tiny.
“Up,” Alex said. I retrieved my duffel and followed him up a narrow wooden staircase off the living room.
The little room at the top of the stairs looked like it was straight out of a fairy tale. The ceiling was pitched so steeply that I couldn’t stand up except in the exact middle of the room. There was a twin bed pushed up against each of the sloping walls, each one of them with its own patchwork quilt. In between them was a table with a white lamp on it. Above it, right up near the peak of the roof, was a tiny round window.
Alex threw his bag on the bed on the right, and Linda’s voice came through the floorboards at us. “C’mon, guys; people are heading down to the dock.”
WATCH THE BLUES
I followed Alex downstairs. Linda was in the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of white wine. There were pots and pans hanging from nails on the walls, and the stove only had two burners, like the hot plate in the studio. It surprised me how different the house was from Linda’s loft, which was all white leather and glass and metal, everything super clean and modern and untouchable.
This house was lived-in. I loved it.
The toe ring lady, whose name I still didn’t know, grabbed three cold cans of apple juice out of the fridge for us, the skinny ones with a sticker on top. I helped Maggie pull hers off.
When we left the house, I turned right, the opposite of the way we’d come in. Alex went the other way. “The sun sets on the bay side,” he told me, like I knew where that was. He was barefoot. I thought about leaving my sneakers in the pile of shoes outside the door but worried about them getting stolen; I only had one pair with me. I left them on.
The dock was a wooden platform over the water where a cluster of grown-ups were drinking wine. There weren’t a lot of people there, maybe because it was the weekend before Memorial Day. Maggie went over to some kids fishing off the end of the dock, using pieces of what looked like raw chicken, although I chose not to investigate further. She squatted next to one of the boys, looking into a deep white bucket at the fish he’d caught. I could see its shadow flitting around inside.
Alex walked along the railing of the dock. The railing was a flat board, wide enough to sit on, but only just. There was a ten-foot drop from the railing to the water. He sped up, leaping like a mountain goat along the edge, going faster and faster. I couldn’t believe he was doing it in front of Linda—and that she was seeing it and wasn’t screaming her head off—but it didn’t even seem like she cared. When running along that rail got boring, Alex turned upside down and walked along it balanced on his hands.
The dad with the fish was impressed, and he nudged Linda to look over.
I thought he was going to get it then for sure, but all Linda said was, “Oh, Alex. Please.” It was more of a grumble than a real complaint, and she turned away and walked toward a small group of laughing grown-ups at the edge of the dock without making him get down.
We were there for about an hour. I sat on the high, splintery bench, swinging my legs and wishing I’d brought my notebook. If I’d had it, I would have drawn the loose coil of skinny rope wrapped carelessly around a pole, like it wasn’t the only thing holding a shiny white and royal-blue boat called Seas the Day. I would have drawn the pool of water under the spigot where Maggie rinsed off her feet, and the pair of twisted purple sunglasses someone had stepped on, resting on the rim of the trash.
When Linda made her way back toward us, her empty wineglass dangling upside down between her fingers, the sun had started to set, and the sky was filled with bands of lavender and orange and pink. “Still dry, I see,” she sai
d to Alex, who took a little bow. “We’re going to get dinner started. Merle’s going to stay down for a little while. Come on back after the ball drops, you two.”
I watched Maggie and Linda walk away, holding hands. Maggie said something that made Linda crack up, a real belly laugh with her head thrown back, and I understood that Linda wasn’t holding Maggie’s hand like she does in the city, worried about kidnappers and cars, but because she wanted to.
I turned away fast before I could miss my mom.
The group of grown-ups down by the water had thinned out a little, and they were quieter now, too, maybe because the sky was getting wilder with every minute. The sun was the least of it; the sky was flooded with bands of color now, the clouds shaping the stripes of light.
Merle—the lady with the toe ring—was standing beside me. “Watch the blues,” she said, and she was right. The oranges and pinks might have been stealing the scene, but the blues were incredible. I named every one I could see under my breath: celadon, aquamarine, cerulean, but there were hundreds of blues in there that I had no words for, smoky purples and faded teals, colors even Apollo might not have known the names for.
The ball really did drop. The huge orangey sun turned into a half, then a quarter, then a sliver. A minute later, it was gone, and the ferocious pink glow peeking out from behind the horizon was all that was left of the day.
A handful of the people still watching clapped.
I felt embarrassed for them. “It goes down every day,” I said to Merle.
“Maybe it’s a way to say thank you,” she said.
I scowled. There were a lot of things about this day I didn’t feel particularly thankful for. “To who?”
Merle was still looking at the sky. “It’s not the worst thing, is it? To celebrate the extraordinary in the ordinary?” I knew she was teasing me, but it was also the most perfect description of my mom’s art I’d ever heard.