The nurse tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Vamos, poca niña.”
After the baby had been sucked out of her, the pain in her stomach felt like her soul leaving. The nurse from before said a prayer in Spanish while Irene lay in the bed sweating, exhausted, emptied, as the doctor pounded the sides of the air conditioner in the window.
“Not only am I a doctor, but a plumber, electrician, groundskeeper, and accountant as well,” he said, attempting humor.
Irene smiled.
She was doped up still, and she took his hands and turned them over and said, “Don’t hurt these.”
Such beautiful hands, she remembers now, standing in her living room as her father drones on about an “artist” friend of his, Herb Calderhead, who used to sculpt wood with a chain saw until he cut off his own foot.
“That’s enough about Herb,” her mother says. “Where are my babies?”
“Come and see,” Irene says.
Nathan and Andrew are much more receptive to Irene’s father than to Red. He’s the kind of grandpa who makes farting noises with his armpit and clicks his tongue loud like a crack when he knocks their heads with his school ring. Her mother speaks in Swedish to tease them, and the boys try to mimic her, while Robert’s mother can’t bother to keep her cigarette smoke out of the children’s faces.
When Robert returns that evening, later than usual, he shouts toward the sunroom for Irene, who is playing cards with her parents while having a nightcap.
“Didn’t you see their car when you drove in?” she asks as he sits on a stool in the kitchen with a beer. “Why do you smell like a fishing boat?”
“I went for a swim.”
“In this weather?”
“Is that so strange?”
“Honey, don’t be rude. You know how much my father loves you.”
“Is your mother sauced yet?”
“On her way.”
“All right, then.”
Robert and Cliff shake hands and hug like proper men, with an arm on the shoulder.
“Sylvia, I didn’t even recognize you,” Robert says, glancing at Irene, who sharpens her eyes at him as he embraces her mother gently and then playfully nips her behind, which makes her chuckle. Her mother slaps Robert’s chest and blushes. When Robert opens a fresh box of cigars, even Sylvia has one. The four of them sit in the low light drinking and smoking.
Irene is silent while Robert commandeers the conversation. This is the only way he knows how to be. It’s not that he needs the attention, so much as he invites it with his presence, and not just his size, his black hair and black eyes, but by the way he so easily crosses one leg over the other as though natural for a man of his masculinity, and the way his top lip curls, and how he snaps his fingers to put emphasis on sound, a bang, what he heard the other night outside, and saw in the morning it was a dead pigeon that had flown into the window and dropped to the ground.
“Oh, dear,” her mother says, transfixed.
Robert veers into politics, boat licenses, and something about a coyote roaming around one of his subdivisions, how he hired someone to track it down, an ex-army sniper, a real badass. Her parents are fascinated and, by this time, quite drunk.
“What’s that about a boat?” Irene asks.
Robert stops what he’s saying about the sniper and looks at her.
“I missed something. You said a boat?”
“That’s right. Didn’t we talk about this? I said I was thinking about buying a boat, to take the kids out fishing, or water-skiing. I was telling Cliff about what a pain in the ass it is to get a license.”
“It really sounds like a big pain in the ass,” her father says and grins.
“Cliff,” Sylvia says.
“What?”
“You’re drunk.”
“I am. That’s true. And why not?”
“Good point,” her mother says, and pours herself some more wine.
“When would we have time for a boat, Robert?” Irene says.
“Weekends. Holidays. I’ll teach you how to sail.”
“Oh, I can just picture it,” her mother says, and chuckles.
“I think I’ll check on the boys,” Irene says. “We’ll talk about this boat idea another time.”
As Irene leaves the room and starts up the stairs, she hears her father say how he’d love to take a ride on that boat.
“You can’t even swim,” her mother shouts.
“Who cares?”
FIVE
The night Irene met Robert, he was wearing a powder blue suit with a striped maroon tie. It was 1977, and pretty much anything went, but with his curly black hair, dark eyes, and freckled cheeks, she thought the suit was a joke.
“Is it that bad?” he had said.
“You really should burn it,” she said.
Suddenly conscious of her blinking, she drew her hair across her face, flipped it back, and walked to the end of the bar to pour a shot of bourbon for the fat guy in suspenders who came in off the train every evening.
Irene had the following day off. She went into the city and spent hours looking at the work of the impressionists at the Museum of Modern Art. When she returned home, her father told her there was a tall, good-looking Irish man in the bar who’d asked about her and asked what she did and if he had owned the bar all his life and where they lived.
“We talked about the Mets,” her father went on. “He asked about my tattoo. He was drafted. Did you know he was drafted? He seemed pretty interested in my naval career, and my time on the police force. I thought if all he wanted to do was get in my daughter’s pants I would’ve told him to beat it, but here’s the first boyfriend I’ve met of yours that isn’t afraid to look me in the eye.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Irene said. “I don’t even know his name.”
“His name is Kelly. That’s his last name. I forget his first. That’s how taken I was with the young man.”
Irene’s father remembered everybody’s name and when they were born and where and what they did for a living. Only a trickster, a hypnotist, could cause him to forget.
“Anyway, he left his number. It’s there behind the phone.”
She took the number and looked at the terrible penmanship and knew he must’ve played sports or worked a job that was rough and unclean. She thought to throw the number away but instead kept it in her purse next to her cigarettes.
When he sat down at the bar the next night, Irene put a napkin with her number on the bar and poured his beer. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him studying it. Once he understood what it was, he smiled coyly, like a child caught in a white lie. Then she put the cold mug on top of the napkin and said, “You call me. I don’t call you.”
He lifted the mug, the wet ink now unreadable.
“Oops,” she said playfully.
Robert reached over the bar and grabbed another napkin and put it down next to the wet one. He placed his mug on top of it and handed the wet one to Irene.
“I don’t need this anymore,” he said, and smiled. “I’ve already got the number memorized.”
After he left, Irene said his name—Robert. Then the variations of his name—Rob, Bob, Bobby, Robby. She thought he was cute, and possibly teachable.
A week later, Robert picked Irene up at the tavern in his rusted red jalopy and took the FDR past 106th Street to 125th and into Harlem. He turned to her and smirked as if this was some kind of joke and he was going to turn around, which Irene would have preferred.
“You don’t have anything to worry about,” Robert said. “I get along well with the jigs.”
He turned onto Lenox Ave and drove her to a club he considered to have the best steaks in the city.
Inside, there were men in fur coats and women in leopard print dresses. Smoke floated just beneath the ceiling. The booths curved along the walls creating a sort of coliseum-like feeling with the dance floor in the middle of the room. A band played funk music. Only on a first date with a man she didn’t know would s
he ever again listen to such music or be caught dead in such a tacky restaurant, or love every minute of it.
When she looked up at Robert, he looked as though he could pluck her up and toss her into the sky with one hand. Here is a man, she thought. Despite herself, she wanted to feel his power, to have him inside her, to smell the salt and liquor and smoke on their bodies, to be animals.
After they finished eating (the steak was good, but not the best), a tall black man with long fingernails and a manicured mustache came up to their table and asked her to dance. She looked at Robert and Robert nodded. She was offended that he wasn’t offended. She took the man’s hand and let him lead her out across the floor.
Even in her wildest let-go moments in front of her bedroom mirror Irene had no idea how to dance to the type of music the band was playing. She tried to follow the other dancers shuffling their feet and kicking out their knees and throwing up their arms. She copied them so as not to look foolish. At one point, Irene caught Robert laughing when she almost toppled over, spring-boarding off the floor after a rising bass line that had everyone down to their knees. How the song kept going without any lyrics, Irene couldn’t understand. She was folk music and rock ’n’ roll; she liked to think the words mattered.
She was now sweating under her arms and between her legs. She feared Robert might be sickened if they made it in the back of his car later, which she had a feeling they might.
When the song ended, the man with the long fingernails delivered her to Robert, who was sitting with one leg casually crossed over the other, fitting a toothpick between his teeth.
“Your woman can’t dance worth a shit,” the man said and let go of her arm. As he was walking away, he put up both his arms to reveal the holster of a knife attached to his pants.
Robert took Irene’s hand and said he’d already paid.
“Don’t worry about these jigs,” Robert said. “They all think they got something to prove.”
“He’s right,” said Irene. She could still feel the bass line under her heels. “I’m really not much of a dancer. I can do the mashed potato, I can do the twist.”
“You’re funny.”
“Then why aren’t you laughing?”
“That’s a good question.”
She asked him for a cigarette. He lit one for her and watched her smoke while sitting on the edge of the seat, rubbing the sole of her foot with her hand.
After a few drags, she stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and walked ahead of Robert, through the throng of slickly dressed people, out into the sticky city air, thoughtless, unable to hear even the sounds of the cars speeding down Lenox Ave.
When she turned around, Robert was on top of the black man with the long fingernails, beating his face in with his fist. Another man rushed forward and kicked Robert in the stomach and he fell to the ground onto his back. The two men were on top of him now. The man with the long fingernails pulled out his knife and slashed Robert’s side. When Irene screamed at the blood soaking his shirt, the men backed up under the club’s awning.
“Call someone,” she said.
The man with the long fingernails looked shocked by his own violence. He turned back and shouted for someone to call an ambulance.
Later, in the emergency room, she thought to herself, this man is crazy. Then she thought, you must be crazy, too. Why else would you want to spend the rest of your life with him?
SIX
Memorial Day. Robert packs the Wagoneer with a cooler and radio, and Irene fills a beach bag with towels, sunblock, and potato chips. Irene’s parents play with the electric windows in the backseat. Nathan is sitting between them, rocking up and down as the smoke from Robert’s cigarette blows out and back into his face. Andrew’s in the way back, pulling at his scrotum through his swim trunks, something he’s been doing a lot recently.
After they park and set up the chairs and beach towels and radio, the boys swim out to the wooden raft on floats held in place by a long rope knotted to the lifeguard’s post. They quickly make friends with other children, playing games common and medieval—King of the Castle, Shark Bait, and Survival—all of which are slight variations of the same game. They splash water at each other’s faces, push down on each other’s heads, and race to the deep where their toes can no longer touch the bottom.
The radio is tuned to the classic rock station: the Stones, the Beatles, the Animals, the Monkees, the Police, the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
“Is there anything that could ruin such peace more than rock-and-roll music?” Irene’s mother says. “Can’t we just listen to the waves?”
“It’s better than listening to Daddy,” Irene says.
Cliff is snoring loudly, his white T-shirt bunched up under his head. He has a sloppily inked tattoo of an anchor on his forearm. His skin looks pieced together in different shades.
When the boys come in from the water, Irene hands them their towels and they dry off and lie on their backs on the warm sand, stretching their arms and legs as the pink and orange light spreads across the sky. A double-engine glider plane flies overhead. Andrew reaches his hand up and pretends to grab hold of its tail.
Irene wets her thumb and cleans the corners of the boys’ mouths. They squirm and wrench their necks.
“Hold still,” she says, pinching their noses once she has finished. “Okay, all done.”
The boys run ahead toward the Wagoneer.
Cliff snorts and turns on his side.
“What a dream,” he says.
“What dream?” Sylvia says.
“I was playing centerfield for the Mets.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.”
Robert carries the beach chairs under his arm and hoists the bag of towels, Frisbees and footballs, the radio and empty paper tubs of fried clams. Cliff walks in front with his hands clasped behind his back, singing “Meet the Mets, Meet the Mets.” Irene puts on her large straw hat and her white framed sunglasses. Both she and her mother are wearing summer dresses, big and flowing.
* * *
At the dinner table that night, Nathan picks at a dried scab in his ear where his mother had missed with the sunscreen. Andrew pushes his spoon into his crotch, just to try it out.
Robert closes his eyes and blesses the food.
“Holy Moly,” Cliff says.
“Dad,” Irene hisses.
“What? I’m starving.”
Andrew divides the food on his plate into a palette of bold solid colors. Nathan mixes his food together into a mash of carrots, potatoes, and chunks of grilled steak. They eat fast and drink their grape juice with such terrible impatience that when Andrew goes to fill his glass again, he spills the juice on the table. Nathan throws the nice linen napkin on top of the stain.
“Don’t use that!” Irene shouts.
She picks up the napkin and shows it to Robert.
“Now I’ll never get this out.”
“It’s just a napkin,” Robert says.
“Forty dollars apiece,” she says.
“Now that’s something to shout about,” Sylvia says.
“My bridge cost less than that set of napkins,” Cliff says.
“You got a bridge?” Andrew asks.
Cliff shows his teeth and with his tongue pushes his upper tooth out and down, revealing the vacant space left below his gum line.
“Oh, Cliff. That’s disgusting,” Sylvia says, laughing. Cliff makes like he’s putting his face back together and smiles, showing his full set of teeth.
“What are we going to do?” Irene asks.
“About what?” Robert says.
“The napkins.”
“The what?”
“Forget it,” she says, and tosses the stained napkin on top of her plate. “Why do I bother trying to make things nice anyway?”
Chairs are pushed away, crumbs stuck to the rug, a stain of dried milk on the table.
Robert sits on the back porch, smoking. Cliff, beside him, drinks beer from a glass. The sky is nearly flat on th
e horizon, purple above the scattered clouds. There is something crushing yet hopeful about a sky like this.
Later that night, Irene looks in on the boys. They have separate rooms—Nathan’s windows face the street in front, and Andrew’s into the backyard. Nathan’s walls plastered with posters of athletes, and Andrew’s with superheroes. Each has a chest full of toys to share and a bookcase where they stack their albums of baseball cards and action figures and comics. But at night, Andrew often sneaks into Nathan’s room and sleeps on the floor beside Nathan’s bed.
Irene kisses them both on the forehead, then sits on the floor on the other side of Nathan’s bed. She can hear her father sharing some of his old navy stories, and her mother brings up a bit of news she has recently read in the New York Times about this being one of the best times in the nation’s history to invest in real estate. Robert speaks to them as if they’re the most important people on earth. He is capable of making himself believe they are, just as he is with Irene and the boys and the slow kid who bags their groceries at the A&P.
SEVEN
The next day, once her parents have left, Irene can’t shake the nervous anticipation that comes from being alone. She makes cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches and cuts them up into squares and wraps the plate of squares in plastic and puts the plate in the refrigerator for when the boys come home from school. She sits on a stool at the kitchen island and lights a cigarette. It’s half past ten in the morning. She sweeps the floors and puts a load of laundry in the washer, then makes the boys’ beds. She finds a wad of tissues between Nathan’s mattress and box spring. She puts away the dishes and pours a cup of coffee. Now it’s almost noon. She turns on the television. Rat a tat tat tat! Rat a tat tat tat! Soldiers firing machine guns at a stone building. The picture is grainy. Another war. Or another movie. She shuts off the TV. Strands of blond hair fall across her eyes.
The Outer Cape Page 5