Nicotine

by Nell Zink

  Penny misses them immediately. When she reaches the outermost circle, she drops the hands of the boy and girl beside her to go after them. She finds them in the kitchen.

  “Who in hell are all these people?” she says by way of a conversational opener.

  “You should check your eyeliner,” Matt says. “It’s smeared to hell and gone, and your hair is full of random debris.”

  “Leave her alone,” Patrick says. “Come here, kid sister. Give me a hug. I, for one, would like to say that I really admire what you did for Dad, staying with him like that. You’re a mensch.”

  “Thanks,” Penny replies, thinking that too many years on a Francophone island have left Patrick speaking his father’s English.

  “I hear it was hard for you.”

  “Oh yeah. Seriously fucked-up.”

  There is silence in the kitchen under the storm of people drumming and chanting “Norman! Fly free!” outside.

  “What a bunch of drug-heads,” Matt remarks. “They probably think we’re going to break out the psychedelics any minute, like at the Finger Commune. We should tell them there’s acid in the tiramisu.” He pokes an aluminum roasting pan full of tiramisu with its wooden spoon. “One hit of acid, and whoever eats the most tiramisu has the best chance of getting it.”

  “That tiramisu is mine,” Penny says. “Tell them it’s in the oatmeal or whatever this shit is.” She nods at a large glass bowl filled with a grayish substance.

  Smiling, arms folded, Matt walks out to the drum circle. The music quiets. Young strangers appear in the kitchen to fill their plates, shyly, with heaps of cold buckwheat kasha.

  Soon the strangers are festooned around the yard and even the house, where they lie on rag rugs and Colonial-style furniture, looking fixedly at the spines of books, waiting and hoping. Penny sits down next to Patrick on a braided rug to eat her tiramisu. “Aren’t they insane?” she asks.

  “Definitely.”

  Swaying to the music as she eats, she closes her eyes and says, “I really love this place. I love the river.”

  “I remember Mom being here. I mean our mom, not yours.”

  “What was she like?”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t really talk about her. It’s painful. I just wanted to say that I remember her here. Right here, on this very rug.” He pats the rug. “Playing cards with us. Maybe Uno.”

  Finished, she puts her bowl and spoon aside and lies down flat on her back. “Then tell me a story about Dad. Something with Colombia in it.”

  “You know I’m a photographer. I don’t tell stories.”

  “Well, it’s his funeral, and nobody’s talking about him.”

  “That would be bad luck. He’s gone. We don’t know what he’s doing now.”

  “Flying around,” she says. “I saw it.”

  “You saw his soul?”

  She nods.

  “Damn, Penny. You’re very special.”

  “Special. Great word.”

  “I mean it. You were always a cool kid.”

  A cloud dims the sun in her mind. Always a cool kid? He was twenty when she was born, and living in the Philippines. They hardly know each other. He can only be thinking of the last time he saw her, in this same house, eleven years ago. She doesn’t remember whether he ever saw her before that. “Let’s not talk,” she says. “I like the music. You want something to drink?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Penny takes her bowl and spoon to the kitchen and fixes herself a hot toddy (cachaça, lemon, hot water). She rejoins Patrick on the rug and they sit in silence. She no longer tries to feel close. Visitors who glimpse them assume they are deep in intimate familial communion.

  Patrick takes out his phone and shows her photos of the beach near his house, his neighbors’ children, and their pets.

  MATT STANDS IN THE DOORWAY of what had been Norm and Amalia’s bedroom upstairs and says, “May I come in?”

  “Please,” Amalia says. She is sitting up in bed, wearing a thick bathrobe over a flimsy nightgown. A Marlboro smolders in an ashtray. She stubs it out.

  He closes the door and says, “We need to talk.”

  “Sit by me,” she says, patting the bed.

  “No. You’re a fire hazard.”

  She laughs.

  “You’re going to burn this house down. That’s what we need to talk about. Your notions of maintenance.”

  “Ha-ha. Everybody says I look great, for an old lady.”

  He rolls his eyes and says, “Well, I’ve been noticing that you’ve been letting the house go to shit. Not just this place. Even the Morristown house.”

  “What?”

  “It’s my fault for not hiring a yard service after Dad got sick. You can’t just let grass go to seed like that. Grass is supposed to be short. Those tall stems get like nylon fishing line. You can’t get through it with a regular mower. They’ll snag it up. You’re going to need a harvesting combine to mow that lawn, if you wait even one more day.”

  “The lawn?”

  “Not just the lawn. The whole place needs a paint job. And the garage. If anybody could see it from the road, you’d be in violation of the covenant. But you don’t even get the yew trees trimmed, so thank God”—his sarcasm has a vicious edge and an anger that thoroughly dwarf his topic—“it’s our secret.”

  “We have so few secrets anymore,” Amalia says wistfully, trying to be playful.

  “I just wanted to tell you,” he concludes.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you happy? Are you seeing anyone? I care about you a lot.”

  “Can’t you concentrate on one subject for even one minute? Yes, for your information, I get in. Maybe not at this party. Dad should have specialized in treating a disease that strikes the young and beautiful—chlamydia, maybe. Something curable, like pregnancy.”

  “So you don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Amalia. I can tell you’re working up a crying jag, so before you start—before you launch into your tantrum—allow me to inform you that I am not lonely. I’m rich enough to buy and sell these girls I ‘date,’ yet somehow they never think to ask me for a dime. Do not worry about me. Worry about starving children.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “I’m a businessman. That’s why I can’t look at our house in Morristown without thinking of the equity you’re throwing away every day you don’t get that lawn mowed!”

  “And I can’t look at you without thinking of the love you throw away—”

  “Jesus fuck. Shut up! I’m sorry your husband died, but leave me out of it!”

  “He was your father.”

  He pauses. He opens his mouth and closes it. He turns, stomps out of the room, and closes the door behind him.

  “Leave me out of it, too,” she calls to him through the door.

  She sniffles, listening to the nails on his boot heels click as he stumbles down the stairs.

  PENNY LIES FOR A LONG time on the rug—even after Patrick gets up and goes in search of a beer. Seeing Matt approaching, she rises and returns to the drum circle. Now it is reduced to its stubborn kernel, Norm’s closest living associates. The older men play complex patterns softly. The older women crouch, shuffle, smile.

  The sky begins to grow light. At the circle’s eccentric center, by the fire, Penny dances. Her body rocks, feet almost still, shells clacking as her hair sways. She feels entirely significant, as though she could be no one else and nowhere else—like nothing else matters, like a pilgrim in Jerusalem. Songbirds arc through the clearing, and sparks and ash hang in the air, discoloring her dress, burning holes. She looks at her feet. In the gray soil that bears her weight, mixed with spent embers and churned by the stomping, she can see Norm’s dead face.

  When the sun breaks the horizon, she breaks down, the way she imagined. She screams her premeditated grief. It is Norm’s howl of desire to go home. A long roar. But it is not cathartic. Instead of going out of her, the howl
goes in—a long shard of something broken, straight into her broken heart.

  She stops dancing. She goes upstairs, undresses, and falls asleep in lukewarm bathwater. Amalia finds her there and puts her to bed.

  THE FOLLOWING EVENING, WHEN THE guests have all left, Amalia explains her position to her child and stepchildren. “By the laws of the State of New Jersey, your father’s property goes to me. I think it’s the fair way. You are young, hard workers. I’m an old lady. Time for me to think about the future.”

  Matt and Patrick—both older than Amalia—shift their weight on the hard padded benches that line the kitchen. “I don’t think that’s accurate,” Matt says. “Though I certainly wouldn’t pressure you to sell the house right when the market is taking off. By law, you get twenty-five percent up to two hundred thousand, and fifty percent thereafter.”

  “I don’t begrudge you one dime,” Patrick says. “You were there for Dad all those years. Come on! I was in New Caledonia! I’m still there. I’m doing fine. I can wait to inherit whatever there is to inherit, whenever.”

  “Beginning with this beautiful place,” Amalia says. “We all have free use of it, of course! But it will be nice if it stays together. I could never support seeing it cut up.”

  “You couldn’t pay me enough to subdivide this property or let it leave the family,” Patrick says.

  “Since I’m unemployed and just got evicted,” Penny ventures, “maybe I could stay here?”

  “It was the boys’ mother’s house,” Amalia says. “I can’t give it to you.”

  “I don’t want to run off with it,” Penny says. “Just sleep here.”

  “What’s wrong with Morristown?” Amalia asks. “You could help me take care of the house. Mow the lawn.”

  “I’m out of college. I don’t want to move home. Please?”

  “What about the house in Jersey City?” Matt says.

  Patrick and Amalia look at him critically.

  “What house?” Penny asks.

  “Grandma and Grandpa’s house, where Dad grew up,” Matt says. “We could finally unload it. Penny could stay there for a while and hold the fort.”

  “I never heard of it,” Penny says.

  “You can’t do that to her,” Patrick says. “It’s not habitable. The roof burned, and the basement stood full of water for twenty years. The whole place is rotten. It’s probably condemned, or already gone.”

  “That was just Norm talking out his ass,” Matt says. “I drove past it twice in the last week. There’s people living there.”

  “It’s an empty shell,” Patrick says.

  “What house are they talking about?” Penny asks Amalia.

  “A falling-down house in a big slum,” she says. “Where Norm’s parents die in a fire because his father is smoking in bed.” She gazes absently at the knotty pine paneling on the opposite wall.

  “They died in a fire?”

  “Of the smoke. It didn’t hurt them. They were very old. But it’s real painful for Norm. All the years he won’t talk about it, won’t do anything about that house. Like it never happened.”

  Penny lets that sink in. For a moment she sees her dead grandparents still in their bed, like mummies in a museum, frozen there by Norm’s denial. With relief she recalls that the house is inhabited, at least according to Matt. She says, “Okay. But how can I live there, if other people live there already?”

  “They’re living there illegally,” he says. “You get rid of them.”

  “Oh, so now she’s your gentrification shock troops,” Patrick says. “You blow my mind.”

  “She’s a warm body. You can’t make an eviction stick without putting facts on the ground.”

  Patrick looks unhappy; Penny, merely confused.

  “Whatever, blah, blah,” Amalia says. “That house is a ghetto. Probably you looked at the wrong address.”

  Matt says, “Listen up, Amalia. I don’t mind giving you a life interest in the place in Morristown, and I don’t mind time-sharing our weekend getaway here with the three of you. But Grandma and Grandpa’s place isn’t Home Sweet Home for any of us. It’s free money. And I think it’s an ideal project for Penny while she’s unemployed. We could pay her some kind of per diem off the top, minus prorated rent, after we sell.”

  “I don’t know,” Penny says to Matt. “If it’s so ghetto, is it safe? What if it’s a crack house?”

  “What did they teach you at school—raising Labrador puppies for fun and profit? What do you say when someone tries to sell you drugs? ‘No, thank you, sir, I don’t need any drugs today.’ Then you walk away and call the professional gentrifiers in riot gear.”

  Amalia says, “What do you think, Penny?”

  “I guess I could look at it.” She takes out her phone. “What’s the address?”

  “She’ll never even find that house,” Patrick says, “because ten to one it’s fallen down.”

  “What do you know about real estate?” Matt says. “You live in a house made of palm fronds.”

  “Location, location, location,” Patrick replies.

  WHEN THE FESTIVITIES ARE OVER, Penny goes home to Morningside Heights.

  She lies on her back in her father’s old bed, trying to sleep. There is so much to think about, but she can only think of one thing: him.

  She turns on her side. Her breathing echoes in the springs of the mattress, reminding her of his last days of life. His labored wheezing in the weeks when he could do nothing else. Each breath more difficult than the one before, while she waited in desperation for his heart to fail.

  She turns on the light and sits up against his headboard. She drinks from his water glass. She sees herself surrounded by his furniture.

  She smokes a cigarette. She lies flat again. She tries to think about the unfairness of being evicted and under pressure to work for the family instead of moving on with her life, but instead she thinks of Norm’s death for two solid hours before she falls asleep.

  PENNY MARCHES FROM THE GROVE Street PATH station in Jersey City toward the home her grandfather set on fire. It is a sunny Tuesday afternoon in mid-June, and a long walk—more of a bus ride, but the weather is so nice, and she hates buses. The low laburnum hedges along the sidewalk are filled with wild bees. She hears a blue jay screech.

  The neighborhood soon becomes alarmingly ugly. Clapboard row houses wear crooked aluminum siding in mildewed pastel shades. Concrete front stoops are faced on the sides with orange-hued fake brickwork. Flimsy aluminum railings imitate wrought iron. Blocks of cheap postwar construction alternate with blocks of prefab that could have been put up yesterday. She navigates an industrial block awash in broken glass, populated by delivery vans with flat tires. Low, flat-roofed garages crowd the sidewalk.

  She turns into a cross street—a block of larger houses. They have roofed front porches, with wooden railings turned on lathes and coated in innumerable layers of paint. The paint, in chips, lies under the railings. The houses are high and tall, the sort of brick town houses people call brownstones, with big front windows and broken, crooked venetian blinds. The windows gape black, as though there’s nothing inside.

  The next block is better. On one side, small row houses, well kept and tidy. One even has several colorful wooden pinwheels jammed into the dirt in the window boxes, like flowers. The other side is brownstones that look lived-in.

  The four-story, detached brick house on the next corner takes up three lots. It is shaped like an inverted L, with the front door in the long side. The porch wraps around the corner of the house, paralleling the sidewalk, with ten feet of crabgrass between them. The mansard roof is not entirely convincing. Penny’s phone tells her that she has arrived.

  She walks up on the porch. A watermelon cat—that’s what Norm used to call tabbies—sleeps on sweaters, a parka, and advertising circulars in a cardboard box labeled FREE. In place of a doorbell, there is a contraption screwed to a board, with a label reading: 1. SELECT TUNE BY SETTING SWITCH: JAZZ. TONY. ANKA. ROB. SORRY. 2. PRESS H
ERE.

  A symbol is spray-painted on the bricks to the right of the door: an eighteen-inch circle containing an N a foot tall, its first upstroke ending in an arrow pointing down. An anarchist lightning strike. International symbol of squatters. To the right of the N, seven small, regular letters are neatly printed in thick black graffiti marker: i c o t i n e.

  Penny sits down on a Windsor chair next to the FREE box and offers the cat her fingertips. It purrs. She looks around the quiet midday streets, from which everyone seems to have gone to work, except for a few scattered cars. She hears a clanking sound.

  She stands and walks the length of the porch.

  On a fourth lot belonging to the property, around the corner to the left, past the short leg of the inverted L, a beat-up white Chrysler minivan is parked on the twin concrete strips in front of an open garage. A man stands in the shade inside the garage, staring at a bicycle frame clamped into a stand.

  The man is cute enough to have coasted through high school on looks alone—an academically worthless but benign (not dangerous) high school in the semirural Passaic County community where his father, a one-armed carpenter, survives on public assistance in a trailer in the woods. His mother, who drives a forklift in a tri-modal logistics center in Delaware, feels that he lacks a male role model. That’s why she sent him to live with his father when he was thirteen. Also because her husband thinks he’s a sassy smart-aleck and tries to bait him into a shoving match whenever they meet up, which is (for ten years now) never.

  Penny is about to receive a fateful first impression. She sways, her hands on the railing. Indecision swings her body backward and forward. She calls out, “Hello?”

  The man pauses in his diagnosis of a hairline crack in a weld and walks out until he is even with the garage door. He looks her up and down. He is in his late twenties, clean-shaven, tall, with blond hair in a ponytail, blue eyes, brown eyebrows, broad shoulders, narrow hips, and bare feet. He wears a T-shirt made thin by washing, and low-slung, threadbare Lees. Penny observes that he is slim and muscular, with a graceful way of moving, plus this inquisitive yet self-assured dignity-type thing. And he’s working. Alone on a weekday in the garage of a big house, his own boss, maintaining a human-powered vehicle. A living embodiment of masculine self-reliance.