One afternoon Molly sent Rosa and the Yankee to fetch groceries. Molly could wink without moving her eyes.
The dog rode in the backseat. Rosa, looking out the window at the dunes and high grasses, absently caressed the scratches on her arm and asked about his magazines. She felt comfortable with his driving, which was fast, easy, confident. She had never ridden in a BMW. She liked the sting of salt in the ocean air and the rumble of the tires on the road. At the grocery, before they released their seat belts, she noticed vending machines at some distance on the store’s concrete apron. Sunlight gleamed off the glass-and-metal fronts of the machines, one of which sold pop and cola. She couldn’t say with certainty what the other advertised. She knew what it appeared to offer, and the idea charmed her.
“I’m crazy,” she said, “but I believe that vending machine sells Blind Faith.”
He looked.
“Maybe,” he said. “What comes out of a Blind Faith machine?”
“Probably blind faith.”
“In a can? In a wrapper?”
She said, “What faith would you pick? Faith in Allah? Jesus? The almighty dollar?”
He said, “Blind faith must cost more than a dollar.”
She said, “I’ll buy.” She’d been raised Southern Baptist, and though she had strayed she often felt the tug.
She jingled coins in her hand as they passed the soda machine, but there was no blind faith for sale after all, only live bait—worms and maggots—for a dollar. Inside, they filled the basket from Molly’s list, and he added a pouch of dried pigs’ ears for his dog.
At the beach house that night, she whistled, but the cat gave no answer. Later, as she walked sand-swept sidewalks and then to the wharf whistling for her cat, she felt God working in her life. She never saw the cat again.
II. CROAKERS
The day moved toward dusk, and the wind rose, its fiercest gusts scouring them with beach sand. She pushed her hair behind her ears, but dark strands blew loose over her face.
She explained. She said, “Rosalyn was the First Lady’s name. Mine is Rosalind. Like in Shakespeare’s play.”
“Rosalind is difficult to say,” he said. “That D.”
“You have to want to say it.”
He’d taken a break from fishing. He had a length of PVC pipe driven into the sand near the waterline and his fishing pole propped inside it. He was fishing for anything worth eating, but pulling in only croakers. The fish made their croaking sounds as he pried them from the barbs, tossed them underhand back into the sea, then loaded up with bait again.
She told him her age. He was forty-two.
“I work long hours,” he said.
“So do I. And much of my social life is entangled with the firm. Entertaining clients and whatnot. Are you churchgoing?”
“No. I’m a lapsed Catholic.”
“You’re looking at a lapsed Baptist.”
They each nodded and smiled. He fingered a snail shell out of the sand.
“But Sunday morning is pure to me,” she said. “I don’t work then.”
He wore a loose sweatshirt that covered many of his scars, but he was in shorts and was barefoot. She wanted to touch the scars on his leg, to see how they felt. The shape of his legs was right and, in the case of his calves, beautiful. But the skin was all wrong. She showed him her toe that had no nail.
“I dropped a microwave oven on that when I was moving once,” she said.
“Moving out or in?”
“Out.”
“Was leaving him worth losing the toenail?”
“Oh yes.”
He said, “There are nights I can’t sleep.”
“Because of the fire?”
“No. Other things.”
“Does the fire matter?”
“To some folks. It was at a circus. Outdoors. A tent burned and killed a lot of people. My mother and I were there. She seldom talks about it, and I don’t remember much.”
“I remember the microwave oven. A gift from my parents.”
He said, “My parents came from Poland before I was born. I’ve heard every dumb Polack joke ever told.”
She said, “My family’s been poor since before the Civil War. But my daddy made some big money. We’re new at it. I’m sure sometimes we are crude and offensive. Just like the new-money people in Faulkner. But we don’t mean it.”
“I haven’t read Faulkner.”
“Do you have children?”
“No.”
“Do you want children?”
“Yes. Do you?”
“Yes.”
He checked his bait can. He’d run out. He hauled in the line, found a croaker on the end of it. He took a knife from his pocket and decapitated the croaker and dropped its head in the can. Then he sliced the belly and with a finger scooped out the tiny entrails. He spread these among the hooks, added the head to another, then cast it all back into the sea. He rinsed his hands in the salt water and returned to where she sat. He sat so as to shield her from the occasional frenzy of wind and sand. When he spoke her full name, it sounded as if the D came naturally.
She admired how his hands had worked the knife and the fish. She had read Faulkner and studied law and watched her father increase his fortune; from these things she understood that civilization is built and maintained through killing, and she meant to have a civilized life.
III. TURTLE
An afternoon of swimming and bodysurfing and sunbathing led the tired grown-ups to the porch and to vodka cocktails, as seagulls laughed overhead and a band played at a nearby house. Earlier that day there’d been a wedding; now the party: the bride exchanging her dress for an all-white bikini with a tiara and veil; the groom donning a black Speedo, a bow tie around his neck like a male stripper. She chased him with a paddle, laughing and slapping at his tush.
“Did you bring your bow tie?” Molly asked her husband.
“Only my body oil,” he said.
Molly howled. She said to her husband, “You’ve got such pale skin, you get out there with body oil and a bow tie and the only thing gonna jump your bones is a penguin! You work best in the dark, honey.”
Rosa refused to picture the Yankee in a bow tie and body oil. Though she had just met him, she’d begun to imagine him in her bed, and she felt it necessary to see him dignified, solemn. She did not want the scars sewn across his body to be part of some freak-show striptease.
Then the kids, back from a night hunt for sand crabs, thundered up the stairs, their flashlights waving, their voices sharp and astonished.
“There’s a turtle!” the first cried. “There’s a turtle on the beach!”
“A big one!”
“You can’t see it ’cause it’s dark!”
“It walked right up on the sand!”
“It crawled!”
“It’s bigger than this!”
So the grown-ups hurried down, chasing the kids to a spot where a dozen or so people had gathered.
“Keep your distance,” someone said.
“She’s laying eggs,” said another.
“Come up at sunset, right between my fishing pole and my buddy’s there.”
“Don’t shine that flashlight on her!”
Rosa could not see the turtle, but she saw the turtle dig. It kicked backwards with powerful fins, tossing sand into the moonlight with great urgency. Shovelfuls sprayed through the air, and Rosa tried to imagine some backyard swamp turtle big enough to do this. She curled her toes in the sand.
“Someone ought to call the ranger,” said Molly’s husband. He looked around. “Might as well be me.”
Rosa leaned near the Yankee. “Can you see anything?” she said.
“Just a dark lump.”
The ranger, when he arrived, called the turtle a loggerhead. “Back to the beach where she was hatched,” said the ranger. “That’s how they do it. They’ll come a thousand miles. They mate on the water’s surface. The male hooks his foreclaws into the female’s shoulders to get a grip.
By the end, she’s usually scratched and bleeding.”
It was dark now, and they could only make out the spot where they knew the turtle to be and what might be a lump. People drifted away. Molly and her husband took their children home except for the oldest girl, Sara, who wanted to stay. Rosa volunteered to watch with Sara, and the Yankee said he would, too.
They stayed three hours. Sara and Rosa sat in the sand, the girl huddling for warmth against the woman’s bare legs. The Yankee and the ranger stood, peering into the dark. Late in their vigil, the turtle bellowed: a guttural birthing song.
“She’ll lay a hundred or more eggs,” said the ranger.
Then the turtle shifted. It turned. It pushed thick mounds of sand over the nest. Rosa watched unblinking as she would through a hole in time to the days before Eden. The turtle crawled along as if it and the sand had been born of the same mother. The ranger, at a distance, kept pace. Just before the turtle reached the water, the ranger turned on his flashlight. The turtle looked orange in places, and green, and black, and her beaked head did not turn to the light. Water lapped against her, washing grainy sand from her carapace. She pulled herself deeper. The ocean lifted her. She vanished into the foam. Rosa watched, and when the turtle had gone realized that she held Sara’s hand with her left and the Yankee’s hand with her right.
Then the ranger pounded stakes around the nest, and the Yankee helped tie string to make a border. To the string, the ranger fastened blaze-orange tape and signs warning people away.
“I’ll alert the biologists,” he said. “They’ll want to move these eggs someplace safer. There’s a preserve to the south.”
Molly and her husband greeted them from the porch with a pitcher of sea breezes. Sara told the tale, and as she spoke Rosa watched the Yankee and dreamed of the turtle. What monstrous beauties. But there was beast in her, too, and she shivered to imagine the small cruelties she and the Yankee might visit on each other’s grateful selves.
IV. TURTLE EGG
In the morning she crept about the beach house, her brain swollen with vodka and squeezing against her skull, her pulse hammering the vertebrae in her neck. Over a loud, buttery breakfast, she tried to conceal her suffering. She smiled when the children told jokes, nibbled toast, accepted gratefully the aspirin Molly sneaked her. Against her better judgment, she agreed to go with everyone to the beach to see the turtle nest.
The Yankee had not kissed her the night before. On the porch they’d drunk sea breezes, and their mood became one of laughter and flirtation. They let the taste of cranberry juice and lime swirl in their mouths, dreamed of their turtle deep beneath the black waves, sucked ice cubes softened by vodka and two a.m. air. When they parted company, he pressed her hands between his, said good night, then left her wanting more.
Now she knelt beside him, hung over and pretending otherwise, part of a circle of volunteers crouched around the turtle’s nest. They dug with an archaeologist’s care, ever ready for the alien texture that meant another egg. Already they’d collected dozens, directed by a pretty, young government biologist come to save the unborn turtles.
The eggs didn’t seem so fragile. When the biologist had lifted the first one for all to see, Rosa thought it resembled a wet Ping-Pong ball and was surprised to hold it and find heft at its core, the shell like leather, not a wafery plastic.
Ted, Rosa thought. His name. When she’d spoken it the night before, he told her that he liked how she lengthened the vowel nearly to two syllables. He was not then some typical Yankee, puffing himself up by mocking a drawl, acting as if all the world ought to be dull as the Pilgrims. No, he was a man appreciating the music only Rosa could make of his name.
Leaning over the turtle nest, he whispered, “How’s your head?”
He knew. She said, “Leathery and wet.”
He smiled, so she had somehow the sense that her hangover was precious to him, that hers was the world’s loveliest hangover. His kind manner helped her past embarrassment and put her hungover self at ease. Maybe he’d learned that, how to put people at ease, by living with his scars. Such a skill could fend off staring, help him fit in. Why is it, she thought, that characters in movies and on TV always learn that fitting in is bad, that parading your freakishness is the bravest path, and then, in the end, that the reward for reveling in your strangeness is love? That was untrue to life. Sometimes love came because you could fit in, because you helped people feel at ease with your strangeness.
If this sense of ease was love, she’d never felt a finer one.
He leaned nearer. She could hear his breath soft at her ear.
“You can kiss it,” she whispered. “My head.”
She waited. She wanted him to know the things she spoke of with no one. That she ate fast-food burgers to celebrate paydays; that she still believed in God and prayed to Jesus; that one awful rush night she and the others forced a Kappa pledge to dance naked before football players until the girl wept; that she sends the girl flowers every year on her birthday. If he kissed her hungover head, he could share these secrets. With his kiss, she believed, he could ease her through tomorrow and every day after, through all unexplored things, even his own strange embrace.
The biologist, who was a few months out of graduate school, watched him kiss her and thought: That’s what it’s like to have loved for years.
Elephant
I WAS THIRTEEN WHEN MY FATHER TOLD ME HE ONCE SHOT A CIRcus elephant.
“Through the eye,” he said.
We sat in the dim light of Gray’s Tavern. It was payday, and on most paydays we killed afternoons at Gray’s. My father chased vodka with Knickerbocker beer, and smoked his Marlboros. I sipped cola from a glass bottle.
“With a Colt .45, semi-automatic,” he said. “Civilian issue. A tiny gun for such a big animal.”
My father is dead now. Emphysema. He’d smoked since he was a boy in southeastern Poland, hauling lumber out of the woods, which was a dangerous job. Africa and Italy during the war were dangerous, too, but what eventually got him were the two packs a day. He enjoyed cigarettes, and he enjoyed his factory job. He loved my mother.
“I love her more than God loves her,” he once said, as we sat around the dinner table eating stuffed cabbage and meatloaf.
Mama frowned and said, “Your papa is a simple man.”
When she spoke that truth—and she spoke it often—she was describing the man who rocked in a chair on our front porch, listening as the Yankees played at 1080 on the AM dial, tossing bits of stale pumpernickel bread to blue jays and starlings and calling them sweet names. “I’m out to feed my chickens,” he would say as he stepped onto the porch, and the birds would swoop to our yard from neighborhood rooftops and branches. This was Mama’s simple man.
Mama wanted not to be simple. She kept secrets. She spent afternoons alone in her sewing room with the door closed. Sometimes at Sunday Mass she cried but would never say why. My friends and the parents of my friends talked about her. My mother cleaned houses, but she should have been an actress. From her I learned that the redeeming currency of old pain is drama.
Our family’s pain is old enough. Not long after my father left for the war, there was a fire in Hartford that killed nearly two hundred people. The fire is famous not so much for the horrific deaths it caused, but for where they occurred. A circus tent burned that afternoon. No one knows for sure how the fire started, but it consumed the tent so quickly that the crowds inside were trapped. Flaps of flaming canvas fell from the sky. There was black smoke. Panic. Screaming circus animals. A famous photograph shows Emmett Kelly, the saddest of clowns, carrying a water bucket, which, given the scale of black-and-white ruin around him, holds nothing but its own inadequacy. His hobo pants are shredded and his hand bats the air, obscuring his face so all you can see is his bulbous nose and his frown. My mother and I went to the circus for that matinee. We spent weeks in St. Francis Hospital after. Her scars included half a butterfly on her forehead that she never attempted to hide. Mine cover mu
ch of my body, but not my face or hands. People who see my scars ask how I got them, and then they ask what it was like to be inside the tent. They are always disappointed when I admit that I can’t remember. In truth, I’m disappointed, too. When I asked about the fire, my mother would only say I was blessed to have forgotten. She saw no reason to interfere with God’s plan for my memory.
I remember Gray’s Tavern, though. It’s still there: a little hole in the sidewalk down Maple Avenue near Goodwin Park. It’s an Irish bar, and I think my father liked it because he felt supremely Polish there. Surrounded by all the Gavins and Carraghers and Bolgers, his difference shone—the whisper of his Slavic accent, his Slavic eyebrows, his flat, round face. Each time we walked through the door the bartender and proprietor—Eddie Gray, who served with my father in Italy—greeted Papa with the opening line of a joke.
“Hey Charlie, how many Polacks does it take to tie a shoe?”
“Hey Charlie, did you hear about the Polack and the cabaret singer?”
“Hey Charlie, what’s the difference between a Polack and a platypus?”
“Zip the lip, Mick,” my father would say, and Eddie Gray would laugh and so would anyone else in the bar. It was their way of saying hello, how the hell are you, it’s good to see you and we love you, you Polack son-of-a-peasant. Come have a drink.
Behind the bar, a baseball trophy: “Gray’s Tavern, Twilight League Runners-up, 1948.” Their best season ever. Eddie Gray throwing strikes from the mound one game and stabbing line drives at short the next. A year later his arm went bum, and without him the Grays couldn’t even beat Traveler’s Insurance. In the corner of the tavern, a map of “Irlande” hung from the wall, and superimposed over it was a shirted man with his collar open and a rifle in his hand. Below him, the clarion whoop, “They may kill the revolutionary, but they will never kill the Revolution.” Jimmy Williams always sat beside the poster. Jimmy, who was not so old but had the pleading, helpless eyes of a spaniel, and who fingered tunes and hymns on a recorder for coins. “Danny Boy,” of course. But also “When You Wish upon a Star” and each version of the memorial acclamation of the Roman Catholic Mass, proclaiming the mysteries of faith. Only slow tunes, and each note arrived on the air weak in the knees, as if Jimmy first had to think before letting it go. Papa used to tell me not to stare at Jimmy. He always gave Jimmy a dollar.
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