Drinking Closer to Home

by Jessica Anya Blau

  “Ocean.” She stood by the window and stared out at the blue-green sea. It looked endless, still, solid.

  “What?!” Louise came up the stairs and walked into the kitchen. The house was reversed, with bedrooms and bathrooms downstairs and communal rooms upstairs, perched in the trees. There were no rugs to absorb any sound. From the first floor you could follow the tracks of someone on the second floor by their footsteps.

  “I’m talking to the baby,” Portia said.

  “Do you want some coffee?!” Louise yelled.

  Portia took Blue into the kitchen with its scratched linoleum countertop and creaky appliances. There was a dishwasher, but she imagined it only swished the water around like a lazy lake. The plastic dishes all seemed to have a dull smear of grease on them. When she first arrived, Portia got a glass for water and saw that it had a blot of Louise’s lipstick on it.

  “Do you have decaf?” she asked.

  “Decaf? Decaf is for babies!”

  Portia lifted Blue up and waved him around as if the decaf were for him. Louise laughed, then lit a cigarette.

  “We better back up,” Portia said to Blue, and backed away from the smoke toward the dining room, which was divided from the kitchen by a long open counter.

  “What do you think of that baby?” Louise asked.

  “He’s pretty darn cute.” Portia turned her nephew’s face toward her own and smiled. Blue smiled back. He had the soft animal look of Emery as a baby. And he was a nice solid weight. A sack of warmth. As sweet-smelling as cake batter.

  “Don’t tell your sister, but I’m not really interested in babies until they can talk.”

  “I’m going to have one of my own in about a month, Mom. Are you not going to be interested in that one, either?”

  “No,” Louise laughed. “Unless it comes out talking.”

  “What about Dad? Is he into Blue?”

  “You know, he sure talks about him a lot, as if he were interested. But he hasn’t spent more than thirty seconds with the kid since your sister arrived yesterday.”

  “I haven’t even seen Dad yet.”

  “Get on a bike and go find him. Who knows where he is. He’s like Emery when he first realized he could leave the backyard. Gone. Bam. Disappeared.”

  “I hope I can balance on a bike.”

  Louise laughed and waved her cigarette around. “I’m surprised you’re not tipping forward. You need a counterweight or pulley on your back to make sure you stay upright!”

  Emery walked in the room wearing bathing trunks. He was tan, sculpted, man-sized.

  “Mom’s saying I’m fat,” Portia said.

  Emery laughed. “Well, do you think you look thin?!”

  “Where’d you get those muscles?” Louise asked.

  “I don’t know,” Emery said. “They sort of grew in my last year of school.”

  “Well, you didn’t get them from your father,” Louise said. “You got them from my side of the family.”

  “Do I look fat or pregnant?” Portia asked. Emery looked down at his sister’s inflated belly and laughed.

  “Fat!” Louse said.

  Three of Portia’s friends in Greenwich were pregnant, but they had each gained only a portion of the weight she gained. They maintained a cool chic in their regular-person clothes that they adjusted minutely (a shoelace tying a button to a buttonhole under a long shirt), or wore expensive maternity clothes that hung so well they didn’t look pregnant from the back.

  In her anxiety to properly feed her child, Portia burst out like the winning gourd at a 4-H meeting. She wore overalls and Patrick’s button-down shirts. It was startling to see how differently people responded to a fat person in déclassé clothes. The saleswomen in Greenwich’s shops showed little interest in helping Portia, as if they were certain she wouldn’t buy anything. And men looked right past her, never making eye contact. She wondered if they were biologically programmed to ignore anyone who didn’t appear to be a possible mate. The result was a quick loss of hipness, but vision and insight into the blur of Portia’s yuppie self-centered self-righteousness of the past few years.

  “You know, Patrick’s been losing weight since I got pregnant, so sometime last week we actually weighed the same,” Portia said.

  “Christ,” Louise said. “You’re going to end up like one of those ladies in the grocery store who has to ride in a cart to get around.”

  “I have stretch marks on my wrist!” Portia held out her wrist. Emery leaned over, looked at the faint purple lines, and laughed.

  “Let me see,” Louise said.

  “Don’t come near Blue with that cigarette!” Portia said.

  “Oh, for God sakes! You and your sister with the goddamned smoking. Why don’t you just get over it!”

  “Mom!” Emery said. “She’s pregnant and Blue is a baby!”

  “So what!” Louise stubbed her cigarette out in the sink and walked into the dining room. “I smoked when I was pregnant and when you were all little babies.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Portia said. “Thanks for the asthma.” She had developed a mild case of it in fifth grade that came and went according to the season.

  “You know, I once dropped a cigarette ember onto your head,” Louise said as she picked up her daughter’s wrist and looked for the stretch marks.

  “You dropped an ember on my head?!”

  “No, on Emery’s.” Louise let Portia’s wrist fall. “I felt horrible about it. And I tried not to smoke while I was nursing after that, but—”

  “I sort of remember that.” Portia looked at her brother and imagined his baby face, his brown button eyes, his little chimp mouth.

  “Yeah, you were there,” Louise said. “You held him while I ran to the refrigerator for some butter.”

  “Way to mother me, Mama,” Emery said. He yawned and scratched his belly hair.

  Anna came up the steps and into the dining room.

  “Mom! You weren’t smoking near the baby, were you?!”

  “Don’t worry! Your sister there wouldn’t let me get near him with my cigarette!”

  Anna was in a bikini that was no bigger than black censor marks on a nude photo. She was as lean as she’d been at fifteen—before the chain of chubbiness, bulimia, anorexia, and recovery.

  “I can’t believe you lost all the weight already.” Portia nestled Blue onto her shoulder, stepped back and stared at her sister.

  “I only gained eighteen pounds,” Anna said. “I mean, I had to look like a druggie as long as possible.” Anna only quit doing undercover narcotics when she could no longer properly fit into a bulletproof vest. She had told Portia that the day after Blue was born she suddenly realized she could never go back to being a cop. She had to be committed to staying alive for the baby’s sake.

  “What have you gained?” Emery asked.

  “Fifty,” Portia said, and her mother, sister, and brother laughed.

  “No, seriously,” Anna said.

  “Fifty.”

  “Fifty fucking pounds?!” Louise asked.

  “No, fifty stones, Mom. Yes, fifty pounds. Twenty-two kilos, or something like that.”

  “Well, tell people your kilo gain and pretend it’s pounds,” Louise said.

  “Put on your suit,” Anna said, and she took the baby from her sister’s shoulder. “Mom, you coming?”

  “I don’t have a suit.”

  “You came to an island for the summer without a suit?” Emery asked.

  “I’ve never owned a suit—you know that!” Louise said. And of course, they did know that; they had only ever seen their mother swim naked. “And the nude beach here is gay, which is fine with me, but your father won’t go there and I don’t want to go by myself.”

  “Well, we’re here now, so go buy a suit and come to the beach with us,” Anna said.

  “I’m too old for a suit.”

  “But you’re not too old for the nude beach?” Portia asked.

  “Nude beach people are gross,” Louise said. “They
’re fat and saggy and old and wrinkly. It’s the bathing suit people who always look good, and I don’t look good enough for a bathing suit.”

  “They’re not fat and saggy at the gay nude beach,” Emery said.

  “True,” Louise said. Then she snapped her head toward Emery and asked, “How do you know?”

  “Mom,” Anna said, “everyone knows that gay guys take care of their bodies and look great naked.”

  “Mom, why do you care how you look in a suit? You’re not going to run into anyone you know here,” Emery said.

  “I told you already, I’m too old!”

  “You’re hardly old. And it’s not like old age is some humiliating sickness or something,” Portia said.

  “Yes, it is! Old people are ugly. They shouldn’t even leave the house. I hate looking at them.”

  “Mom. Come on. I hope I’m old one day.” Since she had gotten pregnant, Portia had started worrying about things ranging from landfills that were overrun with disposable diapers to moles that could turn into skin cancer. And right then, she started worrying that she wouldn’t know how to age and accept old age, that she’d be resistant and resentful of it like her mother. Portia made a mental note to find new friends who were old: old-age role models. She decided that she needed to embrace old age before it was upon her.

  “The fuck are you still doing here?” Anna said to her sister. “Go get your suit on!”

  Emery pulled the red wagon that came with the house to the beach, loaded with towels, chairs, an umbrella, and a canvas beach bag filled with water bottles, oranges, apples, a baguette Emery had picked up from the corner market, and a couple of Knudsen yogurts. Anna carried the baby and Portia waddled behind.

  At the beach, Portia held the baby while Anna and Emery set up chairs and opened the umbrella to put over the towel where Blue would lie. Portia couldn’t help but note the effort it took to do something that seemed effortless as a child. Growing up near the ocean they simply went. No food. Often no towel. Never a chair. It was like walking into another room. And now that they all lived on the East Coast, the trip was an excursion, a trek, even with home base mere yards away.

  Anna and Emery settled into their chairs, faces turned toward the sun. Blue lay on his stomach on a towel, reaching for and examining a clunky plastic chain with a plastic monkey hooked on one end. The only other people sitting on the beach were too far away to see, but lots of people strolled by—dog walkers, couples, gay men in small black suits.

  “I can’t believe you two aren’t wearing sunblock,” Portia said.

  “There are about three thousand things I’m more likely to die of than skin cancer,” Anna said, and she shut her eyes.

  Portia slathered her legs that had grown so thick and fatty they were touching from the top of the thigh almost to mid-calf. She was wearing a suit loaned by a neighbor who had recently had her third baby. It was the orange of a “Men at Work” sign, with a built-in bra that hoisted Portia’s breasts up and out so her body resembled the bodies of the women in old postcards of Coney Island. She put sunblock on her face, arms, and chest, then threw her hair (newly thick since the pregnancy) into a Pebbles fountain on the top of her head. Portia’s sunglasses had been missing since she arrived, so she wore the pair Louise had found in a plastic bowl on the kitchen counter: red, mirrored. Big.

  Portia thought it was impossible to think of a way in which she could have made herself even less attractive. Boils, perhaps. Although she did have a flowering of pregnancy acne across her forehead and chin. Beneath the suit were the shimmering purple stripes, like fish skin, that decorated her belly from her navel to her pubic bone.

  Anna nursed Blue until he was sleeping. She unsuctioned his mouth from her nipple, then laid his limp body, dewy with sweat, on the towel under the umbrella. Less than a minute later she, too, was sleeping. Emery and Portia sat and looked out at the calm sea, the sand that seemed chunkier and more yellow than California sand.

  “So, I’m living with someone,” Emery said.

  “Yeah, Mom said you had a roommate. Some guy from Cuba.”

  “He’s not my roommate.”

  “He’s not your roommate?” Portia lifted her head and looked at Emery.

  “He’s my boyfriend.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have a picture of him?”

  Emery laughed, got up, and fetched his wallet from the beach bag. He pulled out a Pennsylvania driver’s license.

  “Doesn’t he need this?” Portia asked, staring at Alejandro. He was dark-skinned, dark-eyed, square-headed, handsome.

  “He’s got a New York one now.”

  “Are you in love?” Portia wanted to kick her sister awake and say, “Guess what—he IS gay!” She wanted to phone up Patrick and tell him, too. The thrill in having been right about it all those years was almost too much to contain.

  “Yeah, I’m really in love.”

  “I’m happy for you,” Portia said. And she was.

  Emery seemed thrilled to tell his sister everything about Alejandro, his work (graduate studies in architecture), his family (emigrated, father died in Cuba), and how they met (at a restaurant where Alejandro was waiting tables). It seemed strange to Portia that he had never told her any of this before, that he’d been living with Alejandro for a month and no one knew that he was his boyfriend.

  “Are you going to tell Mom and Dad?” she asked.

  “I guess.” Emery looked at the ocean. He held a hand up over his eyes like a visor and watched a pelican dive into the water. “Or you could tell them.”

  “Do you want me tell them?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “What about Anna?”

  “I would have told her if she were awake.”

  “Would have told me what?” Anna sat up straight and shook her head as if there were water in her ears. She was talking in her usual headlong prattle as if she hadn’t just been sleeping.

  “Emery is gay. His roommate Alejandro is his boyfriend.”

  Emery laughed. Anna smiled.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Emery said.

  “Well, I can’t say I’m really surprised,” Anna said.

  “His boyfriend’s cute, check him out.” Portia tossed the driver’s license to her sister.

  “He’s totally hot,” Anna said. “Does he have brothers?”

  “Two.”

  “How’s that marriage treating you?” Portia said, and Emery laughed. Anna raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. Portia wondered if that was how old women got those lines around their lips, from pursing their mouths in disdain for so many years. Louise had lines around her lips, but they looked like smokers’ lines—everything directed in toward the point of a cigarette-sucking pucker.

  A soft thumping of sand came up behind them and they all turned to see Buzzy loping down the dune.

  “Hey!” Buzzy said. He was wearing beige trunks with blue stripes on the side and a blue T-shirt. His legs were as white and thin as branches from a birch tree. His black wrap-around sunglasses looked like they’d been given to him after an eye exam. And his hat looked like it was older than he was—like it was something Zeyde would wear.

  Portia and her brother and sister all stood up and hugged and kissed their father, who gave them each numerous kisses in a chain from ear to ear.

  “When’d you kids get here?” Buzzy grabbed the extra chair that lay folded near the beach bag, unfurled it, and sat.

  “I was here yesterday, Dad, remember?” Anna said.

  “Oh yeah, I forgot I already saw you!” Buzzy laughed. “Do you have any food?” He was talking as quickly as Anna, feet jiggling, head rocking. It was like he was high.

  “Portia and I got here about an hour ago,” Emery said. “We caught the same ferry.”

  “How’s the baby?” Buzzy leaned back in his chair and looked at Blue. The baby was on his back, arms and legs out as if he were sacrificing himself to the sky gods.

 
; “Sleeping. Don’t wake him,” Anna said.

  “You kids didn’t tell Bubbe and Zeyde we’re here for the summer, did you?”

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” Portia said.

  “Why don’t you want them to know?” Emery asked.

  “Because they’d show up here!” Buzzy said. “So when we call them on Sunday you all have to be quiet so they don’t hear you in the background. And next time you talk to them, don’t mention anything about having seen us.”

  “Don’t fucking worry, Dad. We’re not going to alert your parents to your whereabouts,” Anna said.

  “Where’s your mother?” Buzzy asked.

  “She said she won’t come to the beach,” Emery said. “Is that true? She really won’t go to the beach?”

  “Can you fucking believe it?!” Buzzy said. “We rent this house for the whole summer and she says she’s too old to put on a bathing suit! What kind of bullshit is that?!”

  “Take her to the nude beach,” Portia said.

  “How crazy is it that now that she’s over fifty she’ll only go naked?!”

  “Fifty’s not old,” Anna said.

  “I feel like I’m twenty!” Buzzy said. “And she’s acting like we’re some decrepit old couple. She wants to stay in her studio all day and paint or write. She doesn’t want to go anywhere, she doesn’t want to see anyone, and she won’t go to the fucking beach!”

  “Take her to the nude beach,” Portia said, again.

  “The nude beach is gay here. I don’t want to go sit on the beach with a bunch of gays!”

  “Dad!” Anna said. “Emery’s gay.”

  Everyone paused. Anna, Portia, and Buzzy each turned their head toward Emery, who took a deep breath, his shoulders rising and then falling.

  “You’re not gay, are you?” Buzzy finally said.

  “Yeah. I am.”

  Buzzy dropped his head into his hands. Portia, Emery, and Anna all looked at him, waiting for him to say something. And then his shoulders began to bounce a little and Portia wondered if he was getting angry, or laughing. When a noise burst forth, she realized he was crying. With hiccupping and snorting sounds. Choking gasps. His body was bobbing in beat with his sobs. Portia was stunned. Her father wasn’t a crier. In fact, she’d only seen him cry once before, when she was about twelve years old. Buzzy had called a family meeting one night and tearfully told everyone he was depressed and hadn’t been able to work for a couple months. Portia, Anna, and Emery had sat silently on the couch and watched as Louise pulled Buzzy into her shoulder, like a baby, and told him the whole family was there for him.