by Meg Wolitzer
“How does that thingamajig work?”
The man unstrapped his arm from the machine, which looked like one of those crutches old people wear except with a wire vining up the shaft to a fancy-looking control box, and handed the contraption to my mother. Then he slipped the sunglasses gently from her head and pinched the headphones over her ears and positioned himself behind her, gripping her hand with his own, leaning into her as if he were teaching her to hit a golf ball. The man showed her how to sweep the coil over the sand, back and forth. My mother laughed at something, and there was a look on her face I hadn’t seen in a very long time, not since my parents used to get dressed up for parties and my father would tell her, in a voice I didn’t recognize, how “radiant” she looked. She smiled as the man showed her how to work the knobs and buttons, asking him to repeat himself for no reason. She seemed to hang on every word. Though I had the sense, too, that she was trying to prove something to me, that the real her had stepped out of her body like the harp-toting angel in a cartoon and was watching me the whole time. I looked away. Shorty and Ranger were panting in the sand, exhausted from chasing waves, and I felt suddenly short of breath, too, and a little sick, as though I might throw up. A tire squeaked in the parking lot—my heart leaped—but it was just a lost Jeep turning around. Where the hell was he?
When I turned back to my mother, the beachcomber was still gripping her hand. She caught my eye suddenly and stepped away. Her dress was rumpled. She took off the headphones and handed the metal detector back to the beachcomber.
“How much does it cost?” she asked politely.
“Seven hundred,” he boasted. “You can get cheaper ones, but not with a zero-to-ninety-nine target ID.”
“What a rip,” I said.
The man turned to me and frowned, studying me for a second. “Tell that to the guy who found the Mojave Nugget.”
“The what?” my mom asked.
“Mojave Nugget. 4.9 kilos of solid gold.” The man hitched up his pants. “You wouldn’t believe the treasures lurking underfoot. Friend of mine, just last week, found a diamond ring, and no river rock either. One and a half carats.”
I snorted.
“Pardon me?” the man said.
“Mojave Nugget. Jesus Christ. Don’t be a moron.”
“Caleb!” my mother gasped.
“Will you please just go look for pirate treasure somewhere else?”
The man was about to speak, to put me in my place, but my face seemed to make him reconsider. He straightened his shoulders. Gallantly, he handed my mother her sunglasses and then started back toward the water before stopping a few feet away to slip his headphones on, as if to show everything was fine. My mother wouldn’t look at me; she put her sunglasses back on and plopped down in the sand again.
“Does it feel as good as you thought it would?” she asked after a while.
“What?”
“Calling someone an idiot.”
I nodded, though it didn’t feel good at all. My mother busied herself with her feet, swishing sand over them until they disappeared. I’d never heard her sound so disgusted with me. She yawned, and the disgust in her face seemed to shrink back into sadness.
“Okay, buster,” she said to Ranger, checking her watch.
I glanced at the parking lot. “It’s only three o’clock.”
My mother stared at her missing feet, then at me. I remembered burying her in the sand in Ocean City, how my sister and I would cross her arms over her chest like a pharaoh’s. It seemed like something from a different life.
“Here,” I said, kneeling beside my mother and beginning to dig a trough.
“What are you doing?”
“Burying you in the sand.”
My mother yawned again. “God, I’m so tired,” she said. “Must be the wine. I feel like I could sleep right here.”
I dug with two hands. The idea was to keep us here till my father showed up—keep us here, at least, until I could get ahold of him. The sand was less hot the deeper I plowed, each layer cooler than the one above it, and the coolness under my fingernails versus the warmth against my wrists was such a specific, one-of-a-kind sensation that I came unstuck from time for a second. I could half hear the shrieks of Ocean City, half smell the whiff of my mother’s sun lotion, half see the smile on my father’s face as he smeared the lotion into her back and made her hum like a girl. His wet hair was swooped back and perfectly parted—he carried a folding comb, one that popped out like a switchblade, even to the beach—and I found him incredibly dashing. One time, walking back to the car on the hard part of the beach where the surf had retreated, he stopped to show my sister and me the print of his sneaker tread in the sand, a perfect impression, complex as a tiny fortress. Embossed in the middle of it was the word SADIDA. My father found this to be a marvelous thing. Sadida, I said to myself, because it sounded strange and marvelous to me too. And then my mother made a shoe print next to my father’s—she was wearing sneakers as well, her old Tretorns—and we stopped to admire this, too, the four of us laughing for no reason, and I remember making the long drive back to Baltimore, feeling bored and lucky and spanked all over from the sun, and thinking Sadida Sadida Sadida as we chattered over the Botts’ dots on the highway.
Now my mother lay down in the trough I’d dug, looking up at me in her sunglasses, and I started to push sand over her legs and arms and torso. I buried her as best I could. Shorty and Ranger watched me work. When I was done, she was a mound of sand with a head sticking out. Her cheeks, like mine, were dusted with freckles.
I let her lie there in her sunglasses, tucked to her chin, until I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. “Mom,” I said, but she didn’t answer. Then I jogged up the path to the parking lot, Shorty and Ranger trailing behind me as if I were leading them to the next great happiness. They waited by the phone as I rummaged in my pockets. I had another quarter, I was sure of it, but all I could find was a dime and a nickel. I checked the change slot: empty. I was fifteen years old—practically a man, or so I believed—but I felt suddenly like I might cry. I don’t believe in psychic powers or anything like that, so I can’t explain the certainty I had that afternoon, staring at the rusty phone and its rain-warped Yellow Pages dangling from a cord: a feeling beyond all doubt that my father was home, that he’d been there all day, that he was busy working and hadn’t gotten my message.
I peered over the rocky berm to where I’d left my mother on the beach, but couldn’t see her face. She was just a lump of sand. The beachcomber, too, was nowhere to be seen. I felt as strange as I’ve ever felt.
I checked under the rear fender of the Mercedes and found the little magnetic box where my mom kept a spare set of keys and loaded Shorty and Ranger into the back seat before climbing behind the wheel, blinded by the leathery heat. There was a map in the glove compartment, tearing along the folds. I looked up my dad’s street. The Mercedes started right up, no problem, and though I lurched a bit in reverse, I managed to get out of the parking space well enough and coax it onto the road. I spaced my hands at nine and three o’clock on the wheel, as I’d been taught to do. The big car seemed to glide along, responding to my thoughts. I’d dreamed about it so often that it was like I’d been driving for years. I pulled onto Palos Verdes Drive North, making sure to keep a three-second space cushion between me and the car ahead. I couldn’t help thinking how easy—almost disappointingly natural—it was, this adult thing that all my life had seemed like magic.
I found my dad’s street and turned down it, bucking over a speed bump that sent Shorty and Ranger tumbling from the back seat. At first I thought I had the wrong address. I’d been expecting a condo complex, but this was a stucco apartment building shaped like a box and propped up on stilts. It looked like it might try to creep away in the middle of the night. SAXON ARMS was written on the front in medieval-looking script. Parked under the building, squeezed between two of the stilts, was my father’s Porsche.
I let the dogs out of the back seat and we
walked around to the other side of the building, their collars jingling, and climbed the stairs. One of the apartments had a BEWARE OF DOG sign, emblazoned with the picture of a snarling pit bull, taped inside the window. I stopped at my dad’s door and knocked. It was not a long flight of stairs, but my heart was going as if I’d run all the way from the beach.
“Caleb!” my dad said when he saw me, nearly dropping the CD in his hand. He was wearing sweatpants and one of those pleated Cuban shirts with tiny buttons where there weren’t any buttonholes, which I’d never seen him wear before. He hugged me in the doorway, and I could smell the coffee on his breath mixed with the chemical newness of his shirt. Music played behind him; he was a jazz fan—Fats Waller, that old stuff—and I realized how much I missed hearing its delirious ruckus around the house. Shorty and Ranger barked, excited to see him, and my father bent down to say hello, closing the door most of the way behind him.
“Did you get my message?” I asked.
“I did,” he said, glancing behind him. “Just now. I’ve been on my office phone all morning.” He cleared his throat. “Wow. Look at you. How the hell did you get here?”
“I drove.”
“You have your license already?”
I nodded. My father eyed me carefully—suspiciously, I thought—and then treated me to the rare abracadabra of his smile. “Serena’s taking a shower. She’s been lying out on the patio. The woman can sunbathe through an earthquake.”
The idea of her lying out in the middle of a Tuesday, instead of dealing with bills or laundry or groceries, seemed exotic to me. Scattered on the welcome mat was a pair of pink flip-flops. My dad bent down to collect them, grumbling under his breath, and Ranger slipped into the apartment. “Ranger, heel!” my father said, jogging after him. Shorty and I followed into what looked like the living room, though it was hard to say since the only furniture was a futon folded up into a pillowless couch. Nearby, tucked into one corner, was a kitchen area with a little stove and a microwave whose door was open and some Vogue magazines stacked on the counter next to a Carl’s Jr. bag. One of the cupboards had the sticker of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle on it. I searched around for the office he was talking about.
“I’ve got my eye now on a house in Manhattan Beach,” he said without looking at me. He grabbed Ranger’s collar and pulled him away from a ficus plant in the corner, glancing at the closed door beyond the kitchen. I could hear pipes moaning inside the walls.
“What about Corona del Mar?”
“It’s like Club Med down there now. Anyway, those cliffs? Whole town’s sliding into the ocean.”
My father turned down the music, then glanced again at the closed door of the bedroom. He hadn’t thanked me for bringing Shorty and Ranger, but I chalked this up to my appearing out of the blue. Shorty found the Carl’s Jr. bag on the counter and tried to pull it onto the floor, pawing her way up the cupboard.
“Down, girl!” my father said and yanked Shorty’s collar, hard enough that she yelped. The dog skidded over to me, crouched on her hind legs. “No one cleans up around here. It’s dog heaven. Didn’t you bring their leashes?”
“I thought you’d want to save them from the shelter.”
“I do, bud. I do.” My dad’s face softened. “But they’re pointers. I can’t keep them cooped up in here. They’re run-and-gun dogs.”
“Mom’s going to kill them.”
“It’s me she wants to kill,” he said proudly. He looked at Shorty and then glanced away again, as if he couldn’t meet her eye. “Does she talk about me?”
“Mom?”
“We lived in an apartment about this size, in New York. This was before your sister was born. The boiler didn’t work right, or maybe the landlord was just a prick, but we could see our breath in that place. Your mother stole some bricks from a construction site—a pregnant woman!—and heated them in the oven. We slept with hot bricks at our feet.”
“Can’t you keep them for a little while?” I said. “Till the house is ready?”
“I wish I could, bud, but they’re not allowed in the building. Not even shih tzus. It’s in the lease.”
The pipes in the wall squeaked off, and my dad excused himself and disappeared into the bedroom. I could hear him talking to his girlfriend behind the door, the muffled sound of their voices—I imagined her naked from the shower, dripping all over the carpet—and after a while I had the ghostly sensation, watching the dogs sniff around the kitchen, that we weren’t in my dad’s apartment at all. From outside drifted the sounds of a nearby pool, the echoey shrieks and splashes, and I thought about when Shorty and Ranger were puppies, soon after my father had docked their tails, how he’d trained them to swim. We’d had a swimming pool in Baltimore and I remembered how he’d waded into the shallow end with them one at a time, cradling them in one hand and then lowering them into the pool that way, holding them until they got used to the water. They looked small as rats to me, their tiny heads poking above the surface. My father had them swim to me as I knelt on the deck—how scared I was that they’d drown!—but they made it to me eventually, trembling as if they’d just got back from the moon, and my father took them again and whispered something in their ears, clutching them preciously in both hands.
Eventually, my dad emerged from the bedroom with his girlfriend, who was fully dressed and drying her hair with a towel. She was pudgier than my mother, and not as tall, and had one of those dark tans like she’d stepped out of a TV set that had the contrast knob turned all the way to the left. She’d done up her shirt wrong, and I could see her belly button, deep as a bullet wound, peeking between buttons. She hugged me with one arm.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” she said nervously, then laughed. She stepped back from me. “God, listen to me. That’s just what I’m supposed to say, isn’t it?” She noticed the dogs and went over to say hello to them, squatting down so they could sniff her hand. She scratched Ranger affectionately, just above the tail, and his hind leg began to bounce. “Aha. The way to every dog’s heart.”
My dad frowned at her, trying to send her a message across the room, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“I thought they’d be more ferocious,” she said.
My father snorted.
“Don’t they kill birds?”
“Right,” my father said. He smirked at me. “They have these little dog guns, and they shoot them out of the sky.”
His girlfriend reddened. “How am I supposed to know? I grew up in Burbank.”
She went out to the porch to hang her towel on the railing, and I heard a dog bark in a neighboring apartment. The one with the sign in the window, it sounded like. Shorty and Ranger began to bark as well. My father glanced at me, then cocked his head toward his girlfriend and gave me a secret look. He’d always been a mystery to me, a man of ingenious surprises, but now I knew exactly what he was going to do: roll his eyes. And that’s precisely what he did. He rolled his eyes, one man to another, the only people in the world with half a brain.
At the beach, I parked the Mercedes and headed down to the water, Shorty and Ranger jingling behind me. I was jingling too, my mom’s keys in my pocket. The three of us jingled down the path.
My mother was right where I’d left her, buried up to her neck. It was four in the afternoon. A cool breeze stirred the sand, and you could walk now without stepping on the sides of your feet. I stopped a couple feet away, wondering if I should let her sleep, but then Shorty dawdled over and began to sniff her face. My mother started, then yelled at me to take off her sunglasses.
“Why?”
“I’m afraid to move.”
I knelt down and did as my mother asked. There was something caught in her eyelashes: a perfect jewel, glittering in the sun.
“We can’t afford to lose it,” she said.
She shut her eye very slowly, like an owl, and I reached down with two fingers and plucked the crumpled contact lens from her lashes. Tweezed between my fingers, it really did look like a diamond
. I cupped my other hand around it, trying to protect it from the breeze. My mother took some time getting to her feet, but I didn’t complain. Anyway, this was our life now.
She found a Kleenex and we wrapped the lens up like a tooth and stuck it in her purse. My mother stared at me with one eye screwed shut, covered head to toe in sand. She looked less drunk, as if popping out of the ground had refreshed her somehow. Ranger bared his teeth and growled.
“He doesn’t recognize you.”
“Good,” she said strangely. She brushed the sand from her arms and legs as best she could, and squinted one-eyed down the beach.
“He’s gone,” I said.
She nodded. The breeze had sharpened to a wind, and the waves were getting blown out, dark patches flickering across the water and misting the tops of them. You could smell the salt in the air, stronger than before. My mother bent down and rubbed her legs, which were covered in goosebumps.
“It’s getting chilly out here,” she said. She closed both eyes for a moment, as if she were feeling woozy. “Can I have some of your coffee?”
I went over and grabbed the cup of cold coffee from the sand and handed it to her. She took a sip and grimaced.
“You really like this stuff?”
“No,” I said. I handed her the sunglasses.
“You might like it in a couple years.”
I tried to imagine what I’d look like in a couple years, and where we’d be living, and how the hell my mother would manage to support us. I tried to imagine this, but I couldn’t. I looked toward the water and could see the curve of the earth, way out where the ocean faded into a strip of white, a lone barge out there shimmering on the horizon, still and dainty as a toy, and for a moment the wind at my shirt seemed to blow right through me.
My mother poured the dregs of her Slurpee out, and the dogs sniffed over to the damp spot in the sand, bumping noses. My mom watched them for a while, pink already with sunburn, her glasses reflecting a smaller version of the world, as if the beach and crashing waves and vacant lifeguard stand were as far away as that boat on the horizon, and I could see why Ranger had barked at her. She looked unrecognizable to me, too.