by Tara Ison
When she gets the book home, however, she finds the written part of A Collector’s Guide to Seashells of the World laborious, obsessed with classification and boggy Latin words; Mollusca-Gastropodae-Mesogastopoda-Cypraeidae-Cyprae-Tigris bears no relation at all to the glistening tiger stripes, the whorls, the fierce horny spines, the sinuous geometries, the corallines and saffrons and ceruleans of the shells in the book’s generous color plates. She normally doesn’t like photographs, hears the impassioned rant of an old art professor: A photograph is a dead image of a dead thing! It’s painting, a painting, that creates and gives life! But she has to admit the color photos outshine the prosaic, monochromatic shells she’s actually found on the beach. Perhaps the photos will serve as a prompt, she theorizes. The juxtaposition of glossy dead thing with imperfect real specimen. And so she spends an hour or so each morning leafing through the book over her fresh-ground, cooling coffee, idly admiring the rainbow color rays of gaudy asaphis clams and the fluted projecting scales of giant clams, also known as crypt-dwellers.
THERE ARE THREE different kinds of sand to walk on, she discovers. On the other side of the low brick wall that marks Nana’s property, farthest from the water, the sand is dry and siftable and pale as snow, the warmest to bare feet but the most dangerous with its buried broken things, sharp fragments of plastic and glass, bits of abandoned toys.
The next section is slightly damp, toughened and stiff from the last lunar swell of surf, and the most obstacled with shells, seaweed, ragged seagull feathers, twisted limbs of wood. This sand almost carries her weight without breaking the surface.
Then the wet, darkest sand, briefly and constantly re-soaked with each slow roll and break of a wave. When she steps here she craters the sand for a mere second before her foot trace is swirled away. She lingers, slushing her feet back and forth in a few inches of cold briny water, liking how she seems to disappear with each step.
When she heads back to the warm sand up by Nana’s, she notices a man in shorts studying the house, thick-torsoed but with long and shapely legs like a cocktail waitress; he exits the beach onto the small street and disappears from view. Another man, she notices, is sitting placidly on Nana’s wall, wearing sunglasses, a dark sweatsuit, and black knit cap, curly hair fringe flapping in the breeze. He is unshaven, bum-like. She is annoyed at their presence; it is disruptive.
The early-May beach has been blessedly empty, the ocean and bright air still too chilly for bathers, not even a lifeguard on duty yet atop the high rickety chair facing the sea, and she’s used to having the span of shore all to herself. She is looking forward to swimming, soon; maybe she’ll begin each day with a brisk, invigorating ocean swim. She sits several yards away from the bum-like man and leans her back against the wall proprietarily, prepared to sketch. After a moment she pulls aside her long cotton skirt and exposes her legs, hoping to maybe get some color in the weak sun. She inspects her pale and stubbled calves and thighs, so dry these days, her skin, something she should take better care of. Maybe get some Vitamin E oil, they say that works well, diminishes the marks of time, of old scars. She rubs at her thigh, remembers glowing a perfect unblemished peach, her apricot child skin, her tender, once-upon-a-time skin. She drifts her fingers through the sand, sifts free a shard of glass, bottle-green, like old ginger ale bottles, she thinks, apricot and green, the vibrant colors of those little-girl summer beach days. The ritual stop at 7-11 to buy Coppertone and bruised blushing apricots and those emerald bottles of ginger ale to pack with crushed ice in the cooler. At the La Jolla Shores they’d choose the most isolated spot, stab an umbrella deep, spread beach towels extravagantly.
She always swam off by herself, she remembers, leaving her parents and baby brother with their radio and magazines and baby-boy toys. She remembers the happy stumbling sandy run, the blithe, flapping free dive into the sea, the euphoria of swimming deep. The brief fear as the solid world dropped away beneath her, then surfacing, feeling and realizing the effortless float, the joy of floating free, arms outstretched to greet the next wave. And after each wave came, flipped and roiled her underwater like a scrap of paper and dragged her back to where the ocean broke down and thinned, she’d scramble up from the seaweed and sand crabs, cough, and look for them, her parents, eyes burning and searching and the start of another fear, of panic, but there, always, every single time, there they are. Her parents, watching for her.
Her father waves, proud and affirming, her mother applauds overhead, making it okay to swim back out all over again alone to meet and conquer the next swelling, frothing wave. When she has enough brine in her throat she staggers back, to her mother’s fresh palmful of coconutty Coppertone, a popped-open bottle of that cold ginger ale, a piece of bruised fruit sweating ice, sweet things to cancel the salt and soothe. A brisk rub with a sun-hot towel, their admiration and cheers for a discovered shell, a perfect seaweed fan, the tiny sand crab she’s carried home in her cupped palms, the painstaking drawing she’s made—Mommy, Daddy, come see, come look!—of a perfect seahorse or mermaid or happy family of fish in the damp sand.
You should give them a call, she thinks, blinking. Really, you should call, see how they’re doing, if they need anything. You should check in with them, they’ve been so understanding and supportive and not bothering you. She studies the piece of glass, so careless of people, really, to bring glass things to the beach, just breakage waiting to happen and then all those glinty bits hidden in sand, lying in wait for soft feet and fingers and toes . . .
“Hey!”
She is startled, looks up. She spots the man in shorts exiting the front gate of Nana’s house, approaching. She flips her skirt back down again.
“Hello?” she inquires.
“You Sarah?” he asks loudly.
“Who are you?”
“You know Susan?” Susan is her friend Emily’s first cousin.
“Uh, yeah.”
“I’m her dad’s brother. You know Rose, right?”
Rose, Sarah knows, is Susan’s mother, her friend Emily’s aunt. One of Nana Pearl’s four daughters. Rose was divorced from Susan’s father Bruce when Susan was seven. Sarah knows the twining course of Emily’s complicated family history as well as she knows her uncomplicated own, all those Emily-family gatherings she’s attended, the holidays, weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, graduation parties, the being invited along to birthday celebrations in Catalina, their clannish ski trips to Vail.
“Uh huh,” she says.
“Yeah, I still talk to her a lot, you know, she and Bruce’re still pretty good friends. Heard you were here. Thought we’d come by, say hello.” He gestures behind her, to include in his we the man still sitting on the wall, who is ignoring them, studying the sea.
“Oh. Hello.”
“So, you’re what, on vacation?”
“No, I’m here to paint.” She closes her sketchbook, picks up her sandals, rises; she will have to pass right by him to get to the house. She puts the piece of glass in her pocket, to dispose of properly in Bernadette’s kitchen recycling.
“Oh, hey, you’re an artist?”
“Well,” she says.
“Great. Hey, Marty,” he yells, “we got an artist here!” The man on the wall finally looks over at them, and nods. He swings his sweatsuited legs over to their side, like a concession.
“So, what, you want to go for a walk with us?”
“I was just about to get back to work,” she says, approaching them. “I’m here for painting. I’m getting ready for an exhibition.” Mommy, Daddy, come see, come look! she remembers.
“Oh, come on, take a break. Come for a walk with us. Marty,” the man yells, “come get her to go for a walk with us.”
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“I’m Julius. Bruce’s brother Julius. This is my friend, Marty. We grew up together. Marty still lives here, just a few blocks over. Tell her, Marty.”
Marty points in the direction of a few blocks over.
“Yeah, Marty’s an artist, t
oo. Musician.” Julius tells her the name of a band that sounds slightly familiar, like a group mentioned in a Sounds of the Sixties album commercial. “Big glory days. Ever hear of them?”
“Maybe.”
“So, there, see? Come on, come for a walk with us.” He reaches, puts his hand on her arm, and she is glad to be wearing a long-sleeved blouse. He has skin either an enhanced or natural nut brown, and a ruby red, pouty lower lip.
“I don’t know . . .”
Marty strolls over. He takes off his sunglasses, looks at her inscrutably, and nods. Closer up he looks like a pleasant-faced but aging actor in a going-psychotic role.
This is how women’s cut-up bodies wind up washing ashore, she thinks. This is how it starts.
AS THEY WALK along the shoreline, on the damp, toughened strip of sand, Julius tells of his youthful escapades. A buddy once invited him to a concert in New York and he found himself on a helicopter to Woodstock, where, Jimi Hendrix’s manager having not shown up, Julius walked around for the weekend wearing Jimi Hendrix’s manager’s security badge and doing drugs with John Sebastian. Another time he wound up schlepping a suitcase of opium across Europe, and getting busted in Israel. They kept him in jail for six months, finally letting him go the first night of Hanukkah, he thinks, because he’s a Jew. Not much of a Jew, hafta say, Julius says with a laugh. Now, Marty, that’s a Jew, a real Jew. He’s started keeping kosher, the whole bit. Getting conservative on me these days.
Marty bobs his head in good-humored acknowledgment.
“You Jewish?” Julius asks her.
“Yes. But not much of one, either,” she says.
Now Julius is a stockbroker in Manhattan. He still keeps in touch, though; he manages a Cuban musician and twice a month flies to Havana for club dates and banana daiquiris at one of Hemingway’s favorite bars.
“Seventeen dollars for a daiquiri!” he says. “You gotta come sometime.”
“Are you still in music?” she asks Marty.
“I play around a little,” he tells her.
“He still tours,” Julius says. “He’s got a doo-wop group, they do revival, you gotta hear ’em sometime. And he scores movies. They’re filming a big movie over in Brooklyn,” Julius says. “Marty’s on the set every day.”
“That sounds interesting.”
Marty shrugs. “I mostly produce for friends, do some mixing.” He glances at, then away from her. “Whatever.”
They pass one of the decaying old buildings she has wondered about, three stories of smashed windows and graffiti’d brick, a chain-link fence. “What is that, do you know?” she asks. “It’s horrible-looking.”
“Old age home,” says Julius. “Been here forever. They got it shut down, now.”
“It’s like some Dickensian orphanage.”
“Marty, you had someone in there, right? Your uncle?”
“Yeah.” He nods. “Old guy. Died in there when I was a kid.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarah says. “That’s so sad.” She smiles in sympathy, envisions a lonely old man, abandoned by family and friends, lying on a cot, withering away to the unrelenting sound of seagulls and crashing waves, the smell of aging bodies and industrial disinfectant. Marty doesn’t look especially sad, however, or say anything more, and her words sound insipid, hanging there. “So . . . are they going to tear it down?”
“No, they’re re-doing it,” he says. “It’ll be a community center or something. Maybe a new school. There’s good stuff coming, here.”
“Yeah, he keeps saying.” Julius nudges her. “This whole place went to hell a while back. Great when we were kids, but the late sixties, the seventies, you know, economy tanked and people got the hell outta here. I been trying for years to get this guy to move to the city. You gotta move to the city, I keep telling him.”
Marty nods good-naturedly.
“He won’t budge. Says it’s all coming back these days. It’s your life, I tell him.”
After another hour of walking, Julius says he’s hungry. It is now late in the afternoon, the sun has sloped, and it’s too late, she thinks regretfully, to paint.
“What’s that place you were talking about around here, Marty? The seafood place?” Julius asks.
“Lundy’s. But that’s in Sheepshead Bay. We go after shooting, sometimes.”
“Let’s go. You like seafood? I’m starving.”
“You know, I’ve never been to Brooklyn,” she says. “I picture it like in movies. Moonstruck. Goodfellas. Woody Allen stuff.” She glances at Marty, to include him.
“I don’t want to eat yet,” says Marty.
“You want to come for dinner?” Julius asks her; she hesitates, unsure whether Marty has merely postponed the dinner, or declined his inclusion entirely.
“I don’t know . . . I should still get a few hours’ work done.” There’s spinach left, she thinks, and pasta waiting for her. I might open a can of tuna.
“Tell you what, gimme your number, I’ll call you in an hour.”
“Okay . . .” She scribbles on a page of her sketchpad, rips it off, hands it to him. She wonders if Marty will be hungry in an hour.
“What’s this?” Julius asks.
“The phone number.”
“This’s the house number. My brother, he’s married to Rose eighteen years, you think I don’t know Pearl’s telephone number?” Julius takes the scrap from her and passes it to Marty. “Here. You keep that.” Marty shrugs, and puts it in the pocket of his sweatsuit. He nods at her, turns, and strolls away, heading back along the shoreline toward the Rockaway homes. Julius takes out his phone. “Gimme your cell. I’ll program it in mine. See? We can do this now. Look how good this works.”
Julius doesn’t call until seven-thirty, at which point Bernadette and Avery have already taken over the kitchen with some kind of stew, are banging pots, bellowing at and around each other. Julius’s first-person pronouns indicate he’s coming to pick her up alone. She’s hungry, and the yelling in the kitchen is giving her a headache. She decides to go to dinner, but also decides, at least, that she will partly stick to her resolution and not wash her hair. An assertion of indifference.
“Do you know Julius?” she inquires of Avery as he pours out basmati rice from a massive burlap sack he and Bernadette keep in the storeroom off the kitchen.
“Ah, Julius. Yes, he is uncle to Susan, I think. You are going out?” He seems very pleased, relieved almost, that she will not be having her dinner alone.
I have been eating my dinner alone by choice, she wants to tell him, but says nothing. She just smiles, nods, and exits by the kitchen door to wait outside the house.
“We will be keeping the light on for you, yes?” he booms after her.
WHEN SHE GETS into Julius’s car, a metallic gold Jaguar, she breathes in air freshly sweetened with men’s cologne; it troubles her for being as unperfumed as she is, and also for its scent of expectation.
They leave Rockaway, and, as they drive across the Marine Parkway Bridge, he asks her if she’s ever been married. She says no, and then decides it’s blatantly rude not to return the question.
“Nope. Lived with a lady for twelve years, though. Moira. Irish Catholic girl, there you go. Should find me a nice Jewish girl. Have kids. Not too late for me, huh?”
She smiles, nods, peers out the window. “Hey, Flatbush Avenue,” she says. “I guess I am officially in Brooklyn. Looks like a big field.”
“Yeah,” he says. “We’re going through Marine Park now. That’s Bennett Field, over there. Lots of famous places around here. I’ll drive you by Coney Island, later. Brighton Beach. Better in the day, though.”
At Lundy’s he propels her to the oyster bar and announces his plan to just begin the evening here, for cocktails and appetizers. A chalkboard listing freshly caught options hangs on fishnet over their heads. Julius orders from the bartender—a guy dressed as a pirate, briskly quartering lemons—vodka martinis and a half dozen each of littleneck and topneck clams, and Wellfleet oysters. Sh
e has never heard of Wellfleet and decides to look up their classification in her book when she gets home. Julius cocks back his head and lets an oyster slide from shell to throat; she instead uses her tiny fork to rip free the oyster’s last clinging shred and transfer it primly to her mouth.
“They’d make good spoons, wouldn’t they?” she says, replacing the empty oyster shell in its berth of crushed ice. “I’ve been collecting them on the beach. I feel like I’m choosing flatware for my bridal registration.”
“What, honey?”
“Oh, nothing.” She touches her lips to her martini, and reaches for a littleneck. The oyster pirate brings her another martini at Julius’s crooked finger, then, smiling, shucks oyster after oyster. She wonders if he ever cuts himself by accident. She wonders if the lemon juice from all those wedges burns.
He asks if she has any kids, and she tells him No, but she is very close to her parents. They’re a very close family. Her parents are just wonderful. They’re getting older, though. She tells him her mother is in poor health now, liver problems and maybe a transplant down the road, that her father has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. But early stage. They are treating it with hormone therapy, she adds, sipping her martini, and are all very hopeful.
“Yeah,” he says, nodding enthusiastically. “Hormone therapy. They say that works great, can sometimes do the whole job. Or maybe with the radiation they do. The younger you are, that’s when it’s bad. But you get hit at sixty-five, seventy, you’re okay, you know? Something else’s gonna kill you first.” He seems contemplative and informed on this subject, and she realizes, after all, that he probably isn’t that much younger than her father. “It’s nice they got you to depend on now,” he adds.
“Yes,” she says. “I live, well I lived, just down the street. I do their shopping, take them to their appointments, stuff like that. They’re fun to cook for. I like to make them special meals, healthy things, you know. Nonfat sour cream. Hide the vegetables.”