Rockaway

by Tara Ison

  “See, that’s really something, a daughter like you. Really something.” He nods approvingly at her, and she smiles, basks a little, then waves away the compliment.

  “Oh, they’re wonderful. They’re doing great. Really strong. They’ll both probably live a long, long time, yet.” She takes a healthy swallow of martini. “Thank God.”

  The shrimp cocktail arrives; a rhomboid dish of thick crimson sauce, the shrimps clinging to its glass rim like drowning people clutching at a lifeboat.

  When the check comes she pokes her hand at it, but Julius bemusedly slaps a credit card on top, away from her. The oyster pirate smiles knowingly at her and she understands, with Julius paying for the evening, that she now has a duty to be a charming, attentive companion. She needs to stop discussing stupid and unkind things like prostate cancer and oyster shell bridal spoons. The thought of the rest of the evening still to go like this exhausts her.

  “You look a little like Anthony Quinn,” she tells him.

  “Yeah?” he says, pleased. “Hey, see, then I got time yet. He was still having kids up till the end, right?”

  “Right,” she assures him. “Never too late for a fresh start.”

  Before they leave he loudly asks the manager where to go for real Italian food around here; she thinks this is meant to underscore for her that while he once was from here, he is now from Manhattan. The manager snaps up a card from a large clamshell on the counter, scribbles, and hands it to him. “Marino’s,” he says. “Eighteenth and a hunnert sixty-seven. Ask for Dean. Tell him Larry from Lundy’s sent yover.”

  Julius gets lost. They drive through brightly lit Little Odessa, on a tunnel-like street beneath an elevated train, where they pass pierogi stands selling homemade borscht and Russian nightclubs advertising acts in neon Cyrillic letters. That was a great trip, she says, when I was in Russia, and launches into the story of traveling Europe the summer after college, before she was supposed to move to Chicago for grad school, the tour meant to study Balthus’s naked little girls at the Pompidou, Goya’s witchy women, gouaches in the Prado—she remembers roaming careless and carefree, lightweight everything tossed in a nylon backpack, the gossamer-float sense of skimming trains—and tells him how, the funny thing of the story is, really, that her most vivid memory is standing in line for hours outside the Hermitage to get real Russian vodka, how there turned out to be a glass bottle shortage and so vodka was doled out in condoms, seriously, men rushing home with their drooping latex phalluses of booze, but Julius interrupts to point out Coney Island in an open-ended way, as if expecting her to want to ride the rollercoaster. She then tries asking questions about his work in Manhattan, his upcoming trip to Cuba, but finally realizes his constant What, honey?s and What, sweetheart?s in response means he’s rather deaf. But he doesn’t seem particularly ill at ease with silence, so she stops talking at all.

  Marino’s is on the other side of Brooklyn, and in the end it takes them fifty silent and cologne’d minutes driving through revolving strips of Ethiopian, Russian, Italian, Hassidic, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods to get there. To her dismay, they are told there will be a forty-five minute wait, but Julius hands Larry-from-Lundy’s card to the maître d’ to give to Dean, and they are immediately seated in the prime booth of a black and pink Art Deco room with vertical strips of mirror on the walls. Julius pre-orders the chocolate soufflé, requests another round of martinis, which, when they arrive, he announces inferior to martinis in the city. It’s the vodka, he tells her, they try to pass off the cheap stuff. He lists better restaurants in Manhattan he will take her to. Over the penne arrabiata he inquires with circuitous and excessive delicacy how old she is and then seems both surprised and disappointed at almost-thirty-five; she feels briefly guilty, as though she’d deliberately sought to tantalize with the false impression of fertility and youth. She reassures him of her ability to impersonate twenty-something with the story of how she still gets carded in supermarkets when she buys wine. He seems cheered and charmed, too, by the fact that she purchases her wine in supermarkets, and promptly orders three glasses of the restaurant’s finest cabernets, in order to cultivate her palate. She pretends to be able to discern a difference and insists on drinking down the three glasses by herself, to avoid his getting drunk and aggressive or getting them killed on the drive home. When she asks how old he is, he coyly tells her the year of his birth and makes her do the math.

  Fifty-seven, she figures. No, fifty-eight.

  “Most shells have a life span of about two to fifteen years,” she says. “The larger ones live longer, they can make it up to seventy-five.” My father is only sixty-six, she thinks.

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “Thank you very much for dinner,” she says loudly.

  “Yeah, pretty lucky I found you out there today, on the beach,” he says, looking happy. “Thought that was probably you, sitting there. I knocked at the door, but no one was home. Pretty lucky.” She doesn’t point out the lack of luck involved—that if she hadn’t been sitting on the beach, she likely would’ve been in the house. She decides to let him think he has found something.

  When he offers her a sip of his after-dinner Frangelico she gulps three times.

  Her seatbelt is unbuckled five houses down from Nana’s, and when he slows then stops the car she leans in quickly to peck him on the cheek; he clasps the back of her head with his abalone-thick hand, holding her face against his for an extra moment.

  “You want to maybe have dinner Friday? I’ll know tomorrow if Cuba’s happening this week or not, I’ll call you.”

  She hurries into bed without toothbrushing or face-washing; his cologne, cloying and stale, she finds when she awakens in the morning, has transferred from his face to her cheek, to her pillow, to her sweater, and drifts through the rest of the house, mingling with the curry for days.

  SHE LOOKS FOR mussel shells. Most are broken; all have been snapped into halves. After two hours’ search she comes upon a perfect, intact bivalve; its sides are still held together by a fragile, drying ligament, but strained apart, gapped like castanets or a Munchean scream. She peers inside, but any trace of meat is long gone. There is something mythological here, something insightful and interesting; she remembers what she thinks is a Greek philosopher’s theory of male and female halves, once joined together in human form, now split apart in two drifting, searching sexes. She examines the empty and strained shell, noting its creamy nacre is worn from exposure, its hard beryline surface starting to fade, its chipped edges, its halves shaped like swollen, elongated tears. She hurries the mussel home. By the time she’s rinsing sand from her feet on the front porch she can’t conjure up what beauty or resonance she saw in the shell, only that it’s lusterless, and tacky with dry salt, and so decides instead to first make herself some scrambled eggs for lunch. Also, her head is pounding, from sparing Julius all that alcohol the night before, and so she opens a bottle of beer.

  She passes through the cool dark hallways of the house, climbs the creaking stairs—Why does Nana need all these family photos everywhere? she thinks—to her corner bedroom, winces at the sudden glare of sun through all those windows. She has already made the bed, as she has conscientiously done every morning, stretching the chenille coverlet smooth. She has already put yesterday’s clothes in the hamper, already tidied the bathroom and aligned her toiletries and hung her towels, and neatly laid out her brushes on the nightstand. She has already swept up the traces of sand that always seem to creep into her room, despite the careful rinsing of her feet when she enters the house from the beach.

  All right, she thinks. You’re all ready to begin. She selects a canvas, positions it perfectly on her easel. Mytilus edulis, she thinks, looking at her gaping shell. The common blue mussel. She seizes a tube of pthalo blue, punctures it open.

  There. You have begun.

  Then dioxazine purple. Aureolin yellow, viridian, ivory, iron oxide black. She studies the moist little squeezings of color on her palette. Even with the
employee discount she’d spent a fortune on these studio-sized tubes in her wooden case: Old Holland, the best. Excellent strength of color and lightfastness, no cheap fillers, their pigments still fine-ground by old-fashioned stone rollers and mixed with cold-pressed, sun-bleached virgin linseed oil, each tube packed by hand. She has recited that to customers for over ten years, using her old college canvases as example and display, and, before quitting, purchased herself this grand spectrum. She must be careful not to waste them, all these rich colors.

  The sun through a picture window reflects off the virgin canvas in a harsh, hurtful way. A blank canvas is awful, an insult, she thinks. A sin. You must overcome the sin of the blank canvas.

  She seizes a brush. It is a ragged, windy day; sand flecks the window glass and the wooden frames are rattling in their sockets. She sets the brush down, contemplates the mussel, its faint pearlescence, then, determined, punctures one more tube and squeezes out a healthy dollop of rose dore madder. She picks up a palette knife, dips its edge, taps, makes pretty red dots on the palette. Like smallpox, she thinks. Measles. A coughed spray of consumptive blood. Focus, Sarah, she tells herself. Stop playing around. Carpe diem yourself. Seize this opportunity to express and define who you are, now. Fresh start.

  She puts the palette knife down, swigs beer, and looks out toward the ocean. A seagull hangs, floats in reverse for a moment, fighting the wind, then flies away beyond her view. At the seam of horizon and sea is a large ship, a tanker, she decides, or some kind of freighter. A liner, maybe a cruise vessel. She thinks of buying an illustrated book about ships, all the different kinds. The ship slowly crosses the three picture windows, absorbing the afternoon. When her cell phone rings, once, then twice, she doesn’t answer it. You should have at least sketched the ship, she thinks, too late, as it passes from her last framed view. She gets up, rinses her unused brushes in naphtha in her bathroom sink, props them head-up in jars to dry. She scrapes the red from her knife, wipes it, sets her palette aside. The image of a ship, perfect in its wandering free, floating ship-ness. A floating seagull. Or the ocean itself, the view from your window, the waves and all that beautiful sky. A simple seascape. You should just paint whatever you see, at the moment, in the moment, to get you started. Set you on the path. Why don’t you just do that? Like a prompt. Yes, that’s what you’ll do. She rips from A Collector’s Guide to Seashells of the World several color plates of the more florid, exotic shells and scotch-tapes them, careful not to give herself paper cuts, over the framed photos of Nana Pearl’s family hung in groupings on the walls of her room.

  The humming, relentless sound of breaking waves is beginning to get on her nerves. It is starting to feel as if two conch shells are clamped on her head, trapping the sea’s whispery rise and falls against her ears.

  “IT IS ENJOYABLE for me to watch you cook,” says Bernadette with pleasure. “It is so different from Sri Lankan cooking.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” replies Sarah, unsure of what else to say. As she continues ribboning a roasted red pepper, Bernadette conscientiously snaps off the kitchen light.

  “Could you leave that on?” Sarah asks politely. “I mean, I know it’s still pretty light out, but this is sort of a sharp knife.”

  “Oh, yes, I am sorry.” Bernadette, lugging in the burlap bag of basmati rice, snaps the light back on. “You are having trouble with your eyes?”

  “No, no, they’re fine. I’d just hate to cut myself, you know.”

  “I have cataracts,” Bernadette informs her loudly. “Next month I am going home to Sri Lanka for the surgery.”

  “Really?” I’ll have the house to myself, Sarah thinks. Good, easier to focus that way.

  “And for my teeth, too.” Bernadette taps her upper lip with a finger. “I am losing so many teeth, here.”

  “I’m sorry. Do you really have to fly back to do all of that?”

  “It is less money for me at home.”

  “Ah.” Sarah nods sympathetically. She feels reproachable for her sound teeth, her waste of light.

  “But it will be good for visiting my family,” Bernadette says, measuring rice into a saucepan. “My daughter Nissa is graduating from school as a doctor.”

  “That’s great. Congratulations. You must be really proud.”

  “And my daughter Celeste has the new little boy I have not seen yet. It makes me lonely for him.”

  “You must miss them,” Sarah says. How can someone be lonely for someone they’ve never met? she thinks.

  “Yes,” Bernadette says cheerfully. “Very much. I will show you photographs?”

  “Sure, yeah.”

  “It is hard for a mother, when she is not with her children. Even when they are grown, and off living their own lives. But, perhaps it not as hard for the child?” She looks at Sarah, a small, closed-lipped, questioning smile that makes her nervous.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she says. “I miss my parents. I mean, of course I miss them. That’s totally normal, right?”

  Bernadette adds a stream of cloudy water to her rice, sets the pan on the stove. “And how is your painting coming? It is happy for you, being here?”

  “It’s great. I’m getting so much done. The open air, all the light. The quiet . . .”

  “Avery and I were discussing this. We would love to see your work.”

  “Well, that’s really nice of you guys, thank you, but—”

  “But an artist must be ready to do this. It must be the right time, for showing the work to others. We understand.”

  “Yeah. Exactly. But sometime, sure. Thanks.” She puts her knife down in the sink, scoops her red pepper on top of her pasta.

  “Ah, you are having that on your noodles? I see.”

  “Oh, let me get out of your way, now,” Sarah says quickly, taking her plate upstairs to her room.

  THE HOUSE PHONE rings the next day as she’s slicing strawberries for her afternoon snack. After this, she thinks, you will take a good, vigorous walk on the beach, before that fog comes in. Get your blood moving. And then you will get to work. Get productive, take full advantage of this important—

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Sarah?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Marty. You know, Julius’s friend.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “I’m having shabbes dinner with friends tonight, they live down the street from you.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “It’s the last night of Passover, too.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right. Damn, I forgot.” She suddenly pictures her parents, going through the motions of a seder without her, alone. A lonely lamb shank, two hard-boiled eggs. Store-bought gefilte fish, a sad, sodium-filled can of chicken soup. Waiting for her to call and check in, Happy Pesach, Mom and Dad! Or maybe they didn’t even bother having a seder this year, with her gone. She sees them sitting alone at the kitchen table, eating one of the low-fat casseroles she’d prepared, labeled, stocked their freezer with. She feels sad, guilty, the dull start of a headache, doesn’t hear the silence on the line, and then:

  “Well, you want to come or what?” His voice is softer, freer of Brooklyn than Julius’s.

  “Um . . . I’m just putting my dinner in the oven.”

  “Take it out.”

  She thinks of her greasy hair, her still-unwashed body. “What time?”

  “Not till seven-thirty or eight. We’re still shooting. I’ll pick you up.”

  “Okay. Not before seven-thirty,” she says, calculating.

  “It’s shabbes, Sarah. We can’t eat before eight, anyway.”

  He hangs up, and she figures if she cuts short her walk she’ll have plenty of time to shower and dress for dinner, to do her hair. She’ll come up with a new ritual to inspire the perfect painting. No more chocolate, maybe. Or no more wine, that’s good, be disciplined, keep your head clear, yes.

  HE IS DRESSED nicely in black jeans and a linen shirt, his jaw shaved free of bristle, but still wears the black knit cap.<
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  “We’re walking?” she asks, following him down the sidewalk.

  “They only live a few blocks over. I walked here.”

  They cross the main boulevard, away from the fancier oceanfront properties and the darkening eastern sky, wind through the neighborhood of modest homes pressing close to the street, children’s toys and aluminum lawn chairs left out on porches, bathing suits hung out to dry. They pass families walking along, on their way to synagogue, she assumes, from their yarmulkes and dark suits, the women dressed in long sleeves, long skirts, hats or fancy scarves covering their heads. Even the children, solemn and formally dressed, walking beside their parents like tiny sedate adults.

  “So, who are these people? Where we’re going?”

  “Itzak and Darlene, their kids. Itzak and I grew up together.”

  “Like you and Julius?”

  “No, I knew Julius later. Itzak and me, we used to steal Abba Zabbas from the dime store, you know? Cut school and go smoke grass. Sneak out to the city, go to the clubs. That was music. You ever hear of the Cedar Bar? The Village Vanguard?”

  “No.”

  “No? Wow. Early, mid-sixties, Itzak and me, we’re just kids, right? We’re maybe fifteen, sixteen, we’re sneaking into these basement clubs, we’re hearing Al Cohn, Howard Hart. Miles Davis. Wild.”

  “I’ve heard of Miles Davis,” she says.

  “Itzak’s Hasidic now. Really beautiful.”

  “Oh?” Who is this person? she thinks. What am I doing here? “I feel funny, not bringing anything. I’m a bad guest.”

  “You could’ve brought the wrong thing, though. Even the wine, it has to be kosher.”

  “I thought of that. I would’ve brought a bag of oranges, or something.”

  He shrugs. “Hey, whatever.”

  She feels dismissed, somehow. Irrelevant. “So . . . when did you start keeping kosher? Julius said it was a new thing for you?”