by Tara Ison
But Do it for your mother, Sarah, her father says, She needs this right now, do it for her, and so of course she did, of course she does, give her mother her birthday, and it’s a day spent holding her breath among her friends’ ice-cream-drunk giggles and balloon-twist hats, waiting for the awful thing, her mother laughing too loudly too festive too grim, her father clapping his hands too hard with forced gaiety, clap clap clap. She sees her mother pouring vodka into her Tab from a purse-sized plastic bottle meant to hold Jean Naté body splash, she sees her father see it, sees her father’s face tightening darkening, wait it’s coming, yes, her mother’s laughter turning slack and weepy, there it is, her mother’s hands shaking as she carries in the bright-iced cake, everyone singing the inharmonious “Happy Birthday” too loud, ice cream parlor bells and whistles, her mother shaking, stumbling, the cake sliding, dropping to break and smash on the floor.
Gasps, wails, mock-clapping, awkward laughter. She sees her father tipping into the release of anger, grabbing her mother, his grip brutal on her arm, Sarah, come help me, come here!, but which of them even said that at that moment, which of them was pleading Sarah, do something, come help, demanding her to help clean it all up, to make everything all right? She won’t do it, no, is looking down, away from her parents, her mortified friends, she is studying all those pink plastic mermaids hanging from glass mugs, the chartreuse monkeys hooked from their skinny plastic tails, and she hates her crying slumping mother, her raging father, hates candles and cakes, hates her little brother for dying, hates her pretty friend from school with the prettiest curly hair, Emily, hates her for her pretty look of pity and the well-packed nutritious lunches she brings to school. She hates herself for having a birthday. She grips a tiny acid-pink mermaid in her fist, feels a tiny plastic arm snap off like a wishbone, and, later that night, when the day is over with and done and cleaned up and never again please be forgotten forever, in the quiet of her bedroom she sits on her bed, presses the pink plastic bone edge of a mermaid arm against the skin of her thigh, deeper, feels the quick hot pierce, begins to carve S, then AR, AH into her flesh, each bleeding letter in happy bright red focus, she is here, yes, she is here, she is here.
A surge of applause startles her; she looks up to see Russell the DJ leap onstage to embrace Marty, and the two guys quip with each other, Yeah, we go back, huh?, I’ll tell you folks, I knew this guy when . . . A perm’d, fleshy woman in her late forties begins yelling out requests. The sheepdog guy hoots. Marty and Tony and Frankie and Sammy laugh, bobbing their heads, waving, then Marty starts to sing, the other Satellites backing him on keyboard and bass, their voices in support of his. And Sarah blinks because she sees it, suddenly, sees the music of their voices like pure white light through a prism, split into all the colors of sound.
Harmony, she thinks, oh. I get it now. Marty sings the ruling color, intense, dominant, red purple, maybe, an ultramarine mixed with alizarin crimson, and Tony, Frankie, Sammy sing the complements, they’re yellow orange, yellow green, blue green, the perfect meld to balance, texture, highlight each other, all the hues swirling together, the relationship of note to note, that’s what music is, we should have been listening to music in all those art classes, trying to grasp color, refraction, translucence, perspective, the illusion of depth, and, okay, you know what, Sarah? You have had a lot to drink. No wonder this is so bearable.
She unbites the cup and breathes, tries to just listen and know the harmony is a stable, tangible thing. It isn’t going to go away or suddenly clash, she can trust it, hold on. She breathes, peaceful and wildly relieved, watching music. The jacket over her left shoulder floats up a smell of oil-rich leather, and citrus with a touch of salt; she slides her arms into the sleeves and pulls it around her, warm as a sun-hot towel, a palm of coconut lotion. She tucks her nose in the collar, huddles like a crustacean. She resists the urge to wave at Marty, up above onstage.
“Having fun?” Russell the DJ is standing next to her.
“Oh, sure,” she says. “This is completely great.” I love these guys, she thinks. These old guys singing in their little black fedoras and shades are good, this is a completely charming thing. This is so sweet. She smiles happily at Russell. “I never heard them before this.”
“No? Never?” he says, surprised.
Oh, right, she reminds herself. I’m the girl with the band. She laughs to herself; she has never, ever, this she knows, been the type of girl to be the girl with the band.
“Well, I’ll tell you, they’re the best, these guys. Never made the charts or anything, you know, but they’re the real thing. Look at this crowd. They’re all in love. I see some of these people all the time, they follow these guys around to every gig.” His voice layers over the music like glaze.
“That’s nice.” She swallows what’s left in her cup.
“And that one, he’s my boy. Marty,” Russell nods enthusiastically. “We go back a long time.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell you, you should’ve seen that one twenty years ago. Gorgeous.”
“Really?” she says. “Him?” She wishes, suddenly, that she had bought the album of his they’d found that day on the street. She wishes she’d looked more closely at it.
“Sure. That wild hair, and the voice, and that face. Look at that face. He’s beautiful.”
She watches Marty a moment, trying to superimpose that older, younger image. No, he’s just some shlubby old singing guy, she thinks. Who shoves the Torah at me and davens and eats green onion stalks like pretzel sticks and whom I can’t figure any angle of, I can’t fit into any frame. She watches him standing out in front of the others, singing, with his beautiful hands up, caressing the air, looking ardent and happy and full of light. Oh, no, she thinks. He is. He is really, really beautiful, and you’re all caught up and ridiculous and hearing colors like some strung-out groupie, and now it is too late, something has started, has begun.
The sheepdog guy keeps hooting. She wonders if he’s a normal, enthused fan, or beyond that. Beyond actual. If he’s really deranged, unhinged, lost, and there’s a shotgun sewn into the big stuffed dog, rounds of ammo tucked inside his commemorative Marty Zale T-shirt. If maybe he’s just waiting for the perfect, musical, vulnerable moment to snap and start spraying, to turn on her, take her out, obliterate and make everything end right now. She can’t decide which way she’d like it to go.
SHE WAITS FOR him in the car, still wearing his jacket, watching him finish up autographs for the lingering fans. He glances up, sees her, waves. She waves back. Take your time, she mouths. But he says his good-byes, bear-hugs Russell, and hurries over.
“So?” he says, climbing into the driver’s seat next to her.
“So?” she asks, smiling. He glances at her a little too casually, as if to say her reaction warrants a polite inquiry but doesn’t really matter all that much. “So, that was great,” she says, laughing, nodding. “You guys were really great.”
“That was good, right?”
“Yeah. I’m . . . I have to say, I’m surprised. It’s another whole different side of you. Like a glimpse into your soul.”
“Yeah?”
“I really enjoyed it.”
“I didn’t see you anywhere.”
“I was way in back. Russell came over to say hi.”
“Good, I asked him to take care of you.”
They both gaze straight ahead; Tony, Sammy, and Frankie are still joking around with Russell.
“Do you still have to go finish up anything?” she asks.
“No, I’m okay. It’s good to just sit a minute, you know, come down from it. Whatever. Be peaceful. We’ll go to dinner now, with the guys. Maybe we’ll go to Elaine’s.”
Be scared of me, she thinks. Go on. Be, just a little, terrified. “I sort of got you a present,” she says after a moment.
“Yeah?” He smiles slightly at her.
“Yeah.” She slides his jacket off her shoulders, and twists away from him, facing th
e passenger door. She tugs sideways at the V-neck of her shirt until her left shoulder slips up through the neckline, and turns her show of naked back toward him. “I wanted to do something whimsical.”
She thinks she hears him smile, then turns to look and sees him laugh, a warm little laugh of delight. Low on her left shoulder blade is a faux India ink tattoo in Art’s meticulous cursive script: Marty Zale & The Satellites, garnished with musical notes and a floating G clef.
“I like this,” he says. He’s very pleased.
“It isn’t real,” she says. “Just temporary.”
“This is good. A side to you I haven’t seen.”
“Good,” she says. “Then we’re even.” She turns back to look out the window again, leaving her shoulder bare. She feels even before he does it his hand reach out and his finger trace the tattoo, gliding slowly over the letters on her skin. Then down below the triangular slope of shoulder blade, the smooth, still-perfect skin of her shoulder blade, to first up then down the sides of her spine, then high across the nape of her neck, tracing her collarbone, her throat, places where the tattoo is not.
MITZVAH
SARAH FINDS THIRTY-two-ounce plastic bottles of aloe-vera and ginseng moisturizer with alpha-hydroxy acids on sale at the drugstore on 116th Street; she buys three of them, so that every night she can coat herself thickly in forgiving, rejuvenating lotion, let her dry skin drink it all in while she sleeps. She buys baby oil to smooth on in the shower, and a pumice stone to grate her elbows and heels—rubbery bits of epidermis on the tile floor—and a loofah for husking the backs of her thighs. A cleanser made of ground apricot seeds, for sloughing her face free of dead cells. Tiny ampoules of pure Vitamin E, to puncture and squeeze the healing, erasing oil out of. She buys a new pack of razors, for keeping her legs shaved to an infantile satin. She stands for ten minutes or so contemplating the SPF in various sunscreens, and finally chooses a 35—lax enough to maintain a healthy, youthful glow, but still enough, she decides, to block out all the aging and cancerous rays. A white plastic trapezoid of Johnson & Johnson dental floss; Rembrandt toothpaste with special whiteners. She looks for white cotton gloves in the ladies apparel shops to wear overnight on her lotioned hands, but can’t find any. At a fruit stand next to the Pickles and Pies Delicatessen she buys lemons to squeeze into her hair, the whiff of them bringing a fading, lemony moment, her mother doing that when she was a very little girl, squeezing and combing fresh lemons into her hair, the juice dripping down her bare, chicken-bone back, tossing the lemon rinds to grind up in the sink’s garbage disposal so the kitchen would smell fresh. Then sending Sarah out to sun, or all of them heading off to the beach. But her hair was bright then, anyway, the natural blond of little girls’ blond hair, the kind that tones down, fades, has faded over time to a mousy dun. She hopes the lemons will bring all the brightness back.
DINNER AT ELAINE’S was not what she’d expected. Tony and Frankie came with them, hyped up from the Playland gig, drumming their thighs like bongos, springing in their chairs. All three of them still wearing their doo-wop suits, their black fedoras cocked at smug angles. Marty let his hand wander down her back as he guided her to the table, then ignored her once they were all seated. The guys audited every song of the Oldies show, every note, Rabbi, that was sweet, I’m telling you, that last song, what you did, beautiful man, Frankie, we gotta work on that chorus, Hey, you guys see Nathan in the audience, did he show, or what? They crooned to each other over their rigatoni—she couldn’t decide if she was present enough for them to be serving as audience, or was simply the generic and negligible girl with the band.
The place was empty, harshly lit; she’d imagined the scene from Manhattan, Woody Allen and dewy Mariel Hemingway glowing in soft-filtered black and white, heads together, an intimate twosome amidst a glamorous throng.
Instead, Tony suggested new songs for their repertoire, Frankie argued, and Marty nodded, contemplating, serious and absorbed as a high court judge. No one spoke to her. She asked the waiter for another glass of wine, ate a twenty-two-dollar endive and goat cheese salad, hoped the ridiculous Marty Zale & The Satellites inked on her shoulder wasn’t staining her shirt. Tony announced he wanted to go back to Marty’s that night, right then, work on that one bit—Rabbi, I’m telling you, you gotta hear it with the music—while it was still fresh. Frankie argued, and Marty decided Yeah, they should. He inquired if Sarah didn’t really want dessert, did she? Tony and Frankie were already tensed to go, the balls of their feet scraping the floor, and Marty was gripping the arms of his chair; just to punish all of them, to insist on her presence in the room, she ordered a chocolate soufflé. It took forty-seven doo-wopping, table-tapping, jostling minutes to arrive and she ate it languidly, breaking its puffed crust with her spoon so it sagged, lathering it with whipped cream, letting the flavor of each long mouthful absorb her fully, exclusively.
They drove back to Rockaway. Marty pulled up to Nana’s house; Sarah opened the door, stepped out, and waved good-bye while he was in mid-argument with Tony over a proposed shift in their harmony. He nodded briefly at her, said Yeah, bye, glad you came, call you tomorrow, but the next day he didn’t.
The days went by.
She called her parents, to check in, as she’d been meaning to; her father had just returned from his twelfth in a series of thirty radiation treatments, and described for her, again, in detail, getting his groin tattooed for it, how they’d marked him with indigo dots to help line up the machine for the lasers. There’s just a little burn during the actual treatment, he told her; the only thing to really hurt, so far, was getting the tattoo. Mainly he’s tired from it, wiped out, not all there, only played nine holes this morning, No, your mom’s fine, I guess, looks like she’ll get back on the transplant list, we’ll see . . . how’s your painting coming, honey, we miss you, where do you get those little square batteries for the smoke detectors, your mother can’t find them, we’re hoping there’s no fire while you’re gone, when are you coming home? He began to describe for her how the medication turns his urine a bright cherry red, but she cut in to say she had to go, she’ll call them again soon, really. Her mother got on the phone to say Your father’s no help at all, I’m sick, too, I’m yellow, you should see, what is he blaming me for, my head is throbbing, we miss you, honey, I got an overdraft notice from the bank but it makes no sense, I need you to go through the statement with me, we love you, how’s your painting coming, when are you coming home? She said she’d call again in a few days, Really, yes, I promise, I love you, too, and hung up.
Twice a day she forces herself out of Nana’s house, deliberately leaves her phone behind, feels satisfaction that Bernadette, having left for Sri Lanka, isn’t around to answer any calls on the house phone. She bicycles to the store for a single apple or a carton of yogurt, or maneuvers her way down the invaded, noisy beach, bits of lemon pulp drying in her hair. She steps carefully around the broken shells, the litter, the washed-up jellyfish that look like clear embryonic sacs of fluid with feathery red stars in the center, sets as her goal the towering lifeguard chair roughly twelve blocks’ distance down from Nana’s, looking for the raised red flag and the promise of danger, and directly in front of what she has figured is Marty’s living room window overlooking the shore. She inquires the time of the lifeguard, a golden, cool-authority college kid flipping his whistle lanyard like a lariat, so obviously happy with this awesome summer gig of his, questions him about the starry jellyfish—do they sting? Are there riptides, here, bad undertows?—and stands there peering up at him, resolutely facing the water. She dips a toe in, lets the cool surf swirl past her feet, but the ocean itself is strangely uninviting. She can’t imagine just plunging in to all that cold dark deep.
She trudges back home to do slow stretching and abdominal toning exercises on the sandy floor of her room. Her untouched canvases slant in stacks against the walls; her easel, holding her still-only-begun painting of the little shell, stands to one side like a sentinel. She thinks it isn
’t a strong beginning, after all. She thinks about painting it out, starting again. She thinks about switching it for a fresh clean canvas, starting all over. She decides it would be a waste to give up on it, though, now that it’s already actually begun. She reminds herself it is still only July. There is still plenty of time. She turns all of her canvases to face the wall, to avoid their reproachful stares.
Her phone doesn’t ring until five-thirty the following Friday afternoon, when Marty calls her to tell her what time he’ll pick her up for shabbes dinner at Itzak’s. Fuck you, she thinks as he talks, Fuck you and your loud musician friends and your fanatical religious friends and your insulting self-absorption. What am I doing? she thinks, gazing at her canvas, this is such bullshit, dioxazine purple, that’s what it needs, I’ll just stay home tonight and paint. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing, yes. She tells him she can’t possibly be ready by seven-thirty, she’ll just meet him there at eight. She rides her bike to the store—the third time that day—to buy a bottle of Baron Herzog Chardonnay, and breezes into Itzak and Darlene’s with it at eight-fifteen, after the candles are already lit and just as Marty and Itzak are launching into a vigorous rendition of Shalom Aleichem, the whole family pounding the table like enraptured idiots. Itzak says Kiddush over the wine, and everyone troops to the kitchen to wash their hands. She ignores Marty during dinner, instead plying Itzak and Darlene’s son Jonah with questions about junior high, and their skinny daughter Gwen with questions about her classes at NYU and what she hopes are borderline-inappropriate questions about cute boys. She drinks glass after glass of Baron Herzog, pours it for herself when Itzak lags in his hostly duty, and wonders if Gwen, despite the miniskirts and pierced ears, has ever had sex, ever seen a real penis, ever even kissed a guy. She eyes Darlene’s bobbed hair and wonders if it really is just a clever wig. She wonders if Jonah masturbates. She wonders what Itzak’s beard must taste like, if Itzak and Darlene have sex through a hole in a sheet, if he fucks her with his yarmulke on, if he shuns her during her period then makes her go to the mikvah to ritually bathe away all the filth. She suddenly hates Jews.