by CJ Hauser
“Why would I?” Henry says.
“I don’t know,” I say. But I am surprised. This is his town after all, the one he described to me in ways that got me dreaming about a cozy small-town kind of life. Henry in a diner on Fourteenth Street: back home a waitress would give me a talking-to for not finishing my eggs. Henry at a bar on Fifty-third: one of the fishermen got married and the bride danced on the bar in her wedding dress and a pair of boots. Henry and I at home, his feet in my face and mine in his as we lay on the couch: his parents used to spend Sundays just like this. Bow to stern, they called it. Menamon is supposed to be a place ruled by kind mothers and stoic fathers, fishermen and good folk. Henry’s stories never included three-car garages or summering city people.
“Bye,” Henry says, kissing me.
“Later,” Batman says. Both men climb into a red F-150 that has ARDEN stenciled across the cab door and two cherry trees bungee-corded to the bed. They drive away.
NOT LONG AFTER I met Henry, we spent a day in the park. We’d stopped at a bodega and bought fruit to eat. We sat on protruding roots beneath a tree bordering Sheep Meadow, and as Henry ate his orange sections he spat the seeds into a blue paisley bandanna he’d pulled from his back pocket. I almost shook him when he did that. I almost shouted, Don’t you know you’ve made me love you now? That was the moment. Those seeds in his pocket.
We thought about having a honeymoon, Henry and I. The fuss of a wedding we weren’t much for, and I was afraid what sort of bridemonster my parents might make of me. I didn’t want to think about tablecloths, flowers, or whose drunk uncles would fight with whose angry cousins.
A honeymoon, though, that sounded like something Henry and I would be good at. I’d been thinking of Rome. I’d seen Roman Holiday a dozen times and I was thinking about Henry renting a moped and buying me an ice cream cone and taking pictures on an Instamatic camera. Henry was thinking of a hot island somewhere. With cocktails, he said. With class injustice, I said. Henry groaned.
We kept talking but nothing seemed right—until we thought of Niagara Falls. We both loved the idea of shacking up in some cheap motel and writing dozens of postcards in our underwear, the pictures showing all the things we didn’t do. Niagara Falls was big and dangerous and getting married was like going over it in a barrel. We bought our tickets. We thought we’d go on that boat, the Maiden of the Mist. We would not wear ponchos. We would stick our heads in the flume.
But then, so close to the wedding, I started thinking about the falls. Dreaming about them. I saw a picture in the brochure of a place where you could walk close to the railing at the top and peer over. I kept thinking about that picture, about the railing.
I panicked. I said, We can’t go to Niagara Falls.
Why not? Henry said. What are you talking about, we already booked our tickets.
I just can’t, I said.
And he was so nice to me. Okay, he said. Okay. Let’s just get married, huh? We don’t need any honeymoon.
Yeah, I said. We don’t.
And Henry said, Let’s do it right now.
Now? I said.
Sure, he said.
So we did.
I’d been crying a little, about Niagara and how I wouldn’t see it after all because there was clearly something wrong with me. But I washed off my face. I wore a white dress. A sundress, eyelet cotton. Henry put on his nice jeans, and a nice shirt, and he looked so good. And that was how we did it. We already had our license, so we went to city hall and had this woman with a rubber stamp tell us that we were bound together for the rest of our lives, which was a long time considering we were both twenty-four.
And in our own bed that night we had such sex that I almost didn’t care about Niagara anymore. We didn’t need the falls to have a honeymoon after all.
I didn’t tell Henry any more about Niagara and he never said anything. This was what good marriages were made of, I imagined. Knowing which things not to ask.
If he’d asked I would have had to say, I am pretty sure that if we go up to Niagara I will wind up tossing myself from the falls. When I looked at that picture in the brochure I just knew I would have gone right over the railing. I wouldn’t have been sad, it wasn’t that. I would have been ecstatic, so in love on that night, everything exactly the way I imagined it. But staring down at the falls, thirty-five million gallons a minute . . . who could resist a temptation like that? Imagine it, honeymoon eve, standing there almost touching the spray, ecstatic with love, who would not think: The only place to go from here is down?
4
Quinn
A fish market is a holy place. People who come from near the sea know this and my smartass people were ocean-side flotsam for certain. I grew up with my mother in Mystic, Connecticut. My grandfather was a biologist at Woods Hole. Year-round beach dwellers who weathered the winters and paid for pumps when basements got flooded.
Deep’s Fish Market is in a puny building on the harbor. It’s webbed over with fishing nets, skewered buoys stuck in there. A bell jangles when you open the door.
“Good day, sir!” I say to Billy, who rules the big glass shop counter. He’s only seventeen and it’s a marvel to see how well he plays the man. He wears a yellow slicker, necessary on rainy days but today an affectation. There’s an odor of damp flannel from where Billy is sweating under the arms.
“Good day to you!” he says, smiley. A good smile, even though one of his canine teeth has fallen back and overlapped with its neighbor. Billy Deep has inky-black hair and the pale skin of the drowned. I bet his father tried to put him back the day he was born. In a fishing family, skin like that is bad luck for certain.
Billy says, “We have a special on Glidden Points. Came in this morning. D’you know what oysters do to a lady?”
Billy jokes because he knows he doesn’t have a chance. It was the first time I came in with Rosie that did it. She was in the corner, quietly talking to the lobsters in the burbling tank. We were beaming at her, Billy and I, like she was the most wonderful thing we’d ever seen. Billy caught me staring, staring like he was staring, and just like that he understood he wasn’t my type.
So now we have our rapport. This is what happens to boys once they realize they’re not getting in your pants: they get fun to be around.
“Don’t need any oysters, Billy.”
“Well, then take some flounder and be done with it.”
I watch him cut the floppy white meat into fillets. As he cuts, his gloves wrinkle. The tacky rubber cuff tugs at the dark hairs near his wrist. The slabs of fish are lined up like gems on the ice inside a case. The tuna is red and translucent as a drop of blood. The swordfish is more opaque, purplish and obscene. There’s a halibut that hasn’t been boned yet, its wobbly dead eye still intact. Something happens, not in the eye itself, but somewhere deeper inside, when a fish dies. You’ve seen it happen if you’ve ever watched one flop around a dock until it’s dead. Some brightness or intelligence fades. I saw this happen to my mother. This very same thing.
There are plenty of examples to take from ocean beasts, if you’re willing to look for them. My biologist grandfather specialized in photosynthetic plankton, which seemed infinitely less glamorous than the toothy sharks and blunt-headed belugas in the aquarium. But he showed me maps of how deep the ocean was and how only the smallest percentage of that was surface. He told me how it was the plankton grew green there and could catch the sun. This was what whales ate. Those minuscule creatures wound up in a whale’s belly and made for enough nutrition to keep its lumbering heart beating.
Billy wraps the flounder in white paper and tapes the package closed. “Here you go. Hope your girl appreciates this.”
Rosie always appreciates dinner. She usually says, “I used to go swimming with this?”
Rosie and I can share these small things, and I make sure to appreciate them. I turn them over in my mind real slow. I know it doesn’t sound like much to go on, but I tell myself that if I lump all these small things together, the
y might add up to something. If I keep it up, they just might be enough to feed my big old Monstro heart.
AT HOME, I throw the fish down and say, “I’m making dinner.” But Rosie says she isn’t hungry. She says, “Let’s go to the bar.”
The Monkey’s Uncle is the sort of place where people are drinking for a reason. There’s no one waffling between cocktail options and definitely no chance of an anonymous encounter, which is what I thought bars were for. In the movies there’s always a pretty girl with a sad face leaning against the cigarette machine, waiting for someone to save her with a scotch and soda. I’ve been living here for three months and I know every damn person in the Uncle right now.
Rosie normally drinks beer but she says, “I want what you’re having,” so I order us whiskeys with rocks. Jethro Newkirk is a couple of stools away and perks up at Rosie’s voice. She has this effect on people.
“Rosie, my flower!” he says. Jethro is only fifty but takes old-man liberties: afternoon drink, self-indulgent storytelling, harmless lechery. He lays a hand on Rosie’s knee. “You girls seen the new house going up?”
“It’s a monster,” Rosie says. “Worse than Elm Park.”
That house is going up on a lot where Rosie’s childhood home used to be. They tore her house down last summer, right after some out-of-staters, some flatlanders as Rosie says, bought her parents’ lot and four more adjacent to it. Most of them beachfront, close to the shops downtown, right near the carousel. They paid a lot of money to get everyone out. If you were Rosie’s parents, enough to get you to Florida twice over. Once a week Rosie takes a Polaroid of the construction site and sends it to her parents like a postcard. It usually reads something like: Dear Traitors, I miss you. Love, Rosalind.
“I heard it’s going to have a two-story entrance and a three-car garage,” I say.
“Ah-yuh,” Jethro says. “I hate to see a house like that.” He rubs his pink ears, flushed from booze. “But it’s not getting done anytime soon. I saw the crew just sitting around this afternoon.”
“Well, it’s awfully hot to work that time of day, what do you want them to do?” Rosie says.
Jethro leaps off his bar stool and lifts his glass. “Burn it to the ground!” he cries. “I’d like them to burn it to the ground.”
Rosie takes a sip of her whiskey and purses her lips. I can tell she doesn’t like the taste. “Let it go,” I say, and she dribbles it back into her cup. Beautiful girls can pull off disgusting gestures like this. And Rosie is: short, pale-skinned, and big-lipped with uncountable piercings along each ear. She takes another sip and stubbornly swallows.
We head for the jukebox. Rosie feeds quarters into its slot. She types in E32 and plays the same Guns N’ Roses song she always plays. The one about the city that has all the pretty girls in it. Rosie says when she’s a singer she’ll only sing songs like this one. I wonder if I could get good enough to play like Slash.
No way. I down the rest of my drink.
WE HEAD OUT hours later and the night smells like smoke and summer dying. We have whiskey coursing through our arms and arteries, making us strong and stupid. We walk the roads. We hear a humming. Tucked away among trees is the Menamon substation, the energy hub for most of Hancock County. We stare up at the transformers. There are metal towers with cables looping between their posts and coils of metal conducting insane amounts of wattage. The humming is incredible.
From here we can see the construction site Jethro was ranting about. Rosie points a fierce little finger at the foundation of what will certainly be a monstrously big house.
“I hate them,” Rosie says.
“You don’t even know them,” I say.
“No one needs a house like that,” Rosie says. “You should hate them too.”
“Okay,” I say, because with a girl like Rosie it’s impossible to say no. I pick a stone up off the ground. There’s nothing but a foundation to throw at and the site is too far away anyway, but I hurl the stone toward where the house will be. It flies uselessly off into the dark. “One imaginary window, smashed,” I say. “Happy?”
Rosie grins and hands me another stone. I put it in my pocket. “I’ll save it for real windows,” I say. She squeezes my hand, my spine goes electric, and, man, am I in trouble.
“I buried a time capsule down there when I was eight,” Rosie says. “In my backyard. I had every intention of digging it up and then one day there was all this cement.”
“What’s in there?”
She exhales irritably. Like the stuff in there isn’t even the point. “Some photos. A letter I wrote to myself. A tape of me singing my favorite songs. A magic seashell.”
“Magic?”
“Again, eight years old.”
“Magic.” I turn back to the substation.
Rosie wraps her fingers around the chain-link fence that surrounds this electric outpost. “Hmmmm,” she hums, the exact same pitch as the transformer. Maybe Rosie really will become a famous singer someday. Not to be outdone, I hum an octave higher, harmonizing.
“We’re going in,” Rosie says, and starts to climb the fence.
“You’ve got a death wish,” I say. “You’ll be zapped.”
Rosie shakes her head. “It’s never the fence that’s electric,” she says. “It’s everything inside that’ll kill you.” She hops it.
I follow. An obituaries writer, even a retired one of little mettle, has a duty to follow the doomed.
The ground inside rattles with gravel. Rosie lies down and stares up at the steely forest buzzing around her. I lie down too because she’s fucking crazy and I might want to get close to that.
How many watts is a thousand? A million? I spread my arms wide and make a V with my legs. Then I slide them shut. I do it again, and a third time, and I might be cutting up my bare arms and thighs on the gravel but I don’t care.
“Gravel angels,” I tell Rosie.
“You’re wicked crazy,” she says, and begins to flail. “You know that?”
As we flex ourselves open and closed a cloud of dust rises around us. It hangs in the air, tiny particles. We are scuffing ourselves up in this toxic dirt. We are too close together, and as we beat our wings furiously Rosie’s nails scratch my face and my fist wing catches her ribs and we’re drunk and bruised and laughing.
When we’re exhausted and spent we tuck our wings at our sides. There’s only the sound of our alternately rasping breath and the humming. We sit up. The orange light on top of one of the transformers flicks on and light falls around us like a pumpkin, like a halo.
Rosie’s bright hair catches the light and within minutes pale moths have gathered around her head. They parachute their furry bodies in arcs around her, wholly determined torpedoes. Rosie closes her eyes. A few moths settle on her head. I could stare at her like this for a long while yet. In fact, since I got here, all I want to do is stare and stare at this girl’s face, and yes, I really am in trouble now. Bad trouble, I think as I watch this solar system of tiny revolving bodies orbiting Rosie’s head.
Fall
5
Leah
There are dead bees on the windowsills of the Menamon Star office. Their legs stick up in surrender. I have been here five minutes and already I can tell, this is the kind of office where even the vermin have given up.
Charley is in a backroom office. A scrappy redhead raps on her open door to let her know I am here. Charley knows I am here. The redhead walks past me to the copier. On the breeze of her motion I smell last night’s booze. She sits down at a desk that seems more appropriate for an antiques shop than an office.
“You smell like gin,” I tell her.
She looks at me. Her eyes are pinkish around the rims, like a rabbit my class used to have in school. She’s wearing a blue-and-white-striped button-down with the cuffs rolled up and too-big, straight-legged jeans. “What kind?” she says. Her cheekbones are high, a note of distinction in an otherwise ragamuffin exterior.
“Gordon’s, maybe, but I’m only s
aying that based on looking at you. The smell could be Tanqueray. Could be Beefeater.”
“Who are you?” she says, but then Charley emerges.
Back in her office Charley makes a big show of actually looking through my clippings. I feel nervous, which is laughable, but the real joke is that I want this small-time job as badly as I did my gig at the Gazette, and I’m afraid Charley won’t give it to me. She lights a Marlboro, on which she takes long puffs. I can’t believe her slowness. I think of all the competitive editors back in New York who would piss themselves laughing if they could see me right now. But why do we New Yorkers always think we have the best of everything? Only in New York. Only in New York. Only in New York, my parents told me. But one day I started wondering, Is that really true? Is all this New York hustle really that important?
The key to not blowing your life apart is not asking too many questions. But once I started, I couldn’t stop—and then there was Henry. Standing there in the bar near my office downtown, the one I went to on bad days, not the celebrating pub two blocks the other way where I might see people from work. I was staring at the back of Henry’s neck and waiting to order something truly potent to make the day slip away. His neck was so deeply tanned I knew he worked outside. He smelled of pine and soap, and when he turned he caught me behind him, leaning in too close. What, do I smell or something? he said. We sat in a vinyl booth.
Hours later, I said I hoped I wasn’t keeping him from anything. He probably had somewhere else to be, I said. Everyone in New York has somewhere else to be. Henry said, Where would I be going? He rolled his shoulders to crack his neck and relaxed into the booth. He had tussled sandy hair, and a knobbled nose, and even though he was so young, he had white crow’s-feet by his eyes from being sunburned while squinting. I could see that boring tattoo on his arm, and when he smiled he had a snaggletooth. He had stillness, Henry. He wasn’t rushing away anywhere.
I sit with Charley now, and I see this too is a family trait. They can sit quietly, these Lynches, for what seems like an eternity.