“Baloney. Your wife is out of control. Now go get her.”
“No.”
“I said go.”
Dan smells baked clams on Sy’s breath, the baked clams he didn’t serve lest they were poisoned.
“She’ll come when she’s ready.”
Sy’s white eyebrows meet. “Either you go get her or—”
“Or?” The red dot in Dan’s vision grows spokes. “Whatcha gonna do to me, Daddy?”
Sy shakes his fist. “I—I have a mind to—”
“Kick us out? Kick my butt? Take back the business?”
“I should.”
“Too late.”
“You little ingrate! After all I’ve done—”
“Which is what exactly, Dad? Stole me a house. I know more than you think. If—”
“Shhh.” Sy claws Dan’s biceps. “I have it all under control. I’m paying back the company in small—”
“You billed the house to the company?”
“You shut up if you want to talk to me! It was just a little contracting—”
The spokes have turned a throbbing yellow. Here Dan was asking if Sy had been aware he had bilked Rose, and he goes and admits to another crime altogether. “Is that why you gave me the business? To avoid indictment?”
“Shhh,” Sy hisses. “Everyone’s listening!”
“No one’s listening, Dad!” They really aren’t. Through the entire flare-up, the guests have remained huddled around the table, fully absorbed in Dr. Mole’s account of “the night of the Golden Venture,” right here, right in this very room. Mole whispers for effect or in case Rose returns from upstairs unannounced. He lives right next door, mind you. He heard everything.
Dan turns back to the window just in time to see two ripped-looking dudes join Tim and Sue. One wears Ray-Bans and a zinc oxide–whitened nose despite the lack of sun. The other, a Hawaiian shirt, unbuttoned.
If there’s enough blue in the sky to make a pair of pants, it’s not going to rain, his mother’s voice says in his head. Luckily there’s enough blue.
Dan’s pretty sure that’s his new cashmere sweater out there, balled up on the sand.
* * *
“Hoo-ah!” Ox runs up on his thick bowlegs, yowling. “Do I get to wear a yammy?” But Sue’s poker face straightens him up fast. He whips off his mirrored sunglasses and dips his patchwork head; there are fuzzy spots where his burned-off hair is still regrowing. As for Chris D., he’s already buttoned up his flowered shirt and shoved the ends into his sweats. This is a rite, not a lark. Altar boys, lifeguards, firefighter—their entire lives have been bound and magnified by such rituals. By now they’ve long repented for believing Jews killed Jesus, for using the word Yid, for riding their bikes up and down the boardwalk tipping the hats off Orthodox Jews. Clear-eyed, heads up, arms by their sides, at the ready, they are more present than Tim can ever be, honestly doing their best not to check out Sue’s gigantic tits.
Sue’s smile—all the way up to her gums—is contagious.
Tim just once let his friends goad him into tipping, and immediately he was flooded with regret. Only twelve years old, he’d circled back on his Stingray. Retrieving the big black hat, he had the expectation that his victim would thank him. What an idiot he’d been! The man just flashed Tim a pitying look and put the hat back on his head.
“Who will say a prayer?” Sue asks, passing around the last of Mindy’s teacakes.
“In all dual respect,” Ox admits, “we don’t know Jewish.”
Chris D. cuffs him. “In all due respect, bonehead. And you mean Hebrew.”
“I heard Butter rattle off some good Scripture,” Ox says. “In the hospital, I—”
“Uh-uh.” Tim stops that idea cold. He only did that to placate his mom on the phone.
The wind whips Sue’s hair across her mouth as she tries to slow her breathing. “Someone make something up before I back out, please.”
Whereupon Chris D. just holds up his hand, bows his head, and appeals to “Mary, Mother of God. Bless this woman coming in.”
They all razz him. But Sue’s satisfied; grateful, even. So what she’s not in a regulation mikvah, the witnesses aren’t women, the prayer is ad hoc and Christian. Marching into the lacy backwash, she listens for the major, mounting chords always played at the climax of the climax. Ah, but her feet are cramping; all the nerve endings on her lower body fire. At the rise of the first, veiny-bellied wave, she holds her gut and turns sideways, eyes closed. But she’s determined to go on, deeper. When her feet lift, she imagines she is the baby floating inside a body that is floating inside a body…of water. The actual baby is quiet. Stunned, maybe. Sue forces her head under—Holy God, brain freeze—and emerges in time for a second wave to leap up and slap her in the face. Wake up! Naturally, she thinks of Dan, ever conscious of what he can’t see, of what’s coming. Dan would never have let that wave surprise him. And had she invited him, he’d have thought to bring Sue a towel. Hot drinks. His best self. In Dan’s honor, she invents a fantasy. She is Marilyn Monroe converting for Arthur Miller. Seagulls are her paparazzi. Along the shore, hunky men line up, watching her, wanting her. At last, she is one of the Chosen People.
* * *
“…right here, right where you’re sitting,” Mole says, still milking the tale, to Dan’s dismay. “Almost nine years ago to this day. Blam!” His palm slams the table to simulate a gunshot. Group wince. Sy stumbles. Bob Baum leaps up and slides a chair under him. But Sy’s eyes stay fixed on the neighbor’s lips forming the words “Murder…her son…right in front of her! And me next door the whole time.”
Sue’s mom, Louise, fidgets with the ribbon on a baby gift. Sue’s cousin Pastor Dale wordlessly consults the imprint of the cross on the wallpaper.
“I’m still shocked by it,” Mole says, peeling his bald head.
“It is shocking.” “Completely shocking!” is the consensus.
Only Sy objects—a gurgle from deep in his chest like a pigeon makes. “You have a boat jammed with Orientals trying to get a free pass into—”
“Dad—”
“What? There’s bound to be chaos with the Chinks on the run, dart—”
“Dad!”
“—darting and hiding like roaches!”
It occurs to Dan that his father is truly a terrible person, that this can be so even though the man stayed married to a good woman for forty-two years and paid Rabbi Larry to quit smoking and gave his workers profit sharing and donated half his fortune to Save Our Shores. Dan can love him and he can still be a…total, fucking jerk! “You can’t talk like that, Dad. Not in my house!”
Sy rubs his dyed hairline. Now everyone is listening. (Although the Baums do so nervously, Bob rolling crumbs around the tablecloth, Fran hauling out her knitting.) A shudder travels through Dan as he watches Sy’s pale, wet eyes calculate. Got the stage. Pausing for…What’s my move? Hmm. It’s almost a letdown when he reverts to his default mode. “Do you hear that, everybody? Do you hear the way a son talks to his dying father?” Woe is me. Woe is Sy.
“You’re not dying,” they recite. “Dying? Sy, don’t be silly.” “You’re healthy as a horse. You look swell. Terrific!” And blah-blah until Dan can no longer stand another second.
“That’s right, you’re dying, Dad! You’re on the way out. Any day now!” There’s a bleat in Dan’s ears. He’s giddy with rage. And as soon as you’re gone, I’m gonna burn that pimpy leather vest, he is desperate to add. But Dan knows what’s required of him is a lot more adult, a lot grimmer. After taking his father aside, out of earshot of the others, he sits him down and quietly fires him.
The message ripples across the old man’s saggy face. It flows down his long, bony body. When it reaches his loafers, they plant themselves. Without looking at Dan, without arguing, the despot slowly rises, lurches across the scratched tile, and exits through the hole inside which the back door once hung. Before and after the back door, Dan thinks mystically.
“Where ya going, Gla
ssman?” All the busybodies commence. “Be careful, it’s gusty!” “Sy, honey. Come back! Eat!” When ignored, they turn on Dan. “What did you say to him, Danny? Tell him to come back! What’s wrong with you? That’s your father. What’s gotten into you today?”
The spokes in Dan’s vision begin to vibrate, then rotate. The pattern, now complete, is exquisite. Save for the birth of his girls, it’s the closest Dan’s ever come to a religious experience. That is, real terror. Any time now it will come, the sensation of being stabbed with an ice pick above his left eye for the next forty-eight hours. Dr. Mole told him they actually once used this method to treat mental illness, only the ice pick was plunged through the eye. This to cheer him up.
Dan hustles for the door. Misreading his actions, Sue’s mom starts chirping, “Cleanup! Cleanup time,” whereupon a saucer-size chunk of ceiling suddenly drops, ricochets off the gift pile, and skids onto the floor.
“Okay, Gary, we hear you!” Mole jokes, eyes skyward. But if there’s cosmic intervention, Dan credits his mom. The plaster tore a hole in the wrapping of Pastor Dale’s present, a life-size, arguably Christian, stuffed lamb. After the startled have a chance to recover and the piece of ceiling is thoroughly examined, Dan’s mother-in-law starts in again, now demanding tape.
“Tape?”
“To fix Dale’s wrapping! And while you’re at it, also a paper plate? For the baby-shower hat we make with the bows. It’s tradition.” Other than the fact that Louise wears a suit and tie, you’d never guess she was a linguistics professor with a PhD in semantics and seventeen academic publications.
“I’m sorry, I have no clue where to find either of those things,” Dan says, anxious for meds and bed.
“Don’t you live here?” Louise is surveying the room. Falling ceiling. Cobwebs on the light fixture. Sand collecting between the tiles. On the huge marble sideboard, Dan’s offering—the antipasti and the pasta, the two meats, the vegetable side—has been utterly pillaged, smeared, scattered, mashed. Tomato sauce stains the stone, the floor. Strings of cheese connect serving utensils; the carcasses are shaggy with meat. “Why isn’t my daughter nesting?” Louise demands. “At this stage, she’s supposed to nest, not…roam the beach? Is that what she’s doing? Did something happen between you two, Dan? I sensed something—”
Dan keeps on toward the kitchen but he can’t outrun the fierce Louise. “Oh, listen to me. Like I ever nested! I’m sorry, Dan! It’s just…this house. I keep imagining that poor woman having to watch her son get shot. But I can’t even really imagine. Can you? Imagine?”
Dan can. He does imagine. You could say he obsesses. Just how bloody? Splattered brains? A bullet to the heart? And where exactly in the room did Gary go down? Table? Window? There had to have been rising hostility, panic, misery, a void. And where do those energies go? He thinks of all the little faces crowding the World Trade Center windows.
“Sorry, my head is about to explode,” Dan apologizes before retreating upstairs. “It’s nothing personal.”
* * *
Elated by her plunge, Sue insists the guys come to her party. Her husband’s the best cook. And if the salt air hasn’t already knocked the piano out of tune again, she will play requests. But Chris D. promised to drive his mother to Kings Plaza Mall. And Ox’s shift starts at six. So she’ll have to owe them.
“Just convince our friend Butter he’s FDNY,” Chris D. says before literally racing his pal to the car. Blacky keeps his focus on the red boot he dug up. But as the men pass, he begins to nose the treasure home. He wants to show his find to Sage and Ed. Sweet. Some dogs, you wouldn’t be surprised if they started talking.
Talking, talking. Sue braces herself for the onslaught. Where’s she been? What’s the matter? Friends and relatives drove down from Westchester, over from New Haven, across from Amagansett. They paid sitters or put up with kids on the drive. They made rugelach or bought her trees in Israel. Surely they have a right to know. Sue’s mother will use her rude absence as an excuse never to come “all the way out” to Rockaway again. Sy will be livid, seeking revenge. And yet, Sue tells Tim, it’s facing Rose that freaks her out most. Earlier, when she saw the old lady standing on the stoop, it seemed as if a spell held her upright. “That sounds absurd. A driver was helping, but…probably I just feel guilty.”
Tim describes how disturbing it was to see Rose simply get up and walk across his living room last night. He imitates her arms and legs, “like a marionette’s,” but distractedly. Blacky has momentarily abandoned the boot to bark and bark and keep barking.
“Maybe you feel guilty too,” Sue offers, too late. Tim’s flying. On the lawn, Sy pinwheels his arms.
“Help!”’
It’s the cherries, Tim knows without knowing; Sage ate from the sprayed tree. From beach to house, he’s wasting precious time establishing there’s no cell phone signal to call 911 or Poison Control. “Help! Help!” Swallowed up in the wind, Sy’s shouts sound like birds. He’s standing over the empty pink dress smeared—not with blood, thank God, just cherry. Sweat sprouts from Tim’s scalp, mingles with sunscreen, blinds him. When he peels open his burning eyes, Sue’s at his side, a half-eaten fruit in her open palm.
“Sage!” she’s thundering. “Where are you, Sage? Come out here this instant!”
The girl emerges headfirst and naked from the hole Blacky made in the hedge. “I was scared, so I hid. Did you go swimming, Mommy?”
Tim scoops up the kid before Blacky can lick off the chemical. Her tiny mouth is red and ringed with rash. Tim tilts her head back to confirm her breathing’s right, spits on his shirt, wipes her lips, all this as he’s running for the car, yelling, “ER! ER! We’re going!” He is supposed to have retired from this, first-responding. And yet here he is in another Technicolor emergency—Sage’s pumpkin curls barbed with twigs, blazing pink limbs scored with white scratches. “Tim!” Sue pants, somehow keeping up. “What about Dr. Mole? Can’t we—”
But by then they’re shearing off the side mirror as they jam out of his driveway in a crooked screech because Tim is pulling a Fresca from the glove compartment for Sue to give Sage in lieu of water. “Give it to her, hurry now. Hurry up!”
Shouting at Sue helps Tim keep it together, keep it together. He can do that until somewhere on Beach Channel Drive when he hears Sage say, “Do my seat belt!” punctuated by a fountain of vomit. Then Tim loses it. A flood of relief and sorrow so complete he cannot stop his shoulders from heaving. Sue can’t possibly know that he’s sobbing for another little girl, the one he lost in a riptide sixteen years, eleven months, how many days ago. (Butterfingers.) Or that when he bawls, “It wasn’t my fault,” he means that tragedy. But when she leans in, lightly touching Tim’s arm, and assures him, “No. No. It’s not your fault, not your fault at all,” he feels, for the first time, absolved.
Calming, Tim tells Sue what she ought to know. Mole isn’t really a doctor, just a pharmacist in love with his white coat.
* * *
The red boots are gone. June and Kenny emptied the whole closet and all of the drawers pretending to look. They slid under the beds, came out sneezing, their eyelashes coated in dust. Black boots, yes; brown, even silver. But no red boots (at least plural) and, thus, no gun.
Rose has decided that Maureen took it all. “That bitch!” Enraged, thrashing around, she accidentally overturns her pocketbook, spilling its contents all over the bed. Given the chance, Maureen would steal her soul!
“Who’s Maureen again?” Kenny whispers under a stream of fresh Italian curses.
Like June has a clue.
The tirade crescendos until Dan, nursing a migraine in the next room, moans for Rose to “have mercy.”
The old noises in the wall fill the new quiet. Scratching, rustling. Whatever is in there is getting closer.
“Did you hear that?” Kenny asks, pulling out his BB rifle.
“You found it, hurray!” Rose cheers, confused. She thinks it’s her husband’s gun and demands to have it back.
“Who are you?” Kenny whispers, probably to scare June. No need. She’s already hiding behind him, wielding Sage’s preschool scissors. They both jerk as a cloud of soot shoots out from the fireplace. A bird! It flutters in a panicked path once, twice, around the room, then abruptly lands on Rose’s thigh.
June marvels at the tiny starling, eight inches if that, with black iridescent feathers, sturdy pink legs, and a sharp yellow beak.
“Get it offa me!” Rose croaks. “Get it off!” She shakes her leg but the bird, oddly, hangs on.
Kenny lunges toward the bed with the gun still in his hand.
“Don’t!” June shouts.
Dan whimpers in the next room.
Thankfully, Kenny’s only rushing to open a window. June watches him register that two are woven shut with ivy before he opens the third, overlooking Tim’s house. Maybe this was the reason she’s been hacking the plant off the glass all week. Maybe an unforeseen entity tricked her into believing she was spying on her hero neighbor when actually she had a bird to free. Nah. That’s stupid.
The bird’s stupid or not interested in the window. Over and over Kenny whooshes the gun through the air to show it the way out but it just sits there, staring at Rose.
“What does it want?” The old woman is practically hyperventilating, clutching and unclutching her checkered dress. “Make it go!”
But it takes Dan pleading, “For God’s sake, my head,” for the starling to lift into the air and flap out the door. Chasing Kenny chasing the bird, June again admires the wily creature. It knew its way out all along.
* * *
Dan lies diagonally across the bed in his American-flag boxers, needing, praying for, relief. All this yelling isn’t helping. Nor is the radio, which Dan doesn’t remember having left on. But to turn it off would require moving his head, and that’s definitely not happening. So he tries not to let the sound of broadcasted threat levels get to him. Since the code system’s inception, the level has been stalled at yellow, the third-most-dangerous tier. To remain that alert for that long, you’d have to be a meerkat or part of the Secret Service. Even Tim, with his two decades of lifesaving training, has opted out of that pressure. And what could Citizen Dan even do? Scan the horizon for warships? Hire bomb-sniffing dogs to guard Glassman Locks & Keys? Pray?
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