You and me, Kenny. Things ain’t what they used to be.
Delgado!
What the air sounded like after a while. I held onto him and the flotation cushion, ripped through the outer cover with my fingers to moor his hands inside it to make a stronghold.
Delgado!
It was the wind, yes. Because neither one of us spoke. We couldn’t. I thought that maybe he was dead. Broken body bent against one cushion, circled by another, neck at crazy angles, I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. Things punched down my throat into the hole—water, salt, wind, the sick seesaw motion and ugly fire of thirst, sudden crunching agony when sharp things knocked into me and him, and for some reason I do not even remember I clutched the torn shreds stuffing the flotation cushion and refused to let go. Until everything blew up swollen inside, burning pain of mouth and lips, each soggy breath fought for, resounding like a scream.
Kenny, I said, what about sharks.
The cold. Made me shiver until I could hardly breathe, could barely keep holding on. Then heat. Sunlight glinted off metal on the water, wormed its way through the swollen slits my eyes had become. In the middle of the heat and light I started to shiver again, to shiver so hard I thought my fingers would rattle free of the cushion and leave me to sink, to drown.
Dog meat.
Shoulders and legs not working right. Something broken. I could not swim. Could not see, because of what shone blindingly off the water and surrounded us, making everything shudder and blaze. This light. This light.
And I asked, Kenny, where are we? Asked, in a croak I could not hear: Do you see it?
Then thought I heard someone call my name.
Delgado.
But I don’t remember.
Closet door. Photographs. The little notes scrawled. Names on a calendar.
That light.
I’ve forgotten so much.
“Delgado,” I whisper, just to hear someone say it.
My fingers are cold. I run them over the cover of the paperback on the bedspread. Maybe I have read this book, too, and just don’t remember. Maybe this is life from now on, fatso, and everything will be like this: You will crawl through all the seconds; all the minutes, managing smiles to protect everyone else from the hole you know is there waiting for you, making promises that cannot be kept, in a world of sick guts and frightened longing, until it will seem that there has never been anything inside of you but the failure. It will seem that you have never been capable of any motion at all except to rip into something and grab and cringe, dig your fingers in and hold fast to the pain, have never carried anything off with sureness, or elegance, or grace.
*
My big, graceful girl.
Señorita de mi corazón! He’d call me that, too—every night as soon as he got home from work, toss me in the air. He twirled me in circles like an airplane, dangled me upside down, played bucking bronco while I perched astride, digging in imaginary spurs. It was pretty outrageous. I mean, I don’t think the other kids got that—not Jack, for sure, not Roberto.
Señorita de mi corazón! He said it, for the last time, when I was six years old. The year I started to swim.
It was my dad who drove me places. To clubs, to different coaches. Because, they said, I had talent, had to be developed. But I’d bug him on those drives, stick a hand out the window until cold wind whipped through my fingers into the car with a moaning sound.
Why do we have to go so far away to swim?
Because. It’s too cold at the beach.
No it’s not.
It is, Babe. It is. If you got in the water there now, guess what would happen?
What?
You’d turn into a terrible chica de hielo. Do you know what that is? A chica de hielo?
No.
An ice girl. A girl who turns into frozen white forever, and makes everything she touches cold. That’s what you’d be—a terrible ice girl.
No way.
Yes indeed, señorita. Just remember that. Never turn into an ice girl, Babe. Promise me. Don’t ever turn into an ice girl.
Okay, I told him. Okay, I promise.
Now we’re here together for another long drive. But Jack is with us, stuck between suitcases and things in the backseat like a slob, plugged into his Walkman. Glancing sideways at my dad while he drives, I can’t say for sure that I’ve kept the old promise at all.
*
“Why do they call it Indian summer? Do they mean American Indian or, like, Pakistani?” Jack unplugs himself, rummages in the trunk, hauls out a couple of bags and a box packed thickly with books, drops them on the ground. I give him my disgusted look.
“You shouldn’t take it personally, honey,” my father bugs me. It’s the thing with Mom again—he can’t get it off of his mind and I wish he would.
“I don’t.”
“She thought too many cooks would spoil the broth.”
Jack’s struggling across the parking lot already. I head him off and fight. He doesn’t put up that much resistance—no upper body strength—and I grab the heaviest suitcase. Hear my father locking doors and trunk, coming after us, and I hurry ahead to avoid him.
I couldn’t give a damn about the whole mess, really. He and she can slug it out at the country club. On the new patio. In their bedroom. Either way, I’m out of it.
There are carts full of suitcases, opened cartons of notebooks and records and clothes, music ripping from a dozen rooms, kids with parents or with each other hauling things around. The place looks like some airport in time of war. At Southern, things were pretty nice and calm until all the parental units left. Then shit flew from the slingshots to the walls.
Seventh floor, Delgado—your brand-new Division II home, all expenses paid.
Hold the elevator! he yells.
We don’t.
*
He gave me a check this morning.
But I signed the letter, Dad. It’s a free ride, I told you.
Take it, he insisted. Take it, open a bank account somewhere, I just don’t want you to worry about anything, honey.
I’m not worried, I said.
Well, I almost said it. But I saw there were these tears in his eyes. So I just told him thanks and kissed his nose, folded the check in squares and stuck it into the pocket of my jeans.
Maybe he feels helpless—for which I would not blame him.
“You got your own room?” Jack raps knuckles against the wall of the elevator. CRACK KILLS, reads the graffiti, ACID DOESN’T.
I nod. He gives me the thumbs-up.
“Way to go. That’s what I want out of this cross-country gig, I’m telling you. A free ride, and my own fucking room. None of that roommate shit. You taking any good courses?”
Vague titles come to mind, nothing stays. Think, Delgado. What exactly did you tell them you wanted to study?
“I don’t know. Some literature class, I think. And a couple of other things—”
“Do you have to take math?”
“No.” The light blinks on, off, elevator screeches to a stop between floors. I give him a smile—sometimes he’s so earnest. “No, I don’t have to take math any more.”
“Awesome. When does practice start?”
I freeze again, shrug. This frightens him into silence. We’re inching up now agonizingly, fourth floor, fifth. Sixth. The elevator boxes us in, filled with the day’s heat, with a smell of musty books and tightly wrapped packages, sweating clothes, human bodies. Like locker rooms, but without the water or the flesh.
Seventh floor, and we have to step over things in the hall. Other doors open along the way. Music blares from one—some tape, a potpourri of Sex Pistols and Plasmatics and The Clash—and the girl inside dangles a cigarette from her mouth while she rearranges books on a shelf, ass to the hallway in a pair of tight jeans. Jack stops to admire.
“Come on, jerk,” I mutter.
He does, grinning.
Number 710. The door opens easily.
Boxes slide from my bro
ther’s arms. “At least you got the right key.” Yes. I walk in. It’s empty.
Best room on the hall, though. Clean, spacious, with bathroom and study annex—more a suite than a single.
Good for you, Miss Coach. Chalk one up for the new Kemo Sabe.
I lean out an open window and look down at the courtyard, opposite side from the parking lot. Hear footsteps coming: my father. Shitty music howling from down the hall. But somehow, in this free-ride room, I can be above the noise now. No señorita of anyone’s heart any more, but a big dark ice girl, hovering over all the hot afternoon in a thick still cloak of silence.
Wisdom Teeth
(ELLIE)
Danny and I have always had this pact: You come with me to my dentist, I’ll go with you to yours. The pact remained in effect through childhood and adolescence—even when we went to different schools. When we both wound up at Northern Massachusetts—which was the only institution giving scholarships to East Coast mediocrities that spring—we celebrated together, and the dental pact was reconsolidated. So he was with me the last time, two days before we left for senior year. Wisdom teeth are basically the worst.
It’s too weird. What they do is, before they rip them out, they give you pills and Novocain and this gas and you just soar through the ozone. Later I had blood-soaked cotton wadded into both sides of my mouth. Danny got scripts for painkillers and antibiotics, then held my arm all the way down in the elevator.
I watched him hail a cab. We were both wearing wraparound sunglasses with mirrored lenses. Flying on Novocain and Valium, I felt like some kind of branded calf, numb from the chin up, wobbly from the neck down. A Checker stopped and, inside, we propped our feet on the fold-out stools. I could sense without feeling that blood was dribbling between my lips. He dabbed my face with a tissue then—the kindest, softest gesture in the world—and that’s when he said it for the first time. Out of nowhere.
“Ellie,” he said, “you have got to tell them.”
No way, dude.
I didn’t even try to respond, though, just waved the foolhardy notion off and bounced miserably when our cab hit potholes; I wanted pain to break through and start for real, because it would drown out the torture in my head.
“You’ve got to. Because I personally cannot go on any more being, like, the surrogate boyfriend at weddings. I am too committed to Gary. You’ve got them all thinking that the worst-case scenario is you marrying me, old faithful, their favorite shiksa—”
“Shegetz,” I said, spitting blood.
“Whatever. I can see all the raised eyebrows now.” He sucked in his cheeks, rolled his eyes the way he always does when imitating his parents or mine. Usually it makes me laugh but that day it made me hate him, so much that I had to close my own eyes a minute in case he saw it—the hatred, I mean—jetting out of me like laser beams. He didn’t, though. “Nu, Zischa? What’s with the Alonzo boy? Any good news? So he’s a goy, so what? Like they say, if it works don’t fix it! Tell the two of them to maybe take a shit or get off the pot, if you know what I mean!”
I knew. But couldn’t help resenting him, even more than usual. If I hadn’t felt like chucking up my very guts I would have said something, too, when we turned onto 14th Street—told him he wasn’t funny any more, and to leave me alone about it. Told him that ever since he started seeing Gary—the Great Gary Hesse, grad student extraordinaire, in truth a straw-haired bespectacled nobody who I keep calling Rudolf or Hermann by mistake—he has been a real goading pain in the posterior about my lack of a love life. And I wanted to tell him, too, to keep his Wop-Spic hands off my people. Because I was in this very foul, very racist mood.
It occurred to me that Danny was always telling me what to do. How much weight to lift. What girls were my type, and who he thought I would look aesthetically pleasing alongside of. What clothes to wear. What classes to take.
Like this stupid lit course on Hawthorne and Melville you have to be a junior or senior to get into, he said that I had to take it, absolutely had to. So I waited for it until now, senior year, like I was waiting for the Messiah, and I dropped Journalism 458 because it meets at the same time, and all the while he was telling me how I wouldn’t regret it, how the professor, Kay Goldstein, was this fabulous woman who knew everything about everything and how he thought she was kind of riveting and sexy in a plump lipsticky sort of smart Jewish way, in addition to which he thought maybe she was gay—at least he had heard rumors to that effect—but it didn’t matter anyway because she was just the best teacher in the world, she had made him, on several occasions, want to put his head in his hands and get down on his knees and just weep with insight and compassion.
I listened to all this as if it was the word of God, not just of Danny Alonzo. I signed up for the course. And then it turns out that over the summer this once-in-a-lifetime Dr. Kay Goldstein has dropped dead, and some nobody is going to teach it instead.
*
We went past the Projects, sun glinting like a spider’s web of light through the cracked windshield. He reached over and brushed my forehead with his knuckles. For a moment, I wanted to cry.
“It’ll be all right, Ellie. You’ll see.”
I kept the sunglasses on but gave a squinty look.
“When you tell them, it’s like walking on the moon without a spacesuit. You sweat. Your heart goes crazy. You can’t breathe. But you do it, and so do they, and before you know it the moon walk is over and you’re coming back alive.”
Then what? I thought, hoping maybe he’d shut up for a change. He didn’t.
“Not that they jump for joy, or anything. I mean, who wants to hear that the seed of their loins has gone queer? But they get over it. They do. And you know what?”
What, jerk?
“You feel freer in a way. You feel, like: Okay, now I am liberated. I am free to finally love someone.”
I cried, keeping my mouth shut tight and the blood in it. Tears gathered under the bottom rim of my sunglasses, spilled down both cheeks. He took another tissue and silently wiped them off.
I knew, all of a sudden, what the tears were for. They were for wanting love, and for dreading loss—loss of everything I’d ever had: Zischa. Lottie. My people. My home. Wanting love so much I was willing to pay the price and give all that up eventually, if I had to—even my present, and my past.
See, I wanted it so badly—to love, and to be free—but I wasn’t quite ready for it. And because of all that, I was crying.
*
Danny paid the fare, helped steer me off the sidewalk into the stuffy old hallway, barely lit with this ancient sort of imitation-rococo lighting they keep threatening to renovate but never do. The elevator was busted again. Definitely bad news: I would need him, now, to aid my crawl up five flights.
It would be a triumph for Lottie, though, who never takes elevators if she can help it. Carrying bags of groceries up five flights after work, week in, week out. Cradling abandoned dogs, garbage-slathered kittens, in her arms, up five flights to bathe them and bandage them, down five flights to the street and the veterinarian’s office near Houston where she made sure they had their shots, bought medicine for their injuries and diseases with money we did not have, posted adoption notices on the bulletin board and brought them back home, up five flights to wait. Never kept an animal more than two months. But never failed to see one adopted. All in good homes! she’d boast. She’d cross-examine prospective pet owners like some social service demon, each question geared to root out hidden cruelties and passions. Scuttling past elevators with a visible shudder.
Railroad cars, she says, prison cells. They box you in—and then, who knows?
Whenever she says something like that I get an image in my head: This old daguerreotype of her, Lottie as a young woman, with hair piled high on top of her head and these very, almost, art-deco frills around her neck, and Oskar, her baby boy—My Oskar! she would say, seven months! a joy!—swaddled in lace and blankets, proudly cuddled on her lap.
Also I get t
his other image: baby teeth, taffeta discolored with dried blood. Smoke blows over it in the Polish wind, German wind. You can smell human hair in the wind.
For plenty of years, growing up, I went to sleep with bedtime stories like that. I went to sleep with puppy tails slapping my pillow, cuddling balls of living fur I’d never be allowed to keep, wedged between the beat of cats’ hearts and Woolworth’s clocks—calico, electric, gray tabby, windup. Smell of vaccinations. Dreams of tattoos. Until I stopped begging Please Lottie, please may I keep them? and she and Zischa had a fight, and then—for a long time—she would not bring them home at all.
* * *
Those were the years I’d punch kids out in the playground for teasing Danny. Soon, though, he discovered free weights and biceps and he was punching them out himself. And I was in another school, beating other girls at the forty-yard freestyle—all our swimming done in a crumbling twenty-yard city pool we’d take a bus to for practice four nights a week, with once-weekly meets on Saturdays. Coaching courtesy of Mr. Marachietti, a boys’ gym teacher who had volunteered for the job—and who, unlike others I have had the displeasure to swim for since, at least never did any harm. He was a big, balding guy who used to get red in the face and jump around on the wet pool tiles when you did a fast set, almost falling on his butt every time, and he called all the girls Miss. Actually, Mizz.
Mizz Marks! he’d yell—pronouncing it MAWKS—Mizz Mawks, keep it up! Just keep working hard. You could maybe get a scholarship somewhere, you know—pay for your education, finish a college degree. You’d get a good job then. Or get married, have a couple kids. But keep doing stuff like this, keep working hard, and you’ll stay healthy the rest of your life.
I’d say: Okay, Mr. Marachietti. And do an extra forty as fast as I could. Just to see his big belly flop. Just to see him jump up and down flushed with excitement. Telling me good bright comforting things about my future with a humble, kindly voice.
“Come on, Ellie. It’s the five-flight freestyle.”
“Yaaah.”
But at the bottom of the first flight I stopped, a little dizzy. Wondering about being boxed in, and the smoke, for the first time in years.
The Sea of Light Page 8