I pulled out my new one-piece bathing suit and shimmied into it, wishing it was a polka-dot bikini. Then I unpacked the beach ball that Shirley had given me for Christmas a few years back. At the time I’d thought Santa had given me the beach ball, but Jimmy had set me straight.
There is no Santa Claus, dumdum, he’d said.
There is so a Santa. I just had my picture taken with him, I’d shot back.
That joker with the phony beard? He’s an alkie geezer who gets soused at Papou’s beer joint the other fifty weeks of the year. Didn’t you recognize him?
I know you’re kidding, I’d insisted. I know there’s a Santa.
There is not, kiddo. All that ho-ho-ho is just a lot of ha-ha-ha this country crams down people’s throats so they’ll shell out for more toys.
What about the reindeer? I’d pleaded, holding out hope that at least they were real. What about Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen? What about Rudolph?
Only ducks, geese, and Tweety Birds can fly, Jimmy had said, pretending to aim at one and blow it away. You oughta be smart enough to figure that out. You’re supposed to be the egghead around here, with the straight As.
I started blubbering.
You killed Santa. You killed Santa.
Shirley rushed into the room and tried to comfort me. She asked Jimmy if it had really been necessary to tell me so soon. I was still a baby. He said I was no squalling brat even though I was acting like one, and the longer I went on believing in Santa, the worse it would be for me when I found out. He said he had done me a big goddamn favor and she should quit making a federal case out of it. She was the killjoy ’cause she was the one picking a fight. And if she wanted a fight for Christmas he’d sure as hell give her one with a silver bow.
Then he turned on me.
You’re always starting something. Always turning your mother against me.
His eyes were like two mad hornets.
I stood there, stung.
Shirley plastered on a smile thick as calamine lotion. Everything’s fine, she cooed. Nobody was turned against anybody. Everybody loves everybody in this house.
Then she offered to cook Jimmy a steak, nice and bloody.
To make up for the fact that there was no Santa, Shirley got me more presents than Santa ever had—including the beach ball I had just unpacked.
I filled my cheeks with air and began to blow up the ball. I couldn’t believe what a dummkopf I was to be thinking about Christmas in the middle of summer when there was a great big beach only a hop, skip, and a jump away.
I got the ball nice and full and bouncy, and capped it off. Right away, I could hear the hissing of air. I couldn’t imagine how the ball had sprung a leak. I was always so careful with my toys. I never lost a LEGO or mangled Monopoly money. I wouldn’t even play marbles with my marbles ’cause I didn’t want them getting dirty.
It’s not like I could blame the damage on anyone else. Ever since Tina had pulled the string too hard on Chatty Cathy, I had a firm policy: Nobody plays with my goddamn toys. You never knew how something would come back—with a chocolate smudge on your favorite Barbie outfit or a spring that wasn’t quite as springy or a page torn out of a good book, ruining a whole damn story. I’d been given secondhand toys when I was younger, but now that Shirley was doing piecework and buying me new toys, I sure as hell didn’t want them looking like hand-me-downs.
I let the air back out of the beach ball and vowed to get Shirley to buy me a new one at one of those souvenir shops. Maybe I’d get one for Susan, too. I was already trying to decide what to bring her.
I skipped out into the kitchen in my new bathing suit. Shirley was putting away groceries and Jimmy was studying the Racing Form. Virginia was trying to coax Sylvester out of a cupboard.
Jimmy looked up and smirked. “Where do you think you’re going, Esther Williams?”
“To the beach,” I answered.
Wasn’t it frickin’ obvious? Wasn’t it why the hell we were here?
“We’re not going to the beach, dummkopf. I got work to do. We’re heading to the track.”
My happiness deflated.
Jimmy said he needed to check on Victory Bound’s appetite and get some tips on that night’s racecard from Uncle Bobby.
Virginia and I begged him to let us go to the beach instead. We reminded him that the sun was out and we hadn’t gotten our daily dose.
“You’ll get plenty of sun playing around the barns,” he insisted. “And we can take a dip when we get back.”
Shirley tried to make us feel better. “We’ll be here for two whole weeks,” she reminded us. “Two whole weeks of fun in the sun.”
I put my shorts back on. Jimmy put on his lucky hat.
And we piled back in the car and left the beach behind.
Shit
Victory Bound was happy to see us.
He kept nudging me with his nose and pulling at my pockets for sugar cubes.
The horse was raring to go, Uncle Bobby told Jimmy. He was eating Bobby out of house and home and was kicking his stall like a wild stallion. He had even chewed Jimmy’s fish-gutting shirt to shreds.
Jimmy thought the horse had bulked up real good, like a boxer before a big fight, and his coat had a nice goddamn shine to it. Jimmy looked into Victory Bound’s eyes and said, “This baby’s a winner. I’d stake my goddamn family on it.”
I spit on Victory Bound to ward off the evil eye the way YaYa had taught me to do.
“OK, let’s talk turkey. Let’s retire to the drawing room,” Jimmy cracked to Uncle Bobby, making a sweeping motion toward the shitty tack room where Uncle Bobby slept, right next to Victory Bound’s stall.
They went in and plopped down on a creaky cot and began discussing the evening’s wagering. Jimmy wanted to know which horse was lame, which jockey had been eating too many T-bones, which trainer was juicing his horse, and which trainer was pulling his horse ’cause some two-bit dago gangster from Providence told him he better or else.
I fed Victory Bound my last sugar cube. Well, it wasn’t really my last—that one I was keeping for myself—but it was my next to last.
With no more sugar left, Victory Bound got sick of me and I got sick of him. He started to kick his stall and I began to kick at the dirt.
I wished my mother would save me. I wished she’d take me to the track kitchen for some gummy lemon pie or rubbery chocolate pudding. But Shirley had her hands full. She’d been cornered by Uncle Bobby’s girlfriend, Aunt Hazel, a plump woman with hair like tangerine cotton candy. Hazel wasn’t married to Bobby, so I didn’t see where she got off calling herself my aunt, but since Bobby wasn’t really my uncle, I let it pass.
“Take a load off,” Aunt Hazel said, offering Shirley a filthy lawn chair with a few dangling straps.
“Oh, I’ve been sitting all day,” Shirley stammered. “You go ahead.”
Aunt Hazel sank down on the chair and I held my breath to see if it would hold. Her ass nearly touched the ground, but the straps didn’t snap. Right away, Hazel began telling Shirley her troubles in her high, squawky voice that sounded like a crow that had just found some roadkill. Her troubles were always the same. She was madly in love with Bobby, but he was a cheating lowlife who wouldn’t make her an honest woman.
Jimmy just said Hazel was a fat pig with a big mouth. He thought a catch like Bobby could do better and told him so every chance he got.
I got away from Aunt Hazel’s squawking and went looking for Virginia. I found her behind the barn. She had made friends with a litter of wild kittens and was petting them as they fought to lick her with their rough little tongues.
“Look at these poor little things,” Virginia moaned. “I wish I could smuggle one home. It could live in our bedroom.”
I bent down to inspect the kittens and the runtiest one dug its claws into my earlobe.
“Goddamn sonofabitch!” I cried out, already failing in my efforts to be a good Catholic.
“Quit swearing,” Virginia hissed. “Daddy will moider y
ou.”
The truth was, Jimmy was the one who had taught me to swear in the first place. One Christmas Eve when he was half-lit he had coached me to sing Christmas carols with swearwords.
Deck the halls with boughs of bullshit.
Fa la la la la . . . na fas skata.
Na fas skata, he had said, laughing, was Greek for “eat shit.”
He insisted we were gonna sing the song together for YaYa on Christmas. But, when I started to belt it out the next day, it was a whole different tune.
“Girls don’t curse,” he snapped, “unless they’re no-good whores. Any daughter of mine talks like a no-good whore, I’ll cut out her tongue. I’ll murder her.”
He didn’t say moider. He wasn’t kidding around.
While he was chewing me out, one thing kept going through my head.
Na fas skata! Na fas skata! Na fas skata!
And that’s what I felt like saying now—to Jimmy, to Victory Bound, to Aunt Hazel, to that mean little kitten.
But I knew better and kept my trap shut.
I dabbed at my ear to see how bad it was bleeding. There was only a smear of blood, so at least I wasn’t bleeding to death. I did, however, begin to consider the possibility of cat scratch fever.
“You shouldn’t have put your face so close, dummkopf,” Virginia said.
“You’ll smuggle one of them home over my dead body,” I replied, and got the hell away from those goddamn kittens.
I stomped down to the other end of the barn, navigating an obstacle course of horseshit. This racetrack, I decided, was even crummier than the other ones Jimmy hung around. Everything was encased in mud and dried shit. The entire time I’d been here, I’d been flapping my arms to keep away the horseflies. They were big as Jimmy’s thumb and gave a nasty bite.
Finally, I spotted a flyswatter hanging on a nail and decided to play a game. A killing game. How many of those sonofabitches could I murder, not moider? How many could I smack the living life out of?
And, oh boy, that’s when I started to have fun. I zigzagged around the place killing horseflies like it was an Olympic event and I was going for the gold. I kept score as the body count mounted. Twenty . . . thirty . . . thirty-five. I was going for a new world record. I even whacked one on my leg before it could get me. It hurt, but I didn’t give a shit.
“Die, die, you sonofabitch,” I said to the horsefly.
Finally, I heard Jimmy call out to me.
“Hey, pip-squeak, let’s go for a dunk. That is, unless you want to bunk down here for the night with Victory Bound.”
I threw down the flyswatter and ran to Jimmy, leaping over the piles of horseshit.
I was so glad to be getting out of there I jumped up and kissed him.
Down by the Sea
I rode Jimmy all the way to shore.
The water was so cold I couldn’t feel my hands wrapped around his suntanned neck or my feet hooked around his muscled thighs. We rode through seaweed that got all tangled around our legs. It felt like a killer octopus, but I didn’t care. Well, I almost didn’t.
“I’m a man-of-war and you’re my first mate!” Jimmy shouted as his wiry body sliced through the choppy sea with me on board.
We shot past other kids on their flimsy Styrofoam boards and swerved around their fathers with their potbellies and flabby, lobster-red arms.
I sailed on Jimmy until goose bumps covered my entire body and my teeth were chattering like Squirmy’s.
“Race you to the blanket!” Jimmy finally called out, dumping me off his back. He charged out of the water and I staggered after him.
He drew a line in the sand with his big toe and I stood behind it.
“Ready, set, fire!”
I tore away from the starting line.
He gave me my usual head start. I dug my frozen feet into the sand and pumped my frozen arms. I heard Jimmy’s breath gaining on me and pushed harder. My lungs felt like two ice-water balloons about to burst.
Our horse blanket was just a few strides away. I was beating him this time, I was. I glanced back with a triumphant smile and he went flying by me.
“Sayonara, dum-dum.”
He threw himself down on the blanket and I threw myself down a few miserable seconds later. I lay there gasping and spitting out seawater and snot.
Shirley wrapped a towel around me.
“Can’t you let her win once?” I heard her whisper to Jimmy.
He snorted with laughter.
“You don’t know diddly-squat about raising brats, do you? I’m building her competitive spirit. You need that in this world so nobody pulls anything over on you. If I didn’t have it, all the other hunters would be outgunning me. If Jack Dempsey didn’t have it, he wouldn’t be world champ. If Victory Bound didn’t have it, he wouldn’t be tearing up his stall and headed for the winner’s circle. You catch my drift?”
“Yes,” said Shirley. “I catch your drift.”
“I’ll race you again right now,” I blurted out.
Lucky for me, Jimmy didn’t take me up on it or I really might’ve burst a lung.
“Nah, kiddo, I gotta do some handicapping.”
He bopped me on the head.
“But you almost had me that time.”
I began to shiver and Shirley rubbed me with the towel.
After a while she warned Jimmy it was getting late.
“We got plenty of time,” he insisted. “Plenty of goddamn time. This is the best time of day. Look how beautiful it is with the sun going down and the sky like a painting by Winslow Homer and all the ding-dong tourists gone off to stuff their faces with fried clams. We got our own private beach here like millionaires.”
He gestured from one end of the empty beach to the other. Then he turned his attention back to the Racing Form. Shirley, Virginia, and I wrapped our damp towels tighter around ourselves and turned our backs to the stinging wind.
Virginia buried her nose in 1984—a book that Jimmy had insisted she read to get a better understanding of the police state that would soon be facing us.
I drew a picture of Susan in the sand. She had shells for eyes and seaweed hair and a big, half-moon smile like the moon rising in the cloudy sky above us.
Jimmy sat with his arm draped around Shirley. They studied the Racing Form and discussed which horses were a sure thing for the daily double and how they were going to box the trifecta.
Shirley strained to catch the Red Sox score on a distant radio and Jimmy told her to quit daydreaming.
Finally, Jimmy checked the waterproof Bulova that he had gotten from Uncle Barney. Beads of moisture were clouding up its face, so he had to squint to read the time.
“Jesus Christ, why didn’t you tell me it was so late?” he barked at Shirley.
“I did say something.”
“No you didn’t.”
“I thought I did. . . .”
“You weren’t thinking, dummkopf. You weren’t thinking at all.”
He shook out the blanket and got sand all over us.
We raced back to the apartment.
Jimmy took a shower while Shirley threw together mackerel sandwiches for them to eat on the way and highballs to wash them down.
Shirley sprayed herself all over with Off ’cause someone at work had told her Maine mosquitoes would eat you alive. She offered to spray Jimmy too when he got out of the shower, but he said he wasn’t worried about any puny skeeters.
“They really go for me,” Shirley said. “My blood must be sweeter than yours.”
“They go after females ’cause they smell weakness. You never hear a hunter bellyaching about mosquitoes. If we did, we’d be laughed outta the woods.”
He went to get his binoculars and Shirley slipped Virginia and me each a fin—our entire vacation money. We were allowed to cross the street to buy Pepsis and Ring Dings at the dumpy East Grand Market, but that was it.
On the way out, Jimmy told us to finish up all the mackerel ’cause it was starting to stink. Then he warned us n
ot to open the door to anybody ’cause it could be the Boston Strangler. I locked the door behind them. Jimmy scratched on the door like a madman, and they were off to make a killing.
Lobsters for the Poor
As soon as they were gone, Virginia teased her hair, put on short shorts, and drew some raccoon circles around her eyes with Shirley’s eyebrow pencil.
“We’re only going across the street,” I said. “Not to Hollywood.”
“They won’t be back for hours,” drawled Virginia. “I’m going to the main drag and I can’t leave you alone, so you’re coming with me.”
My throat tightened up like the Strangler had his mitts wrapped around it.
“What if they find out?” I squeaked.
“They’re not going to find out—not unless some little snitch snitches.”
“I’m not a little snitch. I’m not some goddamn snitch.”
“Watch your mouth. And put on long pants so the mosquitoes don’t eat you alive.”
“Look who’s talking,” I said, eyeing Virginia’s shorts, which barely covered her keister.
“I’m fourteen. I can do what I want when Hitler’s not around,” Virginia replied as she bit the price tag off a padded bra. I couldn’t imagine where she got the money to buy the new bra and the short shorts. I hoped she wasn’t sneaking money out of Shirley’s purse since that would make it harder for me to hide my own occasional stealing.
Then I remembered my stealing days were over. I was a good Catholic now. Supposedly.
I put on my plaid pedal pushers and stuck the money Shirley had given me deep in my sneaker.
Virginia and I held our breath and sprayed each other with Off.
I turned on the outside light to see if the Boston Strangler was hiding out there. Mosquitoes immediately began to swarm around the light. Otherwise, the coast was clear.
We were about to head out the door when Virginia froze.
“Oh, crap. We forgot about the mackerel.”
“I’m gonna puke if I have to eat any more smelly mackerel,” I wailed.
“Maybe Sylvester will eat it,” Virginia said.
We brought the mackerel over to the cupboard where Sylvester was still hiding, but he only scrunched farther back into the cupboard.
KooKooLand Page 12