Lemon Reef

by Robin Silverman

  Madison laughed.

  “We were together after that for a little over a year.” The last night we were together I knew without having to think about it. “Christmas Eve, 1983.”

  As I said it, I felt a rush of sadness mixed with nausea, and I swallowed hard and tried to breathe through it. Puck pranced in fits and starts, as if his brain and legs disagreed. It was a little like if all three Stooges had been put into one body.

  “I guess there are things that one feels sad about forever,” I said.

  The way our relationship ended had been like being drawn and quartered. The parts of me that were pried away went without the parts of me that wouldn’t let go of her. Fifteen years later, I still could feel the frayed edges of my own torn flesh. And hear bones popping. And see the bits and pieces of me that lay exposed in the space between when she was my life and when she wasn’t anymore.

  “Del had this bruise on her face that night,” I said. “It started just under her eye and spread out onto her cheekbone.” I was using my own face as a reference point. “I asked her about it, even though I knew where it had come from.”

  “Her mother?”

  “Yeah. Del had tried to stop her from going out and leaving them on Christmas Eve.” I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets, pulled my elbows in close to my body for warmth. “Del just dismissed the bruise.”

  Against the horizon beyond Hunters Point were ship-loading cranes. Lined up as they were, with their industrious, long necks and pulleys, they looked like a herd of robotic brontosauruses out for a sunset stroll, at once futuristic and prehistoric. As I stared at them, I thought about how everything that has ever happened in our lives is always still happening.

  “I told Del I was worried about her. She said not to be, that people either make it or they don’t. She was so sad when she said it, Madison. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that sad.”

  “That’s horrible. It’s like knowing you’re in a coma.”

  Puck chased a golden retriever puppy, much smaller and younger than he. When he caught her, he went down on his front legs, as if he were trying to make himself the same height as her, and then he turned and ran, expecting her now to chase him. The puppy wagged her tail, followed him a few steps, and then ran back to her person. The puppy’s owner, a skinny woman whose face was dominated by bright red lipstick, was interested in what kind of dog Puck was. Madison patiently engaged in conversation with the woman. It’s one of those dog-park etiquette things—abandoning a private conversation in order to exchange niceties and inquire about others’ dogs.

  I stood a few feet away, my eyes drifting back to the cranes. Suddenly, a peripheral blur was followed by bloodcurdling cries. The air filled with vicious snarls and growls mixed with deafeningly high-pitched squeals. A large German shepherd had come from nowhere and was attacking the puppy Puck had just been playing with. The dogs’ bodies tangled into a ball and rolled in the dust like tumbleweed. The shrieking puppy twisted to get away as her owner slapped and kicked at the shepherd, screaming for help. Madison was trying to grab the large dog by his collar.

  I reached into the snarls and cries and scrambling and dust, grabbed the shepherd by his back legs, and yanked them out from under him. The next thing I knew, the shepherd lay sprawled in the dirt, jerking and twisting to get away. I held his legs apart and down as if they were the handles of a wheelbarrow. The woman grabbed her puppy and jumped back. When the puppy was safe, I released the shepherd and he ran off.

  “That was so scary,” the woman said to me. “Thank you so much. I’m going to report that dog to the police.”

  “It’s okay.” I petted the puppy, felt her trembling. “How is she?”

  “A little scared and a few tooth marks,” Madison said, fingering through the puppy’s fur. “He mostly got her collar.” She shook her head and smiled at me. “Where’d you learn that trick?”

  I stared at her blankly. I couldn’t remember, and combined with this unnerving incident on this most unreal-seeming day, it frightened me. Because having an answer felt better than not, I shrugged and said, “TV or something.” My body felt strangely disconnected from my words in that way only a lie can effect.

  With Puck between us, we began back down the hill toward our cottage on Elsie Street. As we made our way, I glanced again at the cranes and suddenly recalled once having seen Del’s mother, Pascale, break up a dogfight between their dog Brute and a neighbor’s dog the same way.

  Chapter Four

  The red-eye departed San Francisco at midnight with scheduled arrival into Miami International just before nine a.m. Miami time the following morning. My return flight was scheduled for Sunday afternoon, allowing five full days in my hometown. I was taking Gail up on her offer to stay with her. She seemed happy about it—although with Gail, it’s hard to tell. I sipped a Bloody Mary and stared out the window, absorbing the vodka and steeling myself against the anxiety I felt whenever I thought about the onslaught of work I would be returning to.

  I had received good news in a voicemail I retrieved before boarding. Carlos Robles was appointed minor’s counsel for Angie in the Flint v. Baxter case. I knew Carlos was thorough, and I trusted he would keep Angie safe. Still, after seven years of never missing a beat professionally, it was not easy to just let my obligations fall to the wayside to attend to something I thought was so firmly behind me.

  I reached into my travel bag and took out a yellowed envelope, folded over in the middle. From it I removed the only photograph I had of Del and me. Katie Dunn had taken it when we were in New Mexico for a soccer tournament. “July, 1982” was scribbled on the back. I was thirteen and Del (who was ten months older than me) was fourteen. In the photo, we were sitting side by side on a tree stump eating sandwiches. I was skinny, with coils and springs for hair (the shorter it was, the curlier), olive skin, and a round face. I was looking away from the camera and laughing, and you could see the dimples parenthesizing my smile. Del’s hair, the color of honey in sunlight, fell lazily around her face. She was looking at me with a wry expression, lips slightly twisted, head at a slant, as if she was trying to figure me out.

  Del had surprised everyone by deciding to join the traveling soccer team the summer before our ninth grade year. She said it was for the exercise, but she did later admit my poems in eighth grade English had gotten to her, and she joined because she had a crush on me. She and I were randomly assigned to stay with the same family in New Mexico. I offended her the first night. She was sitting on her bed reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and she was unwilling to put it down.

  In an awkward attempt to get her attention, I said, “I didn’t take you for someone who read a lot.”

  Del looked up from the page and said challengingly, “Why, because I’m blond?”

  “Blind?” I had misheard her. “Did you say I thought you were blind? I didn’t think you were blind. I just didn’t think you read a lot.”

  She twisted her face curiously, nodded deliberately. “Right.” She paused, and then she said, “I’m not blind.” Her attention turning back to the page, “Are you deaf?”

  I laughed, joined her in making fun of me, which moved me beyond my shyness with her. Riding the laughter like a wave, I walked over and playfully wrestled the book from her hands.

  “What are you reading this for anyway? It’s so deep.”

  “I don’t know.” Del lifted her shoulders, glanced at a place on the wall behind me. “It’s like a car accident. It’s horrible, but you can’t stop watching.”

  I felt the weightiness of her tone and it scared me a little. “Come on,” I said, putting the book down with one hand and offering up a deck of cards with the other. “Spit?”

  Del begrudgingly agreed, but did eventually get into it. We stayed up late talking, snuck out to share a cigarette we found in the room. A good feeling took hold between us, and we began to look for each other even when we were with the rest of the group.

  After the trip, Del and I spent more and more
time together. In those remaining summer days before our ninth-grade year began, when we did hang out it was either at the beach or at my house; Del never invited me over. I thought this incidental, until one day when I showed up at Del’s unexpectedly. Hardly off my bike, Del met me at the fishing-pole-lined porch and ushered me away from the house, suggesting we go see a matinee at a nearby theater. I needed to use the bathroom first. Del insisted there was a bathroom at the theater. At some point I realized Del was trying to keep me from going in and meeting her family. I sensed it was because she felt ashamed. In my best thirteen-year-old self’s attempt to prove to her I cared about her no matter what, I faked around her and headed in the direction of her living room door, checking back with her as I did. Del shook her head with annoyance or dread (I wasn’t sure). Then she took a deep breath and followed me inside.

  From the front door I could see the back door, which was wide open. The scent of stewing tomatoes and onions crept out from behind the wall separating the narrow galley kitchen from the living room. The small box-shaped living room looked as if it were about to bust apart from the heavy furniture and extensive clutter. A large greenish couch of some scratchy, woven synthetic material filled one wall. A worn wooden coffee table had to be navigated to get to the back where the kitchen was located. On the wall opposite the couch, a bulky television with wrinkled antennae rested upon a piece of brown furniture, which appeared at one time to have had doors and drawers in the places that were now gaping holes.

  I hesitated before entering farther, taken aback by the sheer disorder. It was quite a contrast from my own house, which was spacious and chic and spotless. Del scrambled to clean up. I was thinking of ways to reassure her as I quickly side-stepped a large barking dog of indeterminate breed in order to keep from being knocked over. He had run in the open back door chasing two frantically squawking chickens, racing haphazardly through and around the fighting younger siblings. Water and food spilled out from overturned cat bowls, and feathers were flying everywhere.

  “Chickens?” I said lightly, smiling and nodding cheerfully in Del’s direction.

  She heaved a palpable, miserable sigh. “My mother likes fresh eggs.”

  With her arms full of stuff from the floor, Del tried to subdue the frantic dog without stepping on any of the chickens—or children. Ida and Nicole, Del’s little sisters, were in the middle of the living room screaming at each other over the head of the wailing eighteen-month-old Sid, while Pascale remained poised throughout a rather tense phone conversation with the person who seemed to be her boss.

  On my way from the bathroom, as Del steered me toward the front door, I stopped to say hello to Pascale. She was tall, skinny, and muscular. Her face was narrow, and she had a small mouth and brown gerbil eyes. Her short chestnut hair was plowed back off her face, as if being taught a lesson for harassing her, and was held stiffly in place by sweat.

  Now off the phone, Pascale stood by the stove stirring a huge pot. The kitchen was a small rectangle, with barely enough room, it seemed, for the refrigerator door to open. On the refrigerator door was a picture one of the girls had drawn and a copy of Del’s last report card—all A’s. A lit cigarette hung from Pascale’s mouth, the smoke tracing the conversation like an echo. Can of Budweiser in her other hand, she looked up, noticed me, and said hello. In a thick, not readily identifiable accent, Pascale asked me if I liked chili. That I did made her grin hugely, revealing the slight space between her front teeth. She immediately invited me to stay for dinner. I, much to Del’s chagrin, enthusiastically accepted.

  My experiences with Pascale from that day on would take some radical twists and turns, and I’d come to know her at her absolute worst. Still, I was from the very beginning committed to her. I was seduced by the confusing and often entertaining way in which Pascale occupied her maternal role—at once entirely given over to and bitterly oppressed by it.

  *

  Having finally gotten the stewardess’s attention, I requested my second drink. I felt the effects of my first, combined with the sense of overwhelming sorrow and dread that had been constant now for nearly ten hours. I put the photo of our thirteen- and fourteen-year-old selves back in my bag and stared out the window. The sorrow I understood well enough. When you’re as close to someone as I had once been to Del and you lose her, you never get over it—not really. And her death made her loss immediate in a way it hadn’t been in a long time and final in a way it had never been.

  The dread, however, was harder to make sense of. The recirculated air felt heavy in my lungs, the thin felt-like blanket and paper pillow only muted the chill and hardness of the sterile tube. I felt as I always felt in planes: suspended and minimally sustained. The blackness of the night drew me out. I turned my overhead light off so I could feel myself a part of that darkness. I thought then of how in my adult life I’ve hated flying—this prefabricated, one-size-fits-all space—and having to rely on a pilot who could be contending with who knew what personal preoccupations.

  It’s not unlike how it felt to be a child in my family, why the clutter and calamity in Del’s home had been so appealing to me, so freeing at first, before things began to deteriorate for them. Suspended tensely somewhere between San Francisco and Miami—my present life and my past—I heard Del’s words, some people make it and some people don’t, and recalled vividly the night her family’s deterioration became more evident to us both.

  *

  It was Christmas Eve, 1983. The day had begun with my parents telling me our neighbor had seen Del and me making out, felt it was his duty to inform them. Mortified, horrified, terrified by the news, my parents forbade me to leave the house until, as they put it, they could “find a way to help” me. This made Del’s and my plans for the night—that I would sleep over as I often did—more complicated. I was thinking of ways to get to her house when she called.

  “It’s me.” Her voice was strained. “Are you still coming over?”

  “Yeah.” I leaned back and felt the pillow fold around my head. I’d already told Del in a quick phone call earlier in the day that my parents knew we were more than friends. What she didn’t know yet—what I was somehow going to tell her when I saw her—was that I had been forbidden from having any contact with her outside of school.

  “I was scared you wouldn’t be allowed,” she said.

  “I’m coming.”

  I looked at the clock, which said six p.m. I was waiting for my parents to leave. They were doing their usual Christmas Eve thing—going out for Chinese food and to the movies with other Jewish friends.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. Then, in response to my quietness, she said, “I mean, could you just get here, please. They’re at it again.”

  I could hear her mother and father screaming in the background in Spanish.

  As soon as my parents left, I stuffed my blanket to create the effect of a sleeping body, and then hopped on my bike and headed to Del’s. Miami Shores, the neighborhood in which we grew up, had radically richer and poorer areas. My family lived closer to the waterway, although not on it, like the really rich kids at our school did. Del lived farther inland, on the west border of our school district. Second Avenue, which I crossed to get to Del’s house, was a dividing line, a proverbial railroad track. Home and property sizes and values diminished block by block, with Del’s mother’s house skirting the lower end.

  A year and a half since that first visit, when I had stood outside not being invited in, Del greeted me now by throwing open the door and expecting me to enter. The usual chili was not cooking on the stove on that night, just the scents of crowding and resentment folded into spindling cracks in the pasty plaster and the musky, dull air generating from a small wall-mounted metal heater.

  Del’s conversation with me on the phone picked up as if there had been no interruption.

  “It’s crazy here,” she said. “I can’t believe it’s Christmas Eve. My father left, so my mother said she’s going out, too.” Arms up, palms out. “Sh
e’s just gonna leave us—on Christmas Eve.” Del shook her head with disgust and looked at me wearily. “She promised she wouldn’t drink tonight.” Another headshake. “She’s so drunk. I feel bad for my sisters and brother, I mean, you know, they still look forward to this fucking holiday.”

  We were stepping over…things.

  “I think she got fired again,” Del said, once we had managed to navigate the shared living space and find refuge in her small but always immaculate bedroom. “She has to stop drinking, you know, it just doesn’t work with a nine-to-five.” A car door slammed and an engine started, followed by a shrieking reverse and a peeling into forward. “Maybe she’ll get killed,” Del said casually.

  She turned to reveal her profile and hitched her middle finger to the edge of her tooth to gnaw at what little nail remained.

  There was a red spot under her right eye that was already turning into a vague bruise. Bringing my hand to her cheek, I asked, “What is that?”

  Del pushed my hand down and moved her head away. “What do you think? I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Del,” I said, my breath momentarily skidding to a halt, “you tried to stop her from going out, didn’t you?” I hooked her hair behind her ear to get a better look at the bruise. “You promised you wouldn’t…”

  “Will you stop?” She pushed my hand away firmly. “I have to think about what to do.”

  I wanted to help. “We could see what’s on TV.”

  “It’s a Wonderful Life,” we said at the same time, then laughed.

  The door flew open and eleven-year-old Ida swung in. “Sid’s up. He’s hungry.”

  Ida’s fiery hair fell flamboyantly against her olive skin and dark eyes. Four years our junior, Ida loved to be included in our shenanigans. She had been the audience for our bad poetry readings, the fall guy for our practical jokes, the reluctant post for our soccer net.