We had not always stayed at the same hotel: my mother’s idea, I suppose, to keep my father on the move and away from lasting relationships. One of the hotels had been torn down, and rising from the ruins was a low modern motel. Another was boarded up and shut for the winter. But a third, thrillingly familiar, was open to the public. I wondered who came there to bask in the cold winter sun. There had been only a few figures on the boardwalk, hunched against the wind, and at least one of them had been a derelict, stumbling, perhaps in the delusion that it was summer.
Who lives here? I wanted to shout, as I entered the lobby of the hotel. Everyone there was old. An old man slept in an overstuffed chair that seemed to embrace him. Two old women sat poised on the edge of a love seat. Even the desk clerk was stooped and wrinkled, and he rested his head against the quiet wall of the switchboard. It seemed to be merely a stage set, a place on which the actors, my mother and father and myself, would soon appear. On the worn red carpet of the staircase, perhaps, in woolen bathing suits and beach robes, with pail and shovel and newspaper and lunch basket and towels and blankets; so encumbered as to almost stagger.
Why had I never asked Jay to come here with me so that I could show him a small piece of my history? He always used imagery in his photographs as a silent language. He would have understood. One memory is worth a thousand words!
I knew that I came back here now because I believed it had been a place where my parents and I had truly loved one another, where we had been a perfect triumvirate of love. This was safe ground in my mind, where somehow we had been all and enough for my father. I could remember no quarrels. I was even included in their room to lie on a cot unfolded by a colored maid who seemed to approve of us. Had it all been in my imagination? It didn’t matter. It was only important that I believed it, that I continued to believe it even in the face of all evidence.
I walked around the edges of the lobby, saw that the barbershop and the gift store were closed, saw the arrows that pointed to the direct passage to the beach, saw the paintings (the same, the same) of waterfowl, of sheep, of brown ships on a brown sea.
The dining room was open for lunch. Only a small cluster of tables was set, still with white cloths and frosted pitchers of water and silverware that would be heavy in the hand. White napkins stood in pyramids at every setting. It was early and only one table was occupied. An elderly woman sat there, wearing a fur-collared coat. She held the massive menu in front of her as if it were a hymnal.
There were no waiters in the dining room. I stood in the doorway and waited and then the woman looked up over her pince-nez and nodded, as if she expected me.
I nodded too and even smiled. How would a voice sound in the quiet of that room?
She raised her water glass to her lips and drank. Then she cleared her throat in three harsh sounds and said, “Are you meeting someone?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Would you care to join me?”
I walked through the hoop of light thrown by the crystal chandelier. “Thank you,” I said. When I removed my coat and sat down, she handed the menu to me.
“Your nose is all red,” she said accusingly.
I raised a wrinkled tissue to it. “A cold.”
“Soup,” she said. “Fluids.”
Then, as if on cue, the waiter came on the sides of his collapsed feet, and teetered above us until we ordered.
It seemed that she would accept me without question, as if I were Alice, entering her world through a dream.
“I came here as a child,” I said.
“I came here before then,” she answered.
“It seems smaller now.”
“Everything shrinks.”
“I know. Schoolrooms. Old houses.”
“I came here on my honeymoon,” she said, and I knew that her husband was long dead.
“I came here with my mother and father.” Somehow she had aroused a competition between us.
“We had filet of sole for our wedding lunch. The manager sent a bottle of wine.”
“We were very happy here,” I said. Was it true? I remembered ordering food in the dining room. It was a serious business. The waiters came to know us and would wait a long time before they came to the table to take our order. My father would say, “The veal looks good. Chops sound nice.”
My mother would nod. “How about the filet of haddock?”
“I don’t know,” he’d answer. “I don’t feel like fish. Do you want soup?”
“Do you?” my mother would ask.
“I don’t know,” my father would say, and on and on through the vegetables du jour, the salad dressing, the beverage, the dessert.
Now the waiter came with bowls of soup in trembling hands.
She lifted her spoon and said, “I’ve come back here every year for forty-five years.” Her chin was raised triumphantly and I knew that the contest was over.
“Then you were here when I was a child.”
“There were so many children.” She dismissed them with a wave of her ringed fingers. “My children hate this place. They always say, ‘Why do you come back here? It’s rotting. It will fall into the sea.’”
We ate our soup in silence for a while.
Then she put her spoon down. “Once, last year, I think it was, I was eating breakfast right here, and a woman came into the dining room. She looked deranged. Her coat was buttoned wrong. Her hat came over her eyes. She began to shout. ‘How can you sit here eating rolls and butter when children are starving all over the world?’
“ ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked her.
“ ‘It’s your decadence that’s killing them, that’s swelling their bellies!’
“The manager came running from the kitchen. ‘I’m an old woman,’ I said. ‘I hardly enjoy my food anymore.’
“But she only repeated herself. ‘It’s your decadence that’s killing them!’ The manager waved his arms at her. ‘Out! Out!’ he shouted.
“ ‘Just listen,’ I told her, ‘my teeth don’t even fit right. I can hardly chew. They irritate my gums.’
“ ‘Decadence, decadence!’ she said. The manager grabbed her sleeve and pulled her toward the door. On the way out she knocked over water glasses and she took rolls from the last table.”
“The world is changing,” I said, selfish, meaning my world.
“It’s true, though,” she said. “I can’t eat a steak anymore.”
“People are desperate.”
“I can’t even breathe well. I sleep on three pillows.”
The waiter came and removed the soup bowls and brought the main course.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Next year I might go to Miami.”
Out on the boardwalk again, fortified by the food, I saw two brown horses carrying riders along the shore. I walked past closed amusement places and frozen custard stands. At the barred entrance to the steel pier, shredding posters announced the world-famous diving horse and Stars! Stars! Stars! The wind lowed and the water licked around the legs of the pier. Coming soon! the posters said. A Galaxy of Stars For Your Entertainment!
Further down the boardwalk, a voice beckoned from a sheltered arcade. “THIS IS THE PLACE FOLKS HERE IT IS COME IN TO CURL YOUR TOES TICKLE YOUR FANCY AND WARM YOUR NOSE THAT’S FANCY F-A-N-C-Y NO OFFENSE TO THE LADIES THIS IS THE FREE-EST SHOW ON EARTH GATHER AROUND ME CHILDREN BECAUSE I HAVE TO HAVE YOUR CLOSE AND UNDIVIDED ATTENTION!”
Obediently I went toward the sound of the voice and saw in the square of yellow light that others were already gathered. It was the same sort of auction that we had attended on summer nights years ago and I remembered that I always sat up near the front, innocent and free from the possibility of coercion, while my parents would cautiously sit in the last row.
Once the auctioneer had given me a plastic letter opener inscribed Willie J. Parnes 25 Years Atlantic City N.J. “THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING FOLKS ONLY THE BEGINNING OF THE GIVEAWAY TRUST ME IF YOU’LL ONLY TRUST ME MOVE A LITTLE CLOSER HONEY I DON’T BITE CHOMP
CHOMP,” and he held a set of clicking false teeth in his hand. Then he gave me a small American flag and I waved it in triumph at my parents, who moved closer and closer, a row at a time, as if they were ambushing the enemy.
They may have bought other things but I remember a radio, compact and ivory, that stood on our refrigerator at home after the vacation. Voices and music faded and blared, faded and blared, interrupted by fits of static for which my father beat it as if trying to revive someone in a terrible spasm of coughing. “Damn radio, damn radio! Oh, that bastard!” And one memory of the summer was less than perfect.
A small knot of people were in the auction room now, sitting together up front as if they were warming themselves at a hearth. A black woman smiled at me and removed her massive handbag from the folding chair next to hers, and I sat down.
“He just beginning,” she said. It was as if we were in church and I had not missed the opening remarks of the minister.
I wondered briefly what I was doing there then, as if I had been mugged and shanghaied and was just struggling to come to myself again. I thought, I should be home now dragging myself through some domestic rites, folding clothes warm from the dryer, making soup, chasing dust, concentrating on Jay, on Jay.
And then the auctioneer began again, his voice as soothing and hypnotic as one’s own pulse and heartbeat. “OKAY OKAY,” he said, his mouth too close to the microphone. “THIS IS THE RIGHT PLACE WITH NO OBLIGATION ABSOLUTELY NO OBLIGATION EXCEPT TO CONTROL YOURSELF AND NOT WALK OUT WITH EVERY INCREDIBLE BARGAIN THAT IS GOING TO MAKE YOUR EYES POP RIGHT OUT OF YOUR HEAD JUST TO WARM YOU UP A LITTLE BIT AND SHOW YOU THAT YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR EXCEPT FOR THE GUY SITTING NEXT TO YOU I’M GIVING A FEW THINGS AWAY THAT’S RIGHT DON’T CLEAN OUT YOUR EARS MOTHER GIVING AWAY AS AN ACT OF FAITH AND FRIENDSHIP MOVE A LITTLE CLOSER DON’T MOVE AWAY WHEN THE MAN IS GIVING THINGS AWAY WHEN HE IS MOVED TO THE ACT OF GIVING HOW CAN YOU SEE MY FRIEND?” (to a man just entering and seating himself in the last row). “DON’T BE A STRANGER IN PARADISE MY FRIEND BUT COME CLOSER AND GET IN ON A GOOD THING.”
The man in the last row smiled and folded his arms.
“OKAY YOU BE THE SERGEANT AT ARMS AND SEE THAT NOBODY TRIES TO LEAVE HA HA.” A fan of ball-point pens opened in his hand. “A LITTLE LEGERDEMAIN SONNY,” (this to a small black boy who buried his face against his father’s coat). “THAT’S BIG FOR MAGIC COME ON SONNY PICK A COLOR ANYTHING YOU LIKE BECAUSE IT’S ALL YOURS WITH NO OBLIGATION TAKE IT TAKE IT.”
The father prodded and poked and the boy finally reached one small hand out and grasped the pen nearest to it. The father immediately took it from him and wrote with it on the back of an envelope.
“PENS THAT WRITE NOTHING BUT THE BEST HERE IN ATLANTIC CITY WHERE QUALITY IS FIRST AND FOREMOST PENS THAT WRITE UNDER WATER UNDER THE INFLUENCE TOASTERS THAT TOAST FOUR SLICES OF BREAD AT ONE TIME WITH A MAGICOLOR DIAL A BUILT-IN BRAIN THAT TELLS YOU WHEN YOUR TOAST IS READY RADIOS THAT FIT INTO THE PALM OF YOUR HAND BLENDERS THAT CHOP MIX BLEND GRIND WHIP BEAT SADISTIC BLENDERS AND PENS THAT WRITE FOR YOU AND YOU AND YOU”
I snuffled and felt my head nodding pleasantly, almost in rhythm with his voice. I had a right to be there after all, to have a little peace, the way a sick child has a right to absent herself from school and luxuriate in her mother’s care.
“You sick?” the woman next to me asked.
“Yes. Only a cold.”
“Cold, huh? Jello for that, before it sets. Nice good hot jello clean out the passages.”
I rose from the seat, still nodding, and she patted my arm. “Jello,” she said again, and I lurched out into the gray light of the boardwalk.
My head felt clogged with the cold and with crowding thoughts as I sat on a bench in the bus station waiting to end my pilgrimage. There was a large family sitting near me. The children, uniformly pale and restless, banged their heels against the lower slats of the bench and swatted listlessly at each other.
“Stop it,” the mother said from time to time, pinching the arm of the child who happened to be nearest to her. “Stop it for Christ’s sake.”
The father dozed, snored, and woke occasionally, looking surprised to find himself there, with that particular wife and those squirming battling children. He’d rub his eyes and grunt, then settle his buttocks against the unyielding wood of the bench and sleep again.
A loudspeaker announced the departure and arrival of buses—“Ventnor. Margate. Ocean City.” The father was startled awake again and he turned his glazed eyes to look at me. Now what? his face said. He lit a cigarette and all the children vied for the honor of blowing out the match, spittle flying, sparkling as dew on the fine hair of my arm, on my pocketbook. “Watch out for the lady, stupid!” Father blew smoke rings to encircle the frail waist of the youngest girl. Mother laughed, leaned over for a puff, and gave the cigarette back, lipstick-marked and moist. Oh, how dare they be so intimate in the face of everything?
Their bus was announced and they rose at once like a flock of noisy birds. The last boy ran, tripping across my feet, and his mother yanked his arm with a pull that might have wrenched it from its socket and she smiled at me with an endearing smile full of bad teeth and apology.
I yawned, growing luxuriously sleepy, and watched the continuing parade of passengers. A man rushed across the depot floor and his shiny black suitcase flew open. “Oh sh-it!” he cried in true despair and his life’s secrets tumbled out as if they had been shot from a cannon. I jumped from the bench to help him and other people stopped too and bent over, picking up the pieces and flinging them back into the open mouth of the suitcase. “Damn lock,” the man muttered, as I touched his jockstrap, his Ivory soap, his Modern Screen, his white shirt wrapped in laundry cellophane, his alarm clock, his pamphlets on the new world of computer programming.
“Damn, damn,” he said, until the suitcase was filled to overflow. Another man gave him a length of rope and together they bound the suitcase as if it were a resisting prisoner. “Thank you, thank you all!” he called, waving his free arm and running toward the boarding gate. Then they announced the bus to New York.
Boarding the bus and sitting down next to a middle-aged black man, I knew how really tired I was. Jay was dying and I dreamed of a warm bath and food, of cool and perfect sheets. It was as if I were too distracted by life to be concerned with death. Yet when I tried myself once more, letting in the thoughts of darkness and of separation, my heart took terrible plunges. And Jay, surrounded now by the enemy, with the enemy living inside him, did he have dreams of soup and bread and other beds for sleep and love instead of for dying?
I began to die then, my mouth and nostrils and ears filling with black earth, and I wanted to pull on the sleeve of the man sitting next to me and confess that I could not stand it, that I would not. But in his dark, African inscrutability, he had turned away from me and fallen asleep.
The bus moved urgently away from the delusions of childhood and back toward the real world. Going away hadn’t done very much, after all. Slowed time a little maybe, creating illusions like the ones in a slide show. Maybe I should have gone back to Jay’s beginnings instead. What happens to someone’s nostalgia when he dies? Jay, near the subway, waiting for his beloved and missing father. Mona, singing in her Bronx kitchen, polishing silver with a pink and pungent cream. Is it possible to reconstruct everything, if you go back? To change things? The neighborhoods were all changed. Buildings torn down. Nothing remained constant. Se habla español. Childhood, oh God. Elusive as this moment, now. The movement of the bus rocked and bumped me against the warm arm of the man sitting next to me. I yawned again, and my thoughts became sleepy and disjointed. Back again. Home. Jay. Then I felt myself going under too, into sleep.
The whole journey was made in that sleep and in the bus station in New York again, I went to a telephone booth and called the hospital. The floor nurse said that there were no major changes, that Jay had had a fairly comfortable day. He read a book, she reported. He ate some lunch. Then she connected the cal
l to Jay’s room and I heard his voice. “Hello, Sandy?” His voice entered me. Could I say that? Your voice enters me.
He wanted to know about my cold, about the children. “Fine, fine,” I said. Your voice enters me.
I told him that I would come to see him as soon as the sniffles were gone. I actually used the word, as professionally cheery as a nurse. Then we blew kisses to one another that fell to their death somewhere in the trunk lines and I hung up.
Back in Isabel’s apartment I was surprised to see her ex-husband, Eddie, sitting on the sofa, smoking a pipe. It wasn’t Sunday and yet he was there, looking tranquil and domestic, with his younger daughter, Janice, on his lap and Harry nestled close to his side.
In the kitchen Isabel was busy, oven-flushed and happy. It was Janice’s birthday and her father had come for the celebration dinner. Paul was wearing a paper birthday hat with a green feather on it. He took my hand and led me to inspect the cake on display next to the refrigerator.
I began to set the table and Eddie came in from the living room, his face lost in the veil of smoke from his pipe. He leaned in the doorway and watched me. “So Jay is having a hard time,” he said.
“Yes.”
Eddie’s pipe made sounds like faulty plumbing and he sucked and sucked at it, as if he were trying to draw out new ideas. “Tough break,” he said at last. “Tough break.”
I placed a basket of candy at every place setting, and a noisemaker and a party hat. My hands trembled as I put the silverware down. I wondered how he felt on this celebration of his daughter’s birth. Did he remember the original day and his first sight of her in the world?
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