He tried to ignore the noises, but he knew that the men were taking his mom away on some kind of trolley with wheels. He could hear Esther crying, and he shut his eyes, forced it away. When they found him and made him come out, the sunlight was pale and gray, and it was already morning.
Their mom had loved him (he remembered everything, even though he wasn’t supposed to), but she’d abandoned him anyway, abandoned Esther, even though she hadn’t meant to. Esther didn’t remember. He had decided long ago to leave the memories inside, where they couldn’t cause more harm. And they were his memories, no one else’s. Maybe he was hoarding them, feeding off them. The psychologists and psychiatrists, his father, all of them trying to find out what he knew, what he remembered, and he wouldn’t tell them.
He and Esther had been taken to Grandma Eileen’s house. And then, finally, to her son’s house (“I’m your dad,” he told them, and then he adopted them to prove it). All through their childhood, the bay had been their playground: hunting for crabs in the crevices of the rocks, clusters of them, with their shiny backs—when they moved, it was sideways, with their pincers raised; poking their fingers in the soft, fleshy centers of the sea anemones, tucked in the rocks—purple, gray, green, red—so that they closed up like the petals of a flower, but quickly, like mouths sucking at their fingers; at low tide, walking through the clearish-green bay water, up to their thighs, heads down, in search of starfish and sand dollars—when Esther walked ahead of him, he stepped in her dissolving footprints.
They’d see the shadows of sand sharks moving over the sand, disappearing behind rocks or bunches of flowering seaweed. He loved the spiky-skinned starfish—yellow, orange, red, pink—with rows of tube feet on their undersides, growing back missing limbs, mouths and stomachs caving inward at their centers. The dead ones were dry and brittle, arms curling upward, colors faded (they collected them, set them on Grandma Eileen’s deck—until she threw them away because they smelled).
Sometimes they’d spot a stingray, its outline against the sand, the same color, half-buried, and they’d throw a rock or a shell, watch it rise like a space ship and swoop away, tail flicking a pattern in the sand.
One time, Esther stepped over a stingray but Eric’s foot landed on it—like stepping on a giant lip. The tail kicked up, stung him in the heel. It felt like a bite and then it stabbed all the way up his leg, into his chest. The stingray lunged away like a ghost, leaving a cloud of sand. He ran back to Grandma Eileen’s house, Esther following. His feet didn’t feel like they were touching the ground, an electric current of pain running through him, making him powerful.
When they got to the house, Grandma Eileen thought it was Esther who had been stung. (“Why are you crying?” she asked her, when she saw that Eric was the one who was hurt.) He soaked in a bathtub with baking powder; he passed out for a little while. When he came to, he was on Grandma Eileen’s bed, on a thick terry towel, another towel covering his “private area,” and his foot and leg throbbed. She let him drink as many Cokes as he wanted, and he and Esther watched a marathon of The Twilight Zone on the big-screen TV for hours, while he burped from the carbonation, until eventually the pain subsided.
The memory moved through Eric, and then he saw the pale green wallpaper of their mom’s bedroom, and their mom in bed, fixed there, at the edge, close to the bedside table, lying on her side with her knees crooked inward, her shoulder above the bedspread (Esther’s shoulder), and her hip creating a small mountain under the covers.
Before she overdosed, she took a hot shower, the steam thick, and when she opened the bathroom door, it crawled out. He sat cross-legged on the floor and watched her towel off; then she rubbed lotion all over her body, everywhere, so that her skin glistened. The mirror was coated with steam and she wiped at it with her palm, created a circle of visibility, but it clouded up again. Her hair hung in wet curls between her shoulder blades. She slipped on her blue nightgown—a sheer material—a dark patch between her legs, and the circle of her nipples still moist with lotion.
Little man, their mom used to call him: “Come here, little man.” She was always in her bed.
“Get out of bed, Mommy! Get up! Please!”
He spooned Chef Boyardee ravioli from a can when Esther had no teeth, because there wasn’t any milk (babies drank milk) and he didn’t know what to give her; he knew enough to smush the ravioli into a mush with the base of the spoon, but when she started choking, her face turning purple, he thought he might have accidentally killed her—Oh, God!, Please breathe. But then a fingertip-size piece of ravioli catapulted from her mouth, landing on his chest.
“Hand me my cigarettes, little man. I love you, little man.”
“Mommy. I love you, Mommy. I’ll take care of you, Mommy. I love you.”
“You’re my little man.”
She let him sleep with her; he breathed her in and became her. Her chest and legs and stomach pressed against him and he could smell her: nicotine and a coppery smell, reminding him of blood. She whispered, told him stories. With gleaming eyes, she murmured things and he pretended to understand. Sometimes she looked serious—angry—and he was frightened.
“He thinks he can pay me off,” she said. “One kind of loneliness,” she said. “I traded one kind of loneliness for another.” She said that she was nothing. They were nothing. They were nothing to him except trouble. Her brown eyes filled with sorrow and pain, and he felt it beating into him. Pounding into him.
Yet she loved him with her sorrow, and her love had a power and rhythm—it was unstoppable.
No one could see it or take it away. He wanted to yell: Her love is unstoppable! But he let the waves and sky yell for him. And the words flew up and over him, carried everywhere.
He pressed the tip of his finger to the sand crab’s covering, gently, and it felt like he was touching the tip of his own nose.
He looked up—the tide was creeping in, and the ocean seemed to curve around him, ready to overtake him. It was as if the ocean were holding back, gaining strength. He could feel it breathing, surging.
Whenever his mom fell asleep beside him or pressed her lips onto his face or rubbed his back, he felt her history being passed into his body. And once, she showed him a photograph of a man: “I am a secret,” she said, holding the photo, “and you and your sister are secrets”—letting him see for only a second—“and secrets are invisible, we do not exist.”; then she ripped it up, let the pieces fall on the bedspread.
But he had already memorized it: The man wore a blue and green–striped tie; he sat behind a desk, his big hands folded somberly before him; his head was tilted to the left; he was squinting; he wasn’t smiling.
The same squint, the same hands, and the same tie of the man in the photograph on Grandma Eileen’s bedside table.
Eric met him only once: Gurney’s fat fingers sliding through his hair, an empty stare. And then, a few years after that, they were at a funeral: Grandpa Gurney had died from an explosion in his head.
ERIC FELT A tickling on his palm, the sand crab sidling to the edge of his hand. Careful, little man, he said or thought or thought and said, said and thought—at the same time—he wasn’t sure. Regardless, the words surrounded them, benevolent and sad.
He kneeled over, let the sand crab crawl off his skin, and he watched it burrow, deep, deeper, until the crab and its hole blotted themselves out.
Gone. Sorrow climbed up through his lungs, reached for his throat. Where’d you go, little man? But he let his grief be smothered by a numb euphoria, like a damp towel spread over a flame.
He stood and watched the water in the distance, where there was only openness, stretching out and out and out. The water looked as solid as steel, and he shuddered at the thought that a propeller could cut through it, like a scalpel through skin. He touched the scar on his abdomen, under his shirt, the thickness against his fingertips, remembering Scott and his father standing near the doorway of his hospital room. Scott’s shiny blond hair, slick and combed over his h
ead. Scott had let him try pot, and then cocaine and Ecstasy. His father had blamed Scott; it had given them something more to fight over. But it wasn’t Scott’s fault: the opiates were what soothed Eric, finally brought him home.
A LARGE WAVE pushed itself upward, smashed down, crashed and heaved, and it came to Eric, slapped against his thighs, wisps of spray all over. He steadied himself, his toes gripped the sand, but he could feel his body waving like a tree limb in the wind.
When he had regained his balance, he licked the salt at his lip, tasted it all the way inside him, and the water thundered in his ears, a rushing noise. Sunlight reflected and broke against the surface all around him, multiplying everywhere, like looking through a diamond.
He closed his eyes to it—it was too much—and sounds rushed through him: seagulls and waves slapping against each other, and a kid yelling happily, and then another kid (or the same kid?) laughing.
All over his skin, even inside him, burning through him, was the blissful and terrifying mix of heroin and ocean, smoothing his memories, taking away all of his humiliations, his thousands and thousands of failures—all of it whirling free, like the clouds of spray sliding away in the wind. Little man, little man, little man. The best part was the kid’s laugh—it continued to echo through him, and when he opened his eyes, a wave was wide and soaring, the blue at its center caving inward, and then it stretched and yawned into foam.
He wanted to curl up like a seashell and dream and not think not think not think not think. Already he was aware that his high would not last. And he might get dragged out with the tide, sucked away. He thought of the seaweed and the shells, pulled back to the ocean, deep down, where it was dark and cool.
The sunlight was naked and ugly, and it made him feel unprotected and exposed; he wanted to take his hand and shove the sun away.
Above the shore on the beach was his shaded space, underneath the lifeguard stand. He turned, saw the jacket Esther had given him, waiting in the sprawl of shade. The fur collar looked like a squirrel staring back at him.
There was no lifeguard because it was still winter, and he felt the relief of not having to worry about a lifeguard telling him to leave. Seagulls were swooping, flashes of white, toward the trash bin, where he’d vomited pizza and beer.
A pizza box was next to the jacket, half-buried in the sand, and he knew that inside the box were the cash and his drugs and his lighter and his spoon and his needle. He didn’t want to remember the bank teller’s face, because not only had he hurt her, but it reminded him of the other girl’s face, the one he’d given his last $20 to; that was why he’d robbed the bank (although he knew it wasn’t that simple, but that was what he needed to believe).
She was with another girl, they were smoking cigarettes—so young!—and they’d come up to him, and immediately she’d handed her friend her cigarette and then put her hands all over him, and he knew that all she wanted was his money, that she’d say she’d give him a blow job or lick him or fuck him if he gave her some money. And he wanted to tell her, Take it, take my money. You’re beautiful. What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Her friend stepped back, smiling. He knew that he smelled and that he was disgusting, that he had bad teeth, bad feet, bad fingernails, bad etc., etc., etc. He could see it in the girl’s friend’s eyes, and he looked away, concentrated instead on the white-pink part in the young girl’s hair. And when her face tilted up, he met all the sorrow that waited for him in her eyes. He fell inside her, and she let him.
Her fingers were in his jeans pocket, and when she found the $20 bill, her hand hesitated for a second, and then her fingers dug into his thigh. He hardened, wanting her fingers to reach him, to wrap around him. Just a sad-eyed girl, a little creature, so young, and he wanted her to kiss his mouth, to feel her tongue. He wanted to grab her and shake her and tell her not to rot away.
She and her friend left with his $20, laughing and talking, ignoring him, and he didn’t get a blow job or a kiss or a lick or a fuck, so he lay beneath the bus stop and jacked off, hand down his pants, eyes squeezed shut. Just to make her absence bearable. Thump thump thump, his hand hitting his jeans, on and on and on (it took so long because he kept going soft), until, finally, the warmth released and spread across his thigh; and now his jeans were wet from the ocean, but before that place on his thigh had been stiff when he walked, a reminder of her.
He was moving toward the shade of the lifeguard stand, carefully, crouched like an animal, and the memory of the girl’s face made him feel like he was watching the bank teller again, his finger in the jacket pocket, sweat tickling down his rib cage, passing her the deposit slip: “I have a gun, give me all your cash.”
And then he went back in time, saw himself walk into the bank, wearing Esther’s jacket, its fur collar tickling his chin, his hand sweating in the pocket, ready to become a gun.
He wanted to tell the bank teller not to cry—It’s going to be okay, you’ll see; it’s not really a gun—but he was unable to stop anything, frozen and helpless. Three tears slid down her cheek—one after the other after the other—from the same eye, as if following each other, leaving a wet, smeary trail in her makeup, but she was quiet and passed him the money. And with the memory of the girl with his $20 bill and her friend who had looked at him and let him know that he had bad everything and the bank teller girl and himself all at the same time, all of them together, he fell asleep in the shade, the jacket tucked between his legs.
A BUS WAS idling on and on; it wouldn’t leave—the engine heaved and heaved. Eric tried to huddle deeper beneath the bench. He waited for the bus to take off: a clenching noise as the brakes released, the bus door shutting with a swoosh, a squeezing of air. But it seemed to idle forever, unlocking him from a dream in which he was dumb and innocent.
The sound crawled into him, threaded through him, and woke him. It was the ocean. His mouth and nostrils were filled with sand—thpppt, thpppt, he spat it out and opened his eyes to gnatlike bugs. When he swatted, they disappeared, as if evaporating—there were more of them hovering over a thick patch of dried seaweed.
He rolled to his right, pushed himself up, and spat out more sand. His head ached and his mouth was dry and the sun was spreading orange, hitting him in the thigh and arm and torso.
He scooted into the shade, wiped his face with the jacket, and tried to remember who he was, where he was, and what he’d done.
The sky was the color of the inside of an abalone shell, and the waves were beating against the shore endlessly. He’d woken alone, but now they came to him: the young girl and her friend and the bank teller. He needed to endure his pain and what he’d done, and there must be a way to blot out the sky and ocean without dying. Everything around him—including himself—was unbearable, and he cradled his head in his hands.
9
NORA WAS LEANED over, sorting through the third of four large black garbage bags, placing clothing in three piles, based on cachet—all from Number Seventy-two, a woman who lived at 72 Bayside Terrace and spent her winters in Taos, New Mexico: a size 4, with a disposition toward dark mauves and deep greens, silky cottons and cropped jackets—when she heard the phone ring. She wasn’t sure what time it was, but Clothing for Change had been closed for hours, and the window by the phone showed that the sky was black except for a misty coneshaped shaft of orange light from the street lamp, and the street was quiet except for the occasional car passing, tires slick on the rain-wet road.
Nora had decorated Clothing for Change with old furnishings, intrinsically unglamorous, hoping to give it a homey atmosphere. A donated Steinway grand piano—wood scratched, tuned imperfectly—was in the corner by the three dressing rooms, each partitioned by a dark-blue curtain. A three-way mirror allowed for a visual of back, side, front, and beside the mirror was Nora’s video camera, set up on a tripod.
She had lost track of time, imagining the dinner where Seventy-two had worn the black Chanel cocktail dress, the charity function where the pantsuit had made an appearance, and th
e Caribbean vacation where the two-piece swimsuit and beaded cover-up had been used. Sometimes Seventy-two’s clothes had small stains—a fleck of maroon-colored lipstick, a tawny foundation smear, speckles of wine—but tonight the majority had arrived with tags, never worn, and Nora knew that Seventy-two had fought with her husband again and, in an irrational fit of revenge, a European shopping spree had ensued. In the cold light of rationality, a month or so after the fight, the clothes had been dismissed as too flamboyant, not her style, and some not even her size, but instead an optimistic size 2.
While Clothing for Change would benefit from the marital dispute, the only good thing for Seventy-two’s husband would be the tax write-off. Simply by the look Seventy-two’s live-in maid had given while handing the bags over, Nora had known she had a jackpot. Now, if only she had more parolee clients who were size 2’s and 4’s and 6’s . . . instead, she would sell the clothes at a discounted bulk rate to Moving Up!, a secondhand store off Pacific Coast Highway that sold to women who aspired to be Seventy-two by at least looking like Seventy-two, and she would use the proceeds to buy size 10’s and 12’s and 14’s.
“Coming,” she said to the shrill ring, walking past the wall adorned with framed awards attesting to the moral goodness of Clothing for Change. She leaned over to pick up a People magazine from the floor, the cast of Friends smiling from the cover, and placed it on the side table. Next to the side table was a stuffed sofa where clients sometimes fell asleep. Nora saw it as a compliment, indicating that the women felt safe. A handknitted afghan from her deceased paternal great-grandmother was folded on the arm of the sofa, and she let her fingers pass over it. Nora had attached a personal mythology to Nana (Nana had never married, had had a wooden leg, and had lived and died in Nebraska) and, by proxy, to the blanket, which had traveled with Nora through childhood, college, and the Peace Corps.
This Vacant Paradise Page 20