by T. C. Boyle
[I remember stopping by one year on spring break and finding Miriam in a lawn chair out on the fringe of the ball field, wrapped in an old sleeping bag, keeping watch over a pair of nesting turtles while a pickup game went on behind her. I must have spent an hour crouched there beside her, catching up on things as the turtles patiently extruded their eggs as if time had gone back a millennium and there were no lawnmowers or automobiles or boys with sticks and rocks and baseball bats poised to annihilate them. And where was Sid? Working. Always working. He’d had his reverses on the stock market and elsewhere, a tough year, but he was still a member of the tin knockers’ union and always had work. As far as I could tell, he didn’t even know turtles existed.]
And it’s another day, a year further on, Susan at Rutgers and loving it, or at least liking it, or so she says on the odd nights when she bothers to call, and Miriam has just got off the phone with her cousin Molly, who lives in Connecticut now and whose youngest—Mark, just twenty-four—has had some sort of nervous breakdown. Or worse. He’s been in treatment since he was a teenager and nobody wants to call it schizophrenia because you don’t come back from that. They say it runs in families, and when Miriam comes to think of it, Molly’s father was no mental paragon, scared of his own face in the mirror, hearing voices, talking nonsense half the time. She just thanks her lucky stars her own children turned out normal, though sometimes she wonders about Les, out there on the West Coast, unmarried at thirty and running with a fast crowd, restaurant people, bar people, people who use drugs and don’t go to bed till the sun rises.
She pushes herself up from the table, aching in her joints—and there’s a sharp pain in the calf of her left leg, a kind of thrilling or buzzing that goes away almost as soon as she puts a name to it. She actually pads to the stove and lights the burner under the kettle before she realizes it’s not tea she wants. Or a cigarette either. The house is a mess—she’s never been much of a housekeeper, except on special occasions, holidays, dinner parties, when she can get herself motivated—but she’s in no mood to start sifting through the papers and magazines and books, the pots and pans and dead and dried-up flowers that seem to accumulate like drift, that will one day bury the house like the sands of Arabia and no one here to care one way or the other. From the window she can see the wall of the paddleball courts, which are empty at this hour on a weekday, and beyond them Rose Shapiro—eighty and stooped—pacing the beach as if she were making her way across the steppes of Russia like poor Dr. Zhivago, and the sight only depresses her the more. You marry, have children, cook, clean, get sick, get old, pace the beach till you can’t even remember who you are anymore. That’s life. That’s what it is.
It is then that she thinks of the canoe. Susan had it out last summer once or twice, but aside from that it’s just sat there inert for as long as she can remember. She’s suddenly seized with the idea of it, its smooth white skin pressed to the belly of the water, clouds scudding by overhead, the release of it, gliding, just gliding. She makes herself a sandwich at the kitchen counter, pours juice into the thermos, selects a paperback from the shelf in the den and goes out into the day and the sunlight, which flares with sudden brilliance, feeling as if she’s going off on an adventure. The lake gives back the sun in a fine glaze of light. There’s a ripple of wind across the water, an infinity of scalloped black wavelets riding out as far as she can see. Birds spangle the grass.
She has some trouble with the combination lock—it’s just rusty, that’s all—and then, once she’s got the chain free and tries to flip the boat over, she finds it’s unaccountably heavy. There’s no one to see her, really, aside from Mrs. Shapiro, who barely glances up from her own shoelaces, but still she feels embarrassed to think that she can’t even flip over a canoe, a thing she must have done a hundred times when she was a girl. Is she really that old and weak? She sucks in her breath and gives it another try, like one of those puffed-up Russian weight lifters in the Olympics on TV, and there it is, like a miracle, right side up and thumping reverberantly to the ground. The sound echoes out over the water and comes back again, thrilling with the chatter of birds and the soughing of the breeze in the branches overhead. It’s April. She’s fifty-eight years old. And her feet, her bare feet, are in the water now, the canoe hovering before her and threatening to tip first one way and then the other until all at once she’s firmly planted in the seat and the paddle is working in her sure tight grip and the shore retreats behind her.
It’s a joy. A lark. And almost immediately she finds her rhythm, the motion—dip and rise and dip again—coming back to her as if it were ingrained in her muscle memory, and maybe it is, though it’s been more years than she can count. She feels the sun on her face and when she shifts position it wraps itself across her shoulders like an electric blanket, warming and gentle. By the time she thinks to look back to where her house sits reduced on the horizon, she’s nearly to the far side of the lake. What she’s thinking is that she should do this more often—get out, enjoy life, breathe the air—and she makes a promise to herself that starting tomorrow, she will. It’s not even noon yet when she lays the paddle athwart the gunwales and unwraps her sandwich, pastrami on rye, just letting the boat drift, and isn’t this the best pastrami on rye she’s ever had? The canoe rocks. She lies back, for just a moment, and closes her eyes.
When she wakes, she can’t imagine where she is, despite the evidence all around her. It takes her a minute, so inured is she to her own home, to her kitchen and den and the walls and doors and ceilings that contain her, to come fully to herself. The sun is gone, the clouds bleeding across the sky. And the wind is stronger now, damper, sweeping out of the south with a scent of rain. She’s not wearing her watch—she left it home for fear of getting it wet—and that further disorients her, as if to know the time would put everything back in its place. Nothing for it but to paddle, but which way? She can’t see the shore from here, not through the low-bellied clouds—as best she can figure the canoe must have been carried all the way down the lake while she dozed. All right. She’ll just orient herself, that’s all. She swivels round, scanning both shores till she finds a fixed point, the pale white tower of the seminary all the way up on Stony Street emerging suddenly from the clouds and the canopy of the distant trees, which means she has to go in . . . that direction, there, behind her now. She feels the relief wash over her—at least she knows where she is—until she reaches for the paddle, or the place where the paddle was, and finds it gone.
[This became a family legend, trotted out at dinner parties over the years, the story of how Miriam used her hands to paddle the boat to the nearest point, which unfortunately lay on the far side of the lake, and how she’d walked a good mile and a half barefoot and with her windbreaker and the blouse beneath it soaked through before she got to Kitchawank Village and the pay phone in front of the liquor store there and realized she didn’t have a cent to her name, let alone a dime. How she’d turned around and walked another three blocks on the cold hard unforgiving pavement till she got to Lowenstein’s Deli and Sy Lowenstein let her use the store phone to call Sid, who was installing heating ducts in a four-plex in Mount Kisco where thank God they had a phone already hooked up on the ground floor, to please come get her before she froze to death. And how Sid had let out one of his arpeggiated Jesus Christs! and went twenty miles over the limit all the way back and then had to take her out to Fiorvanti’s because there was no dinner on the table that night.]
She’s never much liked the autumn, even when Susan was in Brownies and she took the girls out into the woods to collect leaves and hickory nuts and they made campfires and cooked wieners over the open coals, because autumn prefigures winter and winter lasts forever. But it’s an autumn day in an advancing year, the trees brilliant around the lake, each leaf painted a distinctive shade and the whole blended as in a Monet, when the phone rings and she picks up to hear from Molly, all the way out in Connecticut, that Marsha’s daughter Seldy is getting married. To
Richie Spano. Who, at thirty-four, is assistant manager of some sort of appliance store in Yorktown Heights and apparently making a decent living, though no one would have thought it from the way he was raised.
What goes through her mind first is a quick envious accounting—neither Alan nor Les is married yet, nor do they look to be soon, and Susan’s been so busy studying for the Bar she hasn’t had a date in months, or not that Miriam knows of anyway—and then, as she forms the words She hasn’t told me anything about it, the hurt sets in. This is Marsha, her best friend all these years, maid of honor at her own wedding, and she can’t call her with the news? Yes, well maybe they have been like strangers lately, because things are different now, everybody getting older and more stay-at-home, the Colony breaking down as people die off or move away to Florida and the new people don’t want to pay their dues and drop out—plus in most cases they’re not even Jewish—but that doesn’t mean you can’t pick up a telephone.
As soon as she hangs up—before it occurs to her that maybe Marsha’s ashamed to have such a son-in-law, not to mention a daughter throwing her life away—she’s dialing. What she wants to say is Hello, how are you? so that she can ease into the situation as gracefully as possible, but her lips betray her. “Marsha?” she says. “How come you didn’t tell me the good news?”
“Hello, Miriam, is that really you?” Marsha returns, her rasping voice as familiar as Miriam’s own. “It’s been too long, hasn’t it, what with one thing and another? But news? What news are you talking about?”
“Seldy. Getting married. Are you planning a spring wedding then—June? Like you and David? And Sid and me?”
There’s a pause. The sound of a match striking and Marsha drawing smoke into her lungs. “No,” she breathes finally, “no, that’s not the way it is anymore.”
And then there’s the exegesis, a story stewed in its details and leaning heavily toward Richie and Richie’s feelings. Richie—he grew up Catholic, did she know that?—hates religion, just hates it, and so does Seldy, or that’s what she claims. They don’t want a fuss. Don’t want anybody there—and it was like pulling teeth just to get them to say that she and David could stand as witnesses when they go before the justice of the peace. And they want to do it as soon as possible.
There’s a pause. Silence on both ends of the line. “Well, could we at least host the reception?” Miriam puts in, feeling nothing but shame and disappointment for Marsha—and for herself, herself too.
Very softly: “No, I don’t think so. I think the Spanos—Rich Senior and Carlotta, the parents?—I think they have something planned.”
She wants to shout back at her You think? but she goes numb all over, the phone pressed to her ear like a weight, like one of the dumbbells Alan had left in the far corner of the basement from when he was in junior high. She gazes out across the lake and hears herself peep and chirp back at Marsha as the conversation runs to the sorrows and sicknesses of people they know, to the sad state of the Colony, how hardly anybody goes to the Association meetings anymore and how they could barely raise a crew to take the raft out of the water this fall, and then finally stalls. “Call soon,” she hears herself say.
“Yes, I will.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
There are half a dozen people she wants to call, she’s so wrought up, but for a long while, as the sun softens and the colors fade from the trees on the far side of the lake, she just sits there, feeling as if someone has died. What will Sid think? Sid’s always had a soft spot for Seldy, as if she were his own daughter, and he’s never liked Richie Spano, never liked what he stood for or where he came from or how he’d managed to get his hooks into her. And then she’s remembering the time, years ago now, down at the lake, when she snapped awake from a sun-soaked dream to a clamor of voices raised in anger. Sid’s voice she recognized right away, a low buzz of outrage that meant he was right on the verge, but the other voice—a high querulous whine that seemed to choke on itself—she didn’t know.
It was Richie Spano’s. She turned to look over her shoulder and there he was, incandescent in the light, flailing his arms and screaming in Sid’s face. He didn’t want to wait for a court and he’d been waiting too long already, shouting it out as if he’d been gored, shouting that the whole idea of holding the court when you never lose was just bullshit, that was all. She pushed herself up from the beach chair in the moment that the two of them came at each other—and Sid, though he was slow to anger, could have torn him apart and would have but for the intervention of David, who forced himself between them before the shoves could turn to blows. But that wasn’t enough for Richie. He danced out of reach, spewing his obscenities till Sid broke loose and came for him, but there was no way Sid could catch him in the open and that just made it worse. The next week, at the very next meeting of the Association, she raised her hand and made a motion to ban people from the beach who weren’t even members of the Colony—and she named Richie Spano specifically, because whose guest was he anyway?
[My memories of Sid are of a man secure in himself, a big man—huge for his generation, six-three and two-twenty and none of it gone to fat—who gave the impression of power held in reserve, even when he was flipping steaks in a rainstorm or revolving a gimlet so that the pale green viscid liquid swirled like smoke in a crystal ball. He was quick-witted and light on his feet, as verbally wicked as we ourselves were, and if you were admitted to his inner circle—and I was, I was—he would defend you against all comers. He’d fought the Germans, done a stint as a beat cop in Harlem and then come home to the house on the lake to raise his family. I remember walking into a bar with him once, an unfamiliar place, down and dirty—and he must have been in his mid-sixties then—and feeling untouchable, as secure as if I were sitting in my own living room.]
The tragic days of our lives, the days of accounting, begin like any other, with routine, with the bagel in the toaster and the coffee on the stove. So this is a morning. Sunlight streams through the big picture window though it’s cold, down to zero overnight, and the lake is sealed beneath a hard uneven tegument of ice so thick you could drive a truck across it. Miriam is feeling good, the pain in her hip subsiding under the ministrations of the prescription the doctor gave her while Sid, home from work because things are slow, is sitting across the table from her, his head bowed to the paper, jaws working at the bagel she’s smeared with cream cheese and decorated with a transparent wafer of lox and a sprinkle of capers. They’re silent, she absorbed in her thoughts, he in the paper. The only sounds are the little ones, the tap of a spoon on the rim of a cup, the sigh of the knife as it divides another bagel. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee is as rich and intoxicating as if they were sitting on a carpet in some bazaar in the Orient.
“You want juice?” she says. “Fresh-squeezed, I can make fresh-squeezed, with the oranges Molly sent us from Florida?”
He glances up from the paper, his eyes a roving watery blue above the little wire reading glasses clamped to the bridge of his nose. His fringe of hair, so thin now it’s barely there, sticks up awkwardly in back. He’s dressed in blue jeans, moccasins, a thin gray sweatshirt she’s washed so many times it’s almost white. “Yeah,” he breathes, “I guess. But don’t go to any trouble.”
She’s already pushing herself up, about to say, They’re going to go bad soon anyway, when she glances reflexively out the window, just as she does a hundred times a day. There’s a scattering of snow over the beach, the lake, the long low building that houses the concession stand, snow like dust. Everything is still, not even a bird moving among the stripped black branches of the trees. Susan says that she needs a hobby, needs to get out more, and maybe she does spend too much time at the window, more interested in what’s outside of her than what’s here inside the house—if this is what old women do, biddies, yentas, then she guesses she’s one of them. Yet when Les flew in from San Francisco for her sixty-fifth two weeks back s
he felt the resistance rising in her—was she really that old? And the cake—the cake was like the flank of some animal set ablaze in a conflagration, only it wasn’t running away. It was right there on the table in front of her.
But here’s the juicer, here the crate of oranges. She dips forward to dig into the crate, her gaze running across the table, past Sid and out to the familiar scene as if it were a picture in a frame. But it’s not a picture and something’s wrong, something’s out of place. She spots it then, a moving shadow in the deeper gloom cast by the overhanging roof of the concession stand, a man there, furtive, jerking back the door and ducking inside. “Sid,” she says, her blood quickening, “there’s somebody out there. I just—I think somebody just broke into the concession stand.”
“Who? What are you talking about?” He’s set down the paper now and he’s leaning forward to peer out the window, his lips pursed in concentration. “I don’t see anything.”
“He just went inside. I’m telling you. There’s somebody in there.”
This is an old story. There’ve always been problems with the place, the lake an irresistible draw for teenagers looking for trouble, and over the years the outbuildings have periodically been broken into, though there’s not much to steal, not in the off-season. They don’t seem to care. They just want to smash things, carve epithets into the counters, spray-paint their dirty slogans in the corners where children can’t miss them come summer. It’s been that way since the first truckload of sand was laid down, though it’s worse now, always and progressively worse, because the community isn’t what it was. And never will be.