The Fourth of July

by Bel Mooney

  After the skies criss-crossed by pylons, and the industrial wasteland around Jersey City and Newark, after the tattered hoardings, and flying neon, dead in the light of morning, I left the New Jersey Turnpike and took Route 35 through the Amboys – soon noticing the rows of clapboard houses, pink, green, white and yellow, and signs for fishing tackle. So quickly, I thought – last time I was asleep, and David Sternberg was driving, and I saw nothing. But you soon hit small-town America, and the smell of the ocean; on the wide roads I began to relax. I believed I would remember the place. Often, during the four years, I had wondered at my own lack of curiosity. Taken there, I had allowed myself to be driven back, admittedly in a shocked stupor, and might as well have had a black bag over my head, like a hostage, for all I saw. If that seems surprising to you, let me confess a much worse omission, something I did not realise until I returned home. I never discovered the surnames of Lace and Marylinne, or where Lace came from, or anything about them at all. All I had to do to discover was get a video of The Nights of Penelope, and look at the credits. But that I would never do. So much of the not-knowing would remain the same forever; the point of this journey was to find the place, as I was sure I could – just to stand there for a moment, and see.

  I was hungry by now, so when I saw a sign on my side of the highway, saying “Chrissie’s Lounge”, I pulled sharply off the road, bumping across cinders. There were a couple of trucks, a pickup, two or three private cars. Behind the low wooden building was a car dump, piled with grotesque, rusted shapes. It looked a cheap place, not quite what I wanted, but it would do. Coffee, eggs – they would taste the same wherever you bought them, and I have never minded rough company.

  Inside, it was dark; we might have been killing midnight instead of waking to a new morning; the jukebox was playing tinny disco music. A huge, horseshoe-shaped bar dominated the room, with red plastic stools dotted around it, and crudely-written posters advertising “Chrissie’s Thanksgiving Party Night – $10 a person”. Two young men were playing pool on one side of the room; one wore a dirty red bandana and looked at me insolently as I came in. I looked back. They never say anything then.

  Behind the bar the fattest woman I have ever seen wobbled back and forth, serving her customers, who hailed her nervously as “Chris”. I wasn’t surprised by their respect: she was the kind of woman who could eject four drunken soldiers just by sneezing. The rose and white checked trousers and salmon lurex sweater clung to her folds of flesh; other versions of pink caked her lips and cheeks. When she gave me the menu Chrissie did not smile, even though she and I were the only women in the room.

  “Pancakes are good,”

  she barked. I decided on pancakes.

  As I waited, drinking black coffee, a man came in and sat next to me. He ordered a Scotch and a Budweiser, and immediately swivelled to fix his gaze on the huge screen that dominated one side of the room, competing with the jukebox. Along the other side of the horseshoe, five or six men sat without speaking, cradling their liquor and also staring at the screen.

  I listened idly. In front of me Chrissie slammed down a vast, thick plate, bearing a vast, thick pancake, and watched silently as, heart sinking, I poured maple syrup all over it. Then with disbelief, and revulsion, I heard the words from the television, and understood why the customers were transfixed.

  It was a court room drama, although I fear it might not have been a dramatisation, but the real thing, televised. The point is, I could not tell. Were those people bad actors being melodramatic, or real people acting as soap operas has taught them? I narrowed my eyes to concentrate on the pictures, but still could not judge. It was deeply unsettling, this blurring of fiction and reality, calling into question my ability to discern – my sight itself. I wondered if the men around me knew. Their eyes were glazed; their jaws moved rhythmically.

  The story was unambiguous. What was being decided was a case of sexual molestation, in which the accused was the mentally retarded step-brother of the child’s mother. Now the mother was on the stand.

  “I could tell that … something had happened to her,” she faltered,

  “Tell us how,” prompted the kindly female attorney.

  “I … she … screamed when I was undressing her and tried to take off her underpants. And …”

  The man with the red bandana shot the black. The men along the bar stared in fascination at the screen.

  “Yes?” prompted the attorney.

  The actress-mother-person sobbed. “She had bruises on her thighs, and … her genitals weren’t right.”

  Somebody raised his can to his mouth, and drew deeply; the other eyes did not waver.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to ask you to explain. Can you tell us what you saw, Mrs Delano?”

  She covered her face with her hands and sobbed uncontrollably, the hysteria ricocheting from the low red plastic lampshades to the chrome trim along the bar to the empty cans and my cold, fat, greasy pancake in its sea of sticky syrup – uneaten.

  A man in a checked shirt asked for eggs, and Chrissie waddled to call the order. Now the subnormal man in his twenties was on the stand, being asked just how he liked to play with the little girl.

  “Uh, I like to have her sit on my knee, and uh, I throw her up in the air, and uh, I look after her.” A wide simpleton smile.

  “Jamie – do you ever take her to the bathroom?”

  “Yes. sir. Yes, I do.”

  “Why do you take her to the bathroom, Jamie?”

  “Because she – uh – she asked me to help her, sir.”

  “And how do you help her?”

  I put four dollars down by my plate and left, the smell of frying eggs and early liquor catching at the back of my throat.

  The feeling of nausea did not leave me, as I continued south, trying to remember the way we came back. Past Shoe Town, and the K-Mart, and the Sheraton Inn, and the Buy-Rite Liquor Store, under a yellow-grey sky. I snapped on the radio: “You’re listening to 97WYNY’s favourite voice, on this rainy Thursday morning, but let’s warm up the atmosphere a little with this sound …”

  The opening chords were familiar; cruising past Dunkin’ Donuts and Howard Johnson’s, looking to my left for the turning, the words hit my mind for the first time. Yes, I thought, accidents of light, accidents of sound – but they all begin to form a pattern in the end, the design of which you can only see if you stand very, very far away. So I heard Annie Lennox singing to me, as if on purpose, and I sang the words with her, the second time around:

  Sweet dreams are made of this

  Who am I to disagree?

  I travel the world

  And the seven seas –

  Everybody’s looking for something.

  Some of them want to use you

  Some of them want to get used by you

  Some of them want to abuse you

  Some of them want to be abused.

  (Remembering Luenbach: “Sure you know what you want. And I know what you want,”) I think I knew then that I would never find the place, that the purpose of this journey was the looking.

  Ugliness I had seen, and my sensibilities had been assaulted in Chrissie’s Lounge. But now I felt softened by the quaintness all around me – Middletown’s little wooden houses, Deal’s half-timbered police station, wreaths of greenery for Thanksgiving already hanging on shiny white doors, a small wooden sailing boat outside a pretty clapboard shop selling fishing tackle and sailing gear. It was beached, stranded, like an odd little fish – reminding me that I was near the ocean.

  There were few people about: a young woman hurrying along with a pram, an old man in a woolly hat strolling as if time had no meaning, not any more, a solitary figure in yellow oilskins, bright against the grey-brown sand. I wondered what they would think of me, the tourist in the hire car with a bag of cameras, out of season, looking for something lost.

  Houses with turrets, dutch gables and verandahs, painted pink, white and green like icecream, wide, tree-lined avenues leading to the oc
ean, waves crashing on black breakwaters which snaked into the ocean – I cruised around, knowing that it was all familiar somehow, and yet so different, with no sun and the emptiness of winter.

  Heading further south, noting how many houses were clearly locked up for the season, hearing flags on closed casinos crack in the wind, I floated, as if in a dream, wanting nothing more than to drive this car into nothingness forever. For it was beautiful, everything around me beautiful, like the landscapes I photographed as a child and piled up in my drawer. And in that solitude no one can reach you, nothing can touch you – only the knowledge that, through grief, you are a part of it all at last. (“Have you ever really loved anyone, Barbara?”)

  There was a pile of driftwood on the shore. I stopped and took a photograph of it, in black and white. And another of a pier in the distance, skeletal against the sky.

  “And now, on your favourite station 97WYNY let’s take it down a little with another track from that album we’ve been hearing, the Sweet Dreams album from the Eurythmics, and this one’s just called ‘Jennifer’. Say, are you out there, Jenny? Give me a call some time, okay”… There was a rush of waves on the soundtrack, then an insistent bass, before the whispering, echo-chamber voice:

  Jennifer with your orange hair

  Jennifer with your green eyes

  Jennifer in your dress of deepest purple

  Jennifer – where are you tonight?

  Jennifer – where are you tonight?

  When the answer came at last it was with an almost celebratory lilt of acceptance:

  Underneath the water … Underneath the water … Underneath the water …

  I turned the car northwards at last, cruising along by strung-out marshy beaches, through hamlets that shrieked wealth, and up along the coast to Long Branch – where I felt suddenly at home. The amusement arcades in Kids’ World were padlocked; in a toyshop stuffed lambs, donkeys and elephants suspended from the ceiling had a macabre realism, as if any second they might spring to life in the dusty gloom and kick their limbs in the air. Jimmy’s Jetty, Guido’s Pizza, Herbie’s Snack Emporium and the Fruitasia Fruitworks were all closed. This place reminded me of Blackpool, only here the sea was charcoal grey, not brown, and the blue and pink neon signs advertising beer said “Michelob” and “Lite”. Next to the Family Eatery was the Blue Dolphin Go-Go Pub. A huge sign boasted “Beautiful Go-Go Girls”. Two men went in, rubbing their hands and hunching against the cold wind.

  I turned to the car, but at that moment saw a figure coming towards me along the boardwalk, an odd, flying, tattered shape that staggered slightly with each step, walking jerkily and weaving slightly from side to side as it walked. Now that the men had gone in to see the go-go dancers, this person and I were the only living creatures moving in this place, apart from sea-birds who hawked above.

  As it drew nearer I saw it was an old woman. Her legs, skinny and bandy, were encased in wrinkled beige stockings spotted with mud, and gashed by large holes through which her flesh showed purple-grey. Her skirt was cotton, and blew about in the wind. Despite the cold she wore only an ancient brown cardigan, unravelling at the cuffs and hem, and spotted with food. Underneath, framing her scraggy neck with an incongruously youthful frilled collar, was a black cotton blouse, which had once been elegant but was now spotted with grease and dandruff.

  She lurched towards me, and put out a wrinkled hand to grab my wrist. The voice was hard to understand, wheedling: “Please, ma’am, can you give me something for some coffee. Just something for some coffee … ’cos I’m so cold.” She drew the cardigan about her and shivered.

  I looked at her a second. The face was long, and from the bone structure I guessed that it had once been handsome. Stringy bleached blonde hair blew about it, whipping into pale, watery eyes that leered at me. The mouth was smiling. It contained one tooth, stained brown.

  “Please, lady, just half a dollar for a coffee,” she mumbled again.

  “I’ll give you three dollars, if you let me take your photograph,” I said, automatically beginning to unzip my bag.

  And she posed for me there, the boardwalk stretching empty behind her, the wind carrying a flurry of rain to wash over us, the lights from the go-go bar flashing pink – she held out her open palms to me, and bared those hard old red gums in a parody of a smile, cocking her head on one side. Then she cackled loudly (the sound carried away as it left her mouth) and twisted her right shoulder to the camera as a model might, twitching up her cotton skirt in a naughty gesture, to show (the stockings being socks) one gnarled, mauve, hairy knee. “Ooooo!” she squealed. “Take my picture, lady! Look at me … Oooo la la!”

  She turned for me, this way and that.

  Nobody saw us.

  I shot twelve on XP1 at f5.6.

  I explored Sandy Hook, taking pictures of the coarse sea-grass leaning in the wind on low dunes, and the piles of golden leaves in the undergrowth. There was a jeep outside the Ranger Station, but nobody in sight. Marshland to the left, the ocean to the right, piles of chairs outside an abandoned mansion like a Hitchcock set. Brooklyn misty in the distance across grey water. Lines leading nowhere.

  Back in the car I smiled. Linda Rondstadt was singing love songs on the radio … “Time washes clean” … And yet (I thought) I do not know what love Annelisa had, except for her parents and grandmother. I know that because she told me, from deep within her pit, knowing that she had lost all faith with the keepers of the cabinet of memorabilia from a different land. She had scattered the blue beads; she had shattered the eggs. They could not know that she had told me that she loved them (and been shocked at my own confession of lovelessness), for I would never make the journey to Wahoo, Nebraska, to tell them. Yet she told me, and those words, unrecorded anywhere, would always be true, for Annelisa washed herself clean in the end, with the echo of them about her mouth.

  It was timely. I wondered, if she had lived, if she’d have ended up a crazy old lady with one tooth, hustling for half a dollar, next to a go-go bar.

  I drove slowly back to Manhattan in the rain, picking up the Garden State Parkway with a greater sense of direction than I had had all day. The drizzle was bleak and cold. Light muzzed in coronas all around me, making me blink; the wipers found it hard to keep pace. And I wondered why I had gone there at all, so fruitlessly.

  It did not matter, I decided. Pilgrimages were made in faith, not needing any visible proof. Believers shuffled miles, suffering privation and even death, to reach the place of miracles or of sanctity, and fall on their knees, praying for a blessing. That was all I had done. I wanted Annelisa’s blessing. And I wanted the forgiveness of Lisa and of Vlasta (real to me now through Annelisa’s words) who would walk towards me through the shimmer of a Nebraska summer day, breaking the swell of wheat, and tell me that there was nothing I could have done to avert what was ordained. It was not my fault.

  Here, doubt caused me to lean back in my seat, slackening speed so that the car behind sounded an irritable horn. What if that were not true? What if they would never come, never walk across the rim of my imagination? I could absolve myself, and in the same mood absolve Anthony Carl, and that swamp of forgiveness would suck me down, filling my eyes, ears and throat, silencing me forever. I was there. I was a witness. And he took her, and made her what she wanted to be (stupid bitch) and added to the weight of that Book of images which drew her to her death. That is true, Barbara, I said to myself. That happened, and you – you were there all along. A part of the trade.

  I don’t know where she is now. Maybe in a Czech cemetery in Nebraska, buried with the pioneers whose names and inscriptions are understood less and less as their language disappears. I like to think that she is there, near the lonely plains that seemed so vast to the child, under silver-grey stone, with the Capeks, and Hrbkovas, and Rosickys, who came, like Vlasta, to the land of opportunity, pointing out the Statue of Liberty to each other, and built their farms, to live honestly, as Anna Karina Cvach never did. I like to imagine her interred w
ith the proper rites, although I know it would not have been possible. No forgiveness there, not even for the sake of her countless childhood repetitions of the Angelus.

  I do know this: that her ashes fill a million dirty ashtrays in a million go-go bars across America, and whiten the aisles in the movie houses where The Nights of Penelope is shown. Ashes left by the curled-up pages of Emperor when a mother finds her teenage son has hidden it under his bed, and throws it on the fire in her fury. Ashes like the greyish-white sprinkling of dandruff on the collar of a crazy old lady, posing prettily for the camera in Long Branch.

  Dust to dust …

  Yes, my poor fool is dead. And I love the dead for what they were – flawed, corrupt, bitter, foolish, or weak. My mother, my father, my brother, Annelisa herself – all wanting the escape in the end, and all deserving it. They are with me as I arrange my objects of nature morte, life stilled for a moment of reverence for all the beginnings that end in disappointment and dust, but had their glory nevertheless, then in the beginning. I go on for them, for the Manes, knowing that I will do all the things they could not do, and opening my heart to allow them to add to the whole of what I am. You cannot absolve yourself in the end. And so I shall be responsible for them forever.

  As I jerked the Ford along 42nd Street, clogged with traffic, and looked around at the tawdry sex shops and cinemas, the men pushing dope on the street and hustling card tricks, the garish girls in doorways waiting for trade – I felt no revulsion. Not any more. Looking at early frescoes of the Seven Deadly Sins, I used to laugh at the white, worm-like sinners, so crudely-drawn, wailing in ludicrous horror as they were about to be devoured by bristling demons for their lust, pride, anger, avarice – all sins of flesh and spirit. In the last four years, I have changed. On holiday in Albi, I contemplated the huge screen in the Cathedral for a very long time. Pale limbs, the muscles atrophied, the mouths crying for a salvation undeserved, bodies waiting for punishment … This time I did not smile. Those permanent images of suffering seemed to me to be unspeakably sad, and all the more so for their gross culpability. And it was like that on 42nd Street: the sense of peering into a sulphurous pit peopled (nevertheless) by sons and daughters who would raise their eyes to a passing Dante, looking for something, looking simply for pity.