by Lisa Howorth
Within five minutes we were sound asleep, scratching our old crud and new mosquito bites, mumbling and dreaming who knows what.
* * *
——————
I was confronted by Estelle early the next morning after eating most of a box of Frosted Flakes—dry. Brickie, the Colonel Saito of breakfast, had gone to work early. When I came home from Max’s at dawn, I’d stashed my pollen-and-web-covered T-shirt and shorts in the kitchen garbage, putting some other trash on top. I should have known better than to try to hide something from the ever-vigilant Estelle, but I hoped it might not be discovered until after my dad picked me up. “Who put these perfeckly good clothes in the trash?” she asked me, holding out the wad of clothes.
The first thing I could think of was “Those aren’t mine.”
“Then who they belong to? Your granddaddy?” Estelle demanded. “And what’s this orange mess all over them?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound concerned. “Let me see them.” I pretended to be examining them carefully. “Oh!” I said. “They are mine! I forgot—we had a Cheeto war.”
“Umm-hmm,” Estelle said. “John, you old enough to know better than to tell me lies. You take those out to the hose and squirt ’em off so they don’t get that mess on the other things in the washer.”
“O-kay,” I said grumpily. “Can’t anyone have any fun around here?”
“That about all you have around here,” she said. “You an’ those boys need some chores to do, keep you outta trouble. Y’all nuthin’ but.” Leaving the room, she turned. “You got all yo’ things ready fo’ your trip with yo’ daddy?”
“I don’t need anything but my bathing suit.” Then, to placate her, I added, “And my toothbrush.”
Estelle rolled her eyes. “You jus’ be ready—he’s comin’ fo’ y’all about noon.”
I went out back and hosed off last night’s clothes, leaving the wet wad in the sink.
Readjourning on Max’s porch, we discussed the night. We weren’t sure if Beatriz got caught, and we weren’t positive that Josephine or the Andersens hadn’t, or wouldn’t, still report us. Hating to, I asked Ivan, “Is Elena okay?”
“She has a big bruise on her cheek,” he said. “She told me that Rudo made her bang her face on the swing by accident.”
I’d hoped the sound we’d heard the night before had been Elena smacking Joe, not the other way around. “Maybe she did?”
Ivan shook his head sadly. “She didn’t see us, and I didn’t tell her that we heard everything.”
“What about your dad?” Max asked.
Ivan shrugged. “He went somewhere this morning. I hope he never comes back.”
“Let’s go get some candy,” I said. “That’ll make you feel better.”
I borrowed a silver dollar from a stack Dimma kept in her dresser and Max was returning a bunch of Coke bottles with boring bottling locations on the bottoms for two cents each. It was only about nine o’clock, but we headed to Doc’s, down on Brookville, to get some Zagnuts. They were Ivan’s favorite, and I wanted to treat him. At the corner we stopped at Beatriz’s house and shouted at her to come out, but she didn’t. We hoped she wasn’t being punished but was off doing some of her girly things.
At Doc’s, we got a sack of candy and started back, eating our Zagnuts warily, keeping an eye out for an ambush by Slutcheon. Back at my house on the brick steps, we polished off the candy and thought about more places we could hunt.
“We could go hunt around the basketball courts,” Max offered. Famous high school basketball stars from all over Washington came there to play. Once we’d gone with the Shreve boys and saw Elgin Baylor play. Or at least Beau and D.L. said it was him. “Maybe the Russians put spiders at the courts to kill our basketball heroes,” Max said.
“Russians don’t care about our basketball heroes,” I said.
“Sure they do! They just beat us in the world championships! But then they got disqualified because of some junk about China. They have a gigantic player named Krumins who’s seven feet three inches and shoots free throws underhand.” Max clapped at some gnats in front of his face for emphasis.
Thinking of Sputnik, I said, “They’re beating us in sports, too?” I’d have to run this by Brickie, but I knew he’d say that the Russians had cheated somehow. I heaved a sigh. “The world is the weirdest place on earth.”
“Yeah, sometimes it seems like we’re living on Pluto,” said Ivan. “What about the park? We haven’t hunted there yet, and that’s where Slutcheon found his black widow.”
“Unh-unh!” I said adamantly. “The Bridge Hoods will be there and might de-pants us.” In addition to smoking, cussing at people, and getting high on glue, the Bridge Hoods were known for this kind of humiliation. Liz said they’d strip girls and de-pants boys. She knew a girl who’d been stripped.
Ivan tried again. “The castle?” Rossdhu Castle was actually the abandoned gatehouse to a demolished mansion with a disgusting brown lake. It was haunted, of course, and kids went there to scare themselves.
“I’m done with ponds,” Max said.
“Well, I can’t go hunting today anyway, ’cause my dad’s picking me up in a while,” I said. “You guys better not catch anything good without me.” I was excited to be seeing my dad and going to the beach, but I didn’t want to miss out on bagging a good spider.
Max said, “You think if we find something, we’re going to say, ‘Oh, it’s okay, cool poisonous spider, we have to wait till John gets back to catch you’? ’Fraid not!”
I was miffed. “I’ll only be gone two days, Max! If you do it, you won’t be my best friends anymore!”
Ivan jumped up and said, “Stop! You guys are making my stomach hurt!” He ran over to a boxwood and threw up. “See?” he said. He pulled up his T-shirt to wipe his mouth. His scrawny white stomach heaved. “Guess I got too upset.”
Max snorted. “Guess you got too full of Zagnuts.”
Ivan did look a little green to me. “You look like you’re from Pluto right now.”
“I think I’m still tired from last night,” Ivan said, his voice very weak. I was concerned, and I knew he didn’t want to go home. But he and Max straggled off to their houses, wishing me goodbye—begrudgingly, in Max’s case. He’d never been to the beach.
8
When our dad lived down on R Street near DuPont Circle, Liz and my post-divorce visits were just for an afternoon movie, or dinner somewhere in Chevy Chase or Bethesda, where, other than the Tastee Diner or Francisco’s and O’Donnell’s Sea Grill, there wasn’t much in the way of restaurants. Less often, we’d go to places nearer to my dad’s apartment, like the Golden Parrot, or downtown to the Touchdown Club for dinner. Liz and I preferred the Touchdown Club because we could play pinball while Dad drank with his friends. But more recently, he liked to bring us to Rehoboth, where he was now living with his buddies, guys he’d gone to St. John’s or G.W. with, including my godfather, a Redskins defensive back who’d been tragically cut because of an injury.
* * *
—
Before she’d gone to St. Elizabeths, my mother had often taken Liz and me on trips with her sister and my uncle and cousins. But those trips were to the Chesapeake Bay, where we’d rent an old coral-colored cottage at Long Beach. It was a very different trip; for one thing, it took half as long to get there. We’d leave home in my mother’s black-and-white ’56 Ford Fairlane 500, traveling through downtown on Pennsylvania Avenue, then past endless tobacco fields and barns, arriving in fewer than two hours. Going to the ocean was fun, but there was more to do at the bay, where we had our cousins, whom we loved, to do stuff with. Our days were spent crabbing off the rocks or the shaky docks at Flag Harbor, poking at horseshoe crabs mating at the lagoon, foraging in the woods for turtles and snakes, and swimming if the dreaded sea nettles weren’t evilly pulsing ar
ound in the water. Someone always got stung, causing painful red welts. On sandbars we’d dig buckets of soft-shell clams, which the grown-ups would soak and steam and eat dipped in butter—but they were too slimy for me and my cousins. My uncle had a sweet fourteen-foot runabout, the Sarah Belle, and we fished off it every day, catching rockfish and flounder if we were lucky, and creepy toadfish and blowfish if we weren’t. Schools of breaking blues attracted terns and gulls, who dive-bombed around us. Best of all, at least for me, the bay’s towering cliffs were striated with eons of fossils. Miocene shark teeth, seventeen million years old, washed down from the cliffs, eventually appearing at the waterline, waiting for us to find them. I had hundreds in my collection. Evenings we ate our fish or picked blue crabs and often played the quarter slot machines at Buehler’s store—illegal for children, of course—and spent our winnings on BB Bats, Mary Janes, and Honeymoon ice cream. We all slept in the attic, telling lies and ghost stories, and doing rain dances if there was a storm, until we finally fell asleep. But since my mother had been gone, we hadn’t been to the bay. My father didn’t care for the bay; he said it was polluted. Also there weren’t any bars there.
But Liz and I did love the ocean, too, and were always thrilled to spend time with our father. At the bay, I learned a lot of about natural history and wildlife, but at Rehoboth, I learned about a different kind of wild life. It was always a little…unsettling to me how loose the situation was down there. But everyone was nice to us, and Daddy always had a girlfriend who made sure we were fed and had Noxzema and Band-Aids. By evening everybody would be pretty smashed. My grandparents weren’t particularly vigilant at home, and they certainly had plenty to drink every evening, but the Rehoboth trips had a crazy, anything-goes feeling. No safety nets. Now that Liz was basically a teenager, supposedly with some sense, we were left even more to our own devices. But Liz would often run off to the boardwalk, bribing or blackmailing me not to tell. I spent a good bit of time by myself, building card houses or digging up sand crabs on the beach while the men and their dates played records and cards, and drank and danced and smoked. Liz liked the dancing, I loved all the great records—the newest hit songs—but I didn’t want to be forced to dance and look like a fool. Dancing with Elena or even Beatriz at the Fiesta would be different, I told myself. I just waited around, hoping for some time alone with my dad.
Later in the night, the partiers would pair off and make out in the porch hammock or go down to the beach. Sometimes a couple might still be lying there, wrapped in a blanket, when I got up at dawn to comb the beach. There wasn’t much to find; there were no shark teeth like at the bay, mostly just whelk egg cases—those weird little black things that looked like dancing imps—but sometimes I’d find an unbroken sand dollar or a beautiful whelk shell, all purple and orange, the kind that you held to your ear to hear the ocean. Later in the morning, Daddy would swim with us, and that was my favorite part of every day.
* * *
—
At the appointed time, Dad pulled up in his convertible MG TD—it was British racing green, and looked like an oversize toy, and it amazed me that we could zip along the highway in it faster than all the boatlike cars of the day. Dimma waved from the front door, but Brickie made sure he wasn’t around whenever Dad came by. Liz said Brickie was never going to be friendly again with our father, but it wasn’t Daddy’s fault. She was very attached to him, and it often seemed to me like she wanted to blame my mother for the divorce. I tried not to think about these things. And I tried very hard not to think about whether Liz knew about James—if what Max had said was true—and if that had something to do with Liz’s simmering anger at my mother.
I ran to the MG with my grocery bag of necessities—my toothbrush, a beach towel, and an extra shirt. The babyish suitcase Dimma had given me now housed my rock and fossil collections. Daddy swooped me up. “Hey, pal! How’s it going?” He kissed the top of my head and squeezed me. It wasn’t like the relief I felt seeing my mother again, but I realized how much I’d missed him.
“I have my bathing suit under my clothes!” I yelled, jubilant.
My sister came primly down the walk in a yellow sundress, swinging her red suitcase, very ladylike. Her new hair was fixed perfectly. “Whoa!” Daddy said, putting me down. “Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse! You look beautiful, darling.”
“I missed you, Daddy!” she said, reaching up for a hug and a kiss. She reeked of her Muguet des Bois cologne, the only kind Dimma let her wear.
“I missed you, too, sweetheart. It’s the one problem with living down at the beach—I can’t see you as often as I’d like to.” In reality, we had never seen him more than once a month even when he lived in town. It was tough for divorced fathers back then; they didn’t have many rights regarding their children. But who knows—maybe that was the way they liked it. I hopped into the small space behind the front seats while Daddy opened the door for Liz, as if she were a real lady. “Here we go!”
As Liz and I were settling in, an old Buick turned in to the lane, the driver looking from side to side until he pulled up behind the MG and got out. “Whew. Just in time. Mr. Mannix?”
“Yes,” Dad said, his happy expression changing.
The man drew a rolled-up sheaf of papers from his back pocket, cleared his throat, and said, “Sir, these are for you.” He looked slightly embarrassed, and quickly got into his car and drove off.
My dad examined the papers. “Goddamn it! I can’t believe this!”
Liz said, “What is it, Daddy? What’s wrong?”
He went around the MG to the driver’s side and got in, slamming the door hard. “Your mother’s what’s wrong,” he said. “She’s suing me!”
“Why would she do that?” Liz asked. I was scared that Daddy was so mad, and I didn’t understand what was happening. “Who was that man?”
“That’s a man who’s hired to ruin people’s lives.” He cranked the car and we rode off. He didn’t say anything else. We were down Connecticut past the basketball courts when Dad shouted over the noise of the wind and the engine, “I think your damn grandfather’s behind this ambush. He’d love to see me behind bars.” And then: “Never mind. You two forget about it.”
We were silent. Daddy didn’t look like he was going to forget about it, but at last he said, “Why don’t we pick up some burgers and fries at Hot Shoppes for the ride?”
Nobody said anything. The possibility of Dad “behind bars” for whatever those papers were about stuck miserably in my head. I hoped the weekend wasn’t going to be ruined now. It wasn’t until we’d stopped at Connecticut Shoppes, and then made our way through downtown to Upper Marlboro, where we turned off, before Daddy seemed to cheer up. We played some road games—Ghost, and License Plates—and listened to the radio. Dad turned the music up really loud and we sang along, into the wind, bellowing out “Bony Moronie” and “Bye Bye Love” as we flew by cornfields and old farmhouses steepled with lightning rods. Then we had to slow way down as we rolled through a few sleepy towns—Denton, Bridgeville—whose cops were notorious for giving speeding tickets to Washington vacationers in fancy cars. The unpainted shingled houses were so pretty, I thought, trimmed in white, yards frothy with blue Bethany Beach hydrangeas.
* * *
—
When we arrived at the weathered cottage on Stockley Street, Liz and I went to the attic to settle ourselves—kids were always relegated to attics in those days. I tore off my clothes, ready for the beach, but waited for Liz because I wanted to interrogate her.
“Why is Mama suing Daddy? What is ‘suing’?”
Liz was pulling on her bathing suit under her sundress, her back turned to me. “It means he did something wrong. I think it’s about child support—you know—giving Mama money to help take care of us. I guess Brickie is trying to make him do it, since Mama’s…sick.”
“Well, why doesn’t he do it?”
“He doesn’t have a job right now, dummy. He can’t pay it.” She pulled the dress over her head, struggling so I couldn’t peek, and hung it on a nail in the wall. The attic was spartan—there weren’t any closets or furniture up there, only beds with naked striped-ticking mattresses.
Brickie was strict about things, but he wasn’t mean. “Why doesn’t Brickie like Dad anymore? Is Dad going to jail?”
“I don’t know. Stop asking me so many questions. Why don’t you ask your stupid Magic 8-Ball?” She grabbed our towels and started down the stairs. “Come on, John. And don’t say anything about all that to anybody.” People were always telling me things and then telling me not to think or talk about them.
* * *
—
We spent what was left of the afternoon on the beach, swimming and surf-riding with Dad and a few of his friends. It was a glorious day, brilliantly sunny and breezy—such a relief from the relentless heat and mugginess of the city. I was happy. I was with my father on a summer day at the beach. All was well. I buried the morning’s unpleasantness as if it were a seashell in the sand.
* * *
—
That evening I sat on the cottage steps, waiting for dinner and for the sun to go down. I had a splinter in my foot from the unfinished floorboards in the attic but I wasn’t telling because then Dad’s girlfriend would root around with a needle and tweezers and alcohol and it would hurt worse than a shot. Dad was just inside on the screen porch, reading the paper and drinking a National Bohemian. His buddies were making a beer run to the Bottle & Cork at Dewey, the next town south. Dad’s latest girlfriend, Carline, was in the kitchen with the other girlfriends making something for dinner, and Liz was helping. We liked Carline okay; she was nice and pretty—they were all pretty—but she couldn’t hold a candle to my mother. And certainly not to Allison Hayes, who was Miss Washington, DC, when Daddy was engaged to her before he met my mom. She dumped him and went to Hollywood to become the 50 Foot Woman.
