The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  Until the boys come home from school and throw their book bags in the mudroom and run up the stairs. She hears them banging around, probably tossing each other on their beds. Then there’s a heavy thud on the carpet. Andrew crying. Nathan mimicking his brother’s cries. Something breaks against the wall. Irene starts toward the stairs but then stops herself. For Christ’s sake, let the two of them rip each other to pieces.

  FOUR

  The following Saturday, on Memorial Day Weekend, Irene’s parents arrive without notice. They are spur-of-the-moment people.

  “Why not enjoy being alive when you can’t possibly know how good or bad it is to be dead?” her father had said to Irene once when she went through a brief period of teenage depression after breaking up with Eddie Prince.

  While helping her parents unpack the gray Volvo sedan, Irene is compelled to say something about her father’s baggy slacks and stained white shirt.

  “Not to worry,” her father says. “I brought my special jacket.”

  “That hideous plaid blazer you’ve had since 1955?” Irene says. “The one with the burn hole?”

  “Am I embarrassing you already, honeybun?”

  “Mom. Talk some sense into him.”

  Her mother had always dressed her father for when they went out but never complained if he didn’t feel like wearing something he wasn’t comfortable in, because that was the point, she believed, to feel comfortable.

  “It was either this or his lucky lemon-colored trousers,” her mother says.

  Irene huffs up the stairs. She’s not really embarrassed. She just wants her parents to show some respect for themselves. Then she remembers why she’s so concerned about their outfits. “Dressing decently tells people you respect yourself and deserve their respect,” she remembers Robert saying just after Andrew was born, and she didn’t feel like wearing anything else but big sweaters. “I’ll remember that the next time you decide to wear that plum-colored polo,” she had said, even though, later that night, she threw the big sweaters into a garbage bag. The next day she donated them to the Salvation Army.

  “I keep forgetting just how big this house is,” her mother says once they’re inside. She drops her bag of shoes by the door. “It must take you hours to dust.”

  “Not hours, Ma,” Irene says.

  “Please, dear, something to drink.”

  As Irene pours a glass of white zinfandel, her mother walks through the kitchen and into the dining room. She stands looking out the window, trapped in light.

  Her father is transfixed by a painting on the wall of a cat licking up spilt milk.

  “Did you do this, honey?” he asks.

  “No,” Irene says and smiles. She hates cats but not this one. “I wish.”

  “You wish you could paint cats?”

  “Something like that.”

  What she wishes is that she had the patience or fortitude, or focus, to sit down at her easel and work one image from her head onto the canvas and into the world.

  “Do you remember that thing you were supposed to draw for the school?” her mother says, taking the glass from the counter, amused.

  On the wall in the hallway of the west wing of Norwalk High School, Irene, a below-average student, who her teachers had described to her parents as a floater—someone who had no official group, a free spirit, a wanderer—had begun a mural of half the Manhattan skyline, a portion of the Brooklyn Bridge, the head of the Statue of Liberty, and what looked like a mass of people rising up from the streets, just the outlines of their faces, quotation marks above their heads, waiting for her to fill them in with whatever prophetic words were worthy enough to keep for each succeeding class, read and reread until finally they were like ancient etchings on the insides of cave walls, slowly disappearing with every ball toss or fistfight or key stroke along the wall, until, finally, the wall was knocked down.

  She would look at the mural every day and wonder what on earth was going on in Midtown Manhattan at this moment. Or, was that the point at all? She began to work on one part or another, even going so far as to shade in Richard Nixon at the top of the Empire State Building, hundred-dollar bills falling like rain, dead bodies wrapped in flags floating on clouds above the skyline, the entire coterie of evil hunkered down in underground bunkers, praying for forgiveness. But how could someone possibly get all of that into one portion of space? As she worked, more ideas came to her and soon she was overwhelmed with the entire thing and packed up her paints and brushes and told her art teacher, Ms. Spang, she quit.

  “Having too many ideas is never a bad thing,” Ms. Spang said.

  “I’m just not in it anymore,” Irene said.

  “Literally?”

  “No, like, spiritually. I don’t feel connected.”

  “Oh, okay. Whatever.”

  Gabe Walcott, a senior, with little to no talent, was given the task of reworking the mural and, in a matter of one week, painted over Irene’s work and managed a faceless soldier holding up the peace sign. It was so poorly rendered and obviously trite that Irene had laughed when it was unveiled.

  “What a fraud,” she cried. Gabe, who came from a wealthy family, was on his way to Northwestern with no fear of being drafted.

  Ms. Spang shushed her.

  “Shush yourself,” Irene said, and walked off to get stoned in her car.

  The only thing left of that mural is a photograph, and even the photograph is missing.

  “I saw a painting of two circles for sale in the gallery next to my office,” her mother says. “Do you know how much they were asking? Six thousand dollars. Can you believe that? Not that I know the first thing about art, but it made me think, if all I need to do to make six thousand dollars is paint a couple circles, then I might as well quit my job today.”

  “It’s not as easy as it looks,” Irene says.

  Her mother drinks down the rest of her first glass.

  “Well, maybe not,” she says, and taps her glass with her pink, painted fingernail. “Another. Please, dear.”

  As a girl, Irene had been foolish and beautiful. She never suffered. She couldn’t recall one terrible thing having happened to her. Her parents were not strict like her friends’ parents, never told her that she couldn’t go on a date with so-and-so, and she couldn’t remember them once asking her what she wanted to do with her life. This kind of freedom was cherished. She had no curfew, no bedtime, and no authority figure outside of school. Her parents had big parties with the neighbors, the upper middle class of Norwalk, the insurance agents and advertising salesmen and local merchants. Occasionally, the mayor was seen grab-assing with the young wives. There was a thick layer of smoke hanging above those beautifully dressed people, and Irene, eight or nine years old, in her nightgown, with her hair down below her shoulders, sat near the record player and listened to swing music. When she was asked to dance, she took the big, sweaty hand of a man wearing a lavender ascot. He twirled her effortlessly around the living-room floor and told her she was going to break a lot of hearts one day.

  Her father had been the former police chief. He retired in his midforties and bought a bar on Post Road. She remembered him coming home the day he had put up the money for what he later called Duffy’s Tavern. She was ten years old then, thin, with great, blue eyes. Her father had rented a red convertible and drove it around the cul-de-sac where they lived, honking the horn, calling for her mother to come out and take a ride with him. Her mother was wearing a yellow scarf, her curled hair bouncing beneath a wide-brimmed hat, between her fingers a cigarette in a long, blue filter, a glass of wine in her other hand. She gave the glass to Irene and ran out to the car, the hat flying off her head, though she didn’t go back for it. Irene sniffed the wine and took a sip and spit it out. She picked up the hat and put it on her head. Her parents rode around the neighborhood, playing the radio as loud as they could, the neighbors out on their lawns, watching them as if they were part of a parade that had no purpose but life itself. Her parents had small ambitions. They w
ere happy people, good people.

  After high school, she rented an apartment in South Norwalk. During the day that summer, she worked on charcoal drawings in her room: faceless outlines, hands, breasts, vaginas, and feet. At night, she tended bar with her father. Her best friend since middle school, Susan Varney, modeled for her on Saturday afternoons. Afterward they got stoned and listened to Buffalo Springfield and talked about movies and boys and someday moving to California or Florida, anywhere warm and wet.

  In the fall of 1974, Susan met a boy and moved to Portland, Maine. And Irene, claiming her right to the future they had discussed, took a bus to Miami Beach. She made friends quickly—Deadheads, wanderers, seekers of an East Coast movement now that California was ruined with drug addicts and psychopaths. She stayed in a room at a boardinghouse two blocks from the beach and walked on the sand naked at night, sometimes alone, sometimes with other women, lovers, or strangers—it didn’t matter; they were all naked. If someone wasn’t naked, then he or she became the outcast, the weird one. Even a cop, flashing his light, his cock half-erect in those ridiculously tight shorts they were made to wear, calling out, “What are you dumb hippies doing? Beach is closed.”

  In Florida, she saw purple. Maybe it was the acid, the pot, the tequila—she painted in purple shades for nearly six months. First, in the boardinghouse, then, after attending a party at a bungalow in South Beach a couple of months later, and waking up next to the bungalow’s owner, a tanned, bone-thin man with a tail of black hair, who made her breakfast and stared in her eyes longer than she was used to, and said his name was Adrian and she was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen, she continued to paint in purple shades, now with a better view of the ocean, and a partner who said he felt like he knew her insides by what she painted. Adrian paid for her brushes and oils and canvases. When she finished one piece, he would tap a nail into the wall and hang it, light a joint, and stare at her work until he was finished smoking. Adrian was receptive to the idea that at a certain time of day, the beach, palm trees, flowers, high-rises, and faces of people strolling along the sidewalks could hold a union of one color.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked.

  “Am I supposed to know?”

  When they made love, Adrian threw her legs up and pushed her knees in toward the side of her head, so that her body was tilted to the side. He whimpered when he came. Afterward, he took back the control he had lost in bed. He talked art and politics and revolution. He was condescending and abrasive. With each day that passed, he looked uglier to Irene.

  One afternoon, just before Christmas, they woke up and walked to the Howard Johnson’s a mile down on the beach. Irene had pancakes with whipped cream and buttered pecans. He ate a cantaloupe and drank a tall glass of grapefruit juice.

  “You’re going to get fat eating that way,” Adrian said.

  “It’s the only thing I ever eat. How could that make me fat?”

  “Not fat now, but later in life. You develop a habit and you can’t break it without some sort of spiritual intervention. I don’t see you as the type to be receptive to such an intervention.”

  Slowly, as though mimicking the anger pushing up inside her, she pushed the plate of pancakes toward the edge of the table, then flung the plate to the floor. The pancakes briefly flopped on the floor like fish; the whipped cream lay flat and still.

  Adrian followed her lead, toppling over the water glasses, emptying the salt and pepper shakers, tossing the napkins from the metal holder up over their heads while other diners watched in horror. The manager grabbed Adrian by the collar and tried to shove him out the door, but Adrian pushed the manager so hard he fell backward over his heels and landed face-first into the pancakes. When he stood, his face dripped with whipped cream, a pancake piece stuck to his cheek. Nobody said a word as Adrian and Irene walked toward the entrance, Adrian holding his middle finger up over his head. Irene reached into her purse for a five-dollar bill, which she placed on the counter as she passed the nervous, outstretched hand of the purple-haired cashier tending the till.

  Late that spring, on a rainy, thunderous morning, Adrian came back to the bungalow with his hair matted in blood, nose broken, and knuckles skinned. He wouldn’t say what had happened. He sat on the bed with his head in his hands, dripping wet; dark red bulbs dropped from the ends of his hair. Then he laid back and curled up and fell asleep with his shoes on. Irene cared for him when he woke up later that afternoon. She helped him to the bath and shampooed his hair, and with a comb scraped away the chips of blood—some of his hair came out, too, but Adrian didn’t stir. There was bruising along his side, but he refused to see a doctor.

  “What if you have broken ribs?”

  “I probably do. So what’s the point?”

  “They’ll give you something for the pain.”

  “I like pain.”

  “You let this happen? I don’t understand.”

  “How could you? You’ve never really felt pain in your entire life. That’s what I’ve learned from being with you this short while, that things will be easy and I won’t have to do much and life will be boring.”

  “I think you’re doing too much coke.”

  “Probably. But that doesn’t take away from the reality of what we are.”

  “What are we?”

  Adrian stood in the tub, then leaned against the tiled wall.

  “Animals,” he said. “Do you know what they do when they can’t find food, when they’re starving?”

  “What?”

  “They eat their young. Do you know why?”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Do you know why, Irene?”

  “Because they’re animals?”

  Adrian laughed then, a hoarse, throaty laugh, followed by a bout of coughing.

  “The reason they eat their young before anything else, even before they eat other animals, is to protect them. But the young can never know that’s why. So it’s sad, really, because these animals that eat their young, they die of depression once they’re satiated. Eventually there is food for them to eat again, but they choose not to. They grow thin and docile, and lie down in the fields to die or be killed.”

  “Are you planning to eat me?”

  “I hope I don’t have to.”

  “I think you’ve officially lost your mind.”

  “Or found it.”

  He stepped out of the tub, wincing from the pain, and tried to put his arms around Irene.

  “Don’t come near me,” she said. “You think I’m some helpless creature you’re protecting by getting rid of me? That’s a fine lie. At least be a man about it and tell me what’s really going on.”

  “I’m going back to New York in a few days. I think that’s best. I have some people there who’ll let me stay with them while I figure out what I’m going to do.”

  She knew he wasn’t asking her to come with him. She knew that to even bring it up would sound pathetic, make her appear more wounded than he was.

  That night they made love with her on top, moving slowly, and his moans not only from the feeling of sex but from the hurt in his sides and chest. Irene dug her thumb into his side just as she was about to come. His body gripped from the pain, and his cock grew harder inside her.

  Afterward, when Adrian had fallen asleep, Irene went out and sat on the beach and smoked. She sat there until the sun began to rise above the horizon of the darkened ocean, like a golden egg.

  For the rest of July, she lived in the bungalow alone. She couldn’t afford the rent. She still had a little money saved, but it felt like she’d be going backward if she returned to waiting tables. She had come here for something, she thought. There had to be something.

  At the end of the month, she started getting sick, and, after seeing a doctor, discovered she was pregnant.

  “What am I supposed to do with a baby?” Irene asked the nurse.

  “You don’t have to keep it,” the nurse said casually. “You can go to one
of those places. I can give you an address.”

  She took a bus to a clinic on Collins Ave, a small building that, from the outside, looked like a shelter for skid row drunks. Windows shuttered, above the door a red cross. She had pressed forward, given her name to one of the nurses there, but left as soon as the nurse had gone to the back. Irene walked down to the beachfront and, for a while, sat on the edge of the planked walkway, under a swaying palm tree, her toes in the hot sand, her palms planted on her stomach as if on the earth itself, urging what was inside her to grow, give proof of the life she knew existed beneath. Irene imagined another life, one with her child, possibly traveling to a town out west with cleaner air and work for mothers. She would raise Charlotte, Sam, Janis, Colin, Fiona—the names she had written on the notepad in her tiny motel room with the beetles bursting against the wall, nearby the hospital—there, waiting tables while her artist friends watched over her baby, and then, when she or he was old enough to go to school, she would begin painting again. She would create something that would make her known around the world as a true force of expression.