Tom informed us that the tunnel was under the rock under the river.
“Well that makes me feel a lot better,” said Emma. “We can be crushed by the rocks then drowned, flailing about, thousands of us in putrid mud. And what about the blowers, the big fans that suck all the carbon monoxide out. One of these days they’re going to break and we’re all going to asphyxiate down here. It would be a simple thing for those fans to break. I wonder how long it would take … probably under a minute for us all to suffocate.”
No one comforted Emma. Eventually the traffic inched forward and we emerged from the Tunnel of Death, went through a series of split-second-decision-requiring intersections, and then we were sailing at full-speed down the New Jersey Turnpike.
“So,” said Tom, trying again, “I met Janet and Mandy one night when I dropped Lisa off at your place. How does everyone know each other?”
Before Lisa could answer, Emma said, “Oh, we met them when we went dyke bar-hopping one night.”
“Really?” said Tom. “So they’re, uh, lesbians?”
“Yes,” said Emma, “they are.”
Tom didn’t seem fazed. “I’ve always wondered what they did.”
“They perform cunnilingus on each other, as a rule. Although some lesbians use—”
No, no, no, Tom broke in, laughing. He had meant what Janet and Mandy did for a living, careerlike not lesbianlike. Lisa followed with convulsive laughter, Tom kept laughing, and Emma joined in so she wouldn’t seem embarrassed, which she was. Many miles and suburbs went by before Emma spoke again, and then only in distress:
“I’m car-zee-ated,” she announced, as we swung around the exit ramp of the Garden State Parkway.
What?
“Carseated. It’s when you have nausea in a car. ‘Carzha.’ You can have buszha, subwayzha, planezha, taxizha—”
New Yorkzha, I suggested.
“Yes, there are metaphysical connotations, too: like Lifezha, Sexzha, both of which I have all the time.”
Polite laughter. Emma moved close to whisper.
“Okay, so Tom isn’t a complete piece of shit, but notice our friend Lisa, huh? She acts differently around him. She’s not one of us anymore … she’s gone over to the other side—”
Emma—
“No, and that’s not all. She waits to see if he laughs before laughing at us, did you catch that? He matters more than we do. This is the great fault of most women, I’ll have you know, they get a boyfriend and then the friends go out the window…”
I told Emma she was being premature, at least wait and see how the weekend goes. Lisa was nervous having us all together.
“I’ll seduce Tom in the dunes—I’ll make the sacrifice to put an end to this. Or you can seduce Lisa in the dunes. Or we could really put an end to it and you could seduce Tom in the dunes. We both could seduce Lisa, we could share her—”
In the dunes, I clarified.
“In the middle of the Garden State Parkway for all I care. We have got to save her. How DARE she go and have sex—successful, all-American, no-nonsense, healthy, functional normal-people sex without consulting us first? We’ll tell her when she can go have sex and when she can’t and if so with whom.”
Then there was Highway 9, and the strip, a world of beach-town junk and souvenir places and stores called Kwik-Pik and EZ-Stop and Stop ’N Get It! filled with cheap beach things. We passed a shack with a hand-painted placard advertising LIVE BAIT.
“Worms. There’s a nice thought for you. Someone sitting there selling cans of squirming, squiggling worms. Teeming worms.” No takers on Emma’s worm gambit. “Some human being goes out and collects those worms,” Emma went on, beating a dead … horse. “What did you do with your one life on the earth? ‘Uh, I filled cans with worms…’”
Every filling station–Kwik Snak junkfood store advertised SLUSHEES and FRE-ZEES and ICEES and SNO-BALLS.
“The finer question,” said Emma, “what Henry James would have been eager to define, is the precise difference between the Slushee and the Icee. I think the Icee and the Sno-Ball are indistinguishable to the naked eye, both are finely chopped ice covered in some chemical-toilet blue flavoring that turns your mouth blue and your urine green. I think the Sno-Ball was really the forerunner of the Slushee, the Slushpuppy, the Fre-zee and the Coolee, which demonstrates a finer ice-slush technology, a more difficult-to-attain consistency.”
No one was listening to Emma. She again elbowed me, leaning in to whisper, “This is a tough crowd. This knocked ’em dead in Peoria. Don’t I pay you to laugh at everything I say?”
I’m laughing, already, I’m laughing.
“There was a moment, a brief moment that I almost had mercy, let my guard fall, almost forgot the sanctity of my mission. This Tom has to go. When she doesn’t laugh at everything I say then we’re dealing with a New Lisa. Look at her … holding hands with him. In his Impala. She’s turning into Pat Nixon before our very eyes.” And then, as the inspiration hit, she said to the front seat: “I’d really like a Slushee now.”
Emma wanted to stop because she was nauseated and there’s something about a big car’s backseat that is nauseating with that car-smell air conditioning and so I said I’d like to stop too. Lisa sort of wanted a diet drink. Emma wanted a Slushee. Tom didn’t want to stop anywhere because he wanted to get down to the beachhouse and open it up before Susan and the others arrived. Emma requested a Slushee again. So Tom spotted a SLUSHEE sign at Eddie’s Convenience Mart but he couldn’t get over in time so we had to go up the road and make a U-turn (which took forever because of all the traffic going the other way), drove back to Eddie’s and tried to make a left turn into the parking lot (which took forever because of all the traffic coming from that way), but after the traffic subsided we turned into the gravel parking lot of Eddie’s Convenience Mart: For All Your Beach Needs.
“I have many beach needs,” said Emma, bursting forth from the Nausea Car, “and we may be here a while.”
Eddie’s Convenience Mart had aisle after aisle of junk, a tanning oil section, a beach inflatable-toy section, a pulp beach trash-novel section, a fishing lure corner, two freezers full of Frozen Confections, two refrigerators full of drinks. Lisa got a diet drink, Tom got some tanning oil, I got a candy bar and a blue Slushee only because Emma said she was getting one but then changed her mind and said she would vomit if she had to get back in the Impala with a Slushee, but she did buy an inflatable porpoise, an issue of Soap Opera Digest, the steamiest romance novel she could find in ten minutes of browsing, and a postcard of Eddie’s Convenience Mart with a picture of Eddie in the parking lot, a fat man in Bermuda shorts, raising his hands in a gesture of welcome. At the cash register Emma asked if Eddie was around and she was told Eddie was dead and the store had new owners and Emma asked why they didn’t change the name and they said that they kept the name as a tribute to Eddie.
“Eddie’s gone to that big Slushee-stirrer in the sky,” she said as we left.
“You know,” Tom began, feeling philosophical on the way to the car, “sometimes I think the Good Life is something like this. I think, hey, why don’t you drop the rat race, the hustle and the worry—”
“The bustle,” said Emma, finishing up his clice.
“Yeah, the hustle and the bustle of Wall Street,” he went on, and I didn’t hear the rest of it, but it was the usual: quit this very profitable I-make-more-money-in-an-hour-than-you-do-in-a-month type of job and go away and do something simple and menial and I guess people are sincere when they say it, but somehow that makes it even worse. And Tom was still going on about it in the car: “… and I mean what more do you really need? A roof over your head, right? Eddie must have a very uncomplicated, relaxing life.”
“Yes, very relaxed at the moment,” Emma added.
“And sometimes I envy that. Knowing the local fishermen. The local kids who come down for things—”
“Like Slushees,” Emma said, still being helpful.
“Yes, I can someti
mes see all that. You know, when I retire.”
“Tom’s Convenience Mart.”
Lisa said nothing, her arms crossed in the front seat. She knew us too well and she knew we thought Tom was generating bullshit, and that Emma, in her way, was laughing at him.
Emma prodded me again as we got back on Highway 9, the car noises covering her whispers. “Something very interesting happened in the course of Eddie’s Convenience Mart, something very subtle.”
So subtle I didn’t know what it was, in fact.
“On the way down we were trying to make him like us—or rather I was, you’ve just been sitting here like a pile of nothing. But the whole I-wanna-give-it-all-up, that Big Bad Wall Street crap was his way of reaching out to us…” Emma poked my arm, she was giddy with her theory. “He’s trying to show us there’s a touch of the Old Bohemian in him, and of course, there’s not. We’ll have him wrapped around our finger by weekend’s end.”
Emma, I protested, your scheming is going to hurt Lisa.
“We’re losing her to the other side, the establishment.” Then after a minute: “Doesn’t she have any consideration for my feelings? Having healthy, uncomplicated, unneurotic sex in front of me, just right in my face—it’s like she’s saying Here Emma, look at me, this is how normal functional people behave.”
Emma, for god’s sake—
“La Rochefoucauld knew: One finds something not altogether unfortunate in the misfortunes of one’s good friends.”
Emma, you start behaving yourself right now. I am part of no conspiracies. If you want to wreck the weekend, it’ll be your doing and I’ll be just as mad at you as Lisa.
“Okay, okay,” she said, flopping back in the seat.
From Highway 9 we went on this county route and then turned and turned and turned again (Emma groaning with each turn, commenting on her imminent illness), and then turned finally into a driveway, two ruts through the mixture of soil and sand, and there we were: Tom’s Beachhouse. It was two stories, a big gray box with lots of screened-in windows, a porch to the side and another second-story porch facing the ocean, steps that led down the dunes and the spiky grass to the strip of beach; there were clotheslines with towels hanging limply, rusting lawn chairs on the decks, a barbecue. All people on the Jersey Shore name their beachhouses and the Davidsons had named theirs Dunecrest and there was a sign on a pole supporting a gaslight (which was really electric) and someone had written DUNECREST in cursive with a wood-burning set across the sign.
“Dooooooncrest,” intoned Emma. “The new CBS afternoon soap. Six people. One beachhouse. The passions, the turmoils, the sexual inadequacy and impotence…”
Lisa, getting the coolers from the trunk, flashed Emma another death-ray look.
“I think it’s a beautiful name,” said Tom. “Very poetic.”
“Yes,” said Emma, taking her embossed journal in hand, “maybe I’ll write a poem called that. ‘Dunecrest’ by Emma Gennaro.” Lisa rolled her eyes, and turned to stomp into the house.
“If you do write something, show it to me,” said Tom, smiling and genuine. “Lisa says you’re a poet and are going to be famous one day. She thinks you’re very talented.” And then Tom went to help Lisa with all the stuff she was carrying.
Aren’t you a little tiny bit ashamed, I asked Emma. Lisa was Emma’s biggest fan, Tom admires Emma, everyone loves Emma and what is Emma doing? Plotting their annihilation. But Emma wasn’t listening to me. She stared out at the sea.
“I bet Tom has a small penis,” she said blandly. “I bet if you had the stopwatch on him, he doesn’t clock ten minutes.”
Susan’s car pulled into the lot: “The Dykemobile is here!” screamed Susan. Chris bounced out of the car and told how on the way they had made him an Honorary Dyke, and how Susan got lost despite Tom’s excellent directions. We all trudged toward the house with our stuff.
Susan fought to share a room with Chris, and no one put a stop to it. Emma and I got to share a bed. I made a joke about sleeping next to her, snuggling up as it got colder, ha ha ha.
“I’m coming up on my two-year celibacy mark and the support group is throwing a party for me and I’m not going to mess up my record for the likes of you. Nothing personal, you understand.”
Now I had honestly put aside all thoughts of Emma—really I had. But that was before I had to spend a four-day weekend in a bed beside her, both of us laughing and drunk and conspiratorial each night. If it hadn’t been for the bed, I would have been my normal indifferent self concerning having sex with Emma. No, really. If you go two years and turn down all offers and go to support groups and walk down the street virtually wearing a sign I AM CELIBATE, then I take you at your word. Emma unpacked and I watched her throw a garment on the bed.
“Don’t look so strange. That’s my nightgown.”
Circa 1896, Grandma’s flannels from the mountain cabin.
“I’ll have you know in certain southern portions of Indiana that would be considered lonjureee. I might get cold.”
How could anyone be cold in a bed with ME?
(Too bad I can’t put in a little picture of her expression in response to that remark.) “Freeman, I am celibate as the Risen Christ. Noli me tangere—got that?” And then she went out the bedroom door, only to lean back in to coo, “Unless, you big stud, you get me drunk,” followed by her best dumb-cheerleader giggle as she walked away.
Drinks are on me, Emma.
I went out to the porch and looked out at the sea on this beautiful day. Emma noiselessly joined me sitting on the steps that led down to the beach and we both stared out into the void; the others ran down to the beach to throw the Frisbee back and forth or stick a foot in the water.
“The day is nice,” said Emma.
Yes. The sky is very blue.
“What is this, Hemingway dialogue?”
Ernest and I are both from Oak Park, Emma.
“I’ve tried not to hold it against you.” She moved to the step below me so she could have more room. “Good stuff, huh? The Atlantic Ocean. You know, you get used to craning your neck in New York, everything, elevators, walk-ups, skyscrapers, is vertical, and then suddenly—WOW: horizontality to the max. Makes you feel like a speck, completely nonexistent.” Then Emma turned up to look at me. “I’d like to expand this thought into a full-fledged neurotic comment, but it’s too much work at the beach.” She turned back and we both stared catatonically ahead, looking at the waves.
Thinking profound thoughts, Emma?
“Yes. I was thinking about dinner.”
Susan padded up to the house and yelled up to us on the porch to get down on the beach and have Fun like everyone else. Susan was wearing this vast lemon-yellow one-piece bathing suit that made her look like a parade float. One giant arm held a cigarette, the other a daiquiri, and you had to fix your eyes to these neutral objects while talking to Susan lest you stare at the mottled flesh, the unshaven legs that were her pride, the anatomy unashamedly there.
“She looks like a buoy,” said Emma, after Susan padded back to the beach. “I wish I was that unself-conscious. I’m the ugliest thing here.”
Susan might edge you out, Em.
“No one counts Susan when you talk about human beings. Mandy and Janet have hard athletic bodies—the good thing about being a dyke, I guess: softball. Janet is magazine perfect—look at her catch that Frisbee there … geez. Lisa, of course, is the winner of the Miss America Swimsuit Competition.”
Lisa was engaged in a clumsy game of catch with Tom. Tom was tan and muscular and all-American and had one of those perfectly chiseled bodies you could eat off of, and he was one of those guys who lived for an excuse to take off his shirt. He was throwing the ball gently to Lisa, who would drop it on any account, and he kept trying to throw it to her softer and gentler and it would still end up in the grass, her flitting after it, giggling. Tom would occasionally run and tickle Lisa and kiss her and make her squeal which balanced out the condescending looks and rolling eyes when she dropped
his simple, easy “girl’s” throws.
“I hate Tom,” Emma said, watching the same spectacle.
Patience, tolerance, I urged.
“No it’s no use. And what happened to our Lisa, huh? Where is that adorably neurotic screwed-up Midwestern mess from Milwaukee we’ve come to know and love? What is this frolic-on-the-beach-with-the-jock-boyfriend shit?”
Exasperated, Emma got up and retreated to the bedroom to change. We had at last surrendered to the notion that we had to make an appearance on the beach. I changed first in the small bathroom next door to our bedroom: khaki shorts and a loud Hawaiian shirt that was too big, and flip-flops. I heard much banging around of suitcases and grumblings and cursings from Emma in the bedroom.
What’s the problem, Emma? (I ask through the closed door.)
“I’m tall for a girl, right? My breasts are gross. They aren’t so big but I will give them this: they are in proportion to my frame.”
Yeah, so?
The suitcase slammed shut again. “So what is it with these thighs—I’m renting myself out to Cellulite as a Before picture. My legs are Ionic columns…” Pause. “I meant Doric.”
Would you come out? You look great.
“You haven’t seen my thighs. They’re going to let Apollo astronauts use my fat thighs for simulated moon surface.” Some more noise within. “That’s it, forget it—I’m not wearing this.”
Finally the door opens. It is Emma, serene, unflustered. She is in a billowy black blouse, black capri slacks (Liz Taylor, circa 1963), sandals, only her ankles and hands exposed. She put on a big pair of dark sunglasses, and said as she led the way outside, “You didn’t really think I was going to expose my wretched body, did you? Let’s get real here…”
It occurred to me as I walked down to the beach, and for some reason not before, that I was the Whitest Person in America. I’ve never been “in shape” in my life. My chest hasn’t changed since I was fourteen and it would have been nice to have some hair on it or some sun on it or something to recommend it, but I was determined to set an example for Emma, so off went the Hawaiian shirt—
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 13
