Rockaway

by Tara Ison

  “But I was just a kid, you know . . .” she finishes.

  “How old were you?”

  “Hmm?” She looks up at him.

  “When you did that? The seder?”

  “Oh . . . nine, I guess? Maybe ten?”

  “Wow.” He looks surprised.

  “So, now I’ve done it every year since. The whole routine. I even do the Four Questions. And I wrap up a piece of matzoh and hide it for myself. Then I make my dad give me a dollar.”

  “You’re kidding.” He shakes his head. “Wow,” he says again.

  “Hey, I’m still the youngest child! That dollar is mine!” She laughs. “I know. It’s twisted. But that’s the tradition now. And once that kind of thing takes, it’s too late, right? You’re trapped. You’re stuck.”

  “No, see, that’s not true. Traditions can change. They’re supposed to. They’re living things. Always evolving.”

  “Oh, things’ve evolved,” she says, mock-assuring. “I’m a much better cook now. Chicken soup from scratch.”

  “No, look, this year, you’re here. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So Pesach is all new again for you, this way. You can appreciate it all over again, like it’s the first time. You gotta do that with everything. You can’t just move through life, we gotta recreate life at the same time. Be conscious of doing that, every single moment.”

  “Oh my God, that is so exhausting.” She smiles at him, to soften the comment, then: “I’m kidding. I get it. You’re exactly right, this year was definitely different.” She waves vaguely at the house, at the family in the dining room.

  “And it’s good, right?”

  “Sure. It’s been a blast.”

  “No, I mean how’s it feel? How’s it different on the inside?” He touches his chest. “Like deeper, how?”

  She feels impatient. Exhausted, yes, ready for this whole evening to be over with and done. No more questions, please. “Like you said, change is good. This has been a good, conscious, evolving evening. Really. Thank you.” She picks up The Torah Anthology again. “It’s like you’re always lifting up rocks to see what’s crawling around,” she can’t resist adding.

  He looks at her, bewildered. “We’re just talking, here.”

  She flips pages of purification rituals. “You’re like those people on the beach that’re always prying open oysters because maybe maybe there’s that pearl inside.”

  “I am?”

  “Or a clam or mussel, like there’s going to be some little animal alive in there, but there never is. It’s just a shell.”

  “Is that what you’re scared of?”

  “I’m not scared. Where do you get that?” She feels fully exasperated now. What’s with him, all this interrogation? No, she realizes, she’s not exasperated. She feels embarrassed. Too seen-into, too revealed. Your own fault, Sarah, offering up so much personal stuff. No reason to tell him all of that, you don’t even know this guy. “You know, I’m just tired. Really. What time is it, anyway?” she asks, standing. Marty doesn’t answer, just nods, chewing his lip, and she heads back toward the dining room.

  “Sarah,” says Itzak. “Come, join us. Have some of this.” He smiles at her, carding smooth the fibers of his beard with one hand and offering her a breast-shaped snifter of brandy with the other. “And come every Friday for shabbes. You’re always welcome.”

  Walking the seven blocks by five blocks back to the house in the nighttime dark, passing again all those families heading home now from synagogue, the sleepy children carried in their parents’ arms, Sarah and Marty talk politely about movies and fog. She murmurs enthusiastic thanks fifteen feet from the front door, and darts into the house without kissing him on the cheek.

  THE NEXT MORNING while munching toast and browsing through A Collector’s Guide to Seashells of the World, Sarah doodles an idea of a shell on the sports section of Newsday, which she is using as a placemat, just below her coffee mug’s damp brown ring. It is not a very identifiable shell, nothing pictured in the book, perhaps some kind of generic gastropod. She looks at it a moment, then sketches in the gastropod’s little foot, peering out. She is using the black ballpoint pen Bernadette keeps for phone messages, and it blobs a bit, messing things up. She dumps her crumbs on top of the shell and sports section and scoops it all into the box Avery uses for recyclable paper.

  She is low on food. Last night’s fog is gone, and the sun is a white blister; she puts on her sunglasses, pedals into town on the little-girl bike, and buys: milk, broccoli, tuna, pasta. Olive oil. A bag of oranges, and, why not, a box of unpresumptuous and probably stale matzoh. She has the casual thought of purchasing kosher wine or brandy, maybe for a future shabbes gift, but there is none in the grocery store. She buys a regular kind of table wine, a half-gallon of red, tucks it in her backpack.

  On her way home, produce and matzoh shaking in her basket, the heavy bottle between her shoulder blades throwing her slightly off-balance, the bicycle turns off the boulevard and down a street that leads to the beach, several blocks from Nana’s. Why not? she thinks again. There’s no hurry to get home. It’s a pretty day to pedal around. Check out the neighborhood a little more. Be conscious of this beautiful day, appreciate it, fine. The weather is warming; down beyond the end of the street, out on the beach she sees what looks like a bathing-suited family spreading out towels near the still-empty lifeguard chair, or maybe it’s a couple of sibling teenagers babysitting a toddler. Maybe I’ll go swimming later, she thinks, maybe it’ll be warm enough to be okay. Should’ve bought some ginger ale. In the gaps between houses she spots a few back porch decks, a barbecue, an inflated plastic wading pool, laundry flapping on lines. She rides up and down the length of the street, the bicycle jolting over cracks, looking for a hanging black sweatsuit or jeans. She starts to feel slightly ridiculous, like an ice cream truck circling in desperate search of customers.

  Behind a small brick and clapboard house facing the beach she spots a clothesline with dark, drooping squares and rectangles, and the smaller smudge of a hat-sized black dot. She fumbles to take off her sunglasses and the bicycle wobbles; she overcompensates by overjerking the handles, and the front tire flips sideways as if kicked. She falls, skidding, to the asphalt, landing first on one knee, then on her back, the bicycle collapsed and plinging on top of her. Oranges roll across the street.

  When she can gasp out a breath again, it comes as crying. Her pants are torn; her ripped knee stings and bleeds grit, her shoulder feels shoved through her chest, and she hears the thick clink of broken glass in her backpack. A garnet trickle slowly pools beneath her. She cries in pain and humiliation and hatred. No one comes rushing from the house with the black knit cap hanging on the line. She stills her crying, swallows it down. She slowly gets up on her feet, righting the bicycle. Her sunglasses are tangled in the rear tire’s spokes and she has to free them before she limps away, pushing the warped bike before her with raw-scraped hands.

  AVERY HAS VISED to the kitchen counter an odd propeller-type device and is gripping a coconut in one hand as Sarah enters the kitchen. At the stove, Bernadette is cooking what looks like pita bread on a spatula-style pan. They look at her, puzzled.

  “You are all right? What has happened?”

  “I wiped out a little on the bike. It’s fine, I’m okay.”

  “You are bleeding that much?” He raises his eyebrows at the ruby splotches on her T-shirt, her pants.

  “No, I’m fine. I just spilled something. A juice bottle broke. Really, don’t worry, I’m fine.”

  He seems satisfied, unconcerned. Bernadette looks at Sarah’s knee and shakes her head, smiling, then returns to her cooking. Sarah opens her backpack and carefully places the broken wine bottle, piece by piece, into the recycling bin for glass. She hopes they don’t smell the alcohol. But they’re busy cooking, Bernadette cupping white flour from a canister into a mound of shredded coconut, stirring.

  “What are you making?” Sarah asks.

  “Brea
d,” Bernadette says happily. She flips a flat disc of it in the pan to its other side. Avery squats on the floor, taps at the equator of his coconut with a hammer and screw-driver-as-chisel, then gives it one hard thwack; the coconut cracks perfectly in half, split to symmetrical and concave whiteness. He presses a coconut cup against the propeller blades and cranks a handle; shreds of coconut drift down to the counter like snow, like a pile of pure, dry sand.

  “I love coconut,” Sarah says.

  “You would like to taste?” Bernadette offers her a piece fresh from the stove; it is warm, it smells toasted and rich.

  “Sure. Thank you.” Sarah chews on the bread; it is delicious. She rinses her torn palms at the sink and pours herself a glass of milky tap water, while Avery shreds out the second coconut shell and Bernadette pats flat another disc of bread. She drinks her water, waiting and hoping for Bernadette to offer her another piece of the bread, but she does not.

  Halfway up the stairs to her room Sarah stops and returns to the kitchen. Avery and Bernadette glance silently at her like all the other family eyes in the house, as she digs through the trash bag of recyclable paper and fishes out her little sketch of an insignificant inky shell on the crumbed and coffee-ringed newspaper. She takes the drawing up to her room with her and sits, tracing it with a finger, studying the blank canvas on her easel, while her knee dulls to healing and outside the picture window the glassy acid-green waves break with their rushing, hushing sound and stretch to foam on the sand.

  PLAYLAND

  “I TALKED TO Julius this morning,” says Marty.

  “Oh? Is he coming today?”

  “No, he had to work.”

  “On Saturday?” Sarah asks.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s terrible. You shouldn’t work on Saturday.” He puts on a pair of dark glasses and glances at himself in the car’s rearview mirror. He settles his fedora to a tilt. It is lintless, and spanking black, a new variation on the black knit caps, the baseball caps, the embroidered, Rasta-looking yarmulkes she has seen him wear.

  They are driving to Brooklyn, to pick up his musician buddies, then heading to some family park upstate, in Rye, a few hours’ drive from Rockaway. Come, he’d said to her on the phone. He and the guys had a gig. An Oldies celebration, WCBS 101.1 FM, New York’s Oldies station, live broadcast, she’d get a kick out of it. Marty Zale & the Satellites, he and the guys, going back a long time, twenty years they’ve been doing this, just for the fun. You oughtta come, you’ll have fun, come.

  She’d professed great reluctance—I’m really on track with my new painting now, I don’t want to break the momentum, she told him—but finally gave in, pleased by his insistence. Her little sketch of a shell has made it onto a canvas in her room; it is now a few charcoal strokes, some vague, preliminary daubs of ivory and iron oxide black. She likes its clumsy little shell foot, just peeking out. It is a slow but good beginning, she’d thought. Good enough that I’ve earned a break. Have some fun, maybe, yes.

  “‘You taking the kid?’” Marty exits the Marine Parkway Bridge, heads down Flatbush Avenue.

  “What?” Sarah asks.

  “That’s what Julius asked me. `You taking the kid?’”

  “Does that mean me? I’m ‘the kid’?” This delights her; she suspects it will continue to.

  “Yeah.” He bobs his head. “You’re the kid.”

  “I like that.”

  He shrugs. “Whatever.”

  “I’m too old for Julius,” Sarah says. Marty smiles slightly at her—he only ever smiles slightly at her—and adjusts the collar of his brown leather jacket. She wonders if he gets the joke, that Julius is fifty-eight, and she is therefore almost twenty-five years younger, but that this is still too old. That Marty, too, is fifty-eight, and so it is meant both as a joke and as a provocation. “You know, right?” she continues, to make sure. “You know I’m thirty-four?”

  “Yeah, I know,” says Marty, looking back at the road. “But I can’t do anything about that.”

  HE HAS BEEN taking her places for over a month now: more shabbes evenings at Itzak’s, where Darlene serves margaritas and he and Itzak reminisce about acid trips from the late sixties; day trips into Manhattan and a boat tour to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island; recording and editing sessions for two movies he’s scoring at tiny studios in Williamsburg, where he ignored her for hours at a stretch while she tucked herself in a corner among abandoned coffee mugs propped on speakers, read The Village Voice and told herself she was doing research, like her shell book and walks on the beach, deepening her vision, gathering experience. Gathering layers, yes, allowing herself time. There is still plenty of time. He has taken her to dinner at a kosher Chinese restaurant, and to a vegetarian Israeli cafe. He insisted on buying her a new, unspattered color wheel and a seventy-five-dollar Isabey sable brush from an art supply shop in Park Slope, which, feeling guilty about her little shell painting waiting for her back in her room, she had reluctantly accepted. Saturday afternoons they have promenaded back and forth along the Rockaway Boardwalk, without bumping into each other, with their own separate bottles of water. When he runs into guys he knows from shul he leaves her standing to one side, shifting from foot to foot, while they talk. He likes to drive around Brooklyn neighborhoods and show her Orthodox Jews, the old men with sidelocks and tall hats trimmed with black fur, the heavily clothed women carrying stringed parcels and flocked by children in lisle knee socks. They fascinate him; he slows the car to a crawl, his hands splayed on the steering wheel, his mouth open, as if they’re driving through a wildlife animal park.

  What am I doing here? she sometimes says aloud to Marty. Who is this guy? she says, rhetorically, meaning him. This always gets one of his slight, amused smiles; she spaces saying this out carefully, to keep him amused.

  She went to watch him play handball with his friend Saul, who is battling melanoma and whose thick, mascara’d-looking eyelashes appear bold and hale against his chemo’d scalp. She was the only woman, only girl, on the crowded playground in Riis Park; they were all men in their fifties and sixties, thwacking rubber balls hard and low around the court, breathing in rasps, sweating, all wearing gloves of thin leather with tiny holes like those in old men’s fancy shoes. She sat on a bench and watched. A few times, when she caught Marty watching her watch, she held out her thumb like artists did once upon a time, squinting, tongue at the corner of her mouth, pretending to paint, to measure him in scale against the world; he posed for her in a position of mid-thwack and the guys, winded, gave him little shoves, knocking him out of the composition.

  She wondered who or what they think she is to him. A niece, the daughter of a friend?

  When one of them missed a ball and swore the others poked him, and jerked their heads at her. She was joined on the bench by a guy named Albie, who wasn’t allowed to play; he showed her the inch-long scar on his thigh from a recent angioplasty and the Aztec-design pillbox in the left pocket of his shorts where he kept his nitroglycerin pills. No problem, she reassured him; her father keeps handy a bottle of those same infinitesimal white chips, she knows about angina and putting one under the tongue. She remembered coming home from eighth grade and finding her father gray, lying on the bathroom floor, rigid and limp with pain, her mother stumbling, rummaging in cabinets and drawers and babbling, Sarah, thank God you’re here, do something, do something!

  She’d told her mother to calm down, call 911, and she’d tipped her father’s head back, dropped in the pill, assured and cradled him until the paramedics arrived.

  She told Albie about her father’s prostate cancer, that the hormone therapy and radiation seem to be working, that he’s still able to play a lot of golf. Albie told her about a prostate piece in the Times, quoted statistics on morbidity and aging, then mournfully watched the other guys play. Marty gave her a clownish grin, waved, and went back to the game.

  Once, walking down a block of musicians and street vendors and coffee houses in Greenwich Village, he stopped in front of a post-waif
girl with chromate yellow glasses, on her knees, flipping through a slanted stack of weathered record albums.

  “Oh, wow,” he said to Sarah. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  He leaned over the girl and pulled an album out; the cover was an overexposed black-and-white photo of a young man with wild, curly dark hair, handsome, bare-chested and somber, his eyes soulful, leaning against a big tree. He handed the album to Sarah and tapped the upper right corner: MARTY ZALE.

  “This is you?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, sheepish but pleased. “My Jim Croce era. Wow. This thing is over thirty years old.”

  “Are you going to buy it?”

  “I’ve got it,” he said. “I got it at home, I’ll show you. I’ll play it for you. The sound quality, it’s different. You probably never heard the real thing.” The album’s cardboard shine was mottled, its corner tips worn gray and furred. He read the liner notes, nodding.

  She was nonplussed by the old, young, exposed image of him. “It’s sort of a relief,” she said finally. He looked at her quizzically. “It’s proof you are who you say you are,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Then he regarded her a moment, baffled. “Aren’t you?”

  “SO, WAIT, ARE you sleeping with him?” her friend Emily asked on the phone.

  “No. I don’t even peck him good night on the cheek. He’s never once touched me.” She felt vaguely embarrassed, not knowing how to explain this . . . relationship? She doesn’t even know what to call it. “Which is totally fine, by the way. My head isn’t even in that space. I’m completely focused on work. That’s the whole reason I’m here.”