by Tara Ison
“WELCOME TO RYE, PLAYLAND! HOST OF WCBS 101.1 FM, NEW YORK’S SALUTE TO THE OLDIES!” comes in amplified static over the loudspeaker, barely audible over parkgoers screaming, laughing, calling, the hawking at carnival-style win-the-teddy bear games, and the tinny circus music piped from Playland attractions: Skyflier, The Derby Racer, Aladino’s Flying Carpet! Marty and the guys are unloading equipment, looking around for the other two Satellites meeting them here. Technicians in sweat-damp “Playland Hosts 101.1 FM’s Salute to the Oldies” T-shirts bolt around wearing headsets and carrying fistfuls of cable wire, dragging bleachers together. Sarah stretches, and wonders if there’s food. She hopes there’s something to drink. Everyone is sweating in the sun.
“WE HAVE BEN E. KING, THE DRIFTERS, THE HARPTONES, MARTY ZALE & THE SATELLITES! LIVE PERFORMANCE AND BROADCAST, BEGINS 7:30 ON THE MAIN STAGE!”
The Cyclone, the Dragon Coaster, the Gondola Wheel! The air smells of corn kernels bursting in hot salted oil, and sugar melted brown and thick to caramel. Food stands sell Carvel’s Ice Cream and Hebrew National foot-long hot dogs. A fried dough concession offers three toppings: powdered sugar & cinnamon, tomato sauce with cheese, and strawberry jelly. There is a photography booth with garish Gay Nineties costumes, a Haunted Mansion Thrills ‘n Chills edifice blasting witchy, shrieking laughter, and, Sarah notes thankfully, kiosks selling sixteen-ounce paper cups of beer—Miller Lite and Bud, on tap. Kids, everywhere. It’s as bad as the beach in Rockaway, children swarming, grubby and hyperkinetic. They bump their faces against sticky, shiny pillows of cotton candy, dart away from the beery or sugared-up adults clutching empty sixteen-ounce cups in one hand and grabbing at the backs of their kids’ T-shirts with the other. Like all those kiddie parties in loud, family-frenzy places like this, the whimsical silly childhood birthdays at amusement parks, Miss Genie’s Wonderland, Swenson’s, Farrell’s Olde Fashioned Ice Cream Parlour. Bright whole family days, her parents, her baby brother, days rooted in gladness and giddy surprise, hugs and presents and laughing, sticky tabletops, gleeful screaming friends wearing balloon-twist hats, Happy Birthday, dear Sarah, Happy Birthday To You!!
“So,” she says to Marty, feeling a little dazed. “Playland, huh?”
“Wait here,” he says. “I have to go get set up backstage, then we’ll walk around together. You okay? You cold? You want my jacket?”
“It’s ninety degrees.”
“It’s going to get cold, later.”
“I’m fine,” she tells him. “Look, I’ve got long sleeves. I’m just . . . out of context here. Go ahead.”
“So, you wait here, right?”
“I’ll walk around a little. I’ll come back.”
“Well . . . yeah, okay. Don’t get lost. Wait, you need some money?”
“Uh, no,” she says, blinking, smiling. “I’m fine.”
“All right. So later we’ll play a game, or go the Ferris wheel, or something. We’ll get ice cream.”
“That all may be a little too whimsical for me.” She has the sudden hideous image of his trying to win her a stuffed panda, but smiles at his hopeful face.
“Yo, Zale!” Tony is standing with a perspiring, grinning man wearing a battered 101.1 FM baseball cap, carrying a clipboard; both men wave frantically at Marty.
He waves back. “That’s Russell, the DJ. I have to go see about stuff now.” He hurries off in a rapid amble, a tall guy hunched at the shoulders, his curly hair flapping out from under the fedora.
Marty Zale & the Satellites.
Who is this guy? she thinks. What am I doing here?
MARTY FINDS HER an hour later sitting on a bench near the whirling Gondola wheel, eating a foot-long and drinking a Diet Coke; she had really wanted a Miller Lite, but it is only four-thirty in the afternoon and she doesn’t want him to see her drinking so early.
“What are you doing?” he asks. “What is that?”
“A hot dog. I was starving.”
“How can you eat that?” He looks disapproving. “It’s treyf.”
“All right. What’s ‘treyf’?”
“Impure. Filthy.”
“I thought that was hazerai.”
“Well . . . it’s unkosher, then.”
“It is not. It’s Hebrew National.” She waves the wrapper at him.
He shudders at her, and takes a seat on the bench. “I’ll take you out for dinner later, afterward.” He scans the crowd, his eyes narrowing behind the dark glasses. “This is good, right? Yeah? All the families out with kids.” He chews his lip.
“Yeah. Are you nervous?”
“No, not really.” He looks at the jagged current of people. “Wow. Look at them.” A couple in their mid-seventies stroll by, dressed in matching Playland T-shirts wrinkled up over their stomachs and holding hands with a deliberate, tender consciousness. “That’s sweet.”
“Probably married sixty years,” Sarah says.
“Yeah. Three dozen great-grandkids. Still coming to Playland. Holding hands. Hey, there, look.” He points out a cluster of pre-teenish girls, roaming. Their braces flash, they giggle and grab at each other and swing their hair, their eyes darting around, watching, always looking. The ritual. Sarah remembers being one of them, a roaming, watching girl. She knows they smell like mint or cinnamon gum, and sweetish drugstore cosmetics, and the faint bitter beginnings of women’s sweat. She remembers having that snug, fluid skin. Perfect skin. You don’t appreciate it at the time, being dewy, you’re too inside of it to see. Flesh that both absorbs and gives off the light. And so hard to paint, to capture that, to pin that kind of living skin to canvas.
“Which one were you?” Marty asks.
“Hmm?”
“Which of them were you? Look, that one’s the leader, right?” The one who looks fourteen but isn’t yet, leggy, wearing a sixteen-year-old’s halter top and miniskirt, who knows not to blow-dry her curly blonde hair but to let it swirl, who knows what they’re roaming and watching for. “She isn’t the oldest, but she gets it, she knows what’s going on.”
“Yeah,” Sarah says.
“Then that one, with the baby fat, she’s older, but she’s scared. She’s scared of the blonde, but she wants that, to be like that. She’s thirteen, fourteen, but she’s really ten. The little one there, she’s sweet, just a kid, but she’s modest, you know? How she’s dressed. That’s nice. Like how you dress, the long skirts and sleeves. Tzenius, that means modest.”
“I don’t know if I was any of them. I don’t remember being that young,” says Sarah.
“Yeah, you’re so old now.”
“See? I told you. My youth is gone. It’s over. No more whimsy.”
“You’re like a little girl, still. You’ll get married, have kids . . .”
“No kids.”
“What do you mean, no kids? You got to have kids.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t want any. I’ve never wanted to have kids.”
“Why?”
“I’m . . . just not into it. Way too much responsibility.”
“Huh.”
“It’s really okay,” she says with a laugh.
“There’s that saying that adults think they make babies, but it’s really babies that make adults.”
“Not always. Not necessarily.” She finishes her Diet Coke, and tosses the cup in a trashcan near the bench. “And are you saying I have to have a baby in order to be an adult?”
“No. But it’s an important way.”
“I agree. But there’s other ways.” She watches him chew at his lip again. He hums. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. You know, whatever. Come on, let’s walk.”
“You look . . . I don’t know. Not happy.”
“I’m happy.”
“You’re not nervous about the show?”
“No, I love this, I love doing this. That’s why I’m here. Me and the guys, we’ve been doing this twenty years now. Russell, the DJ, you know, for the radio station? We go back twenty-five, thirty years.”
&
nbsp; “Something’s wrong.”
“Yeah, well . . .” He peers at her, and she decides he’s happy with her, that he thinks she’s perceptive. She smiles a little, trying to look sensitive and understanding. “So, sure, I feel funny,” he says. “It’s Saturday. I feel guilty being here.”
“Oh.” She gets it. “Because it’s shabbes.” He nods. “But this isn’t work. It’s not like Julius, off manipulating capital. Committing usury. You’re not defiling the Temple.”
“Maybe this’s worse. More self-indulgent, maybe. Like I’m just playing around, not being serious about it.”
“Like you’re not honoring God?”
He hesitates, then nods again, slowly. “I don’t know, God, I don’t know if there even is a God, but yeah, what you mean by that. Whatever.”
“You don’t believe in God? How can a religious fanatic not believe in God?”
“I’m not a fanatic. You think I’m a fanatic?”
“No. I’m just trying to provoke you.”
“You are?” He seems glad. “That’s good. Okay. Look, it’s about that consciousness, you know? It isn’t just—”
“Blind adherence to an irrational and sexist belief system.”
“Right, yeah. It’s about a spiritual consciousness. The laws, the customs, that’s all bullshit, you know? That’s all religion. I don’t study Torah to just memorize that stuff, I’m talking about what they call religiosity, that’s the longing, see, the real creative longing. Awareness. You want to hook into this mystery, this thing at the core of it all, in everything you do. You have to create it with every single act. Maybe that’s communion, God, I don’t know. You got to search for it in every act you do, every decision. Every choice. You know what sin is, real sin? Inertia. Refusing to act. Refusing the responsibility for your own life.”
“Right.” She feels at a loss. “Okay, I get it.”
“In the Baal Shem it says ‘the God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob.’ We don’t say ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ right? Because each one of us has to search for it. Our own sense of the divine. Of God. By doing. Being in the world. You see what I mean?”
No, she doesn’t, not quite. She wonders if he is judging her. She feels unspiritual, heathen, in danger of seeming disrespectful. But hasn’t she always tried to make the good and thoughtful decisions, the right choices? Hasn’t she always been so responsible about everything?
“Hey, man, excuse me, you’re Marty Zale, huh?” A guy in his mid-twenties, carrying an enormous acrylic sheepdog won at some carnival game, creeps up to them, stands with nervous, elastic knees.
“Yeah,” says Marty, smiling.
“Oh, shit, man.” The guy clutches the sheepdog by its ears and sets it down, revealing a Marty Zale & The Satellites T-shirt. He grabs Marty’s hand for shaking. “I’ve seen you guys everywhere, you know, Atlantic City and that place in Philly, I came to Boston once, I’m always keeping an eye out for you, you know?” He glances at Sarah. “Hey, excuse me.”
“No problem,” she says. She pictures this poor bouncing guy wandering the East Coast in a Greyhound bus, hitching rides, saving ticket stubs for scrapbooking, buying T-shirts.
“Thanks,” Marty says.
“Shit, man, you guys are the best. You’re real, I’m serious, you’re actual.”
“That’s really nice. That’s great,” says Marty.
“Yeah, I’ll catch you guys later, huh? I mean, I’m there, later, front row.”
“Beautiful,” says Marty. “Thanks.”
“No, hey, me thanks. Excuse me, huh?” The guy backs up with his sheepdog, gives them an enthused thumbs-up, and springs off.
Sarah chuckles at Marty’s pleased face. “You look tickled,” she says.
“It isn’t about that,” he says. “It isn’t.”
“I know.” It won’t necessarily be horrible, she thinks. He can’t be too bad.
“I mean, that’s nice, okay, right, but that’s the bullshit part, too.”
“That kid is bullshit?”
“No, no, I mean, if we’re connected that way, me and that kid, that’s beautiful. If the music did that.”
“I know,” she repeats. “The music’s what counts.”
“Yeah. That’s . . . here.” He puts his hand on his chest. “The applause stuff? That’s out there.”
“Well,” she says, “you could say it would be dishonest or dishonorable or just stupid blind adherence to rules to deny that inside part of you. The music part. Maybe not doing music would be the sin. Maybe by doing that, by honoring that, you are honoring God. Maybe that is your conscious communion.” Sinatra was dignified, right? “Really. Don’t worry. The angels will bless you.”
“Hmm.” He regards her thoughtfully, and slowly smiles.
“What?”
“I always feel better with you,” he says. “Why is that?”
She has no idea, but she suddenly feels a bright happiness at his inclusive with you. She looks away from him, confused. She doesn’t want to be included in him.
“So . . .” she says to the space in front of her. “You want to walk around for a while?” She looks back over her shoulder; he is in the middle of reaching out to her with one hand, the hand he’d put to his heart. She’s noticed his hands before, on the steering wheel, pouring wine at Itzak’s, shaping her an oyster. They’re beautiful. They’re young hands, like her father’s hands are still a young man’s hands, fresh-skinned, steady, expressive. David had beautiful hands, too, she thinks, but he was only twenty-four. His hands looked younger than hers. He needed to be with someone with twenty-two-year-old hands, veinless, tendonless. Perfect skin on a perfect girl, not some horrible woman who’s messed up, who’s messed herself up. She can’t remember if David felt that way, or she felt that way. This hand, Marty’s hand, looks to be headed toward her, as if to caress her hair, but doesn’t—this hand hovers in the air a moment, suspended, then drops to his side.
They look at each other, then she rises to her feet and forces out a twirl for him, just one, a silly, hopeful twirl. His face brightens, almost into a laugh. He at once appears inordinately delighted with her, and uses her proffered arm to pull himself up.
HE INSISTS ON leaving her his brown leather jacket this time. He leaves her to go do the sound check, warm up with the guys, get focused, whatever. A few hundred people have gathered around the main stage, but the crowd has shifted older in age; they’re people in their forties and fifties and sixties eager for the Oldies they remember from when they weren’t. Only a few whole families are left, parents holding slack, dangling toddlers. Sarah checks his jacket pockets: keys, a wallet without any photos, and a foiled, half-eaten roll of Rolaids.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, LET’S GIVE IT UP FOR . . . THE DRIFTERS!”
There is applause and cheers, and a start-up doo-wop bounce of music for the old guys gripped in blue sharkskin suits running out on stage. Sarah decides it’s time for a drink. She swallows the first Miller Lite quickly, dawdling near the beer kiosk, then buys another and strolls with it, keeping fifty or sixty yards away from the stage so the music pleasantly mutes. The sun is slipping, and tiny white lights are flickering on everywhere, like the fireflies blinking bright in the fields around Emily’s house in Connecticut. The day’s heat is slipping away, too, and wisps of cotton candy float by on the final warm drifts of air. She loves this exact moment, when the summer night coolness lifts and crisps and the color values darken, first toned with grays then shaded with blacks, until the colors themselves are absorbed away. When the first blush of alcohol in her blood alchemizes every pulse. When cotton candy floats like seraphim and she senses herself delicate, fine-boned, full of a holy glow. Every instant feels rich, as if everything is fine, as if something could still happen. Maybe. She takes another sip.
She notices the group of adolescent girls nearby, the ones she noticed earlier in the day, gathered in a small, brightly-lit booth: “Body Art by Art—Temporary Tattoos by Design.” Two of them,
giggling, have bared their midriff and shoulder for smeary transfers of a budding red rose and an ovoid yin and yang. The little one—the modest one, Sarah recalls, tzenius—stands to one side, hugging herself, just watching. Every few minutes the girl glances longingly at the booth behind her friends, where for three scrim tickets and three well-aimed throws of a ping pong ball you could win a stuffed knock-off Snoopy or a Garfield with bulging plastic eyes. The blonde girl in the halter top has her coltish naked legs propped on a table, her slim right ankle offered up for an intricate Celtic-design cuff in faux India ink. The tattooer—Art?—is a Latino guy in his twenties, who looks bored by the girls but absorbed in his work. The Celtic anklet takes a long time. A bunch of sparsely stubbled teenage boys linger nearby, kicking the ground, flexing, scrutinizing, and the girls getting marked scrutinize back.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, LET’S GIVE IT UP FOR A GOOD BUDDY OF MINE, WE’RE LUCKY TO HAVE ’EM HERE, YOU ALL KNOW WHO I’M TALKING ’BOUT . . . MARTY ZALE & THE SATELLITES!”
She leans against a rear bleacher, sipping beer, wearing Marty’s jacket draped over her left shoulder, feeling a nervous twinge in her stomach. Maybe the hot dog, maybe it’s just cramps, she thinks. Or the heat, all that noise, the clapping.
Marty and the guys stroll out to loud cheery applause, full of hoots and people waving like family members at a wedding or birthday’s end. The guy with the fuzzy acrylic sheepdog jars her roughly as he pushes to the front; she grips the waxy rim of her paper cup in her teeth so she can clap, and moves back farther from the crowd. The applauding goes on. She clamps down harder on the cup’s rim and claps methodically. Clap clap clap. She knows she’s at the edge of being just drunk enough or not, holding on to the rim of being drunk. Like mermaids and monkeys, she thinks, pictures in her mind. Tiny plastic mermaid arms and monkey tails in bright acid pinks and greens, holding on, hanging on to root beer floats, hooked on the rims of glass mugs in places like this. Gaudy, celebratory, reeking of sugar. Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour, Don’t you want a party, Sarah? her parents asked, insisted, It’s your birthday!, so determined to create celebration, give her a regular little girl-ness, although she already feels herself too old for an ice cream parlor birthday. She is eleven.
