Someone yells from a second-floor motel balcony, “Show us your tits.” She hears the same thing a half block later from a different group of boys. She drops her head and walks faster, away from the harassment. Calls of “prude” trail her like the barking of provoked dogs. If it happens again, she thinks she might just do it. Drop everything, yank up her shirt and bra, give them a glimpse of her B-cup breasts, gleaming white in the darkening night air. She’d yell back at them, “Satisfied?” An Amazon, a Bond Girl, Bettie Page.
She sips from the thermos, wipes a splash from her chin. Just forget about those guys. Fuck those guys. That’s what she’ll yell next time they shout at her. Fuck you. Show me your prick. The strong drink stimulates courage, or the concept of courage anyway. But then she rounds a corner and comes upon a tall motel taking up half the block. Its sign bears the lofty name Skyview Manor, but there’s nothing posh about the four floors of long balconies jammed to the railing with riotous teens, like a hundred-eyed creature from a monster movie. If anyone gives her serious trouble, she’ll run back to the police station. Until then she’s keeping her course. She has no idea where Chris is, but the closer she gets to the ocean, the more urgent it seems that she’ll find him. Maybe then she’ll have the answer to the question that nagged at her all day long. Why am I here?
She turns a corner and comes upon another motel, the last block before the boardwalk, lit up in white light. This one looks more typical of Seaside Heights—a two-story building, a parking lot, a vending machine near a sign marked OFFICE. There’s a fenced-in pool running the length of the place and a big sign bearing its name, The Surfside. The picture on the sign stops her in her tracks—an illustration of a woman in a swimsuit, her body bent in half, diving into the water. Ruby has been here before. That family vacation, all those years ago. She was only eight, maybe nine, and she shared a room with her brothers. It felt like an adventure, like being on their own, though Dorothy and Clark were just on the other side of the wall. Jackson wanted to build a fort, so she and Robin stretched sheets and blankets between the twin beds, and brought the desk lamp underneath, and the phone, too—whatever they could move from all corners of the room into their “underground hideout.” Robin decided this should be the Batcave. Robin was Batman, Ruby was Batgirl, and Jackson was Robin the Boy Wonder (which was confusing to him, only six years old and asked to play the character with his older brother’s name). Robin fashioned capes for them out of pillowcases and they ran around the room fighting crime. Then they started over, playing criminals this time. Ruby called Catwoman, but Robin wanted to be Catwoman, too, so she agreed to be Catgirl, a criminal not part of the TV show but fine for pretend. She and Robin hissed to each other in cat-voices—“We’re going to commit the purrfect crime”—while Jackson, as the Penguin, waddled around making honking noises. Eventually the door swung open and their father barged in, annoyed. “Aw, come on, guys! Clean up this mess.” He wore his bathrobe, bare chest showing at the collar, hairy legs visible below. After lights out, she and Robin giggled about it—Daddy wasn’t wearing pajamas!
This was the very place, wasn’t it? The Surfside Motel. She remembers her mother lounging by the pool, even though the beach was just a block away, reading the New Yorker. She remembers that they only stayed one night before they moved to another place—too many teenagers, making way more noise than she and her brothers ever could. Ruby strides past the pool, full of girls and boys splashing around, toward a phone booth near the vending machines. She pulls a few dimes from her purse, flips through her address book, and finds her brother’s new phone number in Philly. It’s Saturday night. He’s probably working at the restaurant, or maybe he and George are out for the night. (He’s only been in Philly for a month. Does he have friends? Where do they go when they go out? Do they use fake IDs and go to gay bars? Do they have parties?) The phone rings, then the machine picks up. Dorothy bought him an answering machine when he moved in with George, afraid that she’d lose him in the wilds of West Philly—after the news of the police bombing, she’d called the neighborhood a “war zone.” Ruby had argued that Dorothy didn’t understand politics at all; Dorothy said Ruby had no idea what it was to be a mother. Another standoff.
Robin and George have recorded a funny outgoing message together: “It’s Robin. And George. We’re out recruiting for our secret club. If you leave a message, we might let you join.” When she hears the beep she fumbles with what she wants to say. It’s harder to form words than she’d expected. (What was in those Jell-O shots?) She mentions Seaside, the motel, the party, Chris. “I’m trying to find him. I followed him. I’m a little buzzed.” At some point she realizes the machine has already cut her off. There’d been a time limit, without warning. She thinks about calling back, changes her mind. Keep to the mission.
She’s remembering more and more of Chris, things he told her during those phone calls after the retreat weekend. His father was an engineer at an aircraft company. His mother was a college English professor. Ruby remembers Chris’s descriptions of how brilliant his mother was, but also how unbearably skinny she had been. How he never used to see her eat anything of substance. His older sister was a curvy beauty, a good student with good looks planning on earning scholarship money by entering the Miss New York pageant. Brainy and bubbly and blond. There was a younger sister, too. Chris told her that his bedroom ceiling was hung with model airplanes, rockets, spaceships. Tiny components pieced together by hand. The satisfaction of assembling something intricate. And then, the discovery of inhaling glue. He’d seen a psychiatrist after his sister found him passed out on the stairs, eyes rolling back in his head. He laughed bitterly when he related the catch-22 that emerged during his treatment: the shrink said a “creative outlet” was important, but since his beloved models provided the means to getting high, they were forbidden. The solution was painting and drawing, but the images he came up with frightened everyone—space creatures devouring children on barren planets, blood bursting out of human ears, noses, assholes. He told Ruby he used to squat over a mirror to get a look at his own asshole, in order to be able to draw one correctly.
His confessions made her uneasy, and then made her bold. She, too, held her privates open in front of a mirror, wanting to see the parts she contained. After reading a sex-soaked paperback found in Dorothy’s bedroom, she tried out different textures down there, not just her fingertips, but stuffed animals and a hairbrush and a powder puff stolen from her mother’s makeup table, which tickled to the point of ecstasy. She nicknamed the most tender spot her “clint,” because she wasn’t sure how to pronounce its real name (clitoris or clitoris?). She told him she gave it a man’s name because it felt like a stranger living there inside her. A sensitive, secret self.
It was Chris’s mother who brought him to Jesus. Chris’s shrink had taken one look at Mrs. Cleary and decided all was not well with this bone-thin woman. She had been seeing a therapist, too, and attending a regular support group, and letting a nutritionist put her on a regimen. The Save Your Life Diet, Chris called it. He told Ruby that before, he never hugged his mom because she was so hard and brittle—“Can you imagine that, thinking you could snap your own mother’s bones?” But she put on flesh and grew softer, and the first time she held him against her newly cushioned body, he wept. His mother hushed him, “Don’t cry, I’m getting better.” She told him the change was not only in her body but also in her soul. It wasn’t just the doctors, it was prayer that had made the difference. So the Cleary family went back to church—sober Chris, fleshy Mom, and the rest of them. Chris told Ruby he would stare at a painting of the crucifixion—Jesus’ suffering like an image he himself might have sketched in oil crayons, Jesus with long hair like a rock star and a body as starved as the one his mother had just conquered. Chris would stare and then go home and read the New Testament, looking for anything that spoke of the pain, the actual bodily suffering. He went to their priest trying to understand the meaning of a single idea—that this man who walked the earth so
long ago had suffered in order to end our suffering. It didn’t make sense. The priest told him about a teen retreat called Crossroads.
Ruby remembers all of this. She remembers, too, the jealousy she felt. Chris lived in a house where healing had been possible. (And now? Who was Chris Cleary now? What did he believe in, if anything?) In her own home, pain only rooted deeper over time. Her mother did not go to church, did not forgo her bottles of wine to drink from the cup of Christ, had no miraculous transformation. Dorothy didn’t even drive Ruby to church on Sundays, not even in the winter when the sidewalks were treacherous with ice, and slush seeped into her boots. Ruby believed all on her own, until she stopped believing. That’s what she tells herself, and others, too: She no longer believes in God, as she did back then, when the circumstances of her life brought her face-to-face with the kind of pain only God seemed fit to remove. Because He didn’t remove it, and it deepened: an injured brother became a dead brother, a troubled home a broken one. She’d been uprooted from a quiet town and dropped into a dangerous city. So for a couple years now, she has resisted anything that smacks of the divine. It’s all superstition, placebo. Rhetoric about things that are meant to be is just a way to rationalize a power structure, one that keeps people in their place, especially women. But given all that—how is she supposed to explain why crossing paths with Chris feels so preordained, so fated?
She joins the throng filing up a wooden ramp to the wide wooden boardwalk. Flares of color. Strobing surfaces. Bulbs flashing the entrance to the Casino Pier. Barkers in front of wheels of fortune calling out, “Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows.” The buzzing and whirring of games of chance. She sees Whack-A-Mole and Skee-Ball and the one where you squirt water into the open mouth of a clown, which somehow triggers an inflating balloon coming out of the top of the clown’s head. First one to pop the balloon is the winner. The prizes are enormous stuffed animals, blacklight posters, mirrors painted with beer labels and rock album art. There’s the smell of fried food in the air, pizza and hamburgers and Italian sausage smothered in onions. Music and sound effects compete for attention. She hears “Everybody wants to rule the world” emanating from a blazing blur in neon pink—an enormous disk, tilted on its side, spinning seated, screaming people high into the sky and back down again.
Past the glowing, screaming arcades she sees the ocean. She sits on a bench and puts her boots back on and looks out over the beach, which is mostly empty now. The water is bisected by a wide white stripe. The black waves are capped in glowing foam.
She looks up—a fat full moon is on the rise, big and nearly as bright as the sun. So beautiful. It gives her a moment’s peace. If only it were a spotlight that could pinpoint Chris in its beam and lead her directly to him.
At first she feels the power of moving solo through a mob. The power of invisibility, of sliding under the radar. Couples, families, groups of friends pass by, absorbed in their own good times. Then she gets slammed by a fast-moving shoulder. She gets jostled again moments later. When she calls out “Watch where you’re going,” a burly guy shouts back, “Eat me.” His girlfriend stops, stares Ruby down. “What did you say, freak?” A menacing girl is worse than a bullying guy, more likely to hit another girl. This one is a terror—enormous mane of hair, weighty gold jewelry, animal-print shirt, and matching leggings. Ruby hates the way girls look these days—garish eye shadow, shoulder pads sewn into flimsy cotton T-shirts, athletic jackets that match the ones their boyfriends wear. Do they know they seem like clowns—goofy from a distance, aggressive and scary close up? She wishes she could squirt water into this girl’s mouth until her head exploded. She can’t shake the feeling that the eighties are turning into a mean decade. People are pushy in a way they didn’t use to be. Or maybe she’s just older, more like an adult than she’s ever been and learning the very adult pressure to take from the world what you want, the hell with everyone else.
It becomes clear that her presence is not going completely unnoticed. There are other solo observers here—all men. They catch sight of her and smile. Unwelcome smiles. One of them, early twenties, sports a white, ribbed “Guinea T-shirt,” a slender gold chain, and the short-on-the-sides-long-in-the-back haircut favored by South Jersey boys. He locks eyes on her and breaks into a toothy grin. When he starts to move toward her, signaling for her attention, she darts away, heading not deeper onto the Casino Pier but parallel to the ocean, along the diagonal wooden slats of the boardwalk. In the middle is a bathroom, a moist, smelly concrete chamber. Sitting on the toilet in a locked stall, waiting him out, she feels for the first time all night the risk of what she’s doing. It’s not like her at all, taking this kind of chance, on her own. She guzzles from her thermos, wanting to regain that fearlessness she felt less than an hour ago, when she set out from the party.
“Women are not meant to be alone,” her mother had said one night, preparing for a date with a man she’d admitted she wasn’t all that fond of. The message seemed to be that any man was better than no man. Dorothy remains unmarried but, not yet fifty, still pursues her prospects. Last week she took a man she hardly knew to her brother’s wedding, mostly, Ruby thinks, because she didn’t want to face Clark without a date. Ruby sees now that only men appear on the boardwalk without company, not women. Certainly not young women.
That last chug of booze might have been a mistake. She feels the wobble in her walk as she exits the restroom. She’s had so little to eat today. Breakfast in Manhattan, hours and hours ago with Calvin. A couple mouthfuls of potato salad in the kitchen at Alice’s house, scooped up on a hotdog bun. She needs to eat, feels a craving for something sweet. Cotton candy and a root beer. The airy tastes of a beach vacation.
She enters the glass door of one of the restaurants that run the length of the boardwalk. This one is called Lucky Leo’s, and it’s crowded. Waiting her turn at the end of a long line, she tries not to make eye contact with anyone, but at the same time she needs to look around for Chris. She sees on the menu something she hasn’t had in years: zeppoles, balls of fried dough coated in powdered sugar. She buys a bag, plus the root beer she’d been craving, pays with a couple of singles dredged from the bottom of her purse. She sits at the edge of a table occupied by a harried family—young parents trying to soothe cranky children with French fries.
If she really knew Chris, she could deduce where he’d gone. The boardwalk had seemed the obvious choice, the town’s almighty magnet. Chris might indeed be nearby, drinking a beer under an awning, taking in the swirling decadence. Or he might have known better. Might have understood just how lonely being alone in an amusement park would feel. To deduce, she has to work with the little of him she witnessed. He saw her, kissed her, doused her in cryptic comments, then vanished after Calvin appeared. He was trying to lure her out after him, away from Calvin, away from that crowd—she feels certain of that. But how could he know that she would follow? How could he reasonably expect her to find him?
The children at the end of the table are crying and whining. Dad declares the evening over. As soon as they leave, their seats are occupied again. Two girls about her age sit down across from each other. They are dressed in black. The more petite of the two wears a miniskirt like the one Ruby shed earlier at the house. The girl’s long, flat face reminds Ruby of the head of a snake. She is transfixed by her right index finger—its black-painted nail has had a chunk torn from it. “Joanne,” she says to her friend, “should I just bite it off?”
Ruby winces.
Joanne, the larger of the two, rifles methodically through an enormous black vinyl purse, commanding, “Don’t do that! I have an emery board in here.” Her heavy New Jersey accent turns emery into amree, board into bawd. Her pretty, feline eyes are ringed in dark eye shadow. Her entire face, moon-shaped and powdered, is like that of a white lynx.
“I have a nail file,” Ruby says, and opens her own purse to fish it out. The girls notice her for the first time. She offers them a hopeful smile. They’re the first
people she’s seen all day who in any way resemble her, at least in the way they dress—though she realizes, in Dorian’s clothes she doesn’t quite look like herself.
“She tore it on the Himalaya,” Joanne explains, gesturing toward her friend.
The girl with the ripped nail explains, “You know that safety bar that comes down? It had this little thing sticking out, and I got caught on it. It hurts like a bastard.” She puts her finger in her mouth for a second, and then flicks it in the air as if to shake the pain away. “I should sue.”
“You can’t sue for a fingernail, Wendy.” Joanne looks to Ruby for confirmation. “Am I right or am I left?”
“Right,” Ruby says, smiling.
“Did you go on the Himalaya?” Wendy asks her. “It’s my favorite.”
“I didn’t go on anything.”
“Nothing?”
“I just play the games,” Joanne says. “Last time I won everything I played. It was crazy! I couldn’t even carry it all. These stuffed animals and things, I gave ’em all to my nephew. But I can’t win nothin’ today. And tomorrow’s my birthday!”
“Oh!” Ruby says. “Happy birthday.”
“It’s all rigged, Joanne,” says Wendy.
“Then how come last time I won practically every booth?”
Ruby says, “You were on a winning streak.”
“Right?” Joanne slurps from a straw, seeming to disappear into thought. The cup has an illustration of a snowman on it, and the words RICH AND CREAMY! Ruby wishes she’d had a milkshake instead of the zeppoles, which already feel like they’re expanding in her stomach, gaining mass. A vanilla milkshake seems in this moment like a great comfort.
The girls begin a conversation that Ruby can’t help but listen in on, even though their attention has returned to each other. They’re headed to a club, a place called Club Excess—Wendy is ready to go now, Joanne hasn’t quite given up on the boardwalk, on wanting to win something for her birthday. “Look. We have to get there before eleven,” Wendy says, flashing her watch, square black face with bright green digits.
Robin and Ruby Page 14
