by Joshua Braff
“Well, sure,” my father says, and looks at me.
I will not be the person to tell Brandi the truth. My father barks out a cough and suppresses it with his fist. I wait for him to hurl right here on the boardwalk.
“What’s going on with you?” Brandi says.
“Nothing.”
“You feel all right?”
“Feel perfect. Look at my girl on the beach. Go tell her to take her shoes off.”
Brandi looks out at them again. “I want to see her,” she says, taking off her own shoes. I follow her down the stairs to the sand. When we reach the girls, Brandi hugs my sister before greeting Sarah. “No shoes allowed,” she says, and Debra slips them off. I lift my camera and she screams, “Don’t!” with her head turned away.
“Okay. I won’t.” I lower it and wait for her to face me.
“I think you should come home,” she says. She scoops sand into her hand and we both watch it pour through her fingers. “I want you to come home.”
Brandi slaps me on the head way too hard and says, “You’re it!” before running around us with her heels dangling from her finger. “Come on, get me, David.”
I hadn’t realized how much I needed to hear those words: I want you to come home.
“Come on, slow poke,” says Brandi. “Think you can catch me?”
I look down at my sister.
“Please,” she says.
“Dare me to go in?” says Sarah, pointing at the ocean.
We both watch her lift her dress above her knees. She laughs and starts to dance, a Hasid doing the Charleston.
“I dare you,” Brandi yells.
Sarah sprints straight for the water. The second her toe goes in, her arms go up, and she shrieks before running back to us.
“Told you it was cold,” Brandi says.
“I think about you a lot,” I say, looking out at the sea.
“I think about you more,” she says.
“Did you get my letter?” I ask.
“No.”
“No?”
“Where did you send it?”
“To the house.”
“Maybe she tore it up.”
“She’s not like that, David.”
“Then where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“She wishes I didn’t exist.”
“She wishes you’d come home too,” she says.
“No,” I say, and have to smirk.
“Yes.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“You have this idea that she’s this crazy Orthodox lady with a prayer book in her hand all day.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
Sarah runs past us and tags Brandi. “You’re it!”
“No, David’s it,” she says.
I nod and touch my sister on her knee. “You’re it.”
She touches my shoulder with hers. “No, you’re it,” she says, and is up and running.
“I’ll hold your camera,” Brandi says. “Go chase your sister. I think she could use it.”
I give her the Graflex. It takes me a while to catch and tackle my sister. I toss a little sand in her hair and she screams like girls do in horror movies.
“Okay, okay, I’m it, I’m it,” Debra says.
I tickle her armpit like I used to do when we were little and she laughs with her mouth wide and smacks my shoulder over and over.
“Where’d your father go?” Brandi calls to us. “Do you see him, David?”
I look back at the hotel. “No. Maybe our rooms are ready,” I say, picturing him suddenly face down in the pool. “I’ll be right back.”
I FEEL BETTER WHEN the clerk says my father has gone up to our suite. I knock for some time before he opens the door. The second I see him he runs back to the bathroom.
“Dad?”
“Not now. I need to be alone.”
“Is it any better?” I say.
In a few minutes I hear him flush. He shuffles out and collapses on the bed like a cut-down tree.
“Maybe we should find a doctor,” I say.
He shakes his head and his eyes close.
“Maybe there’s a hospital around here.”
“Big night. Big, big night.”
I run the back of my hand along his cheek, looking down at his eyebrows and dark long lashes.
“I’m worried,” I whisper.
“I’m fine.”
“About Mom.”
“Oh.”
“Should I call her?”
The key jiggles in the door before it swings open.
“Hello?” Brandi says, followed by the girls. My father sits up quickly and pats down his hair.
“How is it out there?” he says, trying hard to look healthy.
“Humid,” she says, removing her sunglasses to focus on him. “Marty, you look terrible.”
“No, no, I feel a little dizzy but I’m sure it’s just the heat. I don’t know. Must be the heat. You got suits for the girls?”
“Yup, yup, you ready, girls?”
Sarah moves directly to the window and looks up at the sky.
“You don’t feel well, Dad?” Debra says.
“Feel fine, honey.”
“The pool is big,” Sarah says. “Come look, Dena.”
“Let’s go in the other room, girls. I’ll show you my stuff and you can decide.”
“Arlene,” my father says.
“What?”
“You need to call Ira and ask him what time you need to be at the Moraga. And get Leo on the phone too. I have no idea where the interview is happening. And you’re tight-lacing so . . .”
“I know, Marty, you told me.”
“I’m telling you again.”
The girls follow her into the adjoining room. When they’re gone my father rolls over to face me. “Maybe you should call your mother,” he whispers. “Just call the house and if she picks up just keep saying ‘One night . . . He deserves one night.’ Tell her I have the friend and I’ll have ’em both back in the morning, as early as she wants.” The phone rings and he startles up, stares at it. “You get it,” he tells me.
The butterflies light a fire in my stomach. It’s her, I know it. I walk to the phone, rest my hand on the receiver. My turn to puke. I lift it, waiting for her voice.
“Hello?” It’s Jocko. I give the phone to my father.
“Yeah? No . . . who . . . who’s late? . . . Ten minutes ago . . . What do you mean? . . . No, I told you this twice. Don’t be stupid today. Open the live peeps only, the side door, and that’s it.” He hangs up and shuts his eyes.
“Is everything okay?”
He waves me away. “Don’t worry. We’ll work it out. I just need to close my eyes.”
I walk into the other room where Brandi’s pulling corsets out of suitcases and looking for bathing suits. She holds the bottom half of a red bikini up to Sarah. “Are you both swimming?” she says.
“That’s not a bathing suit.”
“Sure it is.”
Just the notion of Sarah putting it on is exciting.
“Fuckin’ scumbags!” my father screams and we all look at his door. “Of course we’ll fight it but Keefler’s gonna try and make an example of me! Jocko? Are you there?”
Brandi rolls her eyes.
“Arlene!”
“I’ll be back. There are two suits in there. I think the red will be better for you, Deb.”
“As long as that cock smoker’s got the reins, I’m fuckin’ enemy number one!” my dad screams.
“Shhhhhh!” Brandi says, and shuts the door behind her.
In the moment I forget about my mother and the crime. Debra sits on the end of the bed and slowly pulls pieces of clothing from the suitcase. Black seamed stockings. Leather opera gloves. Bullet bras, garter belts, patent leather stilettos, a black veiled hat. Corsets, corsets, corsets.
“So Dad’s in real estate,” Debra says, and Sarah laughs.
“Sort of,” I say.
“Does he m
ake porno movies?” Sarah says, and covers her mouth to laugh. Debra looks at me and swallows, humiliated. She knows more than I thought.
“No. He owns a building in Times Square.”
“It’s a theater,” Debra says.
“He also has a theater. He owns a few—”
“Girls take off their clothes,” Debra says, picking at the seam in the bedspread.
Sarah lifts her dress above her knees again. “You mean like this? I can do it. How much does it pay?”
I feel my face getting hot. “Let’s talk about something else.”
She shimmies for a second and laughs. “It’s easy. I want a job. Dancing for money?”
“Not hiring.”
“Do you work there?” Sarah asks.
“Yes,” Debra says, and our eyes meet.
“You see all those naked bodies every day?” says Sarah, a mischievous grin.
Brandi opens the door with a sigh and walks to the bed. I am relieved to see her.
“Okay, which of these do you like?” she asks, holding up two more bikinis.
“I think this one,” Sarah says, taking the yellow one from Brandi.
“How big is your chest?”
Sarah laughs and looks at me. I pretend to adjust my camera.
“I don’t know,” she says, looking down at them. She takes the bikini into the bathroom and closes the door. Debra watches her go, her face filled with disbelief.
“You want one, Deb? I got the red.”
“No, thank you.”
“Maybe you can help me then. Eighteen inches?” Brandi says, holding a corset up to her body. “This is gonna be a joke. Will you help me?”
Debra looks at the corset and doesn’t answer, so Brandi steps into the thing with her bathing suit still on. She yanks it up and over her giant breasts and it looks like she’s stuck in an inner tube. I laugh a little and she sticks out her tongue.
“Hey, Peanut gallery. Buzz off if you think it’s funny.”
“Sorry.”
“I basically need you to pull on the strings in the back as hard as you can. And don’t worry about hurting me because I’ve done this a thousand times.”
Debra’s baffled. “You want me to . . . what?”
“Grab the laces.”
Debra takes them in her hands and begins to tug. I lift my camera and see it all through my lens. Click, click.
“Stop, David!” she says.
“Just one more,” I say.
“With both hands. No, sweetie, you really have to pull much harder.”
“I don’t think I’m strong enough,” she says.
“Here,” Brandi says, and lies facedown on the bed. “Now, stand on the bed and straddle me.”
An image of my mother. She’s in the car, racing on the highway toward Atlantic City with a police escort. Fifteen cars, sirens blaring, and she’s behind them, praying, cursing, fuming, pressing the pedal through the floor of the wagon.
“One leg on either side of my hips,” she says. “Now grab the laces with both hands and pull up with all your strength.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“All your strength. Trust me, I’m fine.”
Debra bends her knees and takes the laces. She pulls upward, a tug of war with the strings.
“And again. Up and hard, up and hard. Dat’s a girl,” Brandi says, sounding as if she’s packed in a garbage compactor. “Keep going. Good. Keep going. Tighter, tighter. Okay, now, tie it off! Tie it off!”
Debra starts to tie it but her fingers are fumbling so she tries to get better footing but slips and plops down right onto Brandi’s butt. Brandi starts to roar with laughter. Her whole body shakes and Debra is bouncing from it so she starts to giggle and it turns to hilarity for both of them and I’m seeing all this without my camera so I lift it, despite my sister. I just start shooting away and in the middle of it all, Sarah walks out in the yellow bikini. I lower the camera again, trying not to gawk at this body, this gorgeous and smooth-skinned girl with her hair down and her arms folded and her eyes so coy.
“Debra,” Brandi yells. “Stop laughing or we’ll have to start again!”
“I’m trying not to,” Debra says.
“But you’re sitting on my ass.”
Debra is cackling like I haven’t seen her do in years, it seems. She tries to take the strings and hold them in place. When someone knocks on the suite’s door, I hear it but no one else does. It’s her, I know it.
“Someone’s at the door,” I say, and everyone stops.
“Who’s that knocking?” my father yells from the other room.
Brandi hops up so fast that Debra is thrown off and tumbles onto the floor.
“Jesus, are you okay?” Brandi asks.
“Yes,” Debra says, trying to stand.
“Who is it?” Sarah says, running back into the bathroom. My sister joins her in there and they shut the door.
“Coming,” Brandi says. As she unlocks the door, I feel my heart beating in my forehead.
It’s Ira. In plaid shorts with socks and loafers. I take a deep breath and sit on the end of the bed. He looks miserable as he walks quickly into my father’s room.
The girls come out of the bathroom after he’s gone by and I see Sarah adjusting the bikini top while looking at herself in the mirror.
“David!” my father yells. I run in there. Ira’s in a chair in the corner and my father’s still horizontal on the bed.
“The films we got from Abromowitz are shit,” my dad says. “Tell him, Ira.”
“Black and white, too grainy to see, ugly goddam chicks with zits on their asses. A death penalty prisoner couldn’t beat off to these movies. They’re useless, just like Larry Fuckin’ Abromowitz. Useless!”
I know what my father is thinking. The deal will bite us. My first deal. My fault. He lies back down and shuts his eyes. “Fifteen grand on a system and we don’t have any movies.”
“That’s why we need to make our own,” Ira says. “Like Killowatt and Show World and Pinchy’s. They all make their own.”
“Make our own what?” I say.
“Porn!” he barks. “It’s easy. You do some auditions, buy an 8mm camera, a mattress, and a fake houseplant and start shooting. Post it in the Express, ask a few of the undercard chicks if they’ll fuck on film for fifty bucks. I don’t know. I’m like your dad here, we don’t know dick about porn movies. We come from vaudeville.”
“We’re not making movies,” my father says. “I don’t want that in my life. Either find out where to buy them or pull that fuckin’ system out and get the money back. We’ll survive on the live.”
“I know exactly where to buy them,” Ira says. “But as soon as you get in bed with the goombas, you never get free. You know that, Marty.”
“No thugs,” my father says. “I’d rather open a Dairy Queen.”
“I can name ten places on the strip that make their own. Buy a camera and the mattress and you just saved ten K a year in distributor fees and around two hundred K to grease whichever goomba comes down the road. How ’bout you?” Ira turns to me.
“How about me, what?”
“You’re a photographer, right? Can use a movie camera.”
“That’s it, Ira. Hire my kid to make your dirty movies.”
Ira laughs. “I’m buying you a movie camera for your birthday.”
“Could you get me some water?” my dad says.
I go to the bathroom and fill a cup. He drinks it like he’s been crawling in the desert. In the other room I see Sarah at the vanity table.
“This one’s especially for you,” Brandi says to Debra, removing a wig from its Styrofoam head.
It’s the color of tinsel. The strands are light and floaty and reflect off the wall.
“What do you think?” she says.
Debra smiles. “No thanks.”
“Oh, just try it.”
“It won’t fit.”
“Yes it will,” she says, guiding her to the edge of the bed.
She pulls out Debra’s ponytail tie and starts pinning her hair on top of more hair until it’s all off her neck. Brandi places the wig on Debra’s head, tugging it down until she’s satisfied and grinning and beaming like a proud parent.
“Amazing,” I say.
Sarah says something in Yiddish and Debra laughs and adjusts the wig.
“Please let me take your picture.”
Another knock on the door.
“Jesus Christ,” calls Brandi. “Who is it now?”
No answer.
The girls both run into the bathroom and close the door.
“Who is it, please?”
Silence. Silence.
“I’m looking for Dena,” a voice says. “I’m looking for my daughter. Her name is Dena.”
I bolt into my father’s room. He and Ira are both gone. “Dad,” I yell in a whisper.
“What?” he says, from the bathroom.
“Dad, she’s here!”
“Who?”
At the door my eyesight blurs as I reach for the doorknob. And there she is, out of breath, shoving my shoulder and rushing past me and into the room. “Where are they?”
“Mom, wait.”
“Where are they?” I hear her say, and then Brandi’s “Hello, Miriam.”
My mother starts banging on the bathroom door.
“It’s me!” she says, crying now, rattling the doorknob. “Open this up.”
My father steps into the room. “Mickey? Look at me. Hey, Mickey, can you relax?”
“I’ve called the police, Martin,” she says. “It’s over. It’s over, Dena!” she yells between the hinges. “Just open up. Please. Open this now.”
We all hear the door unlock and the second Debra appears my mother slaps her with an open hand, below her right eye. From behind me I see Brandi lurch forward and grip the back of my mother’s black dress. She swings her body out of the way and onto the carpet like Raggedy Ann. My mother tries to get up fast but Brandi stops her with her knee.
“Who do you think you are?” she says to my mother’s face. “Don’t you ever touch her again!”
My father’s tries to unhinge Brandi’s hand. “Let go, Arlene,” he says. “Let go of her dress.”
Debra runs over and kneels down to my mother. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mama, I didn’t know you were scared.”
My mother rises, takes Debra’s hand, and leads her toward the door. “Sarah!” she says, and Sarah emerges from the bathroom, covering herself with two towels.
