by Rick Gekoski
Addie dropped the kids and Perle at Brown’s Beach – Becca recalcitrant and cranky, Jake in his own world, already scanning the water for his friends – and drove down the road a mile or so, less than a mile, a minute, to join Sally Morris at the tiny beach that served the residents of the development on the hill above. It had no facilities save a floating raft to swim out to, and if you wanted a drink or something to eat, you had to bring it yourself. This was good: it meant that families tended to go down the road, where the sand was better and there was a ready supply of hotdogs, Cokes and ice cream to pacify the children, and slow them down. Whereas at Sally’s beach – as far as Addie knew, it didn’t have a name – a few indolent adults roasted on the sand, swam in their stately breast strokes to the raft, tried to climb up its slippery ladder, soon swam back.
The women laid a blanket at the rear of the beach close enough to the road to catch a bit of the shade from the trees, poured themselves some iced tea from the Thermos, happy to be together, free from domestic responsibilities. Sally was long reconciled to her childlessness, had indeed come to treasure it, when she looked at the lives of her friends and the strangleholds their children had over them. No, no thanks! It had been a trial and a long ache, but now it seemed a blessing.
‘So, how’s it going, are you settling in all right? Is your mother being . . . well, you know, your mother?’
Addie laughed, lay back on her blanket, adjusted a folded towel under her head. Sally was her only friend in Huntington, always available, non-judgmental, waspish, funny. They claimed to have the same view of the world, though neither could have articulated, quite, what it consisted of, though disappointment was writ large at the centre. Wry disappointment, perhaps, but neither woman felt she had entered the promised land of her girlhood dreams. Nobody does, they acknowledged, nobody does. Everyone is disappointed, but not everyone is both angry and funny at the same time, in similar ways. It was common ground, they were proud of it.
‘Never mind about her,’ Addie said. ‘But have a look at this, will you?’
She reached into her bag and took out Ben’s letter, which had arrived that morning, handed it over. Sally read it quickly and looked up over the rim of her sunglasses.
‘Nu?’
Addie sat up, took it back and crumpled it up before depositing it angrily in her bag.
‘Have you ever heard such condescending bullshit? I’m so furious I almost called him at his office!’
‘Bad idea,’ said Sally firmly. ‘Very bad idea. Anyway, what’s so terrible about it? Bit boring, yeah, I get that. Not engaged. Dutiful. But it’s sweet he wrote as soon as he got home. Harold would never do that!’
Addie was fascinated by her friend’s marriage, so unlike any she’d encountered, the opposite of a Lawrentian passion. If she’d been a novelist it would have been her subject, it was a great story, there was something so touching and pathetic about it.
Harold was no match for his wife’s wit or incisiveness, her openness to experience, which didn’t stop her not quite loving him, but being a devoted, and fond, wife. He had the kind of sweet nature that masks vacuity – it didn’t take long to sense the emptiness within – but his had been a hard life. He’d been born with a harelip and had been subjected to a lifetime of surgical procedures designed first to eradicate, then to ameliorate, his disfigurement. They worked to a small degree, but no one meeting him for the first time failed to be startled, and no one would have guessed that he had previously looked even worse.
It was the single fact, that harelip, that first drew Sally to him, and which she found if not attractive certainly not unattractive either. Viewed from the right angle and with the right attitude, Harold looked like he was turning up his lip – not in a sneer or a smirk (the usual descriptions) but with a look of wry amusement: it looked . . . well, intelligent, whimsical. Sexy even.
Sally was a brilliant student, could have gone to Yale or Radcliffe, with all those perfect blonde girls, but chose Hunter instead, in the sad belief that the many Jewish girls there were uglier than shiksas. She would blend in with the flabby, frizzy-haired, baggy-eyed and hook-nosed.
Her father supported the choice of college in his usual tepid manner, nice to be amongst one’s own, he supposed. Having no sense of humour, he read joke books and memorised the best ones, unfailingly lame. He was not a practising Jew: I don’t have to practise, I’m very good at it. It made her wince: I’m not very observant, I’m sort of Jew-ish.
Harold, whom she met at a Freshman Mixer, was first a friend, then her first lover, recognised quickly as her destiny. One of her college acquaintances, seeing them together, suggested to another – who reported it back to Sally – that it was a hare-brained relationship. She and Harold ran away and got married the next week, came back to school and never mentioned it, not even to their parents for some months. The parents, all four of them, were relieved. Thank God for that! If they’d missed the show of a wedding, at least there had been one.
It had been a satisfactory arrangement, the best she was likely to find, lucky really. Life was drab, but it was the best she could get, being her. She’d been jealous of Addie, perhaps envious was a better word, ever since they’d met at the beach some five or six years ago. Addie was not merely beautiful, she was, well, sort of exotic, with her dark eyes, improbable cheekbones, gorgeous hair, wavy and perfect, and she never had to do anything to it!
Addie went back to her bag, unscrunched the yellow letter, looked at it with disdain.
‘What I can’t work out,’ she said, ‘is whether he’s deluded, or being hostile?’ (She loved the term ‘hostility’, which she’d picked up in graduate school in a seminar on passive aggression.)
‘Not sure I’m following you . . .’
‘This crap about what a jolly car trip to the bungalow, like some family out of a Betty Crocker commercial: see the happy family, smiling together, eating their goddamn cake! Ben knows perfectly well – I think he does, please God he does, God help me if he doesn’t – that it was a nightmare, awful, really terrible, with him pretending and joking and singing stupid songs, teasing the kids and goading me, and setting them against me . . .’
‘Stop! Stop! You’re allowed to breathe, you know.’
‘He does it on purpose, this misrepresentation, he does it to deny my unhappiness, to goad me, to make him the good guy and me a sourpuss!’
Sally started to laugh.
‘But Addie,’ she said, ‘you are a sourpuss!’
Addie laughed as well, heartily, stopped talking, drank some iced tea, wiped her pristine, beautiful lip with her fingers.
‘Goddamn right, I am.’
She lay back and closed her eyes, as if in acknowledgement of a complete truth. But a moment later she sat up and continued.
‘OK, we have to leave DC, we have to. We are agreed about that, it’s insupportable. But why do we have to come to Huntington? I’m a city girl, I’ve only ever lived in cities: New York, Philly, St Louis, DC. City life is the only life that gives women a chance! And anyway, I don’t want to be near, anywhere near, my mother and that goddamn Michelle and her uterine utopia.’
‘I agree. Harold and I like coming here for the summer, and for weekends sometimes, but I’d die without Manhattan, shrivel up and die. After all, what is there to do here?’
‘Beside bitching on the beach, you mean?’
‘Yeah, besides that.’
‘I’d go mad here. Without a job. It’s been too long. Any more time goes by and I will have lost the will to work. Or to live.’
‘Wait a minute, hang on! I saw something . . . was it Newsday? Or The Long Islander? I can’t remember, but it was something about the Long Island school districts hiring school social workers. Not now, but sometime soon. Some sort of worthy programme with a lot of state funding . . .’
Addie shuddered. ‘Not for me, not for me. I don’t like children, even when they’re happy and well adjusted. The idea of working with miserable ones makes my skin crawl.’
Sally looked slightly shocked, turned away, tried to hide it.
‘You seem to like yours well enough . . .’
‘Of course I do, of course I do. I make an exception for family.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Most family.’ She was obviously thinking of Michelle’s eldest, a scowling and petulant child called Jenny, who needed her own personal social worker. Instead Jenny got Michelle, her own personal slave. The child took no pleasure in her mother’s docile desire to please, ran roughshod over her.
‘Darling, no one likes children. Anyone who claims to “adore” children, without consideration of which one, and in what way, is a sentimental idiot. And a liar. Children are the ultimate advertisement for original sin.’
‘Agreed. So why are you telling me about this schleppy job? I thought we were friends.’
‘All social work is schleppy! Nobody said you’d enjoy it. Plumbers don’t have to like shit, do they?’
‘You know why I did it? Parental pressure. I wanted to do a training in clinical psychology and become a therapist, but Maurice wouldn’t hear of it, wouldn’t pay for it. “One more year,” he said, “and you’re on your own.”’
Sally took her hand, as if in sympathy, but mostly just to slow her down; she knew the signs, a little more of this and Addie would implode, start to cry or to rant. She was always moved by the spectacle of her own unhappiness.
‘Self-interest, my dear. Think self-interestedly.’ It was hardly necessary to give this advice to Addie, who usually did. But she wasn’t focusing properly, needed to be directed. ‘So we’re agreed. It was a bad choice of career, all social work jobs are miserable, but some are more miserable than others . . .’
‘Like those with children!’
‘Do shut up. The key to this is that it is school social work.’
There was a pause. Addie was trying to think but nothing happened in her head. So what if it was in a school?
Sally waved her hand in the air, turned it round and round as if stirring a pot.
‘What is unusual about schools?’
No response, Addie was starting to look both irritated and bored. What’s the difference between a duck?
‘When are schools open? When do teachers actually work, if you could call it work? Why is it so easy to be a teacher?’
‘Is it? I think it’s a miserable job.’
‘Of course, everyone knows that. But it’s a short job. Home every day by four, great holidays, and best of all: summers off! If a factory worker did those hours they’d think they were in heaven!’
‘Oh . . . You’re right, OK, I can see that. But it would make me feel exploited, like a whore, renting myself out to do someone else’s dirty stuff. No way, not doing it!’
‘Sourpuss! If you don’t want to feel like a whore you’re in the wrong line of work. And if you cannot abide working with children, why not apply for a job at Family Service League? They’re expanding. I know one of the women on the board, I could put you in touch . . .’
Addie nodded, submitting.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I need to get some work, it’s been a dreadful few years.’
‘Anyway, you know the best thing you could do now? To calm down? Go soak your head! Come on, I’ll race you out to the raft!’
Addie turned down the offer – the only thing worse than feeling hot and cross would be feeling wet and cross. Anyway, a quick look at her watch confirmed that she was already late for picking up Perle and the kids at Brown’s Beach.
‘Gotta go. Love you,’ she said, blowing an air kiss and heading up to the road.
‘She vomited.’
Perle made the announcement with a kind of relish, as if the arrival of an unexpected virus or bacterium was a confirmation of her entire view of life. Becca was lying on the blanket, a towel over her to keep off the sun, looking pale.
‘What did she eat?’ Addie didn’t have much confidence in the fly-blown overcooked burgers and hotdogs at the beach café, but would never have prohibited their consumption, rather liked the odd burger herself, and if an occasional tummy ache or spot of diarrhoea followed, well, that was a price worth paying. There were enough things to worry about, things you could see, without worrying about germs. Invisible! What germs?
Perle, of course, wouldn’t countenance beach food, always brought a basket of sandwiches, cool drinks and vegetables sliced into bite-sized bits: cucumbers, peppers, small tomatoes, carrots. The children refused to eat them, called them rabbit food, so she ate too many herself, to show how delicious they were, and ended up with a stomach ache worse than that produced by the hotdogs.
‘Nothing, not even a drink. I tried to get some liquid in her. We’ve been waiting for you for over an hour, would have walked home if the little one could have made it. And it is so hot!’
Perle wiped her forehead dramatically. It was in the nineties, again, the hottest July for many years, and they had to make a constant effort to keep the children from overheating. In the yard the hose was running most of the time while they squealed and squirted each other; other times they went to the beach and stayed in the water. Not that it was cool enough, even, to be refreshing. The sun darkened their skins quickly, they looked like brown little animals with white tushies where the sun didn’t shine.
‘Hold on a second! I was only due to pick you up at three . . .’
‘Exactly!’ Perle said. ‘You’re late, as usual.’
‘Mother,’ said Addie, ‘it’s only a quarter after.’
Perle nodded at this confirmation of her disappointment.
‘Can I go home now?’ asked Becca weakly, rising slowly from the sand. ‘I feel sick.’ Addie leant over and put her hand on the child’s forehead, left it there.
‘No way to tell in the sun, she’s hot anyway,’ said Perle scornfully. ‘We can take her temperature when we get home.’
Becca winced. ‘No! You don’t need to. I just want to rest!’
Addie was gathering up the beach stuff, folding the blankets and towels, putting the paper plates and cups back in the picnic hamper, waving to a reluctant Jake in the water, urging him back to the beach.
‘She’ll be fine,’ she said, dismissively. ‘It’s only psychosomatic.’ She thought almost all illnesses were generated by the mind, just forms of attention-seeking, not worth taking seriously, except when she had one.
On their arrival at the bungalow Perle set off with grim measured tread in search of the thermometer and jar of Vaseline. She adored making a medical intervention: applying Mercurochrome, dispersing aspirins, putting on Band-Aids, mopping brows, rubbing in ointments and creams, squeezing pimples and pustules, removing splinters, inserting enema tubes or thermometers. Reluctance in her patients only confirmed how necessary her ministrations were.
One year, when Jake was starting to shed his baby teeth, he had one very loose in the front of his mouth, which he kept worrying with his finger, making it looser and looser, but still moored in its setting. It made Perle furious to see him so reluctant to face the dental music, and if she could have tied him down and removed it with pliers would happily have done so. As it was, she convinced the reluctant boy, with offers of various treats (and a dollar) to use the tested procedure – though never tested by her, or him – of putting thread round the tooth, attaching the other end to a doorknob and closing the door sharply. At first it didn’t work because he merely moved towards the door as it was closing. Then it didn’t work because the thread came loose. Then it didn’t work because the thread bit into his gum, the tooth stayed fixed, and copious blood and screams were released. She found the process, all things considered, rather satisfying, all that bleeding to see to. Two days later the tooth fell out of its own free will.
Becca was shepherded into the bedroom, laid on her stomach, swimsuit pulled aside. But rolling onto her side in evasive action, she saw her brother lurking in the corner.
‘Addie! Make him go away!’
‘Jake!’ she admonished. ‘What did I tell you about th
is?’
Yes, she had a temperature of 101.4, was given an aspirin and a lot of water, and put to bed, sweating and miserable, but glad soon to be on her own. Granny fussed about for a time, tucked her in, interrogated her on any other symptoms: Headache? A little. Tummy ache? A little. Sore throat? Yes. Anything else? Becca considered.
‘I’m tired. I want to sleep.’ Which she did for four hours, until the next aspirin was due.
Dear Ben,
Thanks for your letter, which arrived this morning. I’m glad your trip home was so enjoyable. I’d quite like one myself! Not much new here, in only two days, but Becca seems to have caught some sort of bug and is in bed with a temperature. If it doesn’t go down tomorrow I’ll take her to the paediatrician, what’s his name, that nice Jonathan . . . Rose, was it? The one you thought I flirted with. I didn’t, but he should see her, you have to be careful these days. Not that doctors can do much good. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.
My mother is driving me crazy clucking round her sick granddaughter, making a fuss, enjoying herself. She likes to feel indispensable, and God knows I’m no clucker myself. Anyway illness only confirms her view of the human condition. She keeps popping into the bedroom to make sure Becca is still asleep, straightens her blankets in an attempt – not at all unconscious! – to wake her, so the poor child can see how her Granny dotes on her, and her mother doesn’t.
The kids miss you, with your good cheer and funny riddles and goofy songs. They keep humming Sam Hall, all the time, it’s starting to drive me crazy. Crazier. Damn his eyes.
I envy you the peace and quiet, and hope you get some writing done.
I don’t know what to say about the Silbers’ apartment. I know you were trying to be positive. I’m not. Neither are you, not really. It’s as awful as ours. Does it have to be Huntington? Does it? It’s terrible to raise children in a wasteland like this, with nothing to see or do or visit or be educated by. No theatres, no museums, no department stores, no bookshops – cities have decent schools full of interesting children, of different backgrounds, different races even. I love it when we go into DC and there are faces and people from all round the world, brown and yellow and white, it’s so thrilling and rich, and so good for the kids to see. Cities are the great invention of mankind, the triumph of civilisation! Why abandon them in favour of this? The only brown faces you see on Long Island are workers and maids, gardeners, busboys. It’s monochrome, racially and morally. It teaches children all the wrong lessons!
