Before My Eyes (16 page)

“He wishes he knew me,” says Samantha to Jackson.

Barkley leans toward her. “I know that you have been watching me. All the girls in pink have been.”

I'd feel better if there were some irony in that statement, but part of me believes that Barkley believes they've been spying on him. He's dead serious.

“In your dreams,” says Samantha. She flutters her shiny pink nails down on Jackson's hand. He's not holding hands with her, though. At least, they're not at that stage.

And why do I care?

“Hey, I can't wait until school starts, Cooper,” says Jackson, right up into my face.

“I can't wait, Jackson.” My neck and shoulders tighten, and I wish I were floating, not arguing, not thinking, not having to deal with Jackson or Peter or Barkley. In all this, Tricia is looking at me like she wants to tell me something, something funny, and I'm not sure what to do with her behind the Snack Shack counter. I really don't want Samantha or Jackson seeing the fat girl liking me. Trish hands me a humongous swirl cone and rubs my back. I act like I'm in a hurry.

Samantha swivels away from Barkley. “He's an a-hole,” Samantha says to Jackson so prettily I barely catch the insult. I don't know whether she's talking about Barkley or me. All at once, I wish she didn't say it, I didn't hear it, and that she means Barkley, not me.

I shove the cone toward Jackson, a lopsided swirl, dripping at its sides. I want to push it in his face.

“Hey, what the hell is this?” says Jackson.

“Swirl,” responds Peter.

“Take it,” I say. “On me.”

“What a mess,” Jackson says, shrugging and agreeing to the cone, lapping the ice cream up. He offers it to Samantha, who licks in the same place he licked. They step over the end of the counter with their free cone, and I think, some guys get it all: the game, the girl, the cone.

“Enjoy, sweetie,” shouts Trish at them.

“Hey, enjoy,” says Peter behind her, relieved, good-natured as always, though his innocence makes me sad.

The line breaks toward the counter in a wave. All of a sudden, Barkley, in a flat, loud voice says, “Form one line. Get on line. Do you know that only in New York do you get on line?”

A couple of the little kids push left and right. But Barkley freezes. He tilts his head as if listening to something that none of the rest of us can hear.

“You did good, Barkley,” says Trish to him. “Are you coming back on this side of the counter?”

“I know what it means,” he says to no one in particular.

“What it means?” I ask as I keep an eye on Peter serving up bottled water to one kid and a hot dog to the next. With Barkley on the other side of the counter, everyone on line is behaving for the moment. Maybe we should keep him there.

“What it means to be bullied.” He says this to me and Trish without emotion. I take an order for hot dogs and water. Make change. He continues, “And not having anyone side with you, having to listen to that voice in your head to discern what is right and what is wrong.”

I'm not sure why Barkley is always trying to prove he's smarter than us. Maybe I can't get beyond the shaved head, the body odor, and the mirrored sunglasses. Maybe I should be listening to the voice inside my head. Maybe he makes more sense than most.

However, his tragic flaw is that he keeps talking. “The voice inside us needs to be strong, or else evil wins. We cannot let the forces of evil and disorder win, can we?”

Part of me is thinking:
Screw it. Let evil and disorder win. Vote for anarchy.
I don't even fully know what I mean by that, but it feels good to be angry.

Off to the side of the Snack Shack counter, Samantha bends toward Jackson. He smashes the melting end of the cone into his mouth. She swipes at the ice cream with the tip of her tongue, and, seeing me watching her, licks again, slowly. His arm drapes around her shoulder. He flings the cone toward our garbage can and misses. Their cold mouths kiss. Sea gulls attack their ice cream cone.

Beyond the two of them, holding her sister's hand, is Claire, studying the scene, too—Samantha and Jackson kissing—and me, watching, and her watching. Somehow time or movement, the ordinary comings and goings of the sun or tide, contracts to this kiss. They are kissing and the sea gulls are scrambling on top of one another, a flurry of wings over the garbage, and I want to call out to Claire and say—
say what?
Come here? I'll give you and Izzy a free ice cream cone? Come here, because I've got to admit that Samantha is the girl that I've been jerking off to all summer long and that she isn't you, and I'm glad that you're not her?

Instead, I'm hammered by the next customer. “Anybody working here?” he yells across the counter. “I need six ice cream cones before the end of summer.”

“Vanilla, chocolate, or swirl?” I say automatically. Claire's long legs are cutting a path in the crowd, and Izzy's dangling on to her fingertips. I hope she isn't leaving the beach.

“Napkins? Do you have any napkins for me?” Samantha appears at the side of the counter. She directs this question at me, and I look at her dully. The tip of her tongue slices around her mouth. “I'm all sticky,” she says.

“Let's go, Sammie,” shouts Jackson. “We don't have time for these speds.” He raises his hand in a final salute, a middle finger aimed at us.

Next to me, Trish bursts out laughing, relieved, triumphant even, that Jackson is leaving, and of course Peter joins in. I follow, too. Sometimes you can't do anything but go along, even though it will probably hurt me more with Jackson when school starts. But for right now, I laugh at being called a sped.

Barkley tucks his mirrored glasses into the pocket of his sweatshirt. He blinks rapidly, as if negating the crowd, the requests, the daily demands on each of us, and focuses on Jackson. Someone is asking me for a bottle of water, and, for the tenth time this shift, to make sure it's cold.

“Bark, hey, you coming back to work?” I ask, because it's clear that he's not. He's trailing Jackson. “We have a long line here.”

“Make sure it's really cold,” says the next customer in front of me. Under her wide-brimmed hat, this customer's face is too smooth, her lips too full, and her top up and tight as if someone gave orders for her to defy gravity at all costs. Most of all, she's too old for her polka-dot bikini, and worse yet, she thinks she's something I should be looking at.

“Real cold, honey,” trying to catch my eyes and flirt. “It's brutal out here.”

I monitor Barkley. He's closing in on Jackson and Samantha. “Bark! We need your help.”

Instead, he takes off, bounding at Jackson. He bashes into him, throwing him to the sand, sprawling on top of him, pounding the back of his head. A mass of arms and legs rolls through the sand. The line splits apart. Attention is on the fight.

“What is going on?” My customer is annoyed. “I really need my water, don't you see that?”

I race out of the Snack Shack. An old guy in a T-shirt that says “The beer stops here” tries to help and is knocked backward by Barkley wrestling Jackson. The old guy starts cursing about kids, but doesn't make any further effort. Jackson screams.

“Who is a sped? Tell me?” Barkley shouts as he locks around Jackson's suddenly fragile-looking neck.

I grab hold of Barkley's hands. They are ice cold. It's a hundred degrees out and his fingers are ice cold. Maybe he's taken some of his own pills, and they've just kicked in. And if he's done that, will it somehow get back to me that I have pills, too? Maybe the same ones? I don't know if it's Jackson, or Barkley, or me that I'm most concerned about.

Jackson yelps, red-faced.

“Don't kill him, Barkley,” I say, losing my foothold in the sand.

Barkley bashes me in the chest with his elbow, once, twice, rocking the air out of me. I stagger—I didn't think under all that flab was muscle—but I hang on. His hands screw around Jackson's neck. I think: Barkley is going to kill Jackson on my last shift.

“It's the heat! Don't you see? It's making us all crazy. This never-ending heat!” the lady in the polka-dot bikini squeals at us. Another corner is yelling, “Fight. Fight!” Samantha is shouting “Jackson!” as if that will save him. I feel dizzy and sick. Barkley elbows me again, swift and hard. I fall back. My mouth is open. Sand mashes in. I'm eating sand. I should let him kill Jackson.

Like an ox, Peter, in his yellow work boots, stomps out of the Snack Shack. As if through a long tunnel, I hear Trish urging him, “Get Barkley off Jackson.”

And Peter snatches the back of Barkley's sweatshirt. With a grunt, he yanks Barkley from Jackson, who wriggles free, a snake in the sand. Peter keeps his arm around Barkley until, a second or two later, with a violent jerk, Barkley shakes him off and crawls forward—he's searching for his sunglasses in the sand, and finding them a few feet away, sticks them in his pocket. He refuses any more help from Peter, stands in a slouch, arms hanging down, a kicked dog, and lumbers toward the Snack Shack, muttering “sped” under his breath.

My head clears. I stagger my way to my feet next to Peter. He tries to help me and I let him and he's happy, as if we were a team.

Jackson leaps up, cursing, sweat flying. Samantha whips herself between him and me. She's holding up her pink nails between us, and I've got to admit it, perking up those bikini breasts, not much in comparison to someone like Claire, but serviceable in this blocking defense.

“My father is a lawyer,” she says, as if that will solve anything.

“Move,” Jackson says to her.

She glances from me to Jackson, drops her hands, and leans into him, half his size, as if she has nowhere else to go. He's going to be okay—I bet he's even going to get laid at the end of the day.

“I'm going to kill you, Bark,” shouts Jackson over her head, not touching her. Barkley doesn't turn around or otherwise acknowledge Jackson. “You hear me, you fuckin' freak? I'm going to kill you. And you too, Cooper. Just see if anybody shows up at your party. I don't care if you're on the team. Just see what happens to you this year. You're dead. You hear me? Dead to me and everybody else.” Having made his threats, he storms off, back down to the sea. Samantha follows, yet after a few steps stops on the hot sand, glances back at me, then wets her lips, but I'm done looking at her.

Claire

Saturday, 7:30
P.M.

Joy in the sea. Buoyed by the invisible fins of mermaids. High winds. Rocks crop near. Don't listen to the singing of the women-fish. Don't listen. The current swirls.
Swim, Claire, swim.
“Rip currents are the leading surf hazard for all beachgoers. They are particularly dangerous for weak or nonswimmers. Rip current speeds are typically one to two feet per second. However, speeds as high as eight feet per second have been measured—this is faster than an Olympic swimmer can sprint. Thus, rip currents can sweep even the strongest swimmer out to sea. Over one hundred drownings due to rip currents occur every year in the United States. More than 80 percent of water rescues on surf beaches are due to rip currents. Rip currents can occur at any surf beach with breaking waves.” Lost at sea. Tossed against rocks. Listen, the women-fish sing. Listen.
Swim, Claire, swim.

I'm back in my bedroom. I'm trying to make sense of what happened at the beach today, and what is happening here. I force myself to read back the prose poem. I hate reading my own writing.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” writes Yeats. I feel like I can't sit still. I have that line from last year's English class above my computer. I tear it down. I'm holding it all together.

Izzy and I had an early dinner—vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream. We both agreed that it was a perfect dinner. We had left the beach in the mid-afternoon. I had planned on buying us ice cream cones there, but I don't know what was going on at the Snack Shack, some kind of fight. I saw Max leap from behind the Snack Shack, and thought: he saved me from drowning—he did—and now he's trying to break up a fight, or at least, I think he was trying to break it up. It was like watching a movie, something less than real life, though, of course, it was real. It didn't feel real, I didn't feel real. I'm not sure I feel “real” now. But earlier, that weird guy with the shaved head was also in the middle of the fight. I had warned Izzy never to speak with him again. I don't care if she now knows his name and that he knows mine. I don't care that he was the one she ran to when trying to find help. He didn't help at all. Max did.

Obviously Max likes to get himself in the middle of things—that's all I could think when I saw him in that mess of arms and legs and shouts around the Snack Shack. Izzy said she was sure that Max didn't start the fight. She wanted her ice cream. I don't know who started it or who ended it. I didn't stay for the end. I don't like fights or violence of any kind. I'm sure that I would make the worst witness, if I ever witnessed a real crime, and I hope that I never do. I couldn't even report on my mother to the ambulance driver or the doctor. I couldn't even remember if she woke up with a headache, or what time she woke up. I sometimes feel that details slip away from me, that everything is temporary. Nothing stays. When I write, sometimes these details reappear in the poems, half hidden, symbols, and they are as real as anything. I wonder if this is why I write—to know what's real.

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” My mother would sometimes quote from Edgar Allan Poe when I looked like I was far away, thinking, as she would say, “big thoughts.”

But now, I force myself to be here. I listen for Izzy. I jump up and check on her in the room next door. She is lying flat on her back, her arms stretched out, her blond curls fallen around her, a few strands flung over her face, and she is sleeping, even though it's still light outside. She's exhausted from too much sun, too much beach, and too much ice cream. I tease her pink daisy sheet over her. She kicks it off.