Rockaway (9 page)

She wondered who or what they think she is to him. A niece, the daughter of a friend?

When one of them missed a ball and swore the others poked him, and jerked their heads at her. She was joined on the bench by a guy named Albie, who wasn't allowed to play; he showed her the inch-long scar on his thigh from a recent angioplasty and the Aztec-design pillbox in the left pocket of his shorts where he kept his nitroglycerin pills. No problem, she reassured him; her father keeps handy a bottle of those same infinitesimal white chips, she knows about angina and putting one under the tongue. She remembered coming home from eighth grade and finding her father gray, lying on the bathroom floor, rigid and limp with pain, her mother stumbling, rummaging in cabinets
and drawers and babbling,
Sarah, thank God you're here, do something, do something!

She'd told her mother to calm down, call 911, and she'd tipped her father's head back, dropped in the pill, assured and cradled him until the paramedics arrived.

She told Albie about her father's prostate cancer, that the hormone therapy and radiation seem to be working, that he's still able to play a lot of golf. Albie told her about a prostate piece in the
Times
, quoted statistics on morbidity and aging, then mournfully watched the other guys play. Marty gave her a clownish grin, waved, and went back to the game.

Once, walking down a block of musicians and street vendors and coffee houses in Greenwich Village, he stopped in front of a post-waif girl with chromate yellow glasses, on her knees, flipping through a slanted stack of weathered record albums.

“Oh, wow,” he said to Sarah. “You're not going to believe this.”

He leaned over the girl and pulled an album out; the cover was an overexposed black-and-white photo of a young man with wild, curly dark hair, handsome, bare-chested and somber, his eyes soulful, leaning against a big tree. He handed the album to Sarah and tapped the upper right corner: M
ARTY
Z
ALE
.

“This is
you
?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, sheepish but pleased. “My Jim Croce era. Wow. This thing is over thirty years old.”

“Are you going to buy it?”

“I've
got
it,” he said. “I got it at home, I'll show you. I'll play it for you. The sound quality, it's different. You probably never heard the real thing.” The album's cardboard shine was mottled, its corner tips worn gray and furred. He read the liner notes, nodding.

She was nonplussed by the old, young, exposed image of him. “It's sort of a relief,” she said finally. He looked at her quizzically. “It's proof you are who you say you are,” she said.

“Yeah.” Then he regarded her a moment, baffled. “Aren't
you
?”

“SO, WAIT, ARE you sleeping with him?” her friend Emily asked on the phone.

“No. I don't even peck him good night on the cheek. He's never once touched me.” She felt vaguely embarrassed, not knowing how to explain this . . . relationship? She doesn't even know what to call it. “Which is totally fine, by the way. My head isn't even in that space. I'm completely focused on work. That's the whole reason I'm here.”

“I hope you're getting out to the beach, at least. The kids love it when we visit Nana.”

“I was going for a lot of walks, at first. But it's so crowded now.” Invaded, she didn't say, taken over by trespassing kids, and families with kids, kicking gritty sand on her oiled legs, leaving spittled pistachio shells and popsicle sticks and soda cans trickling out to dark blotches in the sand. Even the oyster and clamshells are gone; a tractor plows across the beach every morning, roaring into her bedroom window at six or seven
AM
, crushing everything down to smooth out the sand for feet and blankets and castles. The few unbroken shells left are quickly snatched up to make mermaid jewelry, to decorate battlements or pave moats. She is irritated by the simultaneous littering and scavenging of her beach by children and their silly sense of treasure. Their screeching. A walk on the beach now means dodging screaming kids with slopping bucketfuls of sea water, boomboxes turned up too loud and people screaming over summer pop tunes. Now, when she isn't out somewhere with Marty, she mostly stays inside or on Nana's porch, frustrated and annoyed that she is arranging her time this way. Like a still life with too central a focal point, with no sense of movement.

“Well, you have to. You have to go in swimming, at some point,” Emily said.

“I will. I just haven't yet. I've been so busy. And the water's probably still pretty cold.” Sarah heard children screaming
in the background, suspicious crashing sounds. “What's going on?”

“The kids are dismantling the living room. I told them we need to clear space for the birthing tub. Hey, Rachel? Sweetie, don't let Elijah chew on that, okay? It's icky.”

Sarah envisioned Emily's two howling kids, Rachel at three and Elijah at fourteen months, running amok in Emily's renovated eighteenth-century farmhouse, their cupid faces smeared with fresh-picked blueberries, wearing the tie-dye shirts and whimsical fairy wings made at neighbor children's birthday parties, spilling apple juice and climbing on the Stickley furniture. She pictured Emily, seven months pregnant, varicose, trodding around after them. The thought creeped her, gave her a headache. She and Emily are one month apart in age, and used to get their periods in sync.

“Sorry,” Emily said in her ear. “We just had the sheep shorn, and Elijah likes chewing on the fleece. There's bags of it by the door, I haven't had time to get it washed and carded yet.”

“‘Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?'”

“Don't, please. Rachel won't stop with that. I love my child, but I hear that one more time, I will have to kill her.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Tired. Fecund. My parents are coming for the birth, and my Aunt Rose and Susan are bringing Nana, did I tell you?”

“How's she doing?”

“Amazing. Doing all her physical therapy and zipping around with her walker. She said there's no way she's missing it. And I really, really, want you to get here early and be my doula this time, all right? You should come maybe the first week of August.”

“I'm there. I can't wait. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. And maybe you can do some work while you're here. If you can find a quiet and uncluttered spot.”

“Yeah, maybe. So, are you squatting? Are you doing your perineal massage?”

“Yup. And Michael oils my labia every night. This is my life.”

“That's why this is wonderful. I can experience the whole gruesome miracle through you, and not ever have to do it myself.”

“You're welcome. Next baby, I'm hiring a surrogate.” She heard Emily sigh. “Then I can run off and hang out with you somewhere. Frolic in the ocean.”

“There aren't any sharks in the water around here, right?”

“I don't think so, that far north.”

“What about jellyfish?”

“They're no big deal.”

“Riptides?”

“Oh my God, listen to you. Don't worry, they put up a red flag if it's dangerous. Elijah, honey, come here. You want some nunu?” Sarah heard snaps, the fumbling with a strap.

“You still have milk?” Sarah asked.

“A little. It's more a comfort thing for him. And every time I nurse, I do Kegels.”

“You're going to have vaginal walls of steel.”

“Wonderful. Hey, are you still into that guy?”

“What guy?” She was startled, for a moment, thinking of Marty.

“That young guy you were dating. The kid. Dean?”

“David. Did my saying ‘vaginal walls of steel' make you think of him?”

“I did vicariously enjoy those stories of yours.”

“That's all over, sorry. We ended it when I left.”

“Well, maybe the timing was off.”

“Nah. It was just a fling.”

“So, the big question, now.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You ready?”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you painting?”

“Yes, of course. I mean, I
started
a painting,” Sarah said. She glanced at the barely-begun canvas on her easel, at all the other canvases leaning against the walls of her room, still empty and inscrutable. “I started,” she repeated. She
lifted her new Isabey brush, inspected to see if it was fully clean, fully dry. “But it's just sitting there. It's barely a start, really. Maybe it's nothing.”

This is flat, Sarah
, her professor used to say.
Look at the flaw in your composition. The lack of perspective. You need to work on the illusion of depth!

“Well, you just turned your life completely upside down for this. That can be pretty paralyzing. And there's a lot at stake. But look, you've started! That's the hardest part. Diving in.”

“I know.” She set her brush down. “I have hope. I'm keeping the faith.”

“I can't wait to see it. I'm so really really glad you're doing this, finally.”

“Me, too.”

“It's what you're supposed to be doing.”

“Well, thanks.”

“It doesn't have to be perfect, you know. You always do that to yourself.

“I know.”

“Just keep going.”

“I will. I am. Okay?” She hears the edge in her voice, adds a casual chuckle.

“I don't mean to lecture you, I swear. I know I've got zero credibility. I haven't written a poem in six years.”

“You've been busy. You're busy doing the most important thing in the world.”

“Yeah, right.”

“And you do it so well,” Sarah said. “Really.” Because everything you do, she thought, you do so well. Everything Emily does is important. Is interesting. She published two books of poetry before she was twenty-eight, she won prizes, scholarships, grants, she traveled, she married a rich and handsome man who gave her those exquisite, obnoxious children with her perfect curls and his solemn, Dutch master face. She makes fennel soup and knows what to do with monkfish, knows how to make chunks of tofu taste like heavy cream. At Halloween she carves Picasso and Modigliani pumpkins. She has done so much, already, effortlessly and perfectly and ahead of schedule. Her life is in Golden Section proportion. Sarah could hear Elijah sucking, gulping, pictured him draped across Emily's lap, and suddenly thought of that crazed guy taking a sledgehammer to the Pietà in Rome, the lunatic who'd gotten past Vatican security and smashed away at Mary's serene marble head, at Jesus's death-limp face.

“Rachel's been painting a lot,” Emily was saying. “Of course, I think she's a genius. Maybe she takes after you.”

“Ah. You mean she
isn't
painting a lot.”

“Oh, Sarah. Maybe that's really what you're doing with that Marty guy.”

“What?”

“Not painting.”

“What if I just really don't
want
to paint?”

“Come on.”

“Maybe that's what this summer is really about. Maybe painting
isn't
what I'm supposed to be doing. Maybe there's some whole other thing I just haven't figured out yet.” She sat on the edge of her bed, feeling a little breathless.

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don't know . . .” She flopped back on the bed, considered the ceiling. She reached, brushed away the annoying grains of sand tucked between her toes. “Never mind. I'm just cranky. I'm just tired. Hey, maybe I can hire a surrogate painter.”

“It's just . . .”

“What?”

“You always find something, you know? Some excuse.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, like grad school. Chicago.”

She sat up. “That wasn't a choice, Em. My dad had to have the bypass. I had to go home.”