The Shore, page 5
As in, Hey, I know you hook up with hipster groupies, and hey, I don’t know what your deal is and whether you’re secretly a scumbag whose game is so good you knew how to press every single effing button or whether you’re a kid like me who wants adventure and an interesting life, who loves it here and can’t wait to leave and love it more, who doesn’t want to be disappointed.
As in, Hey, just text me back. Just hang around these few weeks, because distraction is medicine. Hey, just keep bringing me dinner because boardwalk pizza’s buttery crust fills a hole in my soul that no IDC ever could. Hey, you really have no idea how much the attention on a warm night and the way you look at me makes me stand up taller, fills me with something bright and certain, whispers to me that this is the teeniest part of what’s ahead—the corners of the world full of kind oddballs, brilliant fuckups, intense introverts, wild old souls out there that I have yet to meet.
Hey, I’ve seen all the movies, and I know how this ends, I know, I know, I know: waving at the beat-up car driving away with the Labor Day traffic. It’s what I’m signing up for, so sign me up for all of it, I get it.
Hey, text me back, and then take me out anywhere late.
Hey, want my virginity? Please, please, say you do, because I don’t want it. Once is seven hundred universes away from never, and I want once before I go back to those basement parties with the Jesses and then to freshman orientation with slurry frat guys, before Never Have I Ever with roommates from a different state, before I spend my summer-job money on new black flats that will give me blisters from standing too long at my dad’s funeral. Hey, take that virginity, it’s yours, because it doesn’t feel like some special gift but an awkward burden. Hey, let me through that grown-up gate! Hey, take this now, hey, check, check, next!
Hey, have you ever had to take care of someone, like really take care of them?
Hey, what have you already lost? Is there a way you get used to it, because every new thing that’s gone feels like an infected wound exposed to the wind, chafing and blistering and refusing to scab over.
Hey, maybe I’ll keep that to myself.
Maybe that will always be the question I ask about anyone, from now on: What have you already lost?
She took a sparkly sun-on-the-ocean picture and posted it in black-and-white, no caption. She watched for the three dots below her Hey to see if he was texting back, but saw nothing and forced herself to put her phone away.
She turned the combination lock on the big wooden storage box and felt the smooth release when it opened on the last number. She collected the trash: a broken sandcastle mold, greasy paper plates, a straw, a plastic spider ring, and four empty beer cans. Then she stacked the beach chairs into two rows, planted six display umbrellas, hauled out her signs, and counted out her bank. Ready for another day.
Only later, gulping ice water on her break, would she see the text Gabe had sent when he woke up:
hey, this is the day I’m supposed to send you one-word texts back, right? like yeah hey hey I’m distracted and busy, hey u, way too busy to text even though I somehow got a day off on a Sunday what is that about, maybe I’m about to get fired.
hey this is the day I’m supposed to act like I don’t care if we hang out again, whatever, wait a couple hours and make you think maybe I forgot all about last night and I don’t care?
nah, if you need me I’ll be here playing cover songs all day about girls named Mary and Bobby Jean because someone’s said all this better than me before, if you need me I’ll be waiting, boss, I’ll be hitting that little blue arrow right away without reading it over to see if what I said made sense or if I said too much
hey, I want to hang out again, and hey, no, I’m not busy and I’m not cool.
CHAPTER FOUR
Margot
The stained-glass window of St. Agnes cast a fading rainbow glow over Evy and Liz fanning themselves with bulletins, and over Brian, gazing at the crucifix and projecting his AMENS too loud at the Sunday evening mass.
“And also with you… spirit,” Margot said, screwing up the call and response.
“SPIRIT WITH YOUR SPIRIT,” Brian hissed, as if Margot had committed a mortal sin. The “with your spirit” wording the church had switched to a decade ago had never stuck in Margot’s long-term memory. They had been lapsed Catholics for years, until Brian got sick and decided to hold everyone’s hands to pray before meals, until he started making the sign of the cross in the air in the middle of a conversation.
Margot had given in to his demand to drag them all back to church, hoping this fixation might distract him from his trickier ones, like forcing her to Google the members of his grade-school baseball team so he could call them all up. Going to mass usually settled Brian as much as any anxiety drug, and tired him out enough to give them another two hours of peace afterward. In church he existed in a state of something close to calm. They slipped in during the opening hymn and left as soon as the priest sat down after communion, avoiding eye contact with the Catholic Casserole Bitches who sometimes referenced God when they dropped off their lasagnas.
After his loud AMEN and hissing at Margot, the family across the aisle all stared at Brian. If this were a place Margot actually prayed, she would say a silent one for patience and grace for herself, and another for that family to hit every red light on their way home and shrink their favorite pants in the dryer. But she didn’t actually pray here. How could she, in a place that had hidden such dark secrets, in a place that might let one of her daughters get married and not the other? She wasn’t here for the prayers. She was here for the quiet music and echoing voices that calmed Brian down.
Evy and Liz giggled, and Margot shot them a glare. She feared any disruption could trigger Brian; the ritual was everything, and if he got distracted, they might never get him back. But of course the girls rolled their eyes. Evy had called her and Brian out years ago on all the things they didn’t actually believe about being Catholic. She’d convinced them that this formal, ancient place that dismissed so many as unholy was not for them anymore.
“Dad said I could decide for myself, and I’m deciding,” Evy had said, when Margot insisted she join them again at mass after Brian got sick. “You act so woke but then you’re gonna make me go fake-pray there? Why?”
“It’s not about—” Margot stopped, too tired to explain to Evy, because she couldn’t really explain all the contradictions and compartmentalization to herself either. “You can decide for yourself again after he’s dead.” Evy had cried, but climbed into the van anyway. Margot felt nauseated that whole mass.
A few days after snapping at Evy, Margot had written in the GBM Wives forum: I was mean to my daughter, how could I have said that? I will never make her set foot in there again after he’s gone, and I might not either. But after that mass Brian said he felt the bells in his bones and heard a God-whisper. I want us to be together when everything is calm.
Pamplemousse7 responded: Do you think your daughter would probably understand if you explained it to her that way?
Margot wrote back: I should tell them that this is one of the only ways left to connect. I’ll try to say that. Then she had tried, but what she’d actually said out loud to Evy? Not that.
From then on they went to mass together every week. Evy sat on the edge of the pew, looking as if she might bolt at any moment but still standing and bowing her head when she was supposed to. She skipped communion, kneeling alone as she waited for her family to return. She listened to the nonsense homily from the eighty-six-year-old priest, or she listened to music on an earbud she sneaked into her left ear and thought Margot couldn’t see.
Of course the girls giggled. And she shushed them, because where could she even start, in the middle of the profession of faith, explaining how any one of these masses could be the last time their family stood calm and together in one place? She would never say Decide for yourself after he’s dead again, but she would also never say It’s a language your dad still understands and it’s one thing that still feels familiar for him.
She would try to tell the girls in other ways what it meant to her that they showed up. She would make breakfast for dinner whenever they asked; she would cut tiger lilies and put them in a jar on their nightstands as a little surprise.
Liz
“Evy’s doing a turnover at the house on C Street; she’ll be back around noon so you can go to work; I’ll be at the J Street house all day with the contractors; you said you’re in at one today, right?” Margot monologued to Liz, moving from room to room.
Liz’s last layers of sleep were evaporating, but she had a fragile power to reenter her dreams if she ignored Margot. “Storm’s supposed to roll in, so let me know if Carl calls you out, okay? We can have that leftover ziti for dinner—I guess—and don’t forget we have Penn tomorrow—love you.”
Liz sat upright in bed and mumbled a groggy, “Got it,” as the screen door slammed behind Margot. She would be alone with her dad for hours. She needed coffee. Without her contacts in, the room was blurry. She wanted to close her eyes again and boomerang back to the boardwalk lights of her Saturday night with Gabe, to linger for hours on those islands of memory.
Liz pressed her contacts into her eyes and blinked, then peed dehydrated dark yellow. Penn tomorrow meant they would all drive two hours to see Brian’s doctors at the University of Pennsylvania hospital, and the day before was always the hardest balancing act of what-ifs and dread, bracing for the news that either a) they were leveling up for a few more months in this glitch-ridden game they were stuck in, or b) the screen would go blank any minute and the power would go out on the whole system.
Before Sonia left to visit her grandma in Florida, she and Liz had gotten almost halfway through their Cloud Campaign II video game, but still they only knew a fraction of the landscape. When they played, they would pause and watch walk-through videos that showed them how to open doors they hadn’t seen, but still there were infinite unopened ones.
Liz often hit pause on her real life now; it was the only work-around she knew, her only trick, so she did it over and over. She pressed pause when she thought about Gabe and the next time she might see him, and she pressed pause when she was at Sun and Shade, planting umbrellas and giving herself over to the chaos and sweat, ignoring the hey honeys from the dirtbags on the boardwalk. She pressed pause when she scrolled through photos and videos of friends in all her social media feeds and tapped the red hearts over and over.
She hovered her hand above the PLAY button on this game she was supposed to be figuring out. She didn’t know the next right move after her mom said Penn tomorrow, so here she was back in bed for another five minutes, paused, her avatar pixelating and freezing, a glitch within a glitch, a line of broken-girl code.
She shuffled to the kitchen and poured a sludgy, hours-old cup of coffee. Brian stood next to her with his hands folded across his belly. He wore Margot’s red-framed sunglasses, a tight, ratty T-shirt, and a floppy paint-stained hat. How did he find something with a paint stain nearly every day? Liz didn’t think the outfits were kooky or funny. The clothes were an unspoken stand Brian took after ignoring the normal golf shirt and khakis Margot put out for him.
“Two miles sound good today, Brian?” Liz asked. She and Evy had started calling their parents by their first names a lot of the time.
Last night at church he had said the wrong prayers. Today they would go for a walk to get through the morning. She slathered sunscreen on both herself and her dad, the way she would a small child, then dumped sugar in the tepid coffee, stirred, and chugged half of it down. She turned her attention away from Brian pacing and back to the memory of the sweat and salt in Gabe’s T-shirt, feeling the reverberations of the kiss, the night, the guy, the buzz, the secret, hoping they would carry her through.
If Gabe were off this morning, Liz would have made Brian walk along the bay so they wouldn’t run into him. But by now Gabe would be opening the Sumner Avenue umbrella stand, a half mile past their turnaround point on the boardwalk.
She didn’t want to give Gabe the weak little speech where she summarized the GBM WebMD page and her thanks-for-asking-thanks-for-caring SparkNotes. That always felt icky to her, watching the baffled, trapped expressions descend on people’s faces.
She held Brian’s hand at the intersections, but once they were on the boardwalk she let him go, and he swung his arms wide. His strides were erratic and exaggerated.
He used to be a runner, covering this same route in the early morning, alone or with Liz, his gait powerful and even. Before his phone could measure distance for him, he drove out to the inlet with Liz and Evy in the backseat, to see how many miles it was. He pushed them in a double jogging stroller when they were little, stopping to stretch at the playground when they needed a break. He’d run the Jersey Shore Marathon or Philadelphia Marathon every year, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, depending whether he’d followed a training plan or not. He’d made the girls pose with him on the Philly art museum steps like Rocky, he high-fived them as he passed them cheering, he always made a friend during the race who ran a better time because Brian both distracted them and made them pick up the pace.
When Liz started winning races, Brian had asked about her favorite parts of the courses and what she thought of her new running shoes, he’d brought her Gatorades at meets, and he’d cheered for her and all her teammates until he wore out his voice, but he never told her how fast he thought she should go, or when she ought to try to pass the fastest girl from the other team. Liz knew she was lucky he had been like this; she’d watched other girls’ parents before races waving around stopwatches and sticking their heads into the team huddles, while her dad grinned at her from the concession stand, giving her a thumbs-up while he ate a hot dog.
On their boardwalk route now, Brian recited all the landmarks. He called out, “Gazebo one! Gazebo two! Busted water fountain one! Good water fountain two!”
Whenever anyone passed them, Brian said, “Pick ’em up, kid!” and the runners stared at him in his hobo hat and cheap women’s glasses, probably wondering who this weirdo was.
To distract him from cheering on strangers, Liz asked her dad about the stocks he followed; he’d been interested in the market since he’d taught his econ students about it, back before he gave up teaching to run E&E Rentals full-time. Since he got sick, he’d become obsessed, badgering Margot to let him buy and sell shares several times a day, memorizing facts about capital gains taxes and dividends. It was a safe topic because stocks were not social or emotional, and Brian felt like an expert. He forgot you weren’t supposed to call your daughters whores when they wore bikinis, but he remembered all the board members of PepsiCo perfectly.
Hardly any of Liz’s friends besides Sonia asked her about Brian, but when they did, the word weird was her substitute for loneliness, dread, and fear. Weird was a weak emotional label, and addicting if you relied on it too heavily. But just like the late-afternoon coconut iced coffees she’d gotten used to drinking, you could get dependent on weird if you used it enough. And Liz used it all the time.
She kept the conversation with Brian going in a saccharine-bright voice that felt fake, fake, fake. Before he got weird-sick, her dad used to answer her no matter what she asked. What about the companies that spilled oil, do you own any stocks in those? Why? What if a company doesn’t treat its workers well? What happens if everyone panics and sells off all their stocks at once? He’d listen first, let her tell him what she’d already figured out on her own before he asked her, Well, have you thought about it this way, well, what if this were true too?
She would never in her life be able to stand men who assumed she knew nothing, who bloviated or condescended, because of Brian. He had always been willing to change his mind, and she wouldn’t realize for a long time how rare that was.
When he asked if they could stop at the Buccaneer to help Robbie out, her heart sank. Robbie was so patient with her dad, but she knew it was getting harder to have Brian around at the bar, to find jobs he believed were important that wouldn’t mess anything up. Liz didn’t want to show up unannounced when Robbie was probably in the middle of something, or not there, or tired from the weekend. This was all beyond what Brian could understand about another person now.
“You want to go to the Buccaneer?” she asked. “Now? Why don’t we just turn around up here and go home?”
“Well, Mondays are important for Robbie,” Brian said. “And he always says beer flows best between friends.” She could remind her dad about the last three times he’d said Robbie would be there and then he wasn’t, but it wouldn’t matter. When normal limits were imposed, when common sense was explained, when a whim or want was denied, you had to drag or cajole, apologize or lie, insist or give in. Would Brian drink a late-morning beer and then refuse to wipe foam off his upper lip, would he wander into the kitchen instead of the bathroom and stay there for forty-five minutes, or would he stand next to a normal family eating pizza and insist on ordering them hot wings they didn’t want? All the if-thens could end in disaster.
“I’ll have him pour it light,” Brian said. “With no foam.” He was always taking a stand now for silly ideas; he never ever changed his mind when it was set.
“You and Mom can go to the Buccaneer some other time.”
“Oh, she’s quite the obliterator,” he said. “Plus, she thinks Robbie is a dirtbag.”
“Yeah, well, what if we just, uh, go home and you can have a beer there maybe? How about if we do that? I think there’s beers in the fridge.”
“I need to ask Robbie about if he’s all set for next weekend with his inventory.”
This was a glitch, and he thought it was the game.
“Robbie’s not even usually there, Dad, this time of day?”
“We have to push past this little group of swim protectors,” he said, pointing at four lifeguards ahead of them. Liz let him surge ahead. The lifeguards stared at him, then at her. One of them had been in her chemistry class, but she pretended she didn’t recognize him.
