“There’s no head on this boat?” Margaret asked.
“No, it’s too small, where’s it going to go?” Cam said.
“Where is
she
going to go—,” Tracy was saying.
“King of Korn,” she told Tracy, but she wasn’t smiling about it. She jumped back onto the dock and told them she wanted to go find a bathroom. She walked back to the parking lot, where there were some little shops. The Hot Dog Nook. She could smell the malt vinegar people spilled on their French fries. As she headed that way, she passed a small sailboat that was painted black. The amateur brush strokes were coarse and blistered on the mast. She followed the mast to the top and saw the old pirate’s flag, the Jolly Roger, a white skull and crossbones on a black background. The flag snapped open and closed in the wind, an ugly tearing noise overhead. The sight alarmed her; it made her recall the black-and-white scrap on the chandelier at home. How similar these things seemed, although she didn’t know why she felt it so strongly. It was a common logo—she had seen it used on the back labels of household cleaners. Even so, there was something too evocative about the skull, its frontal stare. It made her feel what she always worked to evade—that deep unfinished silhouette rising to the surface. She wanted to suppress it, especially this day when she was keeping in the present tense. Keeping steady with the men.
After she went to the toilet, she purchased a large
brown paper sack of fries and poured vinegar over them. She walked back to the men. As she passed the black yacht, she recognized the snapping of the skull flag, but she didn’t look up. She kept digging in the bag and lifting the wet, fragrant potatoes to her lips. She sat back down in the Donzi and shared the potatoes. Tracy was sawing a Budweiser flip top through the boat’s fiberglass finish. A deep gouge and its glossy shavings marred the surface.
“What is he doing?” Cam asked her. “What the hell is that for?”
“I don’t know,” Margaret said. “Tracy stop it! What are you trying to do? Destroy property?” She knocked Tracy’s hand and the aluminum snip flew into the water.
“Carving your initials? Is that it?” Cam was trying to understand. Maybe it was wild sentiment that made Tracy so reckless.
“It’s just so fucking cherry,” Tracy said, “it makes me crazy.”
They looked at him. Once again, the woman on the cabin cruiser was back outside, splashing her legs and ankles with the hose, but they kept their eyes on Tracy.
“That’s it.” Cam stood up. “We’re finished here.”
“Your owner’s not coming?” Margaret said.
“He’s not going to show,” Cam said.
Cam snatched the soaking bag of fries from the seat and got out of the boat. Margaret followed. They looked back at Tracy. He was rubbing the heel of his hand over his nipple, looking thoughtful. He was doing his pouting-queen imitation. His eyelids fluttered: No One Loves Me Enough. Margaret looked past him. His bluff
was short-lived and he followed them back to the car. Perhaps it was Cam. Cam moved in a linear way, plowed through, and bumped Tracy into a new juxtaposition with the world, with Margaret. Margaret watched Tracy regain control over it, his bad will, the seed of his imagination. It must be as exhausting for Tracy as it was for them.
They rode the upper deck of the Cape May ferry on their way to visit Jane. Laughing gulls collected like harpies, keeping steady with the big ship and diving after French fries and hamburger buns people hurled into the air. Margaret cringed when a bird hovered too near her, clutching something starchy thrown into the sky. She stretched out on one of the sunny benches and put her arm over her eyes. Occasionally, she felt the slight roll of the hull, which some people found nauseating. She worried about seeing Jane. There wasn’t much to say. Jane had a new daughter with her boyfriend, a two-year-old, and that would be something they could discuss. The subject of children can neutralize the conversation if it becomes too acid. Margaret could never describe the years when Jane lived at home. It was as if Jane’s childhood with Margaret had been sucked into a vacuum the day Jane got into some man’s flashy car. Jane displayed a strange self-imposed amnesia, which Margaret found threatening to her own pristine recollections. Margaret tried to say, “Remember that Christmas when the tree crashed into the piano? Remember the dog Trixie? What about that spastic boy, the one who had to wear a helmet?” Jane would shrug.
She told Margaret she couldn’t recall a minute of it.
“What about the time I caught my ankle in the porch glider? You pulled it out—”
“Take it easy,” she told Margaret. “I don’t
want
to remember that house.” But it must be better for Jane now. She had a good setup. Her boyfriend was sweet, always quiet, maybe just dog-tired because he worked nights delivering fuel oil.
Cam and Tracy avoided one another. Cam left Margaret on the deck and went down the ladders to check the Duster. She saw him kick the wooden tire wedge until it was squared. Tracy was standing at the head of the flat, square bow, where a heavy chain was the only thing keeping him back from the edge. There was something brewing between the men. Margaret knew that Cam and Tracy never seemed good with male companions; neither one had close friends or buddies they relied on. Cam had always been a self-assured loner. With Tracy, it was his sponsor or one of the others from group therapy who called him occasionally, but he didn’t keep up with his peers at the newspaper, he didn’t go to see the Red Sox or to hear any rock ’n’ roll. Yet, Tracy was always invited to parties, and Cam had been, too; they were considered essential. Tracy’s dark asides, Cam’s romantic silences, were pleasing in a crowd. Margaret saw how she was someone who always
gave
parties. And even now, Tracy and Cam seemed to hand her the role of social director. They loitered at separate corners of the ship, waiting for her to reunite them.
Jane’s place was a second-floor apartment two blocks
from the ocean. When they arrived, the afternoon sea breeze was strong, lifting the long curtains until they billowed into the front room. Gauzy panels floated level between her and Jane as they tried to embrace. They brushed the curtains away and still the wind lifted the frayed panels until they were wrapped in them, laughing.
They sat at the kitchen table. Jane opened small packets of delicatessen meats, leaving the sliced domes centered on the folded squares of brown paper. She put hard rolls in the center of the table and a bottle of olive oil with a whiskey spout. Jane brought over an armful of stubbies, seven-ounce beers. She claimed that the small bottles stayed cold all the way through. Then she served the next ones. The table filled up with empties, and Jane went to get more from the icebox. Tracy flattered Jane and made a giant sandwich of prosciutto, mortadella, and salami, adding three big dollops of oil and a dribbling of hot peppers. The meats smelled delicious, but there was an unpleasant odor that the wind stirred around. The apartment smelled of heavy heating oil and household ammonia. The oil came from a laundry basket of Jane’s lover’s pewter-colored overalls. “Believe it or not, they’re washed but they still stink,” Jane said. Then her little daughter pissed on the living room carpet.
“I’m training her, but she does this on purpose.” The little girl was stark naked because of the heat. She stood in the middle of the room, spread her legs, and released a substantial stream.
“Gloria!” Jane scolded the girl, quite after the fact.
The baby smiled at her audience. She wrinkled her nose in blissful defiance.
“An imp,” Tracy said. Cam kept looking the other way.
Then Jane took a plastic bottle of ammonia, gallon size, and she scrubbed the dark circle where the girl had urinated. Margaret, having had a few beers with her sandwich, went dreamy for a moment and she wondered, Why does one kind of ammonia curtail another kind of ammonia? They’re different, of course, but how are they different? Where does household ammonia come from?
“Where’s Chris?” Margaret asked Jane.
“Sleeping. He gets off work at seven
A.M
.”
“Oh, God, we’re making too much noise,” Margaret said.
“He can sleep through anything.”
“You work days and he works nights? Do you ever see him?”
“We don’t even have the same days off. These are my two days. Tuesday and Wednesday. He’s normal; he’s got the normal weekend,” Jane said.
“Not even the same weekends. That’s tough.”
Jane said, “Used to it.” She looked at Margaret and dragged on her cigarette. “Like today. He’ll wake up and go over to the VFW and that will be that.”
“The VFW? I’ve always wanted to try a VFW,” Tracy said.
“You didn’t serve, did you? I don’t even have to ask,” Cam said.
Tracy said, “I registered. They didn’t get around to asking me.”
“Maybe one of your balls didn’t drop?”
Jane was enjoying it, looking back and forth.
Cam said, “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of these military nuts. I hated Korea. I hated Fort Dix. They treat you like an animal.”
“Quonset huts? Aren’t they kind of a nightmare? A corrugated hell, a galvanized mouse hole?” Tracy was trying to commiserate.
Cam was smiling. “The worst part was the lack of privacy, going to the shitter in a herd. They line you up in the latrine and everybody waits while you try your best.”
“They watch you do it?” Margaret said.
“It was a psychological-training thing. Identity busting. They get you totally stripped down so you can work like a unit. Live, shit, and die in front of one another. As a unit. I couldn’t function for days.”
“I should say not,” Margaret said. She didn’t want to hear about this, and she peeled the labels from the empty beer bottles, letting her fingernails scratch the hollow glass.
“Then we went out on the rifle range for the first time. We spent hours out there in that Jersey steam bath, lying on our stomachs. You ever pick up an M-1? No? Firing, reloading, firing. Your shoulder takes the kickback, starts to buzz. Everything was making me sick. I went to the latrine; there were twenty of us waiting our turns. I sit on the can and I think of the M-1. It was still rocking me. I feel that M-1,
boom
, and that was all I needed. From then on, I was regular. On schedule.” He smiled at Margaret, forcing her to look the other way. “I still think of guns.”
“You still think of weapons in order to function?” Tracy said.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
Margaret gathered the beer labels and rolled them into a ball under the palm of her hand. She started to tell Jane about the affidavit Elizabeth wanted signed.
Cam said, “They want to go to science. Medical school. They never went to college, but dead they go to Harvard. It says a lot about them.”
“It won’t be Harvard,” Margaret said, “it will be someplace nearby. Johns Hopkins, do they have a medical school? There’s Temple in Philadelphia, no, that’s law.” Margaret stopped naming the colleges when her sister glared at her. Margaret went to a community college for two years.
“Don’t tell them that they can’t go to Harvard. Let them think it’s Harvard,” Jane said. “You always want to ruin things with facts, Margaret.”
“Facts are useful,” Tracy said. “Facts can be proved or disproved. You can’t disprove notions; you have to have a genuine assertion before you can debunk it.”
Jane said, “What is he talking about? How
do
you pick them, Margaret?”
Tracy went on, “How about this Arrow Collar Man, your dad, do you ever feel like squaring off with him?”
Jane looked at Tracy and crossed her arms.
Tracy said, “Your father. Cam’s appointed himself spokesman. He might be going out there to Chicago to read him the Riot Act.”
“Cam’s going to do what?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Cam said. “Tracy wants me to
go out to Chicago. I didn’t say I was moving an inch.”
Tracy asked Jane, “What’s your take on it?”
“I woke up, smelled the coffee, and I don’t give a fuck. Cam has always been the one. That’s his funeral.”
Tracy praised Jane for her “I Look after Number One” attitude. It’s healthy, he said. It showed her emancipation from family aggressions.
Margaret watched her sister’s face. She wasn’t listening to Tracy. “You’ve got beautiful eyes,” Margaret said, and she knew she must be drunk to say something so personal to Jane. Margaret laughed and started coughing. “No, I mean it. I’m not kidding.”
Jane’s eyes misted and changed shape, became elongated almonds when she grinned at Margaret. Jane didn’t often give in. It was
their
laughter, Cam’s and Margaret’s pleasure, which drifted over her face; it took her, it transformed her features. Jane was central, in charge of that abandon, until after several stubbies. Then, Jane quieted; her lifelong distaste for family involvement surfaced, just when everyone was too drunk to get up and leave.
“So, now what?” Jane said. The table had disappeared beneath rows of bottles, which they kept shoving aside so they could lean on the table. Margaret tried to prop her chin in her hand, but her elbow slipped and several of the bottles crashed over. Margaret steered the spill with her forearm, but no one got up to get a towel and the beer pooled in the center of the table.
“Let’s go down to the boardwalk. Do they still have that girl, Lady Godiva, riding that diving horse?” Cam said.
“The horse doesn’t
dive
in the water. They drop it from a high platform,” Jane said. “I don’t know how the girl stays on.”
“That’s cruel,” Margaret said.
“I like it,” Cam said.
“What do you like?” Margaret said.
“A girl in a wet bathing suit riding bareback,” he said. “I guess.”
“That’s a summer job for you, Margaret,” Tracy said.
Jane looked at Margaret. “It’s about time she took a job.”
“I have a job now,” Margaret said.
“Shit, I’m sorry I didn’t hold my breath,” Jane said.
Jane’s boyfriend came into the room. Everyone exchanged hazy, exaggerated greetings. The man was sleepy, but he straightened his posture and took a beer out of Jane’s hand.
“What?” Jane said. “That’s my beer—”
“Had enough? Do you think? I believe,” the man said. Margaret admired his short, succinct phrases.