“Sounds like someone is having a party up the beach,” she said.
“That's just Big Dennis and his mix tape,” I said. “Where's Dad?”
“He went down the beach to talk to Mr. Baxter,” she said. She walked down to the water.
I had the place to myself for a while. I ate breakfast and watched
Young Frankenstein
on Channel 11. Each time I watched it, I got
5 percent more of the jokes. Just killing time until Bobby picked me up. He had a car now, his parents' attempt at seducing him with the sweet nothings of bourgie comfort. I didn't care how the car got there, reveling in the aftermath of our coup. Randy's messed-up jalopy was now in exile, the last-resort overflow vehicle, shotgunned no more. We had reestablished the natural order. Except for the whole girl thing.
The girls just appeared one day, stepping out of their clam. The house came first. We noticed it on one of our early circuits at the start of the summer. It had obliterated a chunk of woods of no special value, bereft of cherished shortcuts and dilapidated hideouts, but it still hurt. It was an '80s prefab joint, no saltbox or rancher, but something you might see if you took a wrong turn and got lost in the suburbs. I'd never been to the suburbs, but I'd seen movies set in sterile subdivisions where over time the dead rotting heart of suburbia was laid bare, and the houses in those movies looked like that house.
The scattered intel and unsubstantiated reports trickled in halfway through the summer. Day One: “There are some girls out,” Marcus declared. “I saw some girls walking up Cadmus,” Reggie reported. “What, little kids?” “No, our age.” “Let's go see.” “No, they're gone, man.” Day Two: NP alleged that “Their names are Devon and Erica.” “Sisters?” “No, man, you see how light Devon is, and then the moms and pops? No way Erica is her sister.” Fact: they were cousins, and it was Devon's house. Day Four's debriefing contained more confirmed sightings, bonehead speculation, and then something new—firsthand encounters. The girls hailed from New Jersey, high-school sophomores to-be. Devon had “those big Lisa Lisa titties,” Erica “a dick-sucking mouth.” “That's too young for me,” Clive demurred, “but y'all should give it a shot.” “I'd hit either one of those honeys,” Randy declared, sharing his enthusiasm for statutory rape. NP presented his conclusion: “Devon would grab your jim with a quickness.” I said, “Really?” By Day Five, it was all over. Bobby and NP called a meeting to announce that they were going out with them, following an eventful afternoon when the cousins “went for a ride” in Bobby's car. I hadn't even met them yet! You go
to work, scoop some ice cream, come back home, and the whole balance was off. Cars, man.
“That Baxter is a panic,” my father said, sliding open the screen door. He had an empty glass in his hand, part of a set we bought when we started staying at the beach house, to replace the '60s glasses with mod designs on them, polka dots and odd geometric forms. The old stuff went in the garbage. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Time to get a fire started.”
He was known up and down the beach as a master griller, the wind itself in service to his legend, bearing the exquisite smell of caramelizing meat through the developments. Every Saturday, every Sunday, in good weather and bad. On good days, the chicken skin bubbled ferociously, sunlight dancing in the juices, and on bad days the rain evaporated on the lid with bitter hissing sounds. He didn't believe in God but was a devout worshipper of Gore-Tex the Miracle Fiber, grilling into autumn and winter while armored in his beloved Windbreaker. “This stuff really works,” he exclaimed, angry gusts ripping the fabric back and forth. Nor'easters roared up the coast, bringing minor complications vis-à-vis fire-starting, but he always discovered his personal storm-eye beneath the overhang, amid the bluster, the flames ripping with fury in the wind. Autumn days, ours was the only inhabited house on the beach, the bucket of fire a sign of life and ancient caveman lore. He grilled in a blizzard once, as he liked to remind people, for kicks and to prove that he could. You should be so lucky as to witness such a strange and marvelous sight. Shelter Island, the bay, everything that existed outside our property line, was an impenetrable void, a kind of hungry salivating darkness, as the snow swirled like a thousand fireflies into the light thrown out from the living room. We were the only ones left, the last human beings, or maybe the first. The chicken took longer to cook, but when he brought it back inside it was fantastic.
If you told him you weren't hungry, he didn't care. He'd grill anyway. Eventually you'd eat it.
Poomp!
Needing a refreshment. How many was that? The one I
heard in the bedroom, and probably a refresher at Mr. Baxter's. Plus this one. Starting at who knows what time that morning. I calculated: almost an hour until Bobby was going to pick me up. I could make it.
Before the
poomp
was the
tock
of the liquor-cabinet door sucking away from the magnet. You could hear the
poomp
all over the house; the
tock
was a slighter sound, inauspicious, given that it was the start of things. It was simultaneously the sound of two things separating as well as the snap of eventualities locking into place. A sequence counting down, tick-
tock
.
To be completely accurate, you heard the ice first, but sometimes ice is just ice and not an omen. I myself enjoyed a nice Coke with ice from time to time. Ice foreshadowed only intermittently. My father rummaged in the freezer, moving the half-full bag of Tater Tots off the ice tray. Then the ice tumbled into the glass. It was a short fall but it seemed longer. The ice cubes jammed in like inmates. Then—
tock!
The bottle of Tanqueray
thunked
on the wood of the kitchen counter, followed by the tinny
rasp
of the bottle cap sliding clockwise.
Crack crack!
The gin shattered the ice, slicing planes through the cubes, but they remained whole, only the thin fuzz of frost melting into the alcohol. The first of the day's many chemical reactions.
Poomp
—the magnet pulled the door shut. He opened the refrigerator door and another magnet, silent in its coat of white accordion plastic, drifted away from the metal frame. The tonic water hissed as the pressure in the bottle fizzed away. The bottle made a slight
ting
as it slid into the rack in the fridge door, next to the relish and mustard.
I was well acquainted with all these sounds and heard the other silent things. This made no sound: my father stirring his drink with his finger. This also made no sound: that dreaded calculation, how many is that today? Certainly this made no sound: the understanding, I'm pushing my luck by hanging around here. And silent now but soon to make itself heard, the chemical reaction in his brain that said, Let's get this hate in gear.
“Can I turn the channel?” I asked. He had turned to CNN.
“Road Warrior
is coming on.”
“Go ahead.”
We were a made-for-TV family. Every new channel added to our lineup, every magnificent home-entertainment advance increased the possibility that we wouldn't have to talk to one another. If we lived a hundred years in the future, we'd never have to deal with one another at all. Peering 24-7 into our virtual-reality headsets, we'd merely bump into one another every so often, a family that knew itself as kicks in the shin and elbows in the stomach. Although if I stop to think about it, that would probably be more physical contact than we had now.
There's no dialogue in the first ten minutes of
The Road Warrior
, once the narrator sets up the when-where-why (After Apocalypse-Apocalyptic Wasteland-Survival.) The Road Warrior and his dog scour the desert looking for food and gas. Mohawked madmen ride motorcycles and trucks and souped-up muscle cars, preying on the weak. Things kick into gear when the Road Warrior discovers the settlement, an old oil refinery where a band of humans have cobbled together a community in the void of the world. They live under siege, the leather-clad psychos circling their walls, the outside world hollering in menace. I loved
The Road Warrior
.
Through the glass, my father got to work. First up, grill prep. He wheeled the Weber to the side of the deck and dumped last week's ashes over the rail. They thrashed through the air in gray waves. His eyes were slits. The ashes tumbled into their mound. Ten feet separated us from the neighbor's house, and no one ever walked over there, especially since me and Reggie had outgrown “exploring” the property, pretending the scrub pines and gnarled bushes were alien territory. Trying to make unknown that which was completely known. The mound grew higher all summer, hardening into black cakes when it rained. Off-season, the wind took it away so he could start over again.
Next came the ceremonial scrubbing away of last week's grease from the grill. “Don't want that to flare up when I'm trying to cook
some chicken.” He cleared the dishes in the sink to have room to work. The SOS pads disintegrated into pink suds and nubs of metal in his hand. Top side, underside, the tiny cracks where the rods met. This took a while. He hummed some Nat King Cole.
I went to the bathroom and when I came out, CNN was on. I turned it back to
The Road Warrior
. He didn't respond.
I wanted something to read. The TV was always on in our house, whether people watched it or not. We needed sound, any kind of sound. Watching TV and reading at the same time was standard op. We didn't have a lot of books in the beach house. There were my mother's Danielle Steels and Judith Krantzs, old horror and sci-fi novels of mine and Reggie's that were neither beloved nor gory enough to reread. I had some old
Amazing Spider-Mans
and
Marvel Two-In-Ones
in our bedroom dresser, but the last few months I had renounced all things dorky and was doing quite well at it, my spring nerd-purge and subsequent haircut revelation feeding my resolve.
Which left
The Book of Lists
, that eccentric encyclopedia of the world, boiling down trivia into thick, murky lumps of truth. National Bestseller! It was falling apart. I'd read it many times, but there was always some new list that fell out from between the pages into my lap, tweaking my status quo. Not 6 Positions for Sexual Intercourse or 8 Remarkable Escapes from Devil's Island, I had those memorized. I didn't care that the book was already horribly dated in 1985 (#1 Hero of American Boys and Girls—O. J. Simpson; #1 Most Beautiful Woman of Modern Times—Twiggy). I still respected the classics, like 8 Cases of Spontaneous Combustion and 10 Ghastly Ghosts, which might as well have been commandments carved into stone tablets, eternal and awesome. Spontaneous combustion is a rare occurrence, to be sure, but you never know. Forewarned is forearmed.
Mrs. Gardner padded up from the beach and made her way across the deck. I saw her out of the corner of my eye and ducked into Dr. Ashley Montagu's 10 Worst Well-Known Human Beings in History. (You'd be surprised.) She rapped on the glass. I feigned being
startled. She was nice enough—her daughter and son were my sister's age, so we'd had a lot of dealings over the years—but still.
“How you doing, girl?” my father asked cheerfully.
“Just making my way down the beach,” she said. “Mind if I use the facilities?”
Another thing, besides the routine quicksand, was that you had to talk to grown-ups all day if you stayed in the house. They came up for a bathroom stop, to say hello and check off this encounter from their weekend to-do list, to grab the drink that was always offered. Back then I didn't realize that most grown-ups didn't want to talk to you as much as you didn't want to talk to them.
Hello, how are you?
The smallest interaction made me shrivel as I considered the consequences. My brother and mother and sister, they were known quantities. I knew how to factor in my mother's rare spells of defiance and Reggie's monkey-wrench ways. These people coming up from the beach were rogue variables, and you couldn't predict their effects. The wrong word, the wrong reminiscence might set the afternoon on a new, choppy course. They might say or do something that started a reaction, either when they were there or after they left, hours later when his brooding had got a hold of it and we were the only audience. The sound of the screen door closing behind them was never much of a relief because you didn't know what they'd left behind.
“You making some of that good barbecue?” Mrs. Gardner asked as she left the bathroom.
“You know me,” he said. “Can I fix you something?”
She went off empty-handed—pre-barbecue visits were always shorter than when food was around—and my father went out to start the fire.
“She better not of stunk up the bathroom,” he said.
I chuckled.
Tock, thunk, rasp, poomp
.
Kingsford charcoal, my father's fuel of choice. When it came to grilling, anyway. The coals rustled out of the big blue-and-white bag onto the grate. Gravity had a design, tossing them in a certain arrangement. My father had his own laws, a precise concept of fire
formation honed over the years. To people like you and me, a briquette is a briquette. Not to him. He seemed to analyze each coal individually, taking measure of its strengths, deficits, secret potential. The diamond in the darkness. He knew where they needed to go, recognizing the uniqueness of each cube and determining where it fit with the rest of the team. He assembled the pyramid meticulously, perceiving the invisible—the crooked corridors of ventilation between the briquettes, the heat traps and inevitable vectors of released energy, any potential irregularity that might undermine the project. The sublime interconnectedness of it all. He asserted his order. Built his fire.
The canteen of lighter fluid was an indispensable tool in this enterprise, up there with the spatula and tongs. (He cried “Tongs!” like a TV surgeon demanding a scalpel.) He doused, he drenched, he baptized his creation with a truly fucking gruesome amount of lighter fluid. The fumes were intoxicating, strangely appetizing in their noxiousness, an anti-aroma to the aroma to come, as interlinked as the caterpillar to the butterfly. The coals were so thoroughly suffused with lighter fluid that every so often a pile preemptively ignited itself when a matchbook got within thirty yards, choosing to embrace its destiny with honor. On those occasions when a mound of coals declined to self-immolate, a single match sent it up with a spine-tingling
whoosh
. My father nodded to the fire and let it be for forty minutes to allow it to make peace with its god.