Every so often, one of his friends or a galoot out for the weekend came up from the beach and, watching this ritual, felt inspired to share their fire-starting techniques. “I make what I call a little ‘nest’ of newspapers under the coals.” “You should try one of those chimneys that they have now.” My father glared at them like the imbeciles they were, spatula a-dangle.
Make a little nest
“Whitey invented lighter fluid for a reason,” he told them. Who could argue with that?
“James! You up there?”
Mr. Turner's bald head broke the horizon of the deck. My hand whimpered in anticipation of the bone-crushing handshake. He was
one of my father's oldest cronies. They went way back, to college, the late '50s, when they were part of a handful of young black men infiltrating the big-time Northeast schools. Brothers from Brooklyn, Harlem, huddling together as the Massachusetts winters, the New Hampshire winters, took a bite out of their asses. What were they doing getting Ivy League educations? They weren't supposed to be there. They hung tight with the five or six other black guys in their school, drank beer with the five or six black guys the next school over. Dated the five or six black ladies at the genteel women's college the next town over, and the other schools on the black network, road-tripping to the big dance that weekend at B.U. or Smith, or up to Montreal, where from all accounts some crazy racial utopia existed, integration of the sort that'd get you lynched in half the South. My father met my mother during that time, on the New England black-college circuit. So that's where all this begins, maybe.
Mr. Turner was also a Sag Harbor guy, son of one of the first families to come out here. I mention this because it was one of those rogue variables with the power to transform my afternoon. My father got to talking, talking got to dredging, and who knew what might happen.
“When did you get out?” my father asked.
“Last night.”
My father went to get him a drink. Mr. Turner stayed on the deck and I kept my head in
The Book of Lists
to ward off eye contact. Mr. Turner had his own company, selling package tours to Africa and the Caribbean. See the Motherland, get in touch with your heritage, vacation where everyone looks like you for a change. He dispatched fleets of rickety buses to chug-chug up scrabbly mountain roads, kickbacks deciding where they stopped for lunch. He negotiated deals with trinket outposts hawking authenticity in many forms, bead necklaces and fertility symbols, the omnipresent masks reflecting back the faces of sentimental longing. When you went to someone's apartment, you never asked, “Hey, where'd you get that cool African mask from?,” because the answer was always, “Mike Turner's tour.” There were Kenyans driving BMWs up to
their mountain villas, big satellite dishes in their backyards, because black Americans needed a little whiff. He provided a service.
I hadn't seen him since he came over to our apartment to apologize for how things went on our Jamaica trip last Christmas. He'd booked us into a crumbling all-inclusive in Montego Bay where the roaches were as big as lizards, the lizards were as big as bats, and the bats had such an impressive wingspan that you wanted to ask them for a lift back to JFK. Everybody got food poisoning one night at the crappy buffet, except for me because I was working a not-eating-salad angle that winter, inexplicable looking back these years later, but fortuitous. “I don't work with them anymore,” he informed us. “The son has really run that place into the ground.” My father had cursed his name for weeks, but after he apologized they went out drinking and it was like nothing happened. They went way back, like I said.
My father tossed him a Budweiser. “My son got himself one of those haircuts like the boys on the corner,” he said, making sure I heard.
“Corner …?” Mr. Turner sucked his teeth. “Man, all the kids have that now.”
Now I had to go out and say hi. He pulverized my hand, but not as much as usual, thanks to my recent fortifying regimen of ice-cream scooping. “Looking like a man now, huh, Benji?” he said. “You got yourself a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Shit, if I were you I'd be all over the girls they got out here. When I was coming up, shit.” He winked at my father.
6 Fake Smiles in Benji's House
To Patronize Grown-ups
On Hearing Cruel Put-down of Family Member
False Front of Invulnerability
When All Else Fails
Bizarro Form of Cognitive Dissonance
To Avoid Being Next
“That reminds me,” Mr. Turner said, lifting his eyebrows, “you know who else is out?”
“Who?”
“Mabel.”
“Mabel Jackson?”
They snickered.
“Haven't seen her in years,” my father said.
“I know she don't want to see you, boy,” Mr. Turner said.
My father shrugged. “Shit, I can't help what I am. How she look?”
“Like her husband left her ass for that young thing, what else she going to look like?”
“Back when, though.”
“Damn.”
I went inside to call Bobby. He was late. His mother told me he'd already left. He'd honk his horn any minute and I'd be free. Maybe we'd go by Devon and Erica's or something. Maybe I wouldn't even have to suggest it, he'd bring it up and I could maintain an air of disinterest. I hadn't been inside Devon's house yet, torturing myself that I missed the Hanging Out in Their Basement period, those four fabled days cut short once Devon's father got wind. Word was he was “really strict.”
“I better go down there and see what these people are getting up to,” Mr. Turner said. He shook his beer can to see how full it was.
“Come back and get some chicken when you're done struttin' through your coop,” my father said.
He checked the fire, spreading his hand over coals. “Mabel Jackson is out.” He shook his head and smiled. “Back in college, she was fine …” He stopped. He looked at his palm. “That's why you should marry a virgin,” he said. “People talk about you. You want to be out with your wife and have some fool whistling about what he used to do?”
“Right. I mean, no.”
“What you do follows you, that's what I'm trying to tell you.”
“Right.” He headed for the kitchen. Ash nibbled the corners of
the coals. One of my mother's friends walked down to the beach along the side of the house, dragging a beach chair across the cracked paving stones. Early Saturday afternoon, there were distractions. A cocktail party up in Ninevah, or a birthday luncheon at the Salty Dog, but the beach was HQ. Things always ended up on the beach, in front of our house.
When I walked inside, he was getting out the chicken. CNN was on. I turned back to
The Road Warrior
. He didn't say anything, but I could've turned on MTV at full volume and he wouldn't have heard. Everything ceased to exist when he spiced up the chicken. His world shrunk to the size of the aluminum tray before him, a type of screen. He scrutinized the limp rows of chicken parts as his hand jagged over them. There are those among us who put their faith in marinades. For others, barbecue sauce—Texas-style tomato-based or North Carolina vinegar-infused—is the order of the day. My father didn't truck with any of that. “Salt. Pepper. Paprika. That's all you need. All you ever do need.” First one side, then he flipped them piece by piece and did the other side. As a concession to the rest of humanity, he'd brush on some barbecue sauce at the end if you asked for it, but it was obviously beneath him and a betrayal of bedrock values. Slap on some store-bought Heinz crap, to show what he thought of you.
He kept changing the channel out of habit. CNN and the Nightly News were the only things he watched. To him, the faces on the screen—the anchors, the newsmakers, this day's victim, and all the everyday heroes—were a parade of shifting masks. Props of an idea, like the souvenirs our friends and neighbors brought back across the Atlantic. He saw the true faces beneath and called them out. He didn't need a teleprompter; he knew his commentary by heart. A Televangelist snuck his hand into the collection box. “Problem with black people is that they waste all this time praying to God when they should be out looking for a job.” Welfare Moms exposed! “Nobody ever gave me anything. Didn't ask for anything. Some people need to get off their asses.” A Hot Young Thing sued her boss for
squeezing her behind. “Women always talking about how they want to be equal, but they get mad at you if you don't hold the door for them.” The Undersecretary of Bullshit explaining why he wanted to bomb some country. “Whitey always trying to blow somebody up. They should put all those warmongers on an ice floe in the North Pole with the penguins, let them blow each other up and leave us the hell alone.” He was our talking head. The only channel we got.
Tock, thunk, rasp, poomp
.
Nobody ever gave him anything, and he never asked. His parents died before I was born. I didn't know much about them because he never talked about them. I knew his stand on every issue, but his parents were a blank. Except for the fact that they never gave him anything. He washed dishes at an uptown restaurant to pay for college, the first one in his family to go. After that, grad school. “I didn't know I could do anything else,” he told us. “Back then if you wanted to make something of yourself you went into the Sacred Seven”—he ticked them off on his fingers—“Teacher, Preacher, Doctor, Lawyer, Nurse, Dentist. Undertaker. If white people aren't going to do it, we have to do it ourselves. Separate and as equal as we can make it. I looked around and thought, Everybody gets sick. And all the black people I knew, they had bad feet. So I became a foot doctor.” He did two days a week at Harlem Hospital and three days at his office on Morningside Drive. I never saw it. I assume it existed. He made a good living. He was right—black people had some bad feet, although it should be pointed out that he worked with a self-selecting sample.
I will add here the personal observation that being a podiatrist taught you how to really put your foot up someone's ass.
My mother returned from the beach.
“You finish making that macaroni salad?” my father asked.
“It's here in the fridge,” she said.
“Your mother makes the best macaroni salad.”
She poured herself some white wine. “It turned out to be a nice beach day.”
“They're all down there?”
“Where else would they be?” She looked over at me. “You going to stay inside all day?”
“Bobby's coming over. We're going driving around.”
“You're going to stay for some barbecue?” my father asked. “I got that good chicken ‘comin’ right up.'”
“I already talked to him.”
A shadow crossed his face but then that gene we shared kicked in, the one that said, Don't show it. To see his expression, he was back at his timetables, when to put on what, turn this, take off that. He was a master griller. It was good I was getting out of there.
The fire was ready. He scraped the pile into an even red layer—none of that hoity-toity direct/indirect heat-zone crap for him. Behind him, this old lady I didn't recognize came up from the beach, her gray-purple hair poking out from beneath a big floppy straw hat. Bet me money and I would have guessed she was in her sixties, but I found out she was twenty years older. She carried her age in her movements, in her tiny hesitant steps and the tremble in her hand as it skipped along the rail. “Gail, is that you?” she said, trying to see into the living room. “Louisa said you might be up here.”
My mother rushed out to the deck. “Mrs. Russell!”
“Natalie,” my father said. “How you doing, girl?” They gave her big hugs. She had to be an Azurest old-timer to get this kind of treatment, one of my grandparents' friends, which was confirmed when she looked around and told my mother, “I remember when your father started clearing this lot.” No matter how old you were, you remembered the trees going down.
“Benji—come out and say hello!” my mother said.
When I shook her hand, Mrs. Russell winced. “That's some handshake.”
Was that some kind of a joke? She told me she hadn't seen me since I was a baby. “Your grandfather—he was just the nicest gentleman that ever came out here. A real one of a kind.”
“Doesn't she look good?” my father asked me. “I swear you haven't aged a day, girl.”
“I do miss coming out here,” she said, almost blushing. “I should make more of an attempt.”
“You're always welcome around my house,” my father said.
“Is that
Finns Spirit?”
Mrs. Russell pointed out to the water. A big white yacht crawled slowly across the water toward the Long Wharf. I couldn't see anybody on it. Big yachts were a rare sight back then, drifting around like rumors.
“I saw it out here last year,” my mother said. She went to fetch the binoculars.
“It's a big one,” my father said.
“It's from Holland,” Mrs. Russell said.
“If you got a yacht like that, you might as well show it off.”
“Is it too big for the yacht club? They're pretty strict there, I know,” Mrs. Russell said.
After my mother and Mrs. Russell went back down to the beach, my father told me, “That's what you look for in a woman—good DNA. She really hasn't aged a bit. If you want to know what a woman is going to look like in thirty years, look at her mother. It's all passed down.”
“Right.”
“That way you don't make mistakes. Her mother, too—she was a knockout. Old as hell when I met her, but still. Classy. A real lady. She was
dark
. That's why she was always nice to me. I wasn't one of them, either. She wasn't one of these light-skinned pussies they got out here. I don't know where the bitch was from, but it wasn't no Sag Harbor, I'll tell you that.”
I thought, This is where the day curdles. It was in his posture, this rigidity. He stared down the beach. From up there, it all spread before him, the slow-moving pageant of an Azurest Saturday. “All these bourgie bitches out here …” He lifted the binoculars. “Who's that down there by the Rock?”
He passed me the binoculars. “That's Sherry. She's friends with Elena.”
“She's going to be fat when she's forty.” He took the binoculars back and looked at her again. “Gotta watch for that. Don't want
people talking about how you got a whale for a wife. It's in the genes, I'm telling you.”