Twenty Grand (14 page)

I
WAS WAITING
for my lover—I would say boyfriend, but my boyfriend reminds me to say lover, not boyfriend, because we are in school and boyfriend sounds silly for a person in school—and it was late. When my bell rang I thought—here's my lover!—so I opened my top door, and at the base of the stairs, beyond the glass of the foyer, I saw the face of the crack lady, although, of course, I didn't know yet who she was. She was tiny, and her skin was black.

I'm your neighbor, the crack lady called up through the glass, I live next door.

Now I had a neighbor who lived next door, and he was black, and his name was Tim, and I liked Tim very much, so when the crack lady said she lived next door I believed her. I did not want to be rude to a friend of Tim's.

You know Tim? I said.

I'm your neighbor, the crack lady said. I live next door.

So I walked down the stairs and I opened the bottom door, the one that goes outside, and then we were body to body. Hers was strong-looking. It smelled like vinegar.

I need your help, the crack lady said. I need your help real bad.

Yes, I said.

She explained that she needed diapers for her baby, who was out of diapers, and that she needed my help to get the diapers. She said, Sister, I need your help.

I knew we were not sisters. But it was nice of her to say so, and if what she really wanted was crack, I thought, I would force her to have diapers instead by going with her to the store, which was one block away, and which stays open until long after midnight.

The street was crispy and our feet made a fine noise stepping together.

So you know Tim? I asked.

Who's Tim? she said.

Tim is my neighbor next door, I said. Don't you live next door?

I'm new, she said.

At the store we went together to the diaper aisle. Everyone saw us together in the diaper aisle, looking at the diapers. I felt that in some sense this made me her mother. I'm gonna get me some diapers to last awhile, my neighbor said, touching a pack of mega-bonus diapers.

Please don't, I said. I don't have much money. Please get the cheap diapers.

All right, she said. She chose some diapers. These are cheap, she said.

They were not the cheap diapers but we took them to the register.

At the counter the counter boy looked at us funny. I did not think anything was so funny I did not like his funny look.

I need a receipt, my neighbor said.

Do you need a receipt? the counter boy said to me.

That made me angry. He had heard us ask for a receipt.

Yes, I said. We need a receipt. I thought it was something to do with welfare, that if you were on welfare, you had to have receipts.

My neighbor left me outside the store. She took a cigarette butt from the butt-can. I need a cigarette, she said.

Good night, I said. I went to my house. I sat on my couch. I felt alone. By the time my lover rang my bell, I knew I had been fooled.

What's with the diapers? my lover said.

Nothing, I said.

She already brought them back, he said. I stopped at the store to get beer just now. All the clerks are laughing about it. They say you're an idiot.

Well, I said, it's a very crispy night.

I don't like you living on this street, he said. I'll be happy when you live with me, on my street.

The next night I was sitting with my lover. We were watching a movie about basketball. When the bell rang I thought—here she is! But when I looked down from the top door I saw a man at the bottom that I had not seen before.

I went downstairs. Hi, I said.

Is your boyfriend home? he said.

My lover? I said.

Yes, he said. Is he home?

Yes, I said. I went upstairs. He wants to speak with you, I said.

While my lover went down, I sat on the couch and waited. I heard their voices—like trucks on a highway—but I could not hear their words.

My lover came back. What did he say? I said.

He wanted two dollars, my lover said.

Did he want the two bucks for crack? I said.

For milk, my lover corrected. He wanted two dollars for milk.

Oh, I said. Milkman, I said. Then, Do you know him?

No, my lover said. I do not know him. My lover lay back on the couch. He started the movie about basketball that he had stopped before. They know this house, my lover said, and they know you live in it, and I do not like you living on this street. I'll be happy when you live with me, on my street.

Okay, I said.

Now I do live with my lover on my lover's street. It is a very pretty street, much prettier than my old street, and the snow has begun to collect itself so that we'll have a white holiday.

This morning, well noon, that is when we wake up, since we are awake late at night, our doorbell rang. Can you get that? said my lover (who generally likes to answer the door but was naked). I'm naked.

At the door was a man. He was a shaggy man wearing a red wool hat. He looked a lot like the father in
A Time to Kill
—he had eyebrows of wrath and an ivory smile. Got any bottles today? he said.

Sorry, I said. I shut the door.

Who was that? said my lover, pulling on pants.

Bottle man, I said.

Oh, he said. Bottle man.

I stood there.

I opened the door.

The bottle man was down the street, wheeling a shopping cart toward the house of our neighbor.

Hey! I said.

He turned. Got bottles? He rolled toward me.

I carried two cases of bottles from the kitchen and I put them on the porch. Wait, I told the bottle man, who stood on the porch with his cart, there's more.

What are you doing? my lover said.

It's Christmas, I said. It's the holiday. I picked up two more cases and carried them out. I was glad to give him so many boxes of bottles.

Happy crack! I said.

He shrugged. Happy crack to you too, he said.

Inside, I was happy, but my lover, no longer naked, was not happy.

You are weird, my lover said.

Was he a crack man? I said.

No, he said. He's a bottle man.

Oh, I said.

Now I am often confused. Crack man, bottle man, father, neighbor, crack lady, sister, mother, boyfriend, lover, pretty street, crack street, these distinctions are slick and leave their colors on one another, but I have the idea that one day soon my God will speak, and then my headphones may save my life.

T
HE
B
ROADS WERE
a blue swath dotted by white sails, an expanse that stretched for miles until at their western edge they were broken by the Forty Islands. So named because there were forty, though many were piles of dirt that stuck up from the water. To exit the Broads and reach the lake's north end, a boat had to go through or around the islands. There were plenty of routes that were pleasant if circuitous. The direct one was a pass filled with rocks. Most of the rocks had jagged tips and stopped just below the surface. But a half dozen in the middle of the channel protruded several feet into the air. These were black and shiny, with globular tops. They didn't really look like witches though; more like women's hunched shoulders and bent heads: six lumpy women who'd risen up out of the lake and were looking, now, back down into it. The stretch was famous for hull damage. But my stepfather liked to tack through the narrow often windless hall.

He had a twenty-four-foot yacht. He bought it used, for ten thousand dollars. It had come with an old chart of the lake, a horn you could sound that would be heard for miles, two moldy life jackets, and a bottle of Blue Glo-Clean for the toilet. He taught me to sail when I was twelve. Whether you had a motorboat or a sailboat, he said, you'd get to know the lake pretty well; but if you had a sailboat, you'd get to know it better. Because you would pass through it slower and be more vulnerable to things like other boats, their wakes, and lack of wind. The lake was glacial, deep, and twenty-six miles long. At its bottom were coal barges, several steamships, a railroad car, and an abandoned underwater naval sound laboratory. My stepfather taught me the islands—more than two hundred—whose names and shapes I forgot after getting to college, like Ship and Moose, adjacent, each just big enough for a house, and Rattlesnake, miles long and winding with oak-covered humps. Whenever we anchored off Sleeper, bright green and circular, he leaned forward and said, “That island's for sale. If ten men had three hundred thousand dollars each, they could go in and buy it.” He took me with him every weekend, whenever he wasn't working at the garage. My mother didn't like to sail, and was often tired. I didn't have much to do. I had track and my homework, which didn't take long. I was tall for a girl, five eleven, and awkward.

Some days we sailed four hours there and back to Center Harbor to get an ice cream at the docks. Fortnights we entered the races our yacht club held. By fifteen I knew every public landing, pump station, and anchor spot, the names of the other crafts in our mooring field, and the dour expression of each old man who spent the week sitting, pale legs forked and pointing toward the path to the dinghies, in chairs on the clubhouse deck.

After we'd left the mooring field and made the point, my stepfather would stand erect. He'd say, “Where'd you like to go?” I'd say, “I don't care.” He'd shut the motor off and ask me to get out the jib. I'd go into the cabin, drag the sail bag from the hold, and lug it onto the deck. He'd be standing in the same position, but his hand would have gone into his pocket. He'd say, “How about the Weirs?” I'd say, “All right.” He'd say, “Great!” Open the sail bag, wrestle the jib from it, and add, “Why don't we take the Witches? It's a shortcut.”

When we entered the pass the birds on the spars would swivel their necks and a few would lift their long wings and their white bodies would raise and puff as if about to shit. I held the tiller and my stepfather stood atop the head, tightening the winch or staring forward. You had to stay an exact course between spars—just so far right of this and this far left of that. I was always convinced, as the rocks neared, that we'd scrape one and our keel would chip or break off entirely. Instead we'd pass into the bay, where there was a beach and a yellow cliff that held up a boardwalk with a penny arcade, a tattoo parlor, a souvenir shop with fake Indian jewelry in front and pipes in back, and La Cucaracha, a Mexican restaurant.

When I was fifteen or so my stepfather and my mother began to fight a lot, mostly about money. The boat was expensive—its maintenance, fees—and he was always on it. She was tired of being alone. My brothers were four and eight. They wore her out. She wanted to go somewhere tropical. She knew other wives who had and thus she knew which islands were the least developed and where to stay and had brochures. Five nights, a private beach, a cottage. His voice went low. “Maybe next year,” he said. “We don't have enough money.” Privately he showed me catalogs. Spinnakers. It was why we came in second or third in the races. Our boat was the best in its class, but heavy. The guys with spinnakers had the edge. They cost two or three grand. He showed me the one he'd picked out: green with white stripes. It wasn't the most expensive one in the catalog, he said, because it lacked some technical innovations. But it was high quality. The fabric was light yet durable. On a day with strong wind, it would pick up gusts from the stern the jib missed. He pointed. Far off, in the Broads, was a rainbow-colored spinnaker pulling a boat. He looked down at his feet. “I can't really afford it,” he said.

He was right. The checkbook was overdrawn. We needed things, my mother a new winter coat, new curtains, new hand towels and comforters for the beds; my brothers fall windbreakers, guitars and guitar lessons, soccer cleats. To make it up he worked overtime and had side jobs. I wasn't sure how the side jobs occured; I think he sometimes told guys, “Come back after the owner's gone and I'll fix it for this much cash.” Maybe he just helped them restore their old cars. At any rate, he'd stay late a few weeks at the garage and come home one night after dark and say, “Austin Healey's done,” or “I fixed the clutch on that TR3.” My mother would nod. The next night he'd make dinner. Afterwards ask, “Is there anything you'd like that I can get you?” She'd say “Baileys Irish Cream.” He'd pick it up at the store and they'd drink it on the couch in the living room and he'd rub her back while they watched TV. But at the month's end they'd meet in the dining room, take the bills out of the china cabinet, and discuss which to pay, and without fail my mother would say, “I think we should sell the boat.”

 

I
STARTED SAYING
no thanks when my stepfather asked me to sail. He seemed to accept this. When the races came around, he had to ask the other guys if someone would let him on their crew. He'd go down and walk all around the club's lodge and its yard and the guys would say, “No thanks” or “Full.” Eventually one guy would say, “All right, Earl, come on.”

I spent time on the track. I got a job in the library. A few years passed and I was done. I didn't miss sailing or even the lake. But at the end of high school, on the night of our senior prom, when a girl I'd loved as a child asked me if we could take my stepfather's boat out, because she wanted to go somewhere quiet, where she and her boyfriend could talk, I said, “Why not,” and when she asked where we should go, I said, “The Witches.”

 

W
E REACHED THE PASS
,
anchored, and floated off the rocks. I sat on the prow and they sat in the stern. They forgot I was there, or didn't care. The girl's boyfriend was twenty-six but nearly crying. She was telling him that she'd decided to go to college after all, not move into an apartment with him as they'd planned, and he was trying to convince her to stay.

On a lot of nights the lake would have been black. But there was a cloud cover that reflected the lights of the town, and the pines leaning out from the nearby islands were visible. I could see the lumpy shapes bending up from the water off the stern, and in a few the deep crevices like fat women's necks, the grayish lichen climbing on them. Sometimes they seemed to be moving, because they were still and the water was moving, and with it the boat. The movement was a black ball at the end of a string. From time to time I closed my eyes. The air was warm for May, fifty degrees, and through the clouds I could see a few green stars. I was feeling lonely. In my purse were diamond earrings the girl had asked me to hold. Her boyfriend was hunched on the stern's bench, and his elbows were propped on his knees.

I knew that his mother was dead and his father was a drunk. He'd graduated late from high school because he'd been in juvie awhile.

Before that he'd been a soccer star. Now he hunched. But every spring one beautiful girl fell in love with him before leaving him for someone else. His name was Dirk Drew. He was stupid, but he often made good jokes about how stupid he was. He had craggy features, dark curly hair, and worked at the marina, on the docks.

I was there because they'd needed a ride. The girl, Crystal, had a heart-shaped face and green eyes. She'd found me and asked for a ride. I would have sat on the prow for five hours or six. But after two, she put her hand on his knee and said she wanted to go for a swim.

Dirk Drew looked at her. “It's two a.m.,” he said.

She took her sweatshirt off.

“The water's freezing,” he said.

“I live on the lake,” she said. “I've gone swimming in April.” She sounded annoyed. She added: “I've gone swimming in March.” Stood up and took her T-shirt off. Then she dropped her sweatpants and T-shirt in a pile on the deck. She unhooked the railing and stood in the gap with her arms raised. In the deck lights, her body looked gold.

“There's rocks,” I said.

She dove. After a minute, we heard her laugh. She was backstroking. I could see white where her breasts protruded from the water.

“It's warm,” she said.

I was surprised by how comfortable she seemed. Meaning she seemed to float effortlessly. But as she'd said, she'd grown up on the lake.

“Come swim,” she called up; and she said it to me.

Dirk Drew told her to come back in the boat. He said she was drunk. He said that she'd always regret giving him up and that no one else was ever going to love her like he had. He was drunk. I'd walked to the stern and I could smell his breath.

“Swim then,” he said, after a minute. “Ruth and I are going inside.”

I knew he wasn't attracted to me. I was too tall. My black hair was rough. My nose was not delicate and I had a square jaw.

He said, “Come on, Ruth,” and his hand came out.

She was still swimming, her arms sweeping back elegantly. He was half watching her, too. The boat was drifting among the rocks. I could hear the water washing against them, a kind of music. My stepfather had told me a million times, never to swim between a boat and a dock. Because the water could shift suddenly, by current or wind, and the boat could press its weight against the dock. She wasn't swimming between a boat and a dock, but she was swimming between a boat and a half dozen rocks. I felt a shock of recognition, or misplaced déjà vu, and opened my mouth. I meant to say, “Let's put the ladder down.” I thought I had. I looked at Dirk Drew, and expected him to get the ladder from the locker under the bench, and put it down. But I must have said, “All right.” Because Dirk Drew nodded and ducked through the cabin door, and once I'd followed, he shut it behind me, locked it, and said, “It's cold tonight.”

 

E
ARLIER THAT NIGHT
,
our town had had its prom. It was held in the ski lodge and each year it was a grand affair. There was a catered dinner, photographers, champagne, and a committee of mothers who judged a beauty contest and choreographed a couples' march down a red velvet carpet. Parents attended and observed every event from a balcony over the rafters. Men from the town who were not parents slipped in at midnight and squeezed onto the balcony too. That afternoon, I'd asked my stepfather to stay home. At first he'd seemed surprised at my request. He'd walked outside to consider it. When he returned he said he'd really like to come. I'd answered that I'd like him not to. He'd repeated that he'd like to, if only for a little while, and then my brothers had been sent outside. My mother had no desire, herself, she said, to go to the prom; she was tired, she didn't feel up for a prom, but she was angry that I'd caused discord over something trivial. My stepfather just kept saying how he wanted to go. How he wanted to take pictures, had been looking forward to it for years, was my stepfather and had paid for my dress. But in the end, he promised not to, if I'd let him take one photograph on the lawn.

I'd put the dress on and been embarrassed. It was tight, shiny, black, and too small. My boobs were practically falling out. The rhinestone necklace—my mother had come to my room and said, “Here, take this, you might as well”—looked cheap. But they'd taken the picture, and wished me good night, and my date and I had left.

Soon after we got there, my date wandered off into the crowd.

I wasn't deeply disappointed, and after he left I danced in the lodge among the crowd as if I weren't alone, until I accidentally stepped on, and tore a small hole in, a woman's long tangerine-colored gown. She made a noise and her boyfriend turned around. I recognized him from my math class, where I'd had a crush on him because he'd been good at math. I apologized to his date. She stared. I offered to pay for the damage. She gathered up the material and studied it sadly. She said, “It's not a question of money.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll pay double.” As soon as I said it the woman looked satisfied. But her boyfriend did not turn back around. Instead he watched me dance. After a minute he said, “You're the worst dancer I've ever seen.”

I moved away as if I hadn't heard, as if my rhythm required it, and looked up at the balcony and saw my stepfather. He was leaning over the railing, peering through the wide pink streamers that had been strung across the beams to give dancers the illusion of privacy. There might have been other people already up there too; I couldn't tell because of the spotlights. But I knew he'd taken off his bathrobe and gotten re-dressed and left the house to come to the prom. He was forty-six. A guy whose idea of a great day was breaking some ones and spending the quarters at the penny arcades. I felt as if I couldn't talk. And I sensed, or guessed, that my stepfather couldn't talk to the other adults on the second floor, either. He had a smile fixed on his face, as if someone had told a joke at his expense. He was standing alone and his head was turning back and forth levelly, as if someone very large were standing behind him and turning it for him. He had on a brand-new red wool sweater.