Jillian Abbott's - Queens Noir

It’s a far swim from the meals she used to make, for her daddy, then her husband, then her son, for the endless stream of relatives from Italy and Bensonhurst, for Good Guys and Bad Guys, their loud wives, sandy children, pets! On a Sunday like this, she’d be expected to serve the antipasti and the pasta, two meats, a vegetable side, dessert, espresso, and mints. She prayed for a daughter to help her. When that didn’t work, she prayed for an air conditioner. Finally, “I just prayed they’d leave me the fuck alone, excuse my Italian. And here I am. Until Paulie gets his way. Or the whale saves me.”

“ A bacterial time bomb ,” the papers are calling the washed-up finback. If the city doesn’t get rid of her before the next high tide, she could infect the whole waterfront. Rockaway’s summer of ’93 would be an environmental disaster, a PR nightmare! A blessing for Rose. No one will bother coming near her house if the beach is closed. Rose will live happily ever after for one more summer. Rose and Li—

Sadly, no one’s ever seen a Chinese person in Rockaway besides the delivery boy for Wok and Roll. People would definitely notice. Li’s dark hair and busy eyebrows are actually a lot like young Vin’s were, but there are those nearly lidless eyes to give Li away, high cheekbones, a nose like some kind of exotic sliced mushroom. He sniffs with what might be disgust at the box of Fiberall cereal.

“If Paulie hadn’t had my gas turned off, I’d make you my famous cutlets and escarole,” Rose apologizes. “Or some soup — I know your people like soup. The nerve of that kid after forty-five years of scarfing my rigatoni. On a Sunday like this, I’d serve an antipasti and a pasta, two meats—

Eyes closed, Li begins quickly eating the cereal, with his hands, from the box, no milk. He’s got a way of chewing with his whole head that Rose has never seen before. And Rose has seen a whole lot of people eating.

“I’d go easy on that Fiberall,” she warns.

He streaked across her lawn just as she made it out the backdoor, without falling. There goes the neighbor’s huge black lab, Blacky, off its leash again, she’d assumed. And though she’d noticed his bark sounded odd, like a croup, she was too distracted, thinking how the wretch had gone to pee in his favorite spot against her shower house. No point reasoning with the owners, people so deeply unoriginal that they’d name a black dog Blacky. Didn’t they also want her property? Eager to buy and tear down the place Paulie was born in to build something they called a solarium . Owning things others covet might make some feel powerful, but it just filled Rose with fear.

In the distance, Ambrose lighthouse pulsed on, off, on, but its usual soothing rhythm was jangled by searchlights roaming the dark, chaotic waves. She could hear sirens. Screams? The helicopter din made it hard to make out. Then that lumpy policeman appeared, bouncing around the side of the house.

“What!” Rose snapped, clutching her sweatshirt closed. She’d been hassled by the law once before, after starting a fire on the beach. Had she really fallen, this officer would have been the one to find her. Quite by accident, while coveting the ivy climbing up her façade, the decorative inlaid tile, flowering shrubbery, large picture windows, his flashlight would have suddenly illuminated what was left of her, Rose Camille Maria Impoliteri. A shriveled, bloodied human carcass. An ugly, used-up thing requiring removal. A nuisance.

“We were ringin’ but you were out here, I guess,” the policeman said, and only then remembered to flash a badge. “O’Donnell.”

Behind him, a second, trimmer uniform materialized. This one trailing a nightstick along the beach wall and whacking now and then at Rose’s ornamental grasses. He looked so much like an old classmate of Paulie’s. Kevin? Kieran? But then they all did. Those fair-haired Rockaway lifeguards and rangers, cops, firefighters, Coast Guard; they could all pass for larger versions of the St. Francis High School bullies who tagged her son “Guido” and “Greaseball Wop,” “Guinnie Rat” and “Zipperhead.”

“Stop!” her frail voice failed to yell. “Why’s he doin’ that?”

“Just checkin’ around.” O’Donnell smiled, still bouncing, in place now. “You see anything unusual?

“Yeah. Over there, your partner beatin’ on my plants.”

“Any Chinese, I mean. Boat ran aground on a sandbar off a Breezy,” he explained. “ The Golden Venture . Full of Chinese illegals. They’re drownin’ and runnin’ so we’re s’posed to check around.” With a couple more bounces for punctuation.

“I know about that,” Rose said. “You need to use the men’s room?”

A genuine offer but O’Donnell ignored it. “Anyone else wit ya here? Husband? Kids? Some kinda companion?”

Rose snapped. “What makes ya think that? I can take care a myself! I am—”

Which is when Blacky started up barking again, barking from inside the house next door, the same old bark she was used to. So Blacky wasn’t actually out there, Rose got around to understanding. So it hadn’t even been a dog that ran past her just—

“Wait,” she called uselessly. By the time her mind had gotten here, the two officers had set off to search the garage. “Wait. You can’t do that.”

Her elbow throbbed and flamed from opening the door, but still she followed.

“You can’t do that! Wait!” Kicking off her flip-flops to try and move faster. “No, I think you’re not allowed to do that. Without a warrant.” Was this true? She hadn’t the faintest idea. All she knew for sure was, “This is my house!”

The backdoor sticks, the tile is scratched; the basement floods every time someone cries, Vin used to joke. But according to the brokers who periodically call, the brick rectangle is now worth two million easy. Ten thousand was what Rose’s daddy paid for it brand new, back in the ’40s.

“Germans came ashore then, did you know that? German spies in Rockaway!”

Now total strangers regularly stroll up and make offers on the house over the beach wall.

“But I’m gonna fool them all, Li,” Rose all of a sudden decides. “I’m gonna leave the place to you .”

The Good Guys didn’t help anyone that much. Other than a lady who let them load up her car with groceries in the Waldbaum’s parking lot, the Good Guys never really helped anyone at all. Vin said they tried but no one was interested. Even the lady with the groceries, Vin said, probably she just felt sorry for them. So the Good Guys took to drinking instead. Then they’d drag race their mopeds up and down Beach Channel Drive. Vin would stagger into Sunday dinner to alternately love up and criticize Rose. My favorite flower. You call this turd a meatball? My soft, fragrant Rose. Lazy bitch can’t go to Bensonhurst for some decent bread!

“It was that and more, and I took it until the day he says, Rose , he says, do me a favor. Don’t serve this grease when my cousins come from Calabria . In front of our Jewish friends, he says this in front of the Friedmans. He calls my sauce grease.”

Li can’t possibly understand the story, yet he tilts his head at its tone of hurt and even stops eating while she speaks. If Paulie and his atheist wife ever showed her half the deference, she might have invited them to live here already. If.

“That night, I burned the table leaves,” Rose continues. “This table here. I dragged those two heavy planks one by one across the floor — see here these long scratches? — that’s from draggin’ them, and mind you, by myself, since Paulie’s too busy upstairs with Vin watchin’ detectives chase each other or professional wrestlin’... But I know you would have helped me, Li.” At that, he tries to give Rose the wad of bills from his Ziploc bag and she pretends not to notice.