Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

In the meantime he stared at the legs, at the way she stood on one of them and slowly rubbed the crown of her foot against the back of her calf. He rehearsed pickup lines. Come here often? What's your major? Are you Polish? French? I couldn't help noticing your… I couldn't help noticing your legs. Do you think you would ever let me chew on them, like you do on a spicy Buffalo wing?

Too late. A red pickup truck had honked from across the street. In the back of the truck were two boys waving and shouting, and also an immense, black, slavering dog. Two women were in the cab. The girl waved, grabbed her bag, ran across to the driver's side, spoke briefly to the driver, and then jumped up into the bed of the truck. Which oddly enough did not move away, but honked again. He looked up. The woman in the passenger seat was calling his name and waving. To his immense surprise (together with a little jolt of pleasure, which followed soon after) he recognized his mother. He crossed the street, where he observed that his sister, Lizzie, was also sitting in the front seat. A quick kiss, a brief explanation, and he found himself in the rear of the truck, being drooled on by the dog, with his knees within inches of hers. The boys stared at him shamelessly. Twins, he noted.

"Small world," he said.

She grinned, showing small, even white teeth. "That's what they say." She stuck out her hand. "Lucy Karp. These three are Zak, Giancarlo, and Gog."

"Gog is the dog," said Giancarlo. "You can tell him from Zak because Zak doesn't drool as much." A brief flurry of friendly punches and nuggies, to which Lucy put an authoritative, physical halt.

"They know they're not supposed to do that in the truck," she said, sitting again. "Who are you, by the way? I saw you on the train and the ferry."

"Did you think I was following you with evil intent?"

"No. You don't look like the following kind. Or evil."

This was said in a flat tone that did not invite banter. Deflated a little, Dan introduced himself, and they spent the rest of the short trip exchanging information. After the usual school and job stuff, he asked, "What were you doing with the headphones on the train?"

"Translating. A speech by the Polish finance minister into French."

"You can translate Polish into French?" he asked, not keeping amazement from his tone.

"Yes, and if you think that's impressive, I can also crack my toes." She demonstrated.

"No, really…"

"She can speak fifty-seven languages," said Giancarlo.

"My agent," she said. "And a lie." To the boy: "How's the garden coming?"

The boy told her, at length, interrupted from time to time by interjections from his brother on the subject of suppressing vermin.

From time to time she looked at Dan, to draw him into the family chatter, but not too far. A strange bird was his thought. Clearly some kind of genius but diffident about it, used to keeping it under wraps. He wondered what the real girl was like.

"Ah, the ancestral mansion," Dan exclaimed as they pulled into the drive. It was a large, two-story, brick house, painted white long ago, with the brick underneath showing pinkly through. The paint on the green shutters was peeling off in strips, and the lawn was high and ragged. Weeds thrust up from the gravel drive.

"Your ancestors need a lawn mower," Lucy said.

"My ancestors have gone to their ancestors, leaving debts and not much else. The place is in hock. My mom has the use of it for her lifetime, if she can pay the taxes and maintenance, which she can't, so it's up for sale."

Everyone left the truck and there were more introductions. Rose Heeney led them all around the side of the house and into a huge kitchen, where she served out sodas and iced tea to all. Rose announced that her husband and her elder son were coming in that Friday, and she invited the Karps to join them in a beach cookout.

"Why not," agreed Marlene. "Butch will be here, too. You'll get to meet him."

At this juncture, Giancarlo, who had wandered out, came back in and asked, "How come you have no furniture? Are you moving in?"

"Out, I'm afraid, dear," said Rose. "We have to entertain in the kitchen like the peasantry. It's the only inhabitable room in the house besides the bedrooms." The furnishings in the remainder, she explained, had all been sold off or taken by Rose and her brothers after their parents' death. "It's terribly Dickensian, or maybe Chekhovian, I don't know which. The decay of a distinguished old family. The Wickhams settled here in 1741." She added to Marlene, "I'm sure you'll want to hear all about them."

"You will even if you don't," said Dan.

"That's his father talking," Rose said. "I'm not allowed to be a bourgeois oppressor of the poor even for one tiny instant."

An uncomfortable pause here, which Marlene ended with a remark about how pretty the house was, after which Rose suggested a tour. Dan said to Lucy, "I'll show you around the grounds. It's included in the package. You also get a brochure printed on recycled paper and a handy souvenir key chain."

"Keep an eye on the children," said Marlene, "and take Gog," at which Lucy made a mumbled agreement and said, "Let's go, brats!"

Lucy and Dan left the house through the empty front rooms, preceded by the three children running with the dog, their footsteps echoing loud on the hardwood. They walked across the sketchy lawn to a low stone pumphouse. The boys and Lizzie ran into it and emerged with scraps of lath, pirate swords. Dueling and shouting, they ran off toward the dunes.

"Now this pumphouse is where George Washington and John Adams planned the American Revolution," said Dan.

"Really? Gosh, it doesn't look big enough."

"Yeah, it fooled the redcoats, too. This is the place. We used to have a plaque but the birds got to it. And I believe this"-here Dan kicked at a weathered butt-"is one of the cigarettes Jefferson smoked while he was writing the Declaration. Our home is indeed rich in history."

"I'll say! Why, compared to your ancientness, my family is just off the boat. And those dunes! Why they look just like the ones Columbus landed on… but… but, that's impossible."

"No, those are the very ones," said Dan in a plummy voice. "Let's explore among them. Who knows? Maybe we can find important artifacts of white imperialist hegemony."

They went up through the line of low dunes and sat down with their backs against the warm sand. Below, the three children raced in circles with the dog. Their screaming came back in snatches on the sea wind. They goofed some more about historical obsessions, about the scene in Boston, about their school life. Lucy mentioned that she had often been at MIT.

"Taking courses?" he asked.

"Oh, right-I can barely do fractions. No, I have sort of a job with the computational linguistics people. They pay me to inspect my brain."

"You're kidding."

She had an urge to say yes. She did not want to interrupt in any way this unexpected pleasure, sitting here on the dunes with a luscious boy who did not seem afraid of her-not of her height or of her face or of her other peculiarities. Of course, he did not know about those yet. For an instant, she was aware of an intense desire to be someone else, before she said, "No, I'm not. I'm a language prodigy. My brain is a national resource."

"Like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?"

"Except smaller. What kind of prodigy are you?"

"Oh, you know, the usual MIT crap-grades, boards, Intel Scholarship. Except I come from West Virginia and I'm not Asian." A little bitterness here, she thought. She didn't know anything about West Virginia. Coal? Hillbillies? That song. It must not have been fun growing up a nerdy, pretty boy in a rural high school.

"So… are you going back to Boston?" she asked.

"I don't know. I have a job up there if I want it, you know what I mean, just computer shit, but it pays. I kind of like the idea of kicking back here for a while. I mean I've been working my butt off this year."