T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

[This became a family legend, trotted out at dinner parties over the years, the story of how Miriam used her hands to paddle the boat to the nearest point, which unfortunately lay on the far side of the lake, and how she’d walked a good mile and a half barefoot and with her windbreaker and the blouse beneath it soaked through before she got to Kitchawank Village and the pay phone in front of the liquor store there and realized she didn’t have a cent to her name, let alone a dime. How she’d turned around and walked another three blocks on the cold hard unforgiving pavement till she got to Lowenstein’s Deli and Sy Lowenstein let her use the store phone to call Sid, who was installing heating ducts in a four-plex in Mount Kisco where thank God they had a phone already hooked up on the ground floor, to please come get her before she froze to death. And how Sid had let out one of his arpeggiated Jesus Christs! and went twenty miles over the limit all the way back and then had to take her out to Fiorvanti’s because there was no dinner on the table that night.]

She’s never much liked the autumn, even when Susan was in Brownies and she took the girls out into the woods to collect leaves and hickory nuts and they made campfires and cooked wieners over the open coals, because autumn prefigures winter and winter lasts forever. But it’s an autumn day in an advancing year, the trees brilliant around the lake, each leaf painted a distinctive shade and the whole blended as in a Monet, when the phone rings and she picks up to hear from Molly, all the way out in Connecticut, that Marsha’s daughter Seldy is getting married. To Richie Spano. Who, at thirty-four, is assistant manager of some sort of appliance store in Yorktown Heights and apparently making a decent living, though no one would have thought it from the way he was raised.

What goes through her mind first is a quick envious accounting — neither Alan nor Les is married yet, nor do they look to be soon, and Susan’s been so busy studying for the Bar she hasn’t had a date in months, or not that Miriam knows of anyway — and then, as she forms the words She hasn’t told me anything about it, the hurt sets in. This is Marsha, her best friend all these years, maid of honor at her own wedding, and she can’t call her with the news? Yes, well maybe they have been like strangers lately, because things are different now, everybody getting older and more stay-at-home, the Colony breaking down as people die off or move away to Florida and the new people don’t want to pay their dues and drop out — plus in most cases they’re not even Jewish — but that doesn’t mean you can’t pick up a telephone.

As soon as she hangs up — before it occurs to her that maybe Marsha’s ashamed to have such a son-in-law, not to mention a daughter throwing her life away — she’s dialing. What she wants to say is Hello, how are you? so that she can ease into the situation as gracefully as possible, but her lips betray her. “Marsha?” she says. “How come you didn’t tell me the good news?”

“Hello, Miriam, is that really you?” Marsha returns, her rasping voice as familiar as Miriam’s own. “It’s been too long, hasn’t it, what with one thing and another? But news? What news are you talking about?”

“Seldy. Getting married. Are you planning a spring wedding then — June? Like you and David? And Sid and me?”

There’s a pause. The sound of a match striking and Marsha drawing smoke into her lungs. “No,” she breathes finally, “no, that’s not the way it is anymore.”

And then there’s the exegesis, a story stewed in its details and leaning heavily toward Richie and Richie’s feelings. Richie — he grew up Catholic, did she know that? — hates religion, just hates it, and so does Seldy, or that’s what she claims. They don’t want a fuss. Don’t want anybody there — and it was like pulling teeth just to get them to say that she and David could stand as witnesses when they go before the justice of the peace. And they want to do it as soon as possible.

There’s a pause. Silence on both ends of the line. “Well, could we at least host the reception?” Miriam puts in, feeling nothing but shame and disappointment for Marsha — and for herself, herself too.

Very softly: “No, I don’t think so. I think the Spanos — Rich Senior and Carlotta, the parents? — I think they have something planned.”

She wants to shout back at her You think? but she goes numb all over, the phone pressed to her ear like a weight, like one of the dumbbells Alan had left in the far corner of the basement from when he was in junior high. She gazes out across the lake and hears herself peep and chirp back at Marsha as the conversation runs to the sorrows and sicknesses of people they know, to the sad state of the Colony, how hardly anybody goes to the Association meetings anymore and how they could barely raise a crew to take the raft out of the water this fall, and then finally stalls. “Call soon,” she hears herself say.

“Yes, I will.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

There are half a dozen people she wants to call, she’s so wrought up, but for a long while, as the sun softens and the colors fade from the trees on the far side of the lake, she just sits there, feeling as if someone has died. What will Sid think? Sid’s always had a soft spot for Seldy, as if she were his own daughter, and he’s never liked Richie Spano, never liked what he stood for or where he came from or how he’d managed to get his hooks into her. And then she’s remembering the time, years ago now, down at the lake, when she snapped awake from a sun-soaked dream to a clamor of voices raised in anger. Sid’s voice she recognized right away, a low buzz of outrage that meant he was right on the verge, but the other voice — a high querulous whine that seemed to choke on itself — she didn’t know.

It was Richie Spano’s. She turned to look over her shoulder and there he was, incandescent in the light, flailing his arms and screaming in Sid’s face. He didn’t want to wait for a court and he’d been waiting too long already, shouting it out as if he’d been gored, shouting that the whole idea of holding the court when you never lose was just bullshit, that was all. She pushed herself up from the beach chair in the moment that the two of them came at each other — and Sid, though he was slow to anger, could have torn him apart and would have but for the intervention of David, who forced himself between them before the shoves could turn to blows. But that wasn’t enough for Richie. He danced out of reach, spewing his obscenities till Sid broke loose and came for him, but there was no way Sid could catch him in the open and that just made it worse. The next week, at the very next meeting of the Association, she raised her hand and made a motion to ban people from the beach who weren’t even members of the Colony — and she named Richie Spano specifically, because whose guest was he anyway?

[My memories of Sid are of a man secure in himself, a big man — huge for his generation, six-three and two-twenty and none of it gone to fat — who gave the impression of power held in reserve, even when he was flipping steaks in a rainstorm or revolving a gimlet so that the pale green viscid liquid swirled like smoke in a crystal ball. He was quick-witted and light on his feet, as verbally wicked as we ourselves were, and if you were admitted to his inner circle — and I was, I was — he would defend you against all comers. He’d fought the Germans, done a stint as a beat cop in Harlem and then come home to the house on the lake to raise his family. I remember walking into a bar with him once, an unfamiliar place, down and dirty — and he must have been in his mid-sixties then — and feeling untouchable, as secure as if I were sitting in my own living room.]