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

The tragic days of our lives, the days of accounting, begin like any other, with routine, with the bagel in the toaster and the coffee on the stove. So this is a morning. Sunlight streams through the big picture window though it’s cold, down to zero overnight, and the lake is sealed beneath a hard uneven tegument of ice so thick you could drive a truck across it. Miriam is feeling good, the pain in her hip subsiding under the ministrations of the prescription the doctor gave her while Sid, home from work because things are slow, is sitting across the table from her, his head bowed to the paper, jaws working at the bagel she’s smeared with cream cheese and decorated with a transparent wafer of lox and a sprinkle of capers. They’re silent, she absorbed in her thoughts, he in the paper. The only sounds are the little ones, the tap of a spoon on the rim of a cup, the sigh of the knife as it divides another bagel. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee is as rich and intoxicating as if they were sitting on a carpet in some bazaar in the Orient.

“You want juice?” she says. “Fresh-squeezed, I can make fresh-squeezed, with the oranges Molly sent us from Florida?”

He glances up from the paper, his eyes a roving watery blue above the little wire reading glasses clamped to the bridge of his nose. His fringe of hair, so thin now it’s barely there, sticks up awkwardly in back. He’s dressed in blue jeans, moccasins, a thin gray sweatshirt she’s washed so many times it’s almost white. “Yeah,” he breathes, “I guess. But don’t go to any trouble.”

She’s already pushing herself up, about to say, They’re going to go bad soon anyway, when she glances reflexively out the window, just as she does a hundred times a day. There’s a scattering of snow over the beach, the lake, the long low building that houses the concession stand, snow like dust. Everything is still, not even a bird moving among the stripped black branches of the trees. Susan says that she needs a hobby, needs to get out more, and maybe she does spend too much time at the window, more interested in what’s outside of her than what’s here inside the house — if this is what old women do, biddies, yentas, then she guesses she’s one of them. Yet when Les flew in from San Francisco for her sixty-fifth two weeks back she felt the resistance rising in her — was she really that old? And the cake — the cake was like the flank of some animal set ablaze in a conflagration, only it wasn’t running away. It was right there on the table in front of her.

But here’s the juicer, here the crate of oranges. She dips forward to dig into the crate, her gaze running across the table, past Sid and out to the familiar scene as if it were a picture in a frame. But it’s not a picture and something’s wrong, something’s out of place. She spots it then, a moving shadow in the deeper gloom cast by the overhanging roof of the concession stand, a man there, furtive, jerking back the door and ducking inside. “Sid,” she says, her blood quickening, “there’s somebody out there. I just — I think somebody just broke into the concession stand.”

“Who? What are you talking about?” He’s set down the paper now and he’s leaning forward to peer out the window, his lips pursed in concentration. “I don’t see anything.”

“He just went inside. I’m telling you. There’s somebody in there.”

This is an old story. There’ve always been problems with the place, the lake an irresistible draw for teenagers looking for trouble, and over the years the outbuildings have periodically been broken into, though there’s not much to steal, not in the off-season. They don’t seem to care. They just want to smash things, carve epithets into the counters, spray-paint their dirty slogans in the corners where children can’t miss them come summer. It’s been that way since the first truckload of sand was laid down, though it’s worse now, always and progressively worse, because the community isn’t what it was. And never will be.

Sid doesn’t want to be bothered, she can see that. He thinks she’s crazy, calling him at work every time a strange car pulls into the lot, sitting out there over her turtles and chasing dogs away from the Canada geese, ringing up the Yorktown cops so many times they don’t even bother to send a patrol car anymore. He’s already turned back to the paper—“It’s nothing, Miriam, nothing, don’t worry yourself”—when she drops the oranges right back in the crate and snatches up the binoculars. At first she can’t make out a thing, but then she focuses on the door, and sure enough, it’s standing open and there’s movement there, a man’s face showing like an image in a slide projector, presented and withdrawn all in the space of an instant. “Sid. Sid!”

The look he gives her is not a loving look. He sighs in that way he has when he’s feeling put-upon, a sigh that could contain a novel’s worth of martyrdom and resentment. But then she’s handing him the binoculars and he’s standing there erect at the window, focusing in. After a moment, he emits a low curse. “Son of a bitch,” he mutters, and he strides across the room to the door even as she calls out, “Take a coat!” and tries to fumble into her parka and slip on her boots all at the same time.

By the time she reaches the gates — and the big brass padlock there is hanging open, no question about it — he’s already at the paddleball courts, moving swiftly, his shadow jogging on ahead of him. It’s cold and she’s forgotten her glasses. She digs into her pockets, but can only come up with one mitten. The pain in her hip is back, as sharp as a scalpel. She’s forcing herself on, breathing hard, breathing as if she’s about to have a heart attack, when she hears the shouts ring out, and she makes the open door just in time to see Richie Spano, in a black peacoat and with the dark slash of a mustache slicing his face in two, standing over Sid, who’s stretched out supine on the gray concrete floor. What she doesn’t know, not yet, because she hardly ever talks to Marsha anymore, is that Vic Janove, who’s run the concession stand for the past twenty years and who’s become as close to the Goldsteins as she and Sid used to be when they were young together, has asked Richie, as a favor, to look after the place while he’s in Florida.

Sid is down on the concrete. He’s sixty-eight years old and he’s just been in a fistfight. And Richie, the breath issuing from his mouth like one of those dialogue balloons in the funny papers, squares his shoulders, swings round and walks right past her and out the door, and all he says, his voice so fierce and choked he can barely get it out, is, “You bitch. You stupid interfering bitch.”

[This too is family legend, though it’s etched in pain. Sid, who had suffered what the neurologists quaintly call an insult to the brain when his head struck the concrete, was too stubborn to go to the doctor. He’d been knocked down before. It was nothing. He took a fistful of aspirin to quell his headache, asked Miriam to make him a cup of tea and maybe some soup, borscht or chicken noodle, it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t really hungry anyway. Three days later, when finally he relented, and she, unsteady on her feet herself, tried to help him down to the car, he collapsed in the driveway. He was dead before she could get the car door open.]

It’s a Saturday in July, another Saturday, the voices of children careening about her and the steady thwock of the dense black rubber ball punctuating her thoughts. These are new children, of course, the children and grandchildren of her friends and of the new people too. She barely glances at the men on the paddleball court — they’re interchangeable, their bare legs furred in dark swirls, T-shirts glued to their torsos, sweatbands at their wrists. Their voices rise and fall, immemorial. Someone laughs. A radio buzzes, seeking the signal. Thwock. Thwock. She knows it will all be lost, everything we make, everything we love, everything we are.