T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

There were maybe twenty cars in the lot: station wagons, Volvos, VW Bugs, big steel-blue Buicks with their crushproof bumpers and nautical vents. An inch of new snow softened the frozen ruts and the strips of yellowed ice that lay like sores beneath it. Beyond the lot, a short slope, the white rails of the dock, and the black lapping waters of the Hudson. It was five of two — he checked his watch — but the belly of the sky hung so low it might have been dusk.

A moment earlier, when Naina had stepped from her car, a chain reaction had begun, and now the car doors were flung open one by one and the others began to emerge. They were old, all of them, as far as he could see. A few middle-aged, maybe. Some in robes, some not. The men were ghosts in baggy trunks, bowlegged, splay-footed, and bald, with fallen bellies and dead gray hair fringing their nipples. He thought of Buster Keaton, in his antiquated swimsuit and straw boater. The women were heavier, their excrescences forced like sausage stuffing into the black spandex casings of their one-piece suits. Their feet were bloated and red, their thighs mottled with disuse, their upper arms heavy, bulbous, the color of suet. They called out to one another gaily, like schoolgirls at a picnic, in accents thick with another time and place.

“Jesus, Naina,” he whispered, turning to her, “this is crazy. It’s like something out of Fellini. Look at them.”

Naina gave him a soft tight-lipped smile — a tolerant smile, understated, serene, a smile that stirred his groin and made him go weak with something like hunger — and then her mother’s car schussed into the lot. The whole group turned as one to watch as the ancient, rust-eaten Pontiac heaved over the ruts toward them. He could see the grin on Mama Vyshensky’s broad, faintly mustachioed face as she fought the wheel and rode the bumps. He froze for an instant, certain her final, veering skid would send her careening into the side of his Camaro, but the big splotched bumper jerked to a halt six feet short of him. “Naina!” she cried, lumbering from the car to embrace her daughter as if she hadn’t seen her in twenty years. “And Marty,” turning to envelop him in a quick bear hug. “Nice weather, no?”

The breath streamed from her nostrils. She was a big woman with dimples and irrepressible eyes, a dead ringer for Nina Khrushchev. Her feet — as swollen and red as any of the others’—were squeezed into a pair of cheap plastic thongs and she wore a tentlike swimsuit in a shade of yellow that made the Camaro look dull. “Sonia!” she shouted, turning away and flagging her hand. “Marfa!” A gabble of Ukrainian, and then the group began to gather.

Marty felt the wind on his exposed hand and he took a final drag on his cigarette, flicked the butt away, and plunged his hand deep in his pocket. This was really something. Crazy. He felt like a visitor to another planet. One old bird was rubbing snow into the hair of his bare chest, another skidding down the slope on his backside. “A toast!” someone shouted, and they all gathered round a bottle of Stolichnaya, thimble-sized glasses materializing in their hands. And when one old man with reddened ears asked him where his swim trunks were, Marty said it wasn’t cold enough for him, not by half.

They drank. One round, then another, and then they shouted something he didn’t catch and flung the glasses over their shoulders. Two ponderous old women began fighting playfully over a towel while Naina’s mother shouted encouragement and the others laughed like wizened children. And Naina? Naina stood out among them like a virgin queen, the youngest by thirty years. At least. That’s what it was, he suddenly realized — an ancient rite, sacrifice of the virgin. But they were a little late in this case, he thought, and felt his groin stir again. He squeezed her hand, gazed off into the curtain of falling snow, and saw the mountains fade and reappear in the distance.

Then he heard the first splash and turned to see a flushed bald head bobbing in the water and the old man with reddened ears suspended in the air, knees clutched tightly to his chest. There was a second splash — a real wallop — and then another, and then they were all in, frolicking like seals. Naina was one of the last to go, tucking her chin, planting her feet, her thighs flexing as she floated out into the tumult of the storm and cut the flat black surface in perfect grace and harmony.

The whole thing left him cold.

They’d been going together a month when she first took him to meet her mother. It was mid-October, chilly, a persistent rain beating the leaves from the trees. He didn’t want to meet her mother. He wanted to stay in bed and touch every part of her. He was twenty-three and he’d had enough of mothers.

“Don’t expect anything fancy,” Naina said, sitting close as he drove. “It’s the house I grew up in. Mama’s no housekeeper.”

He glanced at her, her face as open as a doll’s, high forehead, thick eyebrows, eyes pale as ice, and that hair. That’s what caught him the first time he saw her. That and her voice, as hushed and placid as the voice talking inside his head. “How long do we have to stay?” he said.

The house was in Cold Spring, two stories, white with green trim, in need of paint. It was an old house, raked back from the steep hill that dropped through town to the foot of the river. Naina’s mother was waiting for them at the door. “This is Marty,” she pronounced, as if he could have been anyone else, and to his horror, she embraced him. “In,” she said, “in,” sweeping them before her and slamming the door with a boom. “Such nasty day.”

Inside, it was close and hot, the air heavy with the odor of cooking. He was no gourmet, and he couldn’t identify the aroma, but it brought him back to high school and the fat-armed women who stood guard over the big simmering pots in the cafeteria. It wasn’t a good sign.

“Sit,” said Naina’s mother, gesturing toward a swaybacked sofa draped with an afghan and three overfed cats. “Shoo,” she said, addressing the cats, and he sat. He looked round him. There were doilies everywhere, lamps with stained shades, mounds of newspapers and magazines. On the wall above the radiator, the framed portrait of a blue-eyed Christ.

Naina sat beside him while her mother trundled back and forth, rearranging the furniture, fussing with things, and all the while watching him out of the corner of her eye. He was sleeping with her daughter, and she knew it. “A peppermint,” she said, whirling round on him with a box the size of a photo album, “maybe you want? Beer maybe? A nice glass of buttermilk?”

He didn’t want anything. “No thanks,” he managed, the voice stuck in his throat. Naina took a peppermint.

Finally the old woman settled into the sofa beside him — beside him, when there were six other chairs in the room — and he felt himself sinking into the cushions as into a morass. Something was boiling over in the kitchen: he could smell it, hear it hissing. Sitting, she towered over him. “You like my Naina?” she asked.

The question stunned him. She’d tossed him a medicine ball and he was too weak to toss it back. Like? Did he like her Naina? He lingered over her for hours at a time, hours that became days, and he did things to her in the dark and with the lights on too. Did he like her? He wanted to jump through the roof.

“You call me Mama,” she said, patting his hand. “None of this Mrs. business.” She was peering into his eyes like an ophthalmologist. “So. You like her?” she repeated.

Miserable, squirming, glancing at Naina — that smile, tight-lipped and serene, her eyes dancing — and then back at her mother, he couldn’t seem to find anything to focus on but his shoes. “Yeah,” he whispered.