Tara Ison - Rockaway

AVERY HAS VISED to the kitchen counter an odd propeller-type device and is gripping a coconut in one hand as Sarah enters the kitchen. At the stove, Bernadette is cooking what looks like pita bread on a spatula-style pan. They look at her, puzzled.

“You are all right? What has happened?”

“I wiped out a little on the bike. It’s fine, I’m okay.”

“You are bleeding that much?” He raises his eyebrows at the ruby splotches on her T-shirt, her pants.

“No, I’m fine. I just spilled something. A juice bottle broke. Really, don’t worry, I’m fine.”

He seems satisfied, unconcerned. Bernadette looks at Sarah’s knee and shakes her head, smiling, then returns to her cooking. Sarah opens her backpack and carefully places the broken wine bottle, piece by piece, into the recycling bin for glass. She hopes they don’t smell the alcohol. But they’re busy cooking, Bernadette cupping white flour from a canister into a mound of shredded coconut, stirring.

“What are you making?” Sarah asks.

“Bread,” Bernadette says happily. She flips a flat disc of it in the pan to its other side. Avery squats on the floor, taps at the equator of his coconut with a hammer and screw-driver-as-chisel, then gives it one hard thwack ; the coconut cracks perfectly in half, split to symmetrical and concave whiteness. He presses a coconut cup against the propeller blades and cranks a handle; shreds of coconut drift down to the counter like snow, like a pile of pure, dry sand.

“I love coconut,” Sarah says.

“You would like to taste?” Bernadette offers her a piece fresh from the stove; it is warm, it smells toasted and rich.

“Sure. Thank you.” Sarah chews on the bread; it is delicious. She rinses her torn palms at the sink and pours herself a glass of milky tap water, while Avery shreds out the second coconut shell and Bernadette pats flat another disc of bread. She drinks her water, waiting and hoping for Bernadette to offer her another piece of the bread, but she does not.

Halfway up the stairs to her room Sarah stops and returns to the kitchen. Avery and Bernadette glance silently at her like all the other family eyes in the house, as she digs through the trash bag of recyclable paper and fishes out her little sketch of an insignificant inky shell on the crumbed and coffee-ringed newspaper. She takes the drawing up to her room with her and sits, tracing it with a finger, studying the blank canvas on her easel, while her knee dulls to healing and outside the picture window the glassy acid-green waves break with their rushing, hushing sound and stretch to foam on the sand.

“I TALKED TO Julius this morning,” says Marty.

“Oh? Is he coming today?”

“No, he had to work.”

“On Saturday?” Sarah asks.

“Yeah, I know. It’s terrible. You shouldn’t work on Saturday.” He puts on a pair of dark glasses and glances at himself in the car’s rearview mirror. He settles his fedora to a tilt. It is lintless, and spanking black, a new variation on the black knit caps, the baseball caps, the embroidered, Rasta-looking yarmulkes she has seen him wear.

They are driving to Brooklyn, to pick up his musician buddies, then heading to some family park upstate, in Rye, a few hours’ drive from Rockaway. Come, he’d said to her on the phone. He and the guys had a gig. An Oldies celebration, WCBS 101.1 FM, New York’s Oldies station, live broadcast, she’d get a kick out of it. Marty Zale & the Satellites, he and the guys, going back a long time, twenty years they’ve been doing this, just for the fun. You oughtta come, you’ll have fun, come.

She’d professed great reluctance — I’m really on track with my new painting now, I don’t want to break the momentum, she told him — but finally gave in, pleased by his insistence. Her little sketch of a shell has made it onto a canvas in her room; it is now a few charcoal strokes, some vague, preliminary daubs of ivory and iron oxide black. She likes its clumsy little shell foot, just peeking out. It is a slow but good beginning, she’d thought. Good enough that I’ve earned a break. Have some fun, maybe, yes.

“‘You taking the kid?’” Marty exits the Marine Parkway Bridge, heads down Flatbush Avenue.

“What?” Sarah asks.

“That’s what Julius asked me. `You taking the kid?’”

“Does that mean me? I’m ‘the kid’?” This delights her; she suspects it will continue to.

“Yeah.” He bobs his head. “You’re the kid.”

“I like that.”

He shrugs. “Whatever.”

“I’m too old for Julius,” Sarah says. Marty smiles slightly at her — he only ever smiles slightly at her — and adjusts the collar of his brown leather jacket. She wonders if he gets the joke, that Julius is fifty-eight, and she is therefore almost twenty-five years younger, but that this is still too old. That Marty, too, is fifty-eight, and so it is meant both as a joke and as a provocation. “You know, right?” she continues, to make sure. “You know I’m thirty-four?”

“Yeah, I know,” says Marty, looking back at the road. “But I can’t do anything about that.”

HE HAS BEEN taking her places for over a month now: more shabbes evenings at Itzak’s, where Darlene serves margaritas and he and Itzak reminisce about acid trips from the late sixties; day trips into Manhattan and a boat tour to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island; recording and editing sessions for two movies he’s scoring at tiny studios in Williamsburg, where he ignored her for hours at a stretch while she tucked herself in a corner among abandoned coffee mugs propped on speakers, read The Village Voice and told herself she was doing research, like her shell book and walks on the beach, deepening her vision, gathering experience. Gathering layers, yes, allowing herself time. There is still plenty of time. He has taken her to dinner at a kosher Chinese restaurant, and to a vegetarian Israeli cafe. He insisted on buying her a new, unspattered color wheel and a seventy-five-dollar Isabey sable brush from an art supply shop in Park Slope, which, feeling guilty about her little shell painting waiting for her back in her room, she had reluctantly accepted. Saturday afternoons they have promenaded back and forth along the Rockaway Boardwalk, without bumping into each other, with their own separate bottles of water. When he runs into guys he knows from shul he leaves her standing to one side, shifting from foot to foot, while they talk. He likes to drive around Brooklyn neighborhoods and show her Orthodox Jews, the old men with sidelocks and tall hats trimmed with black fur, the heavily clothed women carrying stringed parcels and flocked by children in lisle knee socks. They fascinate him; he slows the car to a crawl, his hands splayed on the steering wheel, his mouth open, as if they’re driving through a wildlife animal park.

What am I doing here? she sometimes says aloud to Marty. Who is this guy? she says, rhetorically, meaning him. This always gets one of his slight, amused smiles; she spaces saying this out carefully, to keep him amused.

She went to watch him play handball with his friend Saul, who is battling melanoma and whose thick, mascara’d-looking eyelashes appear bold and hale against his chemo’d scalp. She was the only woman, only girl, on the crowded playground in Riis Park; they were all men in their fifties and sixties, thwacking rubber balls hard and low around the court, breathing in rasps, sweating, all wearing gloves of thin leather with tiny holes like those in old men’s fancy shoes. She sat on a bench and watched. A few times, when she caught Marty watching her watch, she held out her thumb like artists did once upon a time, squinting, tongue at the corner of her mouth, pretending to paint, to measure him in scale against the world; he posed for her in a position of mid- thwack and the guys, winded, gave him little shoves, knocking him out of the composition.