Tara Ison - Rockaway

No, she doesn’t, not quite. She wonders if he is judging her. She feels unspiritual, heathen, in danger of seeming disrespectful. But hasn’t she always tried to make the good and thoughtful decisions, the right choices? Hasn’t she always been so responsible about everything?

“Hey, man, excuse me, you’re Marty Zale, huh?” A guy in his mid-twenties, carrying an enormous acrylic sheepdog won at some carnival game, creeps up to them, stands with nervous, elastic knees.

“Yeah,” says Marty, smiling.

“Oh, shit, man.” The guy clutches the sheepdog by its ears and sets it down, revealing a Marty Zale & The Satellites T-shirt. He grabs Marty’s hand for shaking. “I’ve seen you guys everywhere, you know, Atlantic City and that place in Philly, I came to Boston once, I’m always keeping an eye out for you, you know?” He glances at Sarah. “Hey, excuse me.”

“No problem,” she says. She pictures this poor bouncing guy wandering the East Coast in a Greyhound bus, hitching rides, saving ticket stubs for scrapbooking, buying T-shirts.

“Thanks,” Marty says.

“Shit, man, you guys are the best . You’re real, I’m serious, you’re actual .”

“That’s really nice. That’s great,” says Marty.

“Yeah, I’ll catch you guys later, huh? I mean, I’m there, later, front row.”

“Beautiful,” says Marty. “Thanks.”

“No, hey, me thanks. Excuse me, huh?” The guy backs up with his sheepdog, gives them an enthused thumbs-up, and springs off.

Sarah chuckles at Marty’s pleased face. “You look tickled,” she says.

“It isn’t about that,” he says. “It isn’t.”

“I know.” It won’t necessarily be horrible, she thinks. He can’t be too bad.

“I mean, that’s nice, okay, right, but that’s the bullshit part, too.”

“That kid is bullshit?”

“No, no, I mean, if we’re connected that way, me and that kid, that’s beautiful. If the music did that.”

“I know,” she repeats. “The music’s what counts.”

“Yeah. That’s. . here.” He puts his hand on his chest. “The applause stuff? That’s out there.”

“Well,” she says, “you could say it would be dishonest or dishonorable or just stupid blind adherence to rules to deny that inside part of you. The music part. Maybe not doing music would be the sin. Maybe by doing that, by honoring that, you are honoring God. Maybe that is your conscious communion.” Sinatra was dignified, right? “Really. Don’t worry. The angels will bless you.”

“Hmm.” He regards her thoughtfully, and slowly smiles.

“What?”

“I always feel better with you,” he says. “Why is that?”

She has no idea, but she suddenly feels a bright happiness at his inclusive with you . She looks away from him, confused. She doesn’t want to be included in him.

“So. .” she says to the space in front of her. “You want to walk around for a while?” She looks back over her shoulder; he is in the middle of reaching out to her with one hand, the hand he’d put to his heart. She’s noticed his hands before, on the steering wheel, pouring wine at Itzak’s, shaping her an oyster. They’re beautiful. They’re young hands, like her father’s hands are still a young man’s hands, fresh-skinned, steady, expressive. David had beautiful hands, too, she thinks, but he was only twenty-four. His hands looked younger than hers. He needed to be with someone with twenty-two-year-old hands, veinless, tendonless. Perfect skin on a perfect girl, not some horrible woman who’s messed up, who’s messed herself up. She can’t remember if David felt that way, or she felt that way. This hand, Marty’s hand, looks to be headed toward her, as if to caress her hair, but doesn’t — this hand hovers in the air a moment, suspended, then drops to his side.

They look at each other, then she rises to her feet and forces out a twirl for him, just one, a silly, hopeful twirl. His face brightens, almost into a laugh. He at once appears inordinately delighted with her, and uses her proffered arm to pull himself up.

HE INSISTS ON leaving her his brown leather jacket this time. He leaves her to go do the sound check, warm up with the guys, get focused, whatever. A few hundred people have gathered around the main stage, but the crowd has shifted older in age; they’re people in their forties and fifties and sixties eager for the Oldies they remember from when they weren’t. Only a few whole families are left, parents holding slack, dangling toddlers. Sarah checks his jacket pockets: keys, a wallet without any photos, and a foiled, half-eaten roll of Rolaids.

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, LET’S GIVE IT UP FOR. . THE DRIFTERS!”

There is applause and cheers, and a start-up doo-wop bounce of music for the old guys gripped in blue sharkskin suits running out on stage. Sarah decides it’s time for a drink. She swallows the first Miller Lite quickly, dawdling near the beer kiosk, then buys another and strolls with it, keeping fifty or sixty yards away from the stage so the music pleasantly mutes. The sun is slipping, and tiny white lights are flickering on everywhere, like the fireflies blinking bright in the fields around Emily’s house in Connecticut. The day’s heat is slipping away, too, and wisps of cotton candy float by on the final warm drifts of air. She loves this exact moment, when the summer night coolness lifts and crisps and the color values darken, first toned with grays then shaded with blacks, until the colors themselves are absorbed away. When the first blush of alcohol in her blood alchemizes every pulse. When cotton candy floats like seraphim and she senses herself delicate, fine-boned, full of a holy glow. Every instant feels rich, as if everything is fine, as if something could still happen. Maybe. She takes another sip.

She notices the group of adolescent girls nearby, the ones she noticed earlier in the day, gathered in a small, brightly-lit booth: “Body Art by Art — Temporary Tattoos by Design.” Two of them, giggling, have bared their midriff and shoulder for smeary transfers of a budding red rose and an ovoid yin and yang. The little one — the modest one, Sarah recalls, tzenius —stands to one side, hugging herself, just watching. Every few minutes the girl glances longingly at the booth behind her friends, where for three scrim tickets and three well-aimed throws of a ping pong ball you could win a stuffed knock-off Snoopy or a Garfield with bulging plastic eyes. The blonde girl in the halter top has her coltish naked legs propped on a table, her slim right ankle offered up for an intricate Celtic-design cuff in faux India ink. The tattooer — Art? — is a Latino guy in his twenties, who looks bored by the girls but absorbed in his work. The Celtic anklet takes a long time. A bunch of sparsely stubbled teenage boys linger nearby, kicking the ground, flexing, scrutinizing, and the girls getting marked scrutinize back.

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, LET’S GIVE IT UP FOR A GOOD BUDDY OF MINE, WE’RE LUCKY TO HAVE ’EM HERE, YOU ALL KNOW WHO I’M TALKING ’BOUT. . MARTY ZALE & THE SATELLITES!”

She leans against a rear bleacher, sipping beer, wearing Marty’s jacket draped over her left shoulder, feeling a nervous twinge in her stomach. Maybe the hot dog, maybe it’s just cramps, she thinks. Or the heat, all that noise, the clapping.

Marty and the guys stroll out to loud cheery applause, full of hoots and people waving like family members at a wedding or birthday’s end. The guy with the fuzzy acrylic sheepdog jars her roughly as he pushes to the front; she grips the waxy rim of her paper cup in her teeth so she can clap, and moves back farther from the crowd. The applauding goes on. She clamps down harder on the cup’s rim and claps methodically. Clap clap clap. She knows she’s at the edge of being just drunk enough or not, holding on to the rim of being drunk. Like mermaids and monkeys, she thinks, pictures in her mind. Tiny plastic mermaid arms and monkey tails in bright acid pinks and greens, holding on, hanging on to root beer floats, hooked on the rims of glass mugs in places like this. Gaudy, celebratory, reeking of sugar. Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour, Don’t you want a party, Sarah? her parents asked, insisted, It’s your birthday! , so determined to create celebration, give her a regular little girl-ness, although she already feels herself too old for an ice cream parlor birthday. She is eleven.