Tara Ison - Rockaway

Twice a day she forces herself out of Nana’s house, deliberately leaves her phone behind, feels satisfaction that Bernadette, having left for Sri Lanka, isn’t around to answer any calls on the house phone. She bicycles to the store for a single apple or a carton of yogurt, or maneuvers her way down the invaded, noisy beach, bits of lemon pulp drying in her hair. She steps carefully around the broken shells, the litter, the washed-up jellyfish that look like clear embryonic sacs of fluid with feathery red stars in the center, sets as her goal the towering lifeguard chair roughly twelve blocks’ distance down from Nana’s, looking for the raised red flag and the promise of danger, and directly in front of what she has figured is Marty’s living room window overlooking the shore. She inquires the time of the lifeguard, a golden, cool-authority college kid flipping his whistle lanyard like a lariat, so obviously happy with this awesome summer gig of his, questions him about the starry jellyfish — do they sting? Are there riptides, here, bad undertows? — and stands there peering up at him, resolutely facing the water. She dips a toe in, lets the cool surf swirl past her feet, but the ocean itself is strangely uninviting. She can’t imagine just plunging in to all that cold dark deep.

She trudges back home to do slow stretching and abdominal toning exercises on the sandy floor of her room. Her untouched canvases slant in stacks against the walls; her easel, holding her still-only-begun painting of the little shell, stands to one side like a sentinel. She thinks it isn’t a strong beginning, after all. She thinks about painting it out, starting again. She thinks about switching it for a fresh clean canvas, starting all over. She decides it would be a waste to give up on it, though, now that it’s already actually begun. She reminds herself it is still only July. There is still plenty of time. She turns all of her canvases to face the wall, to avoid their reproachful stares.

Her phone doesn’t ring until five-thirty the following Friday afternoon, when Marty calls her to tell her what time he’ll pick her up for shabbes dinner at Itzak’s. Fuck you, she thinks as he talks, Fuck you and your loud musician friends and your fanatical religious friends and your insulting self-absorption. What am I doing? she thinks, gazing at her canvas, this is such bullshit, dioxazine purple, that’s what it needs, I’ll just stay home tonight and paint. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing, yes. She tells him she can’t possibly be ready by seven-thirty, she’ll just meet him there at eight. She rides her bike to the store — the third time that day — to buy a bottle of Baron Herzog Chardonnay, and breezes into Itzak and Darlene’s with it at eight-fifteen, after the candles are already lit and just as Marty and Itzak are launching into a vigorous rendition of Shalom Aleichem , the whole family pounding the table like enraptured idiots. Itzak says Kiddush over the wine, and everyone troops to the kitchen to wash their hands. She ignores Marty during dinner, instead plying Itzak and Darlene’s son Jonah with questions about junior high, and their skinny daughter Gwen with questions about her classes at NYU and what she hopes are borderline-inappropriate questions about cute boys. She drinks glass after glass of Baron Herzog, pours it for herself when Itzak lags in his hostly duty, and wonders if Gwen, despite the miniskirts and pierced ears, has ever had sex, ever seen a real penis, ever even kissed a guy. She eyes Darlene’s bobbed hair and wonders if it really is just a clever wig. She wonders if Jonah masturbates. She wonders what Itzak’s beard must taste like, if Itzak and Darlene have sex through a hole in a sheet, if he fucks her with his yarmulke on, if he shuns her during her period then makes her go to the mikvah to ritually bathe away all the filth. She suddenly hates Jews.

“YOU OUGHTTA COME to my place for shabbes lunch tomorrow,” he says as he walks her home.

“What?” she says, nonplussed.

“I’ll make you lunch. I get home from shul by eleven, so you come over around noon, right?”

“I have too much work to do,” she says. “I don’t have time.”

“But it’s Saturday. I’ll make us lunch.”

“I’m in the middle of a painting, I don’t want to lose the momentum.”

“Oh, come on. Just lunch, right?”

They stop outside Nana’s house; she steps up on the curb, so they’re eye to eye. He looks hopeful, and it quickens her, kills her resolve.

“Yeah, okay.” They regard each other a moment; she quickly leans over and kisses him on the cheek. His arms enfold her unexpectedly, clasping her. She feels clasped. It’s both feeling trapped and feeling held, safe, and confuses her for a moment; she tries to pull away.

“Wait,” he says. She waits, and he takes a deep breath, releasing it into her hair. “Why aren’t you breathing?” he asks. So she takes a deep showy breath, releases it, and her body involuntarily sags against him, her face in the collar of his jacket, the sweetish leather brine. “Yeah, that’s it,” he says. Then releases her so unexpectedly she almost stumbles off the curb. “So, you’ll be there? I can’t call you tomorrow to check.”

“Okay, yes, I’ll be there.”

“Good,” he says, and ambles off.

THERE ARE PHOTOS everywhere: Marty with his son at age six, at ten, at fourteen, at eighteen, Marty with his old bands, Marty onstage, Marty with Tony and Frankie and Sammy, Marty with Julius. Crammed among the photos are books: Jewish History and Spirituality , the Torah, Talmud, Biblical Literacy, Jewish Ritual, The Living Jew, The Jew in America, Zen Judaism, Modern Judaism, The Jewish Mystical Tradition, Jews in Hollywood, Jews in Music, Jews in Rock and Roll , and a section devoted to the Holocaust, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Hannah Arendt, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Hasidism, the history of Israel. Then shelf after shelf of record albums, thousands of them, labeled and chronologized, subdivided alphabetically, smelling of old cardboard turning slowly to dust. The dining room table is set with straw place mats and nice china, tiny crystal glasses with silver filigree, a challah ready for slicing. The two lighted white candles flicker as she passes.

“This is really nice,” Sarah tells him.

He beams at her as he carries in a bowl of salad. “Yeah? It’s good, right? Twenty-five years, I been here.” The dining room window looks out on the beach, a gleam of white sand and blue water, the throng of beachgoers, the lifeguard in his high chair down near the water’s break framed perfectly, asymmetrically, exactly as she’d pictured.

“Did you live here with your wife and son?”

He blinks at the light, turns back to her. “No, I bought it after me and Barbara split up. Daniel, he went back and forth, you know? Barbara lives in Ohio. She’s a realtor.”

“Where’s your son now?”

“My son. My son is off doing his thing. Daniel’s living in Tel Aviv with his wife, a real sabra. You think I’m a fanatic. Man. He’s a record producer, all the digital stuff. He’s off doing, living his life. Here, I made a salad. And there’s hard boiled eggs, you like those?”

“It’s fine. It’s great. I know, no cooking. I didn’t expect a pork roast.” He rolls his eyes at her, and she realizes, pleased, that he’s nervous. She’d dressed deliberately: thin-strapped tank top and her shortest shorts, a pair of boy’s flannel boxers. Her bare legs gleam smooth with baby oil; the skin of her naked arms, she notes with satisfaction, looks golden, unmarred. He’s wearing shorts and a baggy T-shirt, high-top sneakers, just as she’s seen him dressed for playing handball. A backward baseball cap on his head, the name of some movie embroidered above the bill. “Is that what you wear to shul?” she asks.