Tara Ison - Rockaway

“No, I changed when I got back. Oh, wait, here. .” He opens a misty, iced bottle of vodka, half-fills her little crystal glass, tops it off with a dash from a bottle of pinkish liquid. “Apricot schnapps. Daniel brings it from Israel when he comes.” He recites a quick Kiddush in Hebrew while she watches, then hands her the glass. “You’ll like this, here.”

She drinks it down, feels it crawl through her chest like a hot crab. “Mm. That’s nice.”

“Good. Here, you’ll have more. .” He pours her another one, swallows his. He glances at her shoulders, her legs, and she resists the reflexive urge to turn away, to cross her arms or step behind a chair to cover her thighs. She sips from her glass, steps slowly out of her sandals, and scratches the back of one calf with a toe. “You okay in those?” he asks, nodding at her sandals on the floor. “After lunch we’ll go for a walk.”

“Are we allowed to do that?”

“Yeah, sure. It counts as menuchah . Rest. Itzak says it’s a mitzvah, taking a stroll on shabbes. A mitzvah’s—”

“I know, a blessing.”

“No, see, that’s what people think mitzvoh means. But a mitzvah’s more like a commandment. A sacred deed. The mitzvoh, see, those’re what we do , the actions we perform that bring holiness, spirituality.”

“And shabbes is the day to load up on them.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Good. Like going to shul. Lighting the candles. Like taking a long stroll with someone so you can just, you know, be together.” He fills her tiny glass again with vodka, another dash of schnapps, and smiles at her with pleasure. “Like inviting someone into your home.”

THEY STROLL A mile or so down the beach, through Riis Park, past the mobbed handball courts and bicycle paths, around the teeming families picnicking, barbecuing on every grassy inch of space. Even the air is too crowded, here, full of roasting meat, onion, mustard smells, the blare and throb of boom boxes, people laughing, chattering.

“And with the transplant, she’ll be good again, your mom?” he asks.

“I guess. Although if I were a person with Hepatitis C or something I’d be pretty pissed off if they wasted a perfectly good liver giving it to a sixty-two-year-old alcoholic.”

He waves a hand at her, dismisses her comment as a joke. “But your dad’s there, see, that’s good. They got each other.”

“Yeah, but they keep trying to outsick each other. Whoever’s more miserable wins. And he plays a lot of golf. He leaves to go play golf a lot.” She stops to adjust her sandal.

“What do you want to do?” Marty asks. “You getting tired? You want to keep going, or turn around? Head home?”

“No, let’s just stop for a moment.” They head up onto the boardwalk, the warped wooden slats creaking beneath their feet. They pause at a bench, and sit, facing the ocean, pigeons fluttering away.

“Yeah, but still,” he continues, “that’s the thing about growing old together, you know? You take care of your kids, then you take care of each other, and then the kids, right, there’s a point it turns around and your kids start helping you. That’s really the beautiful thing, taking care of your parents. Like you do. Honoring them. Doing back for them everything they did for you. It’s a mitzvah.”

“Yes,” she says. She feels a twinge of resentment, for his ludicrous little mythology. “But little kids need help, they need all that attention and support, for what, ten years, fifteen years? And the whole time parents are raising the kids toward growing up. Toward independence. For everybody. That’s the direction it goes, right, the goal? So parents get more and more free. The other way around, when the parents get older, you just get more and more trapped there. Trapped on that path. And who knows for how long?”

“Huh,” he says. “But you said they were doing okay. With you gone. They’re doing fine, right?”

“Yeah, for now. Like, today. But each day, as they get older and worse, it’s just. . looming. How horrible it’s going to get. They’re going to need more and more help, and I’ll be more and more. .” She pauses. She must sound terrible to him, she realizes, so insensitive and indifferent to her parents’ suffering. “I mean, I’m just trying to appreciate the time we have left together. And it’s worse for them. I’m worried for them . I just don’t want them to be miserable. I don’t want them to suffer.”

“Yeah, sure. I get what you mean. It’s scary.”

They look out at the ocean. A ship is passing in the distance, and she remembers the moment of her early days here, the bright view from her window. Seagulls swoop in arcs, set in perfect composition against the clouds. The water is darkening in the late-afternoon sun, the waves beginning to shadow and peak in the tide.

“So, who takes care of you?” he asks out of nowhere.

“What?” she says. “I’m fine. I’m not the one who needs caretaking, thank God.” He can be so oblivious, she thinks, for all his soul-filled books and questions and spiritual crusades. She looks away from him, grips the bench, feels her throat grow tight. This happened before, she thinks, clenching her jaw, that first night at Itzak’s with him, talking about, what, shells, pearls, the soul, something about pudding. And then when she fell on the bike outside his house, what she thought was his house, but it wasn’t, he wasn’t there, and she cried there in the street like some pathetic little girl. Why be with someone who makes you want to cry because he’s there, who makes you want to cry because he isn’t there? Why even bother?

She unexpectedly feels his hand on the back of her neck; he slides his fingers up, spreads them across the back of her skull, lifting her hair from its damp roots. The sudden breeze there makes her feel crept into, seen through. She feels transparent as gloss gel, and she wants to keep on resenting him, wants its opaque brace.

“But I am going to leave soon,” she says. “I’m leaving,” she says.

“You are?” He looks disturbed.

“My friend Emily’s having a baby in a few weeks, and I get to be there. I’m the doula.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, the midwife’s busy doing all the baby and birth stuff, so the doula’s there to, I don’t know, give the mother backrubs. Get the ice cream and anchovies. Tend to her.”

“Wow,” he says slowly.

“She’s having a water birth. In a big tub in the living room.”

He looks at her as if she’s making this up. “But, how’s that work? The baby in the water like that?”

“It’s only for a few seconds. The baby’s still getting oxygen from the mom, through the cord. They’re still connected like that. Emily says it’s less traumatic for the baby, actually. Like a mellower, more natural transition to entering the cold cruel world and figuring out how to breathe all on its own.”

“Wow,” he says again. “Okay. But after all that, you’ll come back?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs. His eyebrows are lifted in hope and distress, and she likes it.

“No, come on, you’ll come back, right?”

“Maybe I’ll come back.” She tips her head back into his cradling hand. “For a while.”

MARTY SHOWS HER the upstairs of his house: guest room, office, master bedroom, all window’d and full of the same seashell hum as her room at Nana’s. His bathtub is a thick, deep square of creamy veined marble with an ocean view, gold-chromed, fluted spigot and Jacuzzi jets, surrounded by glass bowls full of sea sponges and bath soaps shaped like colorful scallops.