Tara Ison - Rockaway

Marty follows her up the stairs. She expects to feel his hand on her back, as if he’s worried she might fall. But he doesn’t touch her at all.

“Are you mad at me?” she asks over her shoulder.

“No,” he says. “Why would I be mad at you?” They arrive at his bedroom. “Just stay here,” he says. “We’re going to shul again, and then I’ll come back.”

“You’ll come back?”

“Yeah, I’ll come back. Don’t touch anything. Maybe you should get some sleep, or something.”

“So, I can stay here? That’s okay?”

“Yeah. Just stay here.” He motions stay here with his hands, and starts to leave.

“I really do get what Itzak said,” she tells his back. “It’s like music, right? Or color? It’s the same thing, it’s how the notes and colors connect with each other that makes them beautiful. You just have to get the combinations right. Find the harmony.”

“Yeah,” he says. He stops, looks back at her, pleased. “It’s like that.”

“And remember you and I talked once, about how every act should be done with the consciousness of God?” He nods, listening, pleased. This is awful, what she’s doing, she knows. Using God like bait. “And you said yeah, if there even is a God. But that everything you do has to create that communion. Remember?” Something to hold him, make him want to hold her.

“Yeah, I remember,” he says. “That was a good day.”

“And I told you I thought the angels would bless you. And that made you happy. Remember?” A spiritual striptease, trying to lure with a flash of soul. She feels ashamed of herself. He smiles at her, but he still doesn’t touch her.

“I really get all of that now.”

“Maybe you should take a bath,” he says.

She looks down at herself again, at all the colors. Well, no, she realizes. She’s smeared herself to mud, really, the final, neutral gray of overmixed colors, valueless and turbid as dirt. “A bath?”

He enters his bathroom and turns on the bathtub’s gold, fluted spigots. A cloud of water blasts out. “You need a bath. You need to clean up. Go on.” He nods, smiles gently at her, again, and leaves.

SHE FINDS THE vodka in the freezer, among bags of frozen chopped spinach and green beans, a cardboard box of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, and three packages of Tabatchnick Cabbage Soup. His kitchenware is split in two sections, labeled with masking tape: fleischig in cabinets and drawers on the left, milchig on the right. She selects a big milchig tumbler, and pours. She drinks the glass down halfway. Why bother with the schnapps, she thinks, it’s so pretty this way, so clean and clear and cold. So pure. She pours again to the top, and replaces the vodka in the freezer. She leaves oily gray smudges.

Upstairs, she tips a glass bowl of scallop-shaped soaps into the filling tub. She adds the contents of a bottle or two of bath gel from the wire basket, and presses on the Jacuzzi jets. The water churns madly. She takes off her clothes and steps into the foaming tub; she sits down cross-legged in the bubbles, drinking from her tumbler of vodka and rubbing at her arms. This won’t do it, she thinks. I need turpentine, naphtha. She plucks a washcloth from a folded pile on the tub’s marble ledge and scrubs away at her gray-smeared skin. She swallows more vodka. A pumice stone, something to strip away a layer. She spots a loofah in the wire basket and scours her arms. Maybe if I soak longer. Maybe I need something more. She swallows more vodka, gets out of the tub and inspects the cabinet beneath the marble sink. Isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, a cylindrical can of Ajax, good, maybe that will help. She dusts the bathwater heavily with it, splatting the bubbles flat, and gets back in to soak. Maybe if the water’s hotter. She turns off the cold spigot, lets the hot water flow. She imagines Marty coming back from shul and finding her still in the tub, gleaming and purified. The fumes from the blistering steam sting her nose, but the icy vodka is so cool in her throat. She leans back, closes her eyes, sips. Her milchig tumbler, milk, that’s how the vodka tastes, like cold cold milk on a hot summer day, drinking milk and being eight years old, being breastless, clean-fleshed, with lemon-bright hair falling to her knees. She imagines Marty coming home and finding her like that, back at the beginning, getting in the tub with her, bathing her. She sees them curled up together in his creamy, black-veined marble tub, floating together in an albescent clamshell at the top of a cloudy, uncrashed wave. He straps them in so they’ll be safe, he tells her, they’re taking a whimsical Playland ride, a spinning Ferris wheel, Hold on, hold on, and she wants to reassure him, No, this is safe for real, being together, being here with you. She drinks more milk and raises her arms to take off Marty’s black cap, and he lets her, tipping his head into her neck. The cap slides off to reveal a space of pure, fluid light, no skin, no skull, no hair. The entry to his soul, open and radiant and welcoming, tinted to pearl by angels, just for her. The light pours from him to cover them both, a liquid, beautiful light. It fills the clamshell with blessing, with warmth, lulls her to a shade of home.

“HEY,” SHE DIMLY hears him say.

She rubs her eyes. It’s evening air in the room, air that’s been breathed in and exhaled, heated all day but just starting to cool. She’s on the bed, sprawled out naked under the top sheet.

“What time is it?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe seven, eight. After shul we went back to Itzak’s. We had Havdalah.” He’s still wearing his velvet and gold pillbox yarmulke. The candles downstairs must have burnt out by now, she thinks. She watches him take off his suit jacket, unbuckle his belt.

“You said you’d come back,” she says.

“I didn’t know you’d still be here,” he says.

“But you told me to stay here. You said I could stay.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know .”

“So, you stayed there in case I wasn’t here?” This makes no sense to her. He sits on the edge of the bed to take off his black leather shoes. He smells like onion, like wax burnt off to smoke, like other men in black suits. When I am fifty-four he will be seventy-eight, she thinks, he will be decrepit, riddled with disease, and I will have to devote myself to taking care of him. She cannot decide if she feels panic at this, or relief.

“I was sleeping.”

“Good.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No. Hold on.” He goes into his bathroom, and she hears his footsteps stop. “What’d you do in here? What happened?”

“You told me to take a bath.”

“Wow.”

She hears the sink tap running, the toilet flush, the gurgle of liquid deep in a throat. He reenters the bedroom in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and now a little black knit cap. He gets under the sheet next to her, wafting mint and baby powder, tugging at her arm. “Come here.”

She rolls over obediently, tucks herself against him. He pulls her arm to lie across his chest like a rib. “Shabbes is over,” she says.

“Yeah.” He looks down at her; the skin of arm, her shoulders and chest is still flaked with stubborn gray paint, but raw-looking, inflamed. “What is this? What did you do to yourself?”

“I tried to get it all off,” she says. “But I’m clean, really. Good as new. I swear.” She presses against him, stretches up, whispers into his ear. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No.” He holds her tighter, and she angles her head toward him. When he kisses her, his mouth is soft, too casual. She wishes he would grip her harder, try to draw something out of her. She wishes he felt more urgency, need. She reaches down between them, slides her hand into his boxer shorts, feels he is already hard, good, and she wants him harder, affected. She wants him stricken with her. His hand slides down over her hips, but before his fingers can reach her, she knows she’s still dry, she scrambles on top of him, pushing him on his back. She draws his shorts down, and takes him in her mouth. The best smell of him is there, the savory ripe leather of him; she works her tongue over him, her fingers gripping him slickly at his base, trying to inhale, absorb, whatever she can. But his hands in her hair are keeping her just enough back, off of him. She wants to make him come this way. His hands are over her ears, but she hears his jolted breathing, good, she wants him to come in her mouth, she’ll draw him in that way, swallow all the light.