We Are Water

On the first of July, I moved into the bunker. I hate it there. For one thing, there’s a nightly racket from the bar across the street. For another, the old gal in the apartment across the hall is needy. Pesty. She seems to lie in wait and, whenever she hears my footsteps, pops open her door and wants me to talk or fix something for her. The couch in my apartment has a peculiar, not-quite-identifiable odor to it. And worst of all, the place is just too goddamned small. When I sit on the wobbly toilet seat, I can make my knees touch the opposite wall. Whatever room I’m in, I can reach up and palm the ceiling. The first night I was there, I lay awake in the dark and could almost swear the bedroom walls were closing in on me. It had been a stupid move on my part. Simplify, simplify, simplify? Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

By the third night, I decided that if I was going to quell my emotional and vocational seasickness, it wasn’t going to be at this place. But rather than take our home off the market, I decided that what I needed was a getaway from my getaway. But where? When I’d moved into the bunker, one of the few things I’d taken with me besides the necessities was a box of stuff the kids had given me over the years: homemade cards and gifts, mostly. I pulled from the box the nautilus shell Ariane had given me one Father’s Day. Held it to my ear, listened to the sound of the ocean, and said it out loud: “Cape Cod.”

I looked online. Circled a few of the classifieds at the back of the New York Review of Books. Even though it was off-season, everything was overpriced. And later, when Annie and I finally did talk about the house, she suggested Viveca’s place. Viveca herself called me later that day and offered me the house rent-free. “It’s just sitting there, Orion. It’s yours to use if you want to.” I’d declined her offer at first but then a few days later had changed my mind. It wasn’t until after I’d said yes that I learned there was a stipulation.

Deciding that a slow crawl along the scenic road might be a relief from the bumper to bumper of the main drag, I signal and exit from Route 6 to 6-A. In Orleans, I pass that Christmas Tree Shop where Annie always wanted to stop. Look for bargains, use the restroom. Needing to pee myself, I pull into the parking lot of the Hearth & Kettle where we’d eaten a couple of times. Get out of the car, stretch, and walk on rubber legs toward the restaurant. Passing a newspaper box near the entrance, I read the Cape Cod Times headline: GREAT WHITES CURTAIL LABOR DAY FESTIVITIES. Inside, I head for the men’s room. Some would-be graffiti artist had drawn a cartoon on the wall over the urinal I was using: a shark. “Ah, a human,” it said. “Yum yum.”

Leaving the bathroom, I decide to stay, get something to eat. I wait at the hostess’s stand, looking around at all the families and couples in the dining room. Opt instead for a booth in the bar. A flush-faced young waitress approaches; her colonial cap and ankle-length checkered dress are offset by the snake tattoo crawling up her neck. “Somethin’ to drink?” she asks, passing me a menu. She has tattoos on the backs of her hands, too, I notice, but I can’t see what they say.

“Just an ice tea,” I tell her. “Unsweetened.”

She nods. “You ready to awduh aw do you need a few minutes?”

“I guess I’m ready. What kind of chowder do you have?”

Our eyes meet. “What do you mean, what kind?”

“New England? Manhattan?”

“All’s we got is New England,” she says. She asks me where I’m from and I tell her Connecticut. “Oh, okay. Newyawkachusetts. That explains it. You want a cup or a bowl?”

“A bowl,” I say.

“Cawn frittuhs with that? They’re on special. Three for a dawluh.”

I tell her no, but that I’ll take a Caesar salad. She nods. Writes on her pad. “So what do those tattoos on your hands say?” I ask.

Instead of telling me, she holds them out in front of me. The left hand says, Ask me if … The right says … I care!

After I’ve eaten and passed on dessert, my waitress brings me my bill. Eager to get back on the road, I pay in cash and leave.

At the Orleans cloverleaf, I get back on Route 6, grateful that, at last, the traffic has begun to ease. I should be getting there in another fifteen or twenty minutes. I pass that place that sells the inflatable rafts and the two-dollar T-shirts, remembering the time when we had to pull in there. Andrew had waited to tell me that he had to go to the bathroom until it was an emergency. “Sorry, no public restrooms,” they’d said, and the poor kid had made a beeline for the bushes behind the place and had an accident before he reached them. Had walked back to the car in tears with a big wet spot on the front of his shorts. And when Marissa’d started giggling, her mother had threatened to forbid her from going swimming for one whole day if she didn’t cut it out. Then I’d looked in the rearview mirror at the commotion—Andrew punching his sister, her punching him back. Per Annie’s order, they’d both spent that day on the blanket instead of in the water with Ariane. “Daddy! Mom! Look at this,” she’d kept calling, so that we could watch her turning somersaults in the surf. Poor Ariane: it seems as if she was always trying to get our attention. And poor Andrew, too: he could never measure up to his twin sister’s feats, and never resist being a hothead when his little sister teased him …

“If you ask me, Dad, it’s a sickness,” Andrew had said in that phone conversation we’d had about his mother’s wedding.

I told him I disagreed, and so did the experts. “The DSM stopped classifying homosexuality as a sickness way back in 1973,” I said. “It’s as much an inevitability as blue eyes or someone’s shoe size.”

“So why’d she even marry you then? Why did she have us?”

“Because she loves you guys. And she loved me, too.”

“Yeah, well … this Vivian person?”

“Viveca,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever. In that note she wrote me? When she said she hoped me and Casey can make it to the wedding because it would mean so much to Mom? Hey, sorry, lady. That ain’t gonna happen.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “It’s your decision.”

“You’re not going, are you?”

“No, probably not.”

“You’ve met her, though. Right? Mom’s … friend?”

“Uh-huh. You’ve met her, too. Do you remember that time when your mom had one of her pieces selected for the Whitney Museum show? And the five of us took the train down to New York? Stayed at that nice hotel and went to her opening?”

“Vaguely,” he said. “Was that when you took us to the NBA store and we saw Rick Fox?”

“Yup. Same trip. But I’ve seen her two or three times since then, too.”

“If you ask me, I don’t even think Mom is gay. I think she’s just mixed up. Living in New York, hanging out with all those artsy types. Who wouldn’t get their head messed up? You know what Marissa said? In this e-mail she sent me? That she thinks everyone’s bisexual, and that some people deny it and some people don’t. Now if that’s not fucked-up New York thinking, I don’t know what is. And I wouldn’t put it past that little twerp to be doing some experimenting with the lesbo stuff herself. You know how many gay bars there are in New York City?”

I said I didn’t. Did he?

“Plenty of them,” he said.

I told him I didn’t think living in New York, in and of itself, would turn anyone gay, so we were going to have to agree to disagree on that one. “And as for your sister, she’s an adult. Whatever experimenting she may or may not be doing isn’t really our business, is it?”

“Yeah, but I’m just saying … So what’s this Viveca person like, anyway? No, on second thought, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know.”

“It’ll take some getting used to, Andrew. I realize that, but—”

“Don’t defend her, Dad. Mom having a wife? It’s messed up.”

“Well, it’s legal now, Andy.”

“Because some asshole liberal judge back there—”

“It wasn’t decided by a judge. They voted on it in the state legislature.”

“Yeah, and what are they going to make legal next? People marrying their dogs or something?”

“Oh, come on now. That’s kind of a specious argument, isn’t it?”

“All I’m saying is, it’s unnatural. Do you think that’s what God wants?”

Instead of getting into an argument about God’s existence, I told him I had no idea what God wants. “Hey,” I said. “Not to change the subject, but I saw on the Weather Channel that you guys are getting a lot of rain down there. Right?”

“Yeah. Last couple of days there’s been tornado watches, too. I mean, if women marrying women and men marrying men was God’s plan, then why’d he make Adam and Eve instead of Adam and Steve?” …

Chapter Five

Annie Oh

Viveca has left the prenup on her desk in the study: six legal-size pages with little cellophane flags to indicate the places where my signature’s supposed to go. She’s signed it already in her deliberate, forward-slanting penmanship. I haven’t signed it yet and may not. What’s she or her father’s lawyer going to do if I don’t? Stop the wedding? No, she wouldn’t do that. I’m not powerless in this relationship. Gallery owners need artists more than artists needs gallery owners … But that’s not fair. I mean more to Viveca than those commissions. She loves me. I know she does. But I also know that she envies me my creativity, my treacherous rides inside the cyclone. “Other agents have approached you. Haven’t they, Anna? You can tell me,” she’s said more than once. That’s where my power comes from. I know what her professional insecurities are, and also her personal secrets: that she terminated a pregnancy by a former lover, a man who refused to leave his wife; that she was not an only child like she tells everyone but had a mentally retarded brother who was hidden away at some training school. Profoundly retarded, she told me. She used to hate it when her parents made her go with them on those visits and she had to look at him, drooling and wearing a dirty helmet, banging his head against the wall. I’ve made it my business to know these things but have told Viveca very little about my own history. I hold my cards close to the vest, the way I did all those years with Orion. I may have been powerless against those floodwaters. Powerless against Kent’s secret visits to my room. But I learned about power the day that I got on that Greyhound bus and the driver pulled out of the depot and carried me away from the black hole that had almost sucked me in. The black hole that my life was about to become with Albie Wignall …

I’m seventeen again, stuck in Sterling because that’s where my foster family lives. I’m dating Albie, not because I like him very much, but because one thing has led to another. Two of those snooty girls from my high school, Holly Grandjean and Kathy Fontaine, finally have noticed me—well, not me so much as what we sell at Jo-Jo’s Nut Shack. “Oh, wook. Gummy bears! I wuv Gummy bears,” Kathy says, and Holly says she “wuvs” them, too. I’m not sure why they’re talking baby talk. Are they making fun of me? But then, I decide they aren’t because Holly looks up from my merchandise to me and says I look familiar. “Don’t you go to Plainfield High?” she says, and I nod and tell them that all three of us were in the same gym class freshman year. I’m so grateful that they’re acknowledging my existence, these girls I thought I hated, that I shovel scoop after scoop of gummy bears into an open bag and tell them to just take them instead of paying for them. And then, at the end of my shift, my boss, Leland, points up at the surveillance camera mounted over the entrance to Jordan Marsh. It’s aimed right at my kiosk. Leland tells me to take off my Jo-Jo’s apron and not come back because I’m fired.

But a week later, I get another, better job waitressing at Friendly’s. My manager, Winona Wignall, assigns me to the take-out window, which the newest waitress always gets. But within two weeks, Priscilla is the new girl, and I’m serving people at the counter and making tips. Over the next weeks, Priscilla and I become friends, bonded by the fact that, out of all the Friendly’s waitresses, Winona likes us two the least.

Winona’s son, Albie, is twenty-three but he acts younger. He works at the Midas Mufflers down the road. After work, he comes over to Friendly’s to eat and hang around. He starts picking my section to sit at every time, and it’s kind of flattering, although he’s not much of a tipper. One time all he leaves me is eleven stacked pennies. Albie’s over six feet tall, and he’s blond and broad but not really fat, which is a miracle because when he comes in, he’ll eat a Big Beef with fries and a Fribble, and sometimes after that, will have dessert, too—a sundae, usually, which, when he orders it, he always calls it the Albie Special. The Albie Special is four scoops of chocolate almond chip ice cream, strawberry sauce and hot fudge, and chopped peanuts, the whole thing topped with whipped cream, jimmies, and cherries (three instead of the usual one). Sometimes when I put those sundaes in front of him, our other customers look over at it, and they’re probably thinking, wow, how does that guy rate? This one Holy Roller couple who comes in all the time? (They asked Winona once if they could leave their religious pamphlets for our other customers to take and she said no.) They always stare over at Albie’s sundae while he’s eating it, and I feel like going: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods. (My foster family sent me to parochial school, and I can still recite all the Commandments.) Instead of reminding them about the tenth commandment, though, I told the Holy Rollers that Albie pays extra for his sundae. He doesn’t really. He gets all that extra stuff for the price of a regular hot fudge, plus you have to give him his mother’s employee discount besides. Winona calls Albie “Big Boy,” which fits him size-wise but also is pretty funny because Albie acts childish, especially around his mother, who he still calls “Mommy.” He’s not all that much younger than my brother Donald, except Donald is already married and acts like a grown-up, which he is. So is Albie, technically, but he lives in his parents’ basement and still gets an Easter basket, which I know because all during Lent, Winona kept buying stuff for Albie’s Easter basket and hiding it in our break room. One time, Priscilla stole two Almond Joys from one of the bags. She snuck me one, and whenever we looked at each other during that shift, we couldn’t help laughing.

One night, while Albie’s holding up his elbows because I’m wiping down the counter where he sits, he asks me out. I didn’t expect it, and I don’t know what to say at first, so I say, “Let me think about it.” Then later on I tell him yes, okay, I’ll go. Because, hey, I’m not stupid. He’s my boss’s son.

For our date, Albie takes me to the drive-in. It’s a double feature: the first and second Planet of the Apes movies. (I’ve already seen the first one and thought it was stupid, but Albie picked the movie.) At intermission, he asks me do I want anything from the snack bar. I tell him yes please, a box of Good & Plenty. When he gets back in the car, he’s got my candy plus, for himself, three foil-wrapped hot dogs and a big soda. In between eating my Good & Plenty, I keep shaking the box, which is partly just this habit I’ve had since I was little but also partly because I like the sound. It comforts me.

Albie keeps looking over at me while he’s eating and I can smell that he has liquor breath. “Did you put something in your Coke?” I ask him.

“It’s not Coke. It’s root beer.”

“Yeah, but did you?” He nods, smiles, and pulls a half-empty bottle out of his back pocket. When he hands it to me, I squint and read the label. LONG JOHN’S GINGER BRANDY, it says. Eighty proof.

“You know something?” Albie says. “You’re pretty.”

“No, I’m not,” I tell him. I’m thinking about what I heard someone call liquor once: “Dutch courage.” I don’t know why. What’s so Dutch about getting drunk?

“Yes, you are, and you know you are, too,” Albie says. Ha! I think. He’s either drunk or blind. But then I think, well, maybe in Albie’s eyes, I’m like those girls at the mall who I got fired trying to impress. He scoots closer to my side and starts playing with my hair and my left ear. Then he leans over and starts kissing my neck. He’s trying to be sexy, I guess, but it just tickles, plus now his breath smells like both brandy and hot dogs, which isn’t very appealing. After a while, he reaches down and takes my hand in his. It makes me think of that song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” that’s on my brother Donald’s Meet the Beatles! album. When Donald got married and moved out of state, he gave me all of his old Beatles albums, which I still play quite a bit, even though the Beatles broke up because of Yoko Ono. Instead of watching Return to the Planet of the Apes or thinking about what Albie’s up to, I start singing that song in my head. And when I touch you I feel happy inside … It makes me think about this girl in my fourth grade public school class named Carol Cosentino who used to wear a pink sailor hat that had all these little metal Beatles buttons pinned all over it. Carol’s favorite Beatle was George, I remember. I wonder whatever happened to her. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that Albie, while he’s still holding my hand, is using his other hand to fiddle with his pants. Then I hear this snap-snapping sound and I see his belt flying into the back. From the way he just lifted his butt off the seat, he might have just pulled his pants down. I’m not sure, but I’m certainly not going to look over there and find out. But then he moves my hand over to his side and puts it down there—him and his Dutch courage. I can feel that he’s still got his underpants on, which is a relief, but I can also feel that he’s got a lump in there. A “boner,” I’ve heard boys at school call it when they’re talking dirty in the cafeteria. “Please?” he whispers, moving my hand up and down against his lump. I let him do it, not because I want to but because he said please, which makes me feel, kind of, that it’s me who’s in control of the situation, not him, and also because if Albie likes me, then maybe Winona will like me better, too, and assign me to Section A, where those lawyers from the office building next door always sit, and they’re big tippers. Those booths are Althea’s section, usually. Althea is Winona’s pet and she used to be Albie’s girlfriend. One day I overheard her telling one of the other waitresses that she broke up with him because he has no class. But according to Albie, he broke up with her because, unlike me, Althea is “a bitch on wheels who thinks her shit don’t stink.” That’s one thing I have to say for myself: I never, ever leave a bathroom smelly; I’m very careful about that kind of thing. I keep matches in my purse even though I don’t smoke, and whenever I have to use the toilet and, you know, get the bathroom smelly, I always light a match and burn some toilet paper to, what’s it called? Oh yeah, fumigate it. Part of me wants to yank my hand away from Albie’s lump, but another part of me says, what do I care? It doesn’t even feel like it’s my hand that’s doing what he’s making it do, and while he’s over there, mouth-breathing and making my hand go faster, I try thinking of other things. I make up this game where I have to think of all the songs on Abbey Road in the right order: “Come Together,” “Something,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” I get all the way to “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and then I can’t think of what comes after that. It’s like my mind’s gone blank or something. Thinking about other things is something I learned to do on those nights when Kent would sneak into my room. I’d recite stuff they made us memorize in school: the Ten Commandments; the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. I can still remember some of the Mysteries—the Annunciation, the Nativity, Finding Jesus in the Temple. And, let me think … the Resurrection, the Crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven. (One time, this girl who sat next to me, Tammy Tusia, had to go to the office for being sacrilegious because she leaned over and said to me, trying to be funny, “Gee if Mary got queen, who got first runner-up?” and Sister Presentation heard her say it. Luckily, I didn’t laugh so I didn’t get in trouble.) So that’s how many mysteries? While I’m counting how many I’ve said, Albie starts going, “Oh, god! Oh, fuck! Faster!” Oh, and there’s the Scourging at the Pillar, the Descent of the Holy Ghost. Albie starts to groan and now I can feel the wet stuff. I know from Kent that after the wet stuff comes out, they quiet down and stop bothering you. I finally remember the song that comes after “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” It’s “Here Comes the Sun”—the one George sings. I wonder if Carol Cosentino, wherever she is, still likes George the best, even though he has long scraggly hair now and a beard that makes him look like a hillbilly. In my opinion, the Beatles looked better when they had their Beatle haircuts, like on the Meet the Beatles! cover.

It’s after midnight by the time the drive-in gets out, and when Albie pulls up in front of my foster family’s house, he asks if he can kiss me good night and I say no, it’s late and I have to go in, and he accepts it. See? I’m in control. Not him. “Can I call you?” he asks. I make him wait a couple of seconds. Then I say, “Yeah, okay.” Albie’s not handsome or anything, but he’s sort of cute. Priscilla from work thinks he’s borderline fat and has kind of a pig face, and I can see her point, too. Upstairs, while I’m getting ready for bed, I decide Albie’s ugly-cute, like Ringo. Not that he looks anything like Ringo. He looks like Winona, although he acted kind of insulted when I told him that.

On our next date, Albie and I go to the drive-in again. Saturday Night Fever is playing this time, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing it because I’ve had a little bit of a crush on John Travolta from when he was Vinnie Barbarino on TV. But Albie’s wrecking it for me because he keeps telling me he’d bet me any amount of money that John Travolta is a homosexual. (How would he know?) I’m sitting there, trying to enjoy the movie, and Albie keeps saying stuff like, “Look! There’s your evidence. That’s a flitty walk” and “You know who dances like that? Queers, that’s who. I swear on a stack of Bibles: that guy is light in the loafers.”

“Do you mind?” I finally say, and after that he shuts up for a while, thank god. Then, halfway through the movie, there’s lightning and thunder and it starts pouring. The movie stops and it says on the speaker that they’re closing but giving everyone fog passes at the exit. When we get ours, Albie says he sure as hell would hate to sit through that faggy John Travolta movie again and, to be funny, I guess, he puts the fog passes in his mouth, chews on them, and then spits them out his window. I don’t like Althea, but she’s right about him: Albie’s got no class.

It’s early still, so we go to Kelly’s Drive-Thru and get Cokes and clam fritters, and while we’re eating our food, the rain stops. Albie throws out our trash, and then he starts his car and drives us out to Oak Swamp Reservoir, which is a make-out spot for kids our age. Well, my age. It’s easy to forget that Albie’s six years older than me. He parks and turns off his engine but keeps the radio on. They’re playing that song “Baker Street,” which I like, but when I say I do, Albie says it sucks and that he wants to listen to some real music. He reaches under his seat and pulls out a Judas Priest cassette and puts it into his player. “Yuck,” I say. “Where’s my earplugs?” and Albie says I obviously don’t know good music and turns up the volume. We start making out a little, and he guides my hand down there again to that same area as last time, big surprise, and he’s got his lump again. “Please, sweetie. Please,” he says. It makes me think of that thing my father said to me that time when he caught me feeding veal loaf to our cat, Fluffy, under the table. “You start that, Anna Banana, and he’ll pester you nonstop.” One thing about my father: whenever he got finished working on our car, he always came in and washed his hands with that scratchy soap powder, Boraxo, to get the grease off. But Albie always has greasy hands, and, when he gets close to you, he smells like … mufflers.