CHAPTER VI
Dilly and Cornelius, on diverse paths, discover socializing in its native incarnations.
Dilly’s quest for overdue approbation forced her outside the immediate vicinity. She averaged three best friends per month, thereby depleting the resources of classes, beaches, boardwalks, even densely populated housing projects.
Her persistence was rewarded at last, in early spring, in her twelfth year.
That chilly, drizzly afternoon, the ocean wind caught on the Astrotower, which whistled as Dilly approached it, the 328-foot high, white column tourist attraction supporting its revolving windowed elevator – the donut -- striped in candy-cane red and white. A group of youths embraced her, the motley bunch from the other side of Stillwell Avenue who congregated at the base of the grand tower, and who despised their families at least as much as she. Intolerant parents, intolerable siblings, their complaints were hers, her misery theirs.
Intrigued Dilly absorbed their grumblings. Who ever asked if she wanted those parents? or that brother or the life they forced on her? They owed her plenty! Oh the hollering, name-calling, insults and threats. Vent! Go Dilly!
She decried childhood to allies who traipsed through the apartment to view her strange brother in the flesh -- prickled flesh beneath his insouciant airs. Their visits caused quite a tumult and wooed Mom and Dad away from poor Cornelius, easy as that. Irwin exhorted Dilly to find friends of her caliber. Dilly rejoiced at the misery she caused and continued her campaign. And finally, they uttered the worst: Be more like Cornelius!
Provocation oozed from her swollen heart readily, displaying her talents for infuriating the three of them at once. She practiced; she pressed harder. Resounding tantrums at home guaranteed juicy reports at the tower. “I threatened to quit school! I confessed I’m a technical virgin! I screamed till I got money!” They cheered her, fists high, and opened their hands. At times, she was almost happy.
Pragmatic friendship, then, brought invigorating control, but not the undivided attention of parents. Irwin banged boards overtime, well before they rotted. Mrs. Ekes found solace in migraines—caused by her husband’s escapism as much as her daughter’s invective—migraines which prohibited thoughts of anything but her pain, blinded her right eye, and kept her in bed for days. And Cornelius, when there was no place to go but home, practiced to muffle the screams and to wonder if music could clear his muddled life or protect him, if only for a few moments, from her.
In November of her senior year in high school, another rainy, windy afternoon on the boardwalk, Dilly chased a whirling red-yellow oak leaf. As she caught it under her toe and bent down to grab it, she heard, “Don’t do that. It’s romantic.” She was in love at once. The young man, a not particularly handsome Mr. Calput, offered to share a chocolate egg cream and the evening. They decided to marry. Dilly was only seventeen and required parental consent and funding, which were duly granted. There was no alternative.
The wedding was set for June to enable Dilly to complete her high school education. Even her tower buddies called her plans wacky. You nuts? No. Anything’s better than home and harpsichord. That morning, Mrs. Ekes knocked on the bride’s door, opened it when there was no answer and found white satin, tulle, and Dilly gasping on her bed with a monogrammed trousseau towel stuffed in her mouth. “Then don’t do it. No one’s forcing you,” said weary Mrs. Ekes, but Dilly smothered her scream and pulled out the towel. “Mom? Close the door on your way out.”
With much foreboding, they knew she would be back.
Dilly returned from Eden, edentate. After seven months, she was welcomed to the Ekes bosom with her left front tooth, as keepsake, wrapped in tissue paper in her change purse. In deference to Cornelius’s purity, she concealed details of married life. The bedroom door was closed; the tooth mishap was all Cornelius was to know. But he overheard her whimpers even from his keyboard; he pressed his forehead to the door and learned how, as reward for loving attention to her groom, she was abandoned while on a nocturnal jaunt in the swamp. “He said it was a joke!” Calput “was nice then nuts, it was different before the wedding.” And when he finally came back in the morning, a quarrel so impassioned them, “I screamed and that’s when he knocked out my tooth.” She thought he was sorry later but his overwrought enthusiasm, “he did it in my face. In my face!” She never wanted love like that again. Uncontested divorce. However, her status as Calput remained; if she was ever Ekes, she was Ekes no longer.
Her parents took her to Treatment for commiseration and dentistry, and determined to find her a job when she was ready. Oh they knew it would come to this, that Calput boy was crazy, so was she and so were they for allowing it. And entwined in Dilly’s tears was a silken satisfaction, pleasure amid her stories of warped, requited love. Now it was Poor Dilly.
Without raising his eyes to hers, Cornelius asked, “Anything you’d like to talk about?” He was sincerely sorry for her, although her absurd marriage was only more of the same loudmouth company, Dilly’s Friends. For a long month he tried kindness, she tried patience. “Anything I can do? Dilly?” He forced himself to embrace her waist; she put her beautiful hands over his ears, shaking his head in answer.
She agreed to a job at Treatment: assistant to a friend of Lionel’s, clerical work to keep her mind off her troubles, six days a week. She spent her first paycheck on a stylish light blue suit for meetings, a mauve lawn party dress for future Treatment social events, and two bottles of hair dye, Fire at Sunset 16. A young lawyer who worked in the vicinity introduced himself as Swick and invited her for chocolate egg cream.
After three weeks, Cornelius asked, “How’s work?”
“I have no time for your drivel,” she said. “Try working yourself.”
“She’s strong. She’ll be fine, just fine. And it’s a good thing,” Irwin said to his wife and brother, “that it didn’t happen to Cornelius.”
“It’s time to be practical,” Irwin told Cornelius. No money in harpsichords, but he loved his son and wouldn’t say what they both knew. “With Liny’s connections, and mine, carpentry means steady income. Were you ever hungry?”
“Nope.”
“Don’t be stubborn. Your arms are good. OK?”
No, at first, but prodded by his mother, “Try, Cornelius. Make Daddy happy.”
Yes.
Cornelius apprenticed for eleven months, making his parents, especially Irwin, proud. His future, Irwin assured him, was secure, and Cornelius admitted that he didn’t mind working with his hands.
Across the alley from the Aquarium at Coney Island is Education Hall; its doors open directly onto the boardwalk. Cornelius was there, post practice, at noon one Sunday, early January, to examine the small section of boards he had replaced the week before. He watched the Polar Bears, who swim from October to April; he joined them the following Sunday.
By mid-February, other regulars greeted him, sipped hot tea and boasted about the cold, thirteen days of sleet, brutal gusts especially on the beach. Inside the warm hall, Cornelius stripped to his long shorts, which made him feel taller, rolled the loose cuffs down and up once more to graze the dimples above his knees; that nattily wrinkled roll defined his conciliatory slant toward fashion, and he frankly didn’t care, but for Abigail.
Anticipation protecting him from the weather, he walked outside and followed others in the warm-up, men and women in swimsuits, sweatshirts, wrapped in robes and beach towels, spider veins and cellulite, dashing down the boardwalk and back. “Hey Corn cold enough for you?” asked Jerry or Joey, Cornelius couldn’t remember. It was.
Their virile, tattooed leader appeared from the hall wearing his briefest of stars-and-stripes bikinis and the semiotic-pink straw homburg, elastically secured under his chin, that matched his majestic conch. His watch beeped. One o’clock! Bears’ clarion! Prancing along the boardwalk, down the ramp and across the snowy footprint hills of sand, he blew his sea trumpet tatatatatatataaaaaaa, as thirty-eight polar cubs flung towels on the sand, charged and roared. Cornelius ra
n, slowly.
Several plunged in, others tested with toes. Where was she? his boisterous splasher, too round to suit stylish tastes, and not even that much taller. He might begin, Isn’t the water warm? Better, It makes me tingle. Or, Abigail! My wet dolphin dolly! He waded in up to his knees, which wasn’t very far.
From behind him, she screeched, “Oooooooh! It’s fricken freezing!” and soaked him with one double-handed swoosh. Cornelius swam away; Abigail chased with giggles and spray until he dove, surfaced and hugged her in his practiced arms.
He took her hot hand as they all formed the great wading circle in the waves; bears jumped and squealed; Cornelius jumped too, and raised Abigail’s arm with his in triumphant, temporary contempt for fur coats, thermal underwear, and foreign fossil fuel.
Now the stinging white cold warmed him and grey sea blasts turned blue. She floated on her back; he kissed her briny lips. She dove, disappeared, slithered between his legs to relay her liquid message of love before she surfaced. Then Cornelius and Abigail, hand in hand, sprinted up the beach after their leader, whose conch called all his bears together. “To our new Polar Pair!” he cried, “Bears’ warmest wishes for coldest fishes! Hot tea!” Tatatatatatataaaaaaa!
Ernest stooped as he walked under the garden trellis he had soldered from twisted bicycle spokes, points directed inward in imitation of thorns. He might carry Dilly under the arch; she might cling to him to avoid scratches.