From the water, I saw the long arms of the beach, east and west. I saw Bobby and NP coming back, but no one else out strolling. On the bay, there was always somebody. Some galoot or other. The middle-aged ladies camped out in front of someone's house each afternoon, usually ours, as folks from Azurest and the Hills and Ninevah promenaded by, making the rounds, leaving footprints that were physical traces to a dozen conversations. Trading information—who's up, who's down—while the tiny waves nibbled at the shore. That was the social scene. They came up the steps to our house to fix themselves drinks, to use the bathroom, whether our parents were out or not. We sat up straight, stopped cursing, got into raised-right mode. They made gin and tonics and screwdrivers, moved TV dinners aside to get at the ice-cube trays, and asked when our parents were coming out.
I believed my parents when they said they were coming out, odds be damned. Retrieving the soup cans from the sink, rubbing the dried brown stains off the stove top. Even if in the end they didn't show, the threat kept the house from falling completely into utter teenage entropy. When they called to say they weren't coming, it was always a few minutes after we finished cleaning, as if they had us under surveillance. It kept us in line, the necessary illusion that they returned every Friday. Who knew how Reggie and I would have lived if we truly lived in a world without parents. When we told their friends that they weren't coming out, we got smirks and shakes of the head before they retreated down to the beach to continue their circuit, ice clacking in their plastic Solo cups.
A wave knocked me down and sent me cartwheeling in swirling sand. I walked out farther to be safe. I thought, If they're going to keep skipping weekends, I was going to have to adapt. We needed TV dinners to survive. If the job at Jonni Waffle didn't come through, there was a dishwashing job at the Sandbar that Marcus told me about. I looked up and saw that Bobby and NP were back. Randy was up on his feet. NP said something outrageous—his arms spun in deep anecdote theatrics—and then I saw something strange. The three of them were laughing, and then NP extended his hand and Randy put his hand out, and the hands grew closer, almost in slow-mo, and then I could see it, even from that distance, as if I had binoculars, the most botched handshake of the day. NP approached serpentine, attempting to replicate the pump-'n'-dump that Bobby had used on him, adding a wiggle closer, but Randy was expecting something else entirely, going with a fingertip pull, double squeeze, before winding up with a shoulder-to-shoulder manly half-hug. They recovered and NP continued his story, Bobby nodding in enthusiasm.
It was unmistakable. Everybody was faking it.
A big wave lifted me off my feet and when it rolled past, I sought the bottom, but it wasn't there. My toes poked around, but I couldn't feel anything. I had been pulled out, and my dog-paddler's mind tripped into full fear mode, my fight-or-flight imperative kicking in with a fury. (Thank you, reptilian brainstem.) I understood instantly that the water wasn't merely an inch over my head, but fathoms. I was in the undertow, en route to Europe, there were sharks, and no shark whistle to signal that I was in danger. My hands reached out. I tried to make the water into a rope—from the outside I'm sure it looked as if I was pulling myself toward shore, hand over hand. But I made no progress. My chest tightened and my feet scrabbled vainly for the bottom again and my chest tightened even more. Clive said, “I'm going in.” He was right next to me.
“Hey! I need—can you give me a hand?” I asked.
He looked confused, then stuck out his hand and towed me in half a foot.
I felt the sand beneath my feet, or tippy-toes specifically. I had water up to my neck and I was loving it. I started to explain the situation but Clive cut me off. “Hey, no problem,” he said. “They're back,” he said, pointing. I saw that Marcus was already out of the water and heading toward the others.
NP debriefed us when we joined them. “There was no one out there but this old white man out walking one of those horse-lookin' dogs,” he said. “Dog came up to his chest, lookin' like it wanted to eat him, if you ask me. So this guy sees us walking up to him and he starts frowning like we were trying to move in next door to his house.”
“Looked like a prune,” Bobby said.
“Prune-ass bitch. We kept going, but we didn't see one naked lady. They must be farther down the beach, I don't know where they're hanging out. But you know we're not going to walk all the way to Montauk.”
“So we turn around.”
“Bobby's like, ‘I'm tired,’ and we start heading back and who do we see again but that old white man and his big dog. And he's eye-balling us again. Just flat-out staring. So I'm like, he wants to look at something, he can look at this, and I pulled my shorts down and mooned his funky ass. I was like, ‘Kiss my black ass,’” he said, making a robotic self-spanking motion. “‘Kiss it!’”
We busted out laughing. Lying motherfucker.
“He looked like he was going to have a heart attack right there. And you know that dog would have ate him, too. Be all,” NP put forth his best shaggy-dog voice, “‘I'm sorry you're dead, master, but a nigger's gotta eat.’”
Randy shook sand out of his T-shirt. “I'm ready to head back,” he announced. He was the driver. That was that. We packed up our stuff.
We walked up the dune in single file, end-of-the-afternoon weary, casting our familiar silhouettes. Five o'clock June light, wrung out by the sun, sanded and damp—this day was one in a long series. We had been doing this for years, making adjustments at the beginning of the summer, fine-tuning, to get used to each other again after nine months stuck in our different corners of the city. Figuring out the next version of each other. Somebody was coming with the stuff from their neighborhood, the other guy was bringing the stuff from his neighborhood, and they collided. By the end of the summer we were all on the same page. I was already saying def and fresh at quadruple my off-season rate.
We didn't change all that much year to year, we just became more of ourselves. Where were we the next summer? A few inches closer to it. Bobby returned with a more refined version of his misguided Black Panther–ness, as interpreted by a privileged West-chester kid who hadn't read that much. NP reappeared with a more durable clown persona, getting the gestures and punch lines down, understanding the pauses and various cues that trained your friends and family into being your audience. Everybody on their own trajectory although we sometimes intersected. And me? Keeping my eyes open, gathering data, more and more facts, because if I had enough information I might know how to be. Listening and watching, taking notes for something that might one day be a diagram for an invention, a working self with moving parts.
Until then fumbling, trying to get a sure grip. Hoping no one noticed.
“Get all the sand off your feet before you get in,” Randy ordered. “I don't want you messing up my car. You know you're some sand-gettin'-in motherfuckers.”
We rolled our eyes and clubbed our feet with our towels. We slammed the doors shut. I looked out the back window to watch Marcus disappear around the bend. We became more of ourselves, but what did that mean in Marcus's case? He had a long ride ahead.
Ten minutes later we were still sitting there. The car wouldn't start. There was a pay phone over at the town beach, which we could use to call a tow truck, but not at Left Left. We went to Left Left to be left to ourselves.
Randy tried the engine one more time. Nothing happened. I pictured rust sprinkling down into a pile underneath the motor each time he turned the key.
We sat for a minute.
“Dag.”
IT WILL HIT ME WHEN I LEAST EXPECT IT, CARRIED on the gusts of a restaurant's ventilation system or smothering me at the threshold of a friend's apartment as I'm greeted and told of the goings-on in the kitchenette—the tale of the handed-down recipe relayed over the telephone by an aged relative, the botched first batches. It is the smell of dessert, the smell of chocolate and sustenance shared, the aroma of waiting treasures, anticipation itself. The smell of normalcy. It is dessert, and the sugar-delivery system in a
ll its guises—cookies, pies, cakes, the elaborate confections that are tribute to the creativity of the human mind. It reminds me of ice cream. It makes me gag. It makes me want to puke. After all this time.
That summer was my first tour of duty at Jonni Waffle and the beginning of my exile from the world of decent people. Not that I knew the ultimate ramifications of taking a job there, I just knew I had to make some money. A comedian once said that minimum wage is your boss's way of telling you, If I could pay you less, I would. Certainly, when I first started working there, Martine, the owner of Jonni Waffle, paid me the lowest amount allowed by law. In other words, and I feel I should stress this point, it would have been illegal for him to pay me less. If you lasted, every four weeks he doled out five-or ten-cent raises. How much you got was determined not by competence but by charisma, how much he valued your company. You can guess which schedule I was on.
The nickels added up, but it cannot be said that cash was our true compensation, especially if one considers with a cold and sober eye the hazards of the job. No, our actual reward came in the form of a much more ephemeral tender: we ate ice cream. As much as we wanted. Every shift. Whatever we could cram down our gullets. Chocolate ice cream for breakfast and lunch if I had a day shift, chocolate ice cream for lunch and dinner if I had a night shift. Whatever flavor we desired, washed down with as much soda as we could stand. The soda machine was stingy with the carbonation, making everything into a kind of syrup, but this was only appropriate, in keeping with the consistency of everything else we sold. We were apprentices of ooze, specializing in things that melted out of a solid state into a sticky liquid or otherwise flowed slowly, like the soft ice cream we lever-dispensed from a humming metal box, and the chocolate fudge and strawberry sauce we ladled on with gusto. There was all this candy stacked up in the back of the store—Heath bars, Reese's Pieces, Gummi Bear knockoffs that perspired rainbows on hot afternoons—that we jabbed into the ice cream as toppings. This was fair game as well. If we sold it at Jonni Waffle, you could eat it. In theory, if you had a fetish for wafer cones, this was your chance at wafer-cone-eating nirvana, and you were free to chomp your way through whole boxes, stack after stack, when the compulsion seized.
But wafer cones are not central to this chronicle. It was all about the waffle in there, the new-fangled Belgian waffle cone. There was no escaping it. The dust of the waffle mixture swirled in the air like asbestos in the guts of a condemned factory, roosted in the soft warrens of the lungs, clung to hair like sweet dandruff, commingled with sweat and congealed into salty concoctions unreckoned by the makers of the secret recipe. When you worked the waffle grills, the steam of the cooking cones became a localized atmosphere, the tar-pit exhalations of an ancient, stunted planet. You learned not to pick at the soft stuff if you noticed it on your arm—sometimes it was a drop of batter, sure, but sometimes what appeared to be batter was actually your melted skin, accidentally burned while trying to maintain the crazy hustle of the irons, and what you were actually peeling off was a bit of yourself.
ONE AFTERNOON, not long after I joined the Jonni Waffle family, I was practically cocooned in the stuff. The electricity in the house was out, so we didn't have any hot water, which meant I hadn't taken a shower and my every pore was still plugged up and battered down from the previous night's shift. I'd forgotten to wash my spare Jonni Waffle shirt (Martine, with some ceremony, presented you with two Jonni Waffle T-shirts on the day of your first shift) so I had to wear it even though it was soiled, covered with batter and befudged from a sundae mishap. I dabbed at Peanut Butter Chunk stains with a wet sock and crossed my fingers that by the time I got to work they'd dry into invisibility. It was going to be a smelly couple of hours. I prayed that my waffle musk would be camouflaged by the greater, wafflized environment of the store.
Reggie came in and told me about the electricity that morning. It was my turn in our parents' bed—we switched off sleeping in our parents' room when they were in the city. As soon as they pulled out of the driveway, whoever's turn it was blurted out, “I got their bed,” to lay claim, to head off any argument over who had dibs.
Which was ridiculous. Dibs was dibs, we didn't have to call it. Ever since we were born, we'd lived according to the rough frontier justice of even Stephen, and even Stephen had a perfect memory. Whose turn was it to drag the garbage bags out to the curb, whose turn to decide what channel to watch, whose turn to pick the first piece of chicken—that freshly carved chunk of breast posing on top of the serving platter with a crisp piece of skin coyly slipping off it, obviously the best piece of all, the meal-maker. It was all recorded in even Stephen's immortal ledger, and we obeyed. As former twins, Reggie and I were driven by the fear of being shortchanged, that the other might get a bigger portion of the available resources in our household, whether they be emotional, material, or entirely imagined. Your brother, your de facto opponent in a hundred battles a day, big and small, must not receive more than his share because that meant that you were receiving less than your share. We were terrified of proof of what we understood to be true.
Occasionally the system broke down. The day before the electricity went out, in fact, we had just such a situation. A cornerstone of jurisprudence in our two-man country maintained that you were not liable for your brother's responsibilities, hence the constant declarations of “That's not mine, that's Reggie's” with regard to property placed where it shouldn't, and “It's Benji's turn” with respect to some duty or chore. Blame and responsibility were synonyms in our dictionary, and we disavowed all association until there was no avoiding it.
One law that came into play quite frequently, given our love of prepared meals, was Thou Shalt Not Clean Thy Brother's Soup Pot. There was one go-to pot that was ideal for warming a sixteen-ounce can of soup to eating temperature, celebrated for its heat-conducting properties and an elegant surface-area-to-height ratio that enabled it to heat up fast without boiling over if we suffered a spell of teenage distraction and forgot about it. According to our highly ritualized pot etiquette, if you used it last, you had to clean it if the other person needed it for their soup—instantly stop whatever you were doing, bust out the sponge, and rub away the residue of Chunky Beef Stew.
What happened in the episode in question was that my mother had made tacos for us the night before she and my father went back to the city. Distracted, she hadn't washed the pot out, and it sat on the far burner of the stove for days. It was during a heat wave, and we didn't have air-conditioning. Making the place even hotter was the fact that the windows were closed. My father had been yelling at my mother with such volume and ferocity the night before they left that I had been seized by a deep humiliated feeling, which usually paralyzed me but on this occasion sent me scurrying around the living room closing all the windows. The houses on the beach were quite close together, you see, compared to the interior streets of the developments, to maximize the use of the lot. In the city, when my father raised his voice, it was more or less swallowed up by the ambient noise of the city and absorbed by the walls of our prewar building, which were the product of the construction ideas of a better era and meant to take a licking.
The sound of my father's voice still escaped through the screen door, but by shutting the windows I thought I might cut off the most direct routes to our neighbors' ears. I imagined the progress of the sound waves through the air, as depicted in my Introduction to Physics textbook: the yelling bouncing off the closed windows and remaining trapped inside the house, ricocheting around us off the refrigerator and the media stand and the framed watercolor of the Long Wharf, which was the only thing hanging on our walls, and then some of the yelling sieving through the screen doors and flying out over the deck before being lost and diminished in the immense void of the bay, where there was no one to overhear. My parents ignored me on my window-closing mission or did not see me. They didn't mention it.
The thing was, now that Reggie and I were out working, the glass doors of the living room were shut more of
ten than usual, and during the heat wave the house really became an oven, what with the windows closed, too. I had neglected to open them again after my parents' departure. In the taco pan, a wide and beloved skillet of varied purpose, nature took its course.
“What's that smell?” Reggie said when he got back from work. I had smelled something, too, but wasn't bothered enough to investigate. Reggie and I sniffed near the likely sources. The trash can, which we emptied only when overflowing. According to the even-Stephen system, and its preference for last-minute choring, there was no reason to take out the trash if it was possible to close the lid of the trash can or if it tilted open, propped up by garbage, at an angle of less than forty-five degrees. But the trash can didn't stink too much. We moved the dishes out of the sink. In our logic, we didn't clear the sink unless all sink-related tasks had become impossible by the jutting, ziggurat mess, and consequently food sometimes loitered under the plates and bowls and moldered. But the clumps of browning food didn't stink that much. The smell came from the stove.
“What's in there?” I asked Reggie, referring to the pot.
“It's not mine,” he said, testifying under oath.
“It's not mine,” I said, with equal gravity, and now that we had pleaded not guilty to whatever charge was about to be read, I lifted the lid off the pot.
The stench burst forth. The pale boil of maggots writhed, bumped, and grinded in the decomposing ground beef and orange lumps of solidified fat. They slithered, slightly tinted pink by the Taco Mix Flavor Packet.
“Gahh,” I yelled.
“Arrggh,” Reggie screamed.
We were brothers.
I slapped the lid back on the pot and we conferred. I pressed down on the lid as if leaning against the rattling Gates of Hell. The problem was that this situation lacked precedent. The pot was outside the reach of the law, over the state line. Who had jurisdiction? It was my mother's pot. Eventually it would be cleaned on an eve-of-parents'-return cleanup, and whoever was on kitchen duty that day would have to scrub it out. It was Reggie's turn coming up, in fact. But that was in the future—our parents wouldn't return for days. Did Reggie's impending responsibility apply retroactively? No, he argued, just as I argued the reverse—and had the roles been switched, we would have argued the opposite just as learnedly and emphatically. The pot, in the eyes of the law, did not exist as such. It wasn't my pot, or Reggie's pot—it was society's pot.