Snap, p.13
Snap, page 13
“Going my way?” he says.
Once, Sammy stole a salami from the Prices Slashed cart in the supermarket; they had a picnic in the woods behind the high school. Another time, he took her to the highest spot in Williamsburg and produced a hand mirror and a vial of coke. “We’ll get high on the highest spot,” he said. So what? Sammy’s adventures always struck her as being not quite formed. The salami hadn’t been properly wrapped; his coat pocket smelled of their picnic for months. She had never done coke, and that first time produced very little effect. Maybe it wasn’t real coke. But the car is real, and so is the key as it turns in the ignition, and so is the rabbity purr of the engine. Raising one eyebrow, he speeds out backward, flattening a long, narrow bed of Chrysanthemums. Then the wheels smash gravel as the car spins around and comes back for her.
“This is dumb,” Roxy says, because she can’t think of what else to say. She doesn’t really think it’s dumb, she thinks it’s wonderful, as long as they end up someplace special.
4
THE TOLL BOOTH is the tricky part, a moment of extraordinary danger.
But the road is jammed with cars, every single one of them headed for Virginia Beach, and what’s so unusual about a blue Rabbit with two kids sitting in it?
Roxanne has put on some lipstick, a wet-look burgundy gloss called Wine ‘n’ Dine. She smiles coolly at a cop who drives by through a neighboring booth. The cop grins. Thumbs up. Sammy groans. She takes the sweaty coins out of his hand and leans over him to toss them in the basket. Triumphant at first, he’d driven to the corner of Mulberry Street so she could run home for some beach gear, then he’d glided freely toward the glistening eastward highway, radio blaring, and on toward the promising glare of the ocean. Just before the toll booths he’d started to weaken, but then the car slowed to a crawl amid the traffic so there was no way to chicken out, thank God. She’s feeling powerful in her bathing suit, a black bikini beneath a pair of liquid-looking running shorts the color of Wine ‘n’ Dine. Last night she had discovered Roll-On Nair and stayed up late with Monique experimenting with this ingenious substance. Eyebrows, bikini, facial, thigh, nipple. A point of contention: do you erase the line of hairs growing downward from the navel or let it be?
“Do it,” said Monique.
“I like it, though,” Roxanne countered. “It might be there for a reason.” She was thinking of the line on a highway, the seam on a peach. Two halves make a whole.
“Some men like it, some men don’t. You never know,” Monique advised, and coaxed a snake of Nair the length of her skinny belly.
“I wasn’t thinking of a man liking it or not. I was thinking of me,” Roxanne said next, surprising herself only a little. She had Naired the lower halves of her legs and now stood before the sink, hitching up one leg and then the other to rinse them. How she longed for a tub. The bathroom was cramped even without Monique sharing its few spare corners. Monique had Naired her legs thigh to toe and then rinsed them in the shower. She’d left the shower door open; now the bath mat was soaked and the mirror thick with steam. Roxanne left her own thighs downy, afraid the hairs would grow back with a coarser texture. Aloud she wondered, “What’s the name of the thing you rub the bottoms of your feet with to get the dead skin off?”
Monique didn’t know. “You probably don’t have any dead skin anyway,” she told Roxy matter-of-factly.
Now, having parked the car and crossed the hot pavement and the burning sand, Roxy and Sammy spread the blanket on the beach and lie side by side amid hordes of other bodies. Somehow the tangled abundance makes her terribly aware of the two of them, herself and Sammy, so close to each other on the soft, soft yellow flannel. “The beach blanket,” Sammy’s mother calls it. It smells sweetly, cleanly, of baby oil. There they lie, Roxy on her belly, Sammy on his back, arms touching, toes touching, the knobs of their ankles touching. He is not so much taller than she is. In fact, their two bodies look surprisingly alike except for the usual things. Neither is slender, and neither is plump. They are both fleshed out, as Monique would say. In other words, the bones seem not to interfere with the composition of the bodies. If Roxy’s is womanly, then what does that make Sammy’s?
Substantial.
Each muscle visible under resilient, elastic flesh. Sand on the flesh. A fleck here, a fleck there.
Searching, Roxanne discovers similar flecks on similar parts of her own, similar body. Is it something to do with their geometry, then? Sand behind the knees, on the collarbone, the anklebone, along the vertical line of the back of the neck. Not even Sammy has much body hair to speak of. The stuff on his legs is reddish and blends with the pink of a budding sunburn. On his chest the hair grows long, sparse and flat. Beneath them the naked skin twitches in sleep. Roxy falls asleep too, watching him.
Then a beach ball wakes them, skimming their toes, and blows away across the tide line. They sit up simultaneously and feel the same dry, dizzy sunburn.
“Whew,” they say.
And then, nearly in unison, “I’m thirsty.”
They buy a single Coke at the concession, sip from a single straw and from under the shade of the awning scan the parking lot for a glimpse of the Rabbit as if it may have been stolen, in turn, from them. But it’s there, and they spot it at the very same moment. They could be one body, Roxy thinks. At once the idea of not fucking seems pointless. So maybe they’ll do it. She takes his hand and leads him to the car, spreads the blanket on the back seat, opens the windows, opens the doors, while Sammy takes the car keys from his shorts pocket and drapes a damp towel across the driver’s seat, then sits down on it, ready to go. She can’t believe he’s so dense. He doesn’t see she really wants to do it. In the back seat. Now. Here.
“Sammy,” she says. A near whisper, supposed to be a clue. How can he miss it? She presses both knees into his thigh, wraps a strand of his hair through her fingers, tugs and tugs. It’s what he’s wanted all along but he’s just too dense. Too dumb. The rabbit’s foot is cradled in his palm and with his thumb he is stroking the hot blue fur.
“Are you kidding?” he says. “You wanna drive? No way, Roxy. 1 mean, no way. Sorry. No thanks, baby. The bridge —”
“I’m not talking about that …”
But he is eager only to get on the road. He spreads her towel on the passenger seat, sticks the key in the ignition, turns the radio on and starts jiggling his leg. Roxy understands: his body comes in parts, he turns one part on and another clicks off. He’s not whole, like she is; one squeeze and he breaks, and the break is clean. There’s no inside-out. Nothing residual. Yesterday he had a penis, today, a car. Roxy hands him his sunglasses from her bag; she can see, in the matching reflections, her own eagerness dissolving and displacing itself. She’s in love, all right, but not with him. If it were night, if she could crawl way into the back seat and pull a blanket on top to hide what she is doing between her own legs. But there’s no way. And suddenly he’s driving like a maniac, all stops and starts. He misses a stop sign, swears, skips the entrance to the bridge and swerves into a parking lot, skids out and on a narrow shoulder comes to a halt. Now he gazes at the world as if he’s just now realizing it’s there. A Walnut Bowls billboard. A gas station strung with triangular plastic flags, its lot crammed with birdbaths and garish plaster urns. Around the corner a whole row of houses rests on stilts, the stilts unpainted, the houses themselves gay but fading.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do with this fucking thing.” Out of the blue.
“Drive it,” says Roxy.
“Great.”
“We can return it, Sammy. I mean, just bring it back and park it where it was, if you’re worried.” She doesn’t think he’ll stay worried for long. He says fuck a lot when he’s showing off; he just doesn’t want her to forget that he stole the car.
“You’re off the wall, Roxy. Park it here and hitch back.”
“Here’s too obvious. Take it back to town, maybe to a supermarket. Then we go in and buy some food and walk home.”
“We can stop at the Olive Branch. We still have all the money. We’ll get spanakopita and grape leaves.”
“And wine,” Roxy says, relieved. She likes the Olive Branch, with its wooden decor. Wood tables, wood chairs, rough planks on the walls, wood rafters hung with dangling ferns.
“I don’t have my ID,” Sammy says.
“You don’t have your driver’s license?”
“What’s the difference? It’s a fucking stolen car, Roxy.”
He negotiates the bridge and passes the toll booths warily as before, not blinking, watchful as a tourist all the way home. No Olive Branch, then, after all. At the entrance to Mulberry Street he stops without pulling over.
“You get out here and walk home, and never tell anyone, not even Monique,” he instructs.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Just go.”
“But Sammy …
“Drive it off a fucking bridge,” Sammy says, but he doesn’t, of course. He parks it in the William and Mary stadium parking lot, leaving the keys with their rabbit’s foot swinging gaily from the lock in the door, hoping someone else will steal it.
No one does. The car is still there in the morning, blue as ever, the key chain dewy. Sammy calls Roxy from a pay phone, tells her to call in sick to work, pack a bathing suit and towel and walk casually down Lincoln Street alongside the golf course. He’ll drive on by, pick her up, and they’ll miss all that traffic, he says.
5
IN THE CAR on the highway, she tells him what went on last night just after she got home. She does not embellish the story. Rather, she gives him only the essentials. In truth she wouldn’t be telling him anything at all if not for the fact that his suit is being cleaned and pressed for the wedding. It is a baby blue suit, just right for Sammy, and momentarily she regrets that she won’t be seeing him in it.
What happened was this: Roxy got home to find her mother in the shower, dinner simmering on the stove, the telephone ringing and ringing. It was her father on the phone, more than usually soft-spoken. She knew one thing: her father spoke softly when he knew he was being a jerk. So she was on her guard. But above the clap-clap of her mother’s shower she couldn’t hear him, and so she excused herself and shut the bathroom door before returning to the phone.
By then he had hung up.
He called back, however. Before her mother got out of the shower, of course.
“Yes?” Roxy said.
“I just said I don’t think I can really manage the Sunday thing, sweetheart.”
Roxy meditated a moment. She wondered how he had phrased it during the first phone call, when she had been unable to hear him. Surely not, I don’t think I can really manage the Sunday thing, sweetheart.
He had said sweetheart, of that she was certain.
And she was sure he’d said Sunday, as if he couldn’t bring himself to say wedding.
I don’t think I can really manage the wedding, sweetheart.
Well, marriage was more like it. It was the marriage he couldn’t handle, not the ceremony itself, however simply and quickly done.
I don’t think 1 can really manage being married to your mother again, sweetheart, would have been far more to the point and was in fact similar to something he had told her several years ago following the second divorce. “Sweetheart,” he had said to Roxy then, about her mother, “I just can’t deal with her, you know?”
End meditation.
Roxy said, “And?”
Because she meant to find out exactly what her father was up to. Was he only wanting to confide, or was she to get off the phone, run to her mother and over the thunder of the shower tell her he had chickened out?
“I still think you’re the greatest, Roxy,” he said.
“Mom’s in the shower.” Not true … The water had stopped.
Silence.
“I’ll have her call you,” she said, and replaced the receiver delicately. She turned to the stove and with a long-handled spoon stirred the meat in the pan. Tacos, she guessed, and found the envelope of seasoning mix between some cans in the pantry. Often she and her mother made dinner this way, but this time the habit seemed peculiarly intimate. The phone rang just as she stirred in the spices.
“I don’t think it’s necessary for her to call me. You know, speaking to me actually might be kind of … well, I mean, why put her through it … the sound of my voice. Roxy. I’d like to take you to dinner Sunday night, Roxy, incidentally,” said her father.
“All right,” she said. “Well, let me see. Just a minute.” She laid the phone receiver on the kitchen counter, turned off the burner under the simmering dinner, went into the bathroom and told her mother there was a phone call. Susan wrapped herself in a towel and headed unknowingly for the rotten news, humming. Roxy stripped off her sandy black bathing suit and started the shower again, hard and loud.
This is what Roxy tells Sammy, in the car on the way to Virginia Beach:
“My dad called last night and called off the wedding. This morning Mrs. Mack came to deliver the cake but I told her what happened. My mother’s a wreck. We sent the cake back.”
Sammy squints at a rusting Audi and leans over Roxy to open her window, one hand on the steering wheel. He doesn’t seem to know who Mrs. Mack is. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t even blink.
“Mrs. Mack, the cake lady … ‘ Roxy says.
Sammy adjusts the mirror. Behind them a trailer is pulling a boat named Mable. Sometime earlier, when they’d passed it, Sammy yelled out Mable’s name and honked the horn twice. Now he floors the gas pedal. When both trailer and Audi are left behind, Sammy slows down and starts humming. It takes a minute before Roxy realizes that he isn’t humming a song but simply imitating the purr of the engine. He’s like a child playing motorcycle. Nothing else matters. With both windows open, the wind is like a giant seagull trapped in the car — two wings batting around his head. Roxy wonders if he still knows whose car he is driving. Perhaps he’s blocked it. Perhaps he woke up thinking the Rabbit was his graduation present from his mother and father. Actually, Roxy wouldn’t put it past them.
“Mrs. Mack was riding this junky bicycle that rattled. She didn’t say a thing about the car. I mean, not that she would, but … She seemed really neat. She’s really pretty … Really light. Well, I mean, not light in color. She has that nutty complexion. But I mean, light, like we were standing on the steps, and then she climbed down to her bike and got on, and I don’t think I even saw her feet touch the ground once. That’s what I mean. She didn’t seem upset or anything, and her car’s been stolen, and my mother’s this total wreck telling her to shove her cake up her ass, and she just smiles, Sammy, you know? Sort of a smile, anyway, really great. I can’t describe it.”
“Your mother’s always a wreck,” says Sammy.
Roxy gives up. It’s true, she agrees, her mother is always a wreck, even when she’s not throwing paring knives at the cutting board. Too, her father is always a jerk, and they’re better off without each other. So, she doesn’t know why she feels let down. In the vanity mirror affixed to the visor in Ida Mack’s car, the parts of her face make sad rectangles. The sum of sad parts must be a sad whole. Sad eyes. Sad nose. Sad mouth. Sad forehead, even. Sad Roxy. She shifts in her seat for another view. Sad eyes, again. Well, not sad, exactly, but flat. Glazed, and bothered.
What bothers her most is having had to turn that cake away. What will happen to it now? It is surely a beautiful thing. Ida Mack has a reputation for her homegrown decorative flowers. Each cake is like a miniature formal garden, Roxy’s mother’s friend Annette had said. Roxy wishes she had thought to ask for a look, just a peek in the box that Ida was carrying, before she had sent her away. Maybe a taste, too. One frosty, sweet daisy petal. What bothers Roxy most is that Ida Mack probably put more work, care and love into that cake than either one of Roxy’s parents ever put into their marriage. Just a quick glance at Ida holding the box was enough to see that. She held it tenderly as if it were a child, wrapped up in a white apron. Just to have the wedding anyway would have been something; a morning affair, the big justice of the peace in their tiny living room, Annette dressed in white jeans and silk blouse, weeping on the couch next to Sammy in his baby blue suit. During the brief ceremony, Roxy was to stand holding a bouquet of black-eyed Susans. Then to the kitchen for a stand-up buffet of cake, fruit salad and beer.
The very least her father could have done was to wait until after the wedding, Roxy thinks, to call it off.
What bothers her as well is the glimpse she had this morning of Ida Mack as they’d stood on the landing together. Ida Mack had not looked like a person whose car had been stolen a day earlier. Simply, she did not look angry. And she had not been annoyed even when she was told that her cake was no longer required. She looked perfectly relaxed and amused, as if by some secret predicament. Down one side of her face ran a streak of icing. On her glossy black hair was a dusting of flour. She wore a black T-shirt, no bra, blue jeans, ratty white sneakers, no socks. One ear was pierced. High cheekbones. No facial wrinkles, but a certain settled look about the eyes. She might be just old enough to be Roxy’s own mother. Well, Roxy’s sister, maybe. Someone Roxy could talk to no matter what.
