Lech, p.1
Lech, page 1
LECH
LECH
Sara Lippmann
Tortoise Books
Chicago, IL
FIRST EDITION, OCTOBER, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by Sara Lippmann
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Convention
Published in the United States by Tortoise Books
www.tortoisebooks.com
ASIN: B09TDFFCMJ
ISBN-13: 978-1948954693
This book is a work of fiction. All characters, scenes and situations are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Lyrics to “Déjá Vu” by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, & Neil Young, Copyright © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., BMG Rights Management
Front Cover Image: Shutterstock Image 199198886. By Alexander Prokopenko. Used with permission per standard Shutterstock license.
Front Cover Design: Copyright ©2022 by Tortoise Books. Cover design by Gerald Brennan.
Tortoise Books Logo Copyright ©2022 by Tortoise Books. Original artwork by Rachele O’Hare.
for Rob, who held me to it
“Because first, blessedly, I am an animal.” – Arielle Greenberg
“We have all been here before
We have all been here before
We have all been here before
We have all been here before.”
– Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “Déjà vu”
Lech, lecha.— ְלך -ֶלְך
Go forth. Go for you.
Genesis 12:1
PROLOGUE
The hills of Sullivan County squint into the sunlight each June. Pleasant enough, they are no great beauties, and even the fullest bloom can’t mask the mediocre wonder of nature; then again, it’s often the least assuming landscape that’s known to take root. If these hills could talk—the region has seen it all. Nothing is how it was (only of course it is). Beyond that line of trees the fox and hare perform their age-old dance to remind us that for every prey a predator; every history a ferocity of ghosts. Sliced down the center, these hills reveal a layer cake of Western civilization, from the Lenape to the Irish to the borscht-drunk Jew. Who’s laughing now? Industry has been lost. Seasons turn. Road signs wage a battle of red over blue, the color of blood outside or in, and it’s unclear what is won by winning. The year may read 2014 but this is not a new story. Here in upstate New York the median per capita income is $28K. Farms lie fallow and for sale. Religion ransacks the fitful heart. What’s left are gun shops, a broken roof, the faint smell of stretched hide from centuries-old tanneries, long closed. Ponds are called lakes. There are lakes galore. All through the county, a river wends. For some it’s a haven, for others it’s a trap. Just ask the people.
NOREEN
When the phone rings, Noreen Murphy is minding her Monday at Sullivan Sales. Zero foot traffic, spit of rain. She blows on a fresh coat of polish: Can’t Elope. Her nails look like candy corn. She ears the receiver. All men are honey.
“Depends,” she says. “What is it you need?”
Everyone’s looking for something, but these men are so and so and so and so. They want land, water, they want and they want, and Christ on commission, You’ve come to the right place! She bounds out of her chair. Just like that, it’s happening.
Real estate boils down to location, and Noreen’s the only one physically there. She urges, Tell me more. If it all sounds too good to be true, she doesn’t doubt them. Somehow she remains a bright-side-of-things person. For all the bum cards she’s been dealt, Noreen is not one to fold.
Play your hand, said the elderly guest where her parents worked, can’t remember which, there were so many hotels, with hedges and lawns and a thousand salad forks, the man’s accent thick, his eyes big as a jewel thief’s. She was four, no more than six, small enough to move about the resort undetected.
He found her beneath an eight-top on the veranda busying herself with lost things: a stray golf ball, scalloped compact, iridescent beads loosened from sweaters. A clutch of men penned her in with their black socks and pale knees, hairs curling from calves like frayed wires. Their language, unknown to her, shot from the gut, consonants crashing in a tower of plates, but it was no kitchen accident. This was not even shouting. This was how men spoke in their mother tongue. This was the friendly four o’clock card game.
Every hotel had one. Many had many, going all hours.
Employees were not supposed to bring children to work, but Noreen did not want her brother looking after her. Patrick either didn’t look or gave the wrong kind of look. At the hotel she could disappear among the bottomless buffets, meat fanned on lettuce, vegetables carved intro cranes. Her palms buzzed from flocked wallpaper. Ladies twisted lipsticks and pressed themselves with a kiss. She had such a watchful eye the manager occasionally let her peel potatoes beside her mother or ride the mower with her father or hand out towels in the powder room where satin poufs made every guest feel like a movie star, provided she did not disturb.
Decks smacked, shuffled, fell.
“A-ha. Just as I thought.”
The word “thought” came out as “taut.” Noreen gnawed her kneecap.
“Pitzele, let me explain you something.”
He offered her a candy, hard outside, jelly in, ends folded in like a present. Her legs did not reach the floor. “Everybody cheats. The trick is not to get caught.”
The old man pulled a coin from her ear.
“How’d you do that?”
“Life’s an illusion.” He shut the oily metal into her palm, taught her gin and blackjack with a casino deck stamped in blue winged babies, hole punched through the heart. Practice, he said: get good at math, and a fast calculation might be her ticket. From where to where? That’s when he opened his sleeve. Rolled his cuff once, twice, until it revealed a crooked row of ink. Noreen thought it was a phone number or secret code. “No mind-reader could have imagined.” What? She didn’t say.
“The inhumanity of humanity,” he mumbled, which sounded like a riddle. Then he covered up. “What’s your story?”
No one had ever asked her. She thought about her brother with whom she shared a room. Nine years older, Pat was practically a man, hair sprouting everywhere, his body a Chia Pet, the way it grew, the way he grew when he made her touch it. In the bathroom he asked for a trim around the shaft, no bumps. Noreen was deft with scissors. He smelled like vinegar and fern spores. Told her to put her pencils you know where, measured how many she could fit. When she got to six, he said: good girl. Now you’re ready for school.
The old man waited. “You know, I knew once a girl your age,” he said, but she just stared at his liquid eyes until he regained himself. “It’s okay,” he patted her head.“Next time you’ll tell me.”
Only there was no next time. What did Acapulco have over the Catskills? As hotels closed, her parents floundered. In the off-season her father took odd jobs, clocked hours at the mill, thrashing and hauling seed as needed. Eventually her mother got a job at the state hospital cooking vegetables until they lost integrity. Noreen no longer asked to be brought in to work. She got older. Pat moved out. Her parents died.
For years, Noreen took the expression play your hand to mean accept your station in life, but no: it meant stop waiting around for that ace. Use the cards you’re dealt. Be smart, don’t bleed the fan, and you, too, can hustle the table.
If only he could see her now! How she’s dreamed of this moment: a big call comes in. Just like her online real estate course. Noreen glances over her notes—Steven Frank and Ed Messina—doodled with vines and stars. Frank & Messina: kissing in a tree. Their address is on Madison Avenue. Has she heard of them? Of course, she says. She hasn’t. She pictures Penn & Teller. Will one be large and the other slim? They’re scouting for new opportunities.
“Murmur Lake!” She blurts. That it’s not on the market is a detail she keeps to herself. That it belongs to two different owners; that it’s occupied, comes with baggage—let’s face it, a death cloud—no one would touch, but reputations can be reframed. Letting the property rot like a roadside shrine hasn’t done anyone any good. Noreen had been a teenager when the drowning occurred. Wasn’t there a statute of limitations on grief?
As the men talk opportunity and expansion, Noreen can’t keep up; theirs is a private language of catch phrases (“new dev” sounds like a shampoo); static cuts in—are they eating?—jaws working overtime as they carry multiple sidebars, hold the mayo, which makes her wonder who else is there, is she being broadcast into a midtown conference room or limousine, these men with their booming voices and business speak, do they wear shirts with the contrast collars and cuffs, pinky rings and hair greased in waves? They’re not talking with her but at her, as if she’s inconsequential, uh-huh, she says, because that’s what people want to hear, agreement, echo as opposed to interaction, they want to know you can supply their demand.
Pitzele. What’d I tell you? She can almost hear the old man.
“You’re going to love it,” Noreen says. “A jewel of a place. Beauty to die for, with its very own lake.” When she lobs a price—ludicrous, the cost of a small country—she holds her breath. They’ve muted her, she can tell, but when they return, their voices have dropped an octave. They’re interested. The truth is, Noreen has low-balled. Who doesn’t want a steal? Who could call a three-and-a-half-million-dollar price tag a steal? Steven Frank and Ed Messina, that’s who.
Now all she has to do is get the sellers to sell and the buyers to buy and the banks to close the deal. That she’s never done this before, that she’s flying by the seat of her pants doesn’t faze her. Noreen is not one to follow protocol. Authority has nothing on her. She whispers a prayer to the universe, to her card shark of yesteryear who never did share his name. Maybe it’s not faith, but gratitude. Hell in a hand basket, she’s already won.
Well water or county water? No sweat. She’ll find answers on acreage, zoning laws, tax info, the latest from the gaming commission. Tourism numbers and market trends. Anything Frank and Messina want she’ll get. She uses the word “jiffy.”
The senior sales employees are Sally Roux and Christopher Prig. Chris lives in Brooklyn and comes up on weekends. Their website has experienced a 33-percent spike in activity over the last eighteen months, consistent with the reported uptick in secondary aka “go-homes.” Sally is more of a seller’s agent, but even with signs pitched throughout the county, rainbow sheets draping the boarded up pub, there hasn’t been a need to staff more than one person in the office at a time. Noreen will need another job if she doesn’t sell something and soon. No way she’s splitting this commission. Noreen shuts her desktop and collects her things. Her beat-up Toyota is on the street where she’s left it. A good sign: her daughter Paige has not run off with it. A bad sign: Why isn’t the kid at work?
Lately Paige is in a mood, Noreen never knowing what she’s going to get. Tommy Potts coming around with his boots and his tin can, and that’s when he’s got a job. By the time Noreen was Paige’s age, Paige was almost three, in underpants because accidents cost less than disposables. Lunch was split pea soup, dinner, sliced frankfurter over soup, but she had a daughter who belonged to her only. No one could touch that, the love she felt, particularly those early years: baffling and bursting. If only love paid the bills.
When Paige’s phone goes to voice, Noreen hangs up, slings her studded fringe bag across the passenger seat. Life spills out: Lotto stubs, scratch coins, assorted nips. She lights a cigarette off the dash, cranks the A/C. The sticker on the windshield long expired. It doesn’t take a mechanic to tell her she needs new brakes and rotors, her tires bald from last winter, nor does it take a genius to crunch the math. Inspection will have to wait. At the traffic light she twists the top of an amaretto and shoots it. The bottle is fit for a doll. She turns left out of town, headlong into the blunt iron sky.
Thirty minutes is nothing in the country, Noreen on automatic pilot, though it’s been a while since she’s driven out to Murmur, a rocky, unsettling climb, as if the bottom might drop out beneath her. Fifteen years since she lived out here, up the dirt road and around the bend. Kole is not home. Not working the fields, at any rate. Corral’s empty, the pasture untamed by wind. Late to start running the compressor. Already he should be breaking the cut into bales. If he applies the same neglect to grain, it will go to seed, and Kole will miss the harvest. The Holsteins have strayed out toward the road where the growth is richer, and Noreen slows to watch them stewing in their patties of shit, flies on noses slick as river rocks, tails swatting wire fencing as if trying to break free.
The farmhouse is older than she remembers but so is she. Clapboard once white, now overcast, fallen shingles exposing dark squares like an unfinished puzzle. Satellite dish bent over the roof in defeat. Noreen fixes herself in the rearview. Her face is broad and hard, her nose never quite healed, eyes set like they can’t decide what side they are on, torn at odds in a tug of war. She’s in work clothes: lilac blouse with minimum boob, hair fixed in combs. From under the seat she pulls a concert tee, hacked at the sleeves and neck. Better to give the people what they want. She redraws her eyes. Her rose tattoo blooms on her shoulder. She has her daughter’s birthdate stamped on the inside of her forearm: 081891. Tacky, Paige says, appropriative or something , but the lease on Noreen’s body has expired. Paige no longer has claim to it. Cinder blocks bolster the porch against the earth’s pressing hunger. Noreen flakes her cigarette off the ledge. Every week she quits anew only she’s lying to herself.
No one comes to the door.
The house is unlocked. She could march upstairs and slap Kole from his slumber, haul him into the tub, but Noreen’s moved on from all that, for the most part. He has his wife Kathy now. Still, a suffocating familiarity returns, as if she’s been shut inside a jar of fermenting pickles. Down the hall Mrs. Troller’s room is empty, wheelchair gone; all that’s left is the commode the color of tombstone. Noreen can smell the bowl is full.
“Kole? Kathy? You decent? I got news, a proposition for you.”
Mark is where he always is: at his post by the window. She’s never known what to call him, Kole’s brother; locals, if they called him at all, called him mute or worse; what to call his quarters—parlor, TV nook, bedroom, living room. Salon. His posture admirable in wood-pulp flannel, his gaze fixed toward the lake, hair, thick as ever, as if a pair of squirrels has taken up residence between his ears. He palms the armrests. Visiting Mark is like attending church—calming, infrequent. It fills her up, to watch him watch over Murmur. How she wishes she were the kind of person to instill that kind of loyalty, living or dead.
Noreen coughs in the doorway, mentions the weather, each word an intrusion, she is practically shouting, a ridiculous adjustment, he can hear her just fine—if he chooses.
“Kole on his way home? I can wait.”
Mrs. Troller never wanted Noreen to stick around that long winter. That long winter which turned into four long years.
“A girl is not a kitten. You don’t just give her a bowl and a place to do her Christian. Noreen Murphy is not your problem. Take her in, and she’ll rob you of all your best years.”
Kole was gawky, then, with lots of hair, fiery in a boyish way, not built to be taken seriously. Noreen almost pitied him. Mrs. T was cranky but right: Noreen was not worth the headache. Noreen with Paige in her lap. Noreen with an island-size scab on her lip. She looked walleyed at Mark but he would not look at her. She zipped the Velcro of her daughter’s shoes and stood. Which is when Mark stepped in, Mark the beautiful, Mark the broken, Mark the silent son pushing out the words: “Let her. Stay.”
“Maybe we’ll see some late day sun.” Mark does not turn. The sudden light makes the water look warm although Noreen knows it to be cold. Across, on the other side of the dock, she can make out the outlines of two figures: mother, child. Summer people. She cups Mark’s shoulder, his muscles rigid beneath her touch.
“Would you like to go down?” Meaning the water, a closer look. Frank & Messina wanted images, and the sky after the rain is just right.
“Take a walk with me?”
The lake stirs with life, the swift tail of a fish.
“Whaddya say?”
Mark doesn’t. No need. He’s not going anywhere.
PAIGE
The fuckers are coming. No stopping their big cars belching exhaust from here to eternity where the road ends, dust kicks, where options dwindle. Where signs point: camp or more camp. Every summer, tourists invade, plastic shells humping roofs like suspicious growths. They take over the diner. Paige Murphy watches it all from the parking lot. This summer, she swears, will be her last.
Key fobs click and beep, safeguarding sleeping bags and brushed metal canteens. Doors slide open. Children tumble out in orthodontia, in an assault of tie-dye. Parents steal shirts into chinos and stand in approval of their offspring huddled together like a special unit, a purposeful molecule, as if they were close, as if they really loved each other and were not just trying to milk the last minutes of screen time from their shared devices before they’re confiscated in accordance with overnight camp policy.
Paige aims her cleaner like a weapon. Behind the glass, she mists, clears a graveyard of midges from the sill. At twenty-two, she is impossibly old. Her T-shirt pops up. Sweat feathers her brow. She will have to work fast to maximize turnover, to accommodate the swarm already yanking on the railing that’s come loose. One father will bust through the door, aghast.
