Lech, p.2
Lech, page 2
“Fix that before you have a lawsuit.”
Shaped like an Airstream, an aluminum pill too large to swallow, The Breakstone Diner swells hot and loud and important. The revolving fan can’t compete. Diane, with her hip, is in the weeds, hobbling to and from the hostess stand, leg clicking at her side like an ice cream scoop. These people are not used to waiting, but they know how to tip.
Paige arranges her face. “How many?”
Sunglasses slide onto heads. They are four, they are six, they smudge the dessert tower of éclairs and black forest cake, they leave their condensation on the glass. Children paw a dish of powdered mints shaped like baby teeth.
“That junk has been sitting out all winter.”
“You don’t know where people’s hands have been.”
“This way,” Paige says and they walk ahead like they own the place, pausing in front of the mirrored wall to smooth their hair as she indicates their table—
“Actually, we’d prefer a booth.”
As she gathers the filmy stack of menus and guides them to a booth, kids stomping on fallen forks, mothers and daughters still fixing their hair. There are barrettes in their jaws, tiny fangs, glossy manes swishing, which they lift off their long necks and loop in a way to look casual, accidental, as if they did not spend a fortune on color and keratin.
“Do you have anything bigger?”
Paige plops her menus onto the original round meant for six. These people pay whether she smiles or not. They never run out on a bill. Sometimes, they tip more the grumpier she is—imagining her home life, her prospects, dire straits. Arnie, how would you feel? They whisper as if Paige is not right there, she’s invisible, too dumb to process. And such a young girl. They say to boot. They worry it’s not just pudge she has but pregnancy. This, too, translates to bigger tips. If Paige can keep her wits she will earn enough to get the hell out of Sullivan County by September, so she stomachs their chatter: how long the drive’s taken, the extended fifteen-day forecast. Didn’t such-and-such-hotel used to be around here? Dinner rolls light as pillows!
Children want hot fudge sundaes at ten in the morning. They want cheeseburgers and a side of bacon and a basket of fried chicken and root beer floats.
“Fatten up the little pigs before sending them to slaughter,” fathers say. Dad! Fathers want eggs—here comes the wink—over-easy.
Mothers want fries but order egg-white omelets.
Daughters want coffee. Mothers want their daughters to eat. Daughters want their mothers to stay out of it. Fathers jump to their defense, as if mothers need defending.
Paige says, “How about a side of fries for the table?”
Harsh, maybe, but she has no time for nice. To think: once she looked forward to this time of year, the Neversink flush with snow melt, the air rife with moss and butane. Dragonflies hummed, and she and her mom played cards—spit, palace, bullshit, hearts—the radio antennae crooked skyward for signal. Every cookout had a burger to spare. Winter was long. Paige didn’t ski or skate or partake in any of the regional attractions stamped on brochures. The thaw was brief. Perennials jumped the gun or slept through their window. Spring, her mom said. Fickle, unreliable. There was no trusting it.
Tourists still arrived for autumn leaf-peeping, providing just enough economic stimulus from maple syrup to carry the county to ski season. Her mom, Noreen, colored herself like a Muppet, and charioted Paige from corn maze to monster mash, lollipops sucked thin in a parade of masks and capes, of children pretending to be other people, as if that were possible in a place whose year-round population topped out at 350.
Then Paige caught on to the heist of summer. Coach buses conquered the dusty hills. Paige remembers faces in the glass, aware of how her life in the husk and tassel might seem to outsiders: uncomplicated and carefree. She was five, six, she was always older. The farm grew her up quick. Paige would wind herself in the tire swing Kole Troller tied to the sycamore, a violent hinge, drilling herself into the earth—crust, mantle, core—as if it all that twist and release might transport her elsewhere.
Night, she listened to the freight howling toward the hamlet of Narrowsburg. Sometimes, she slept through. At the Trollers’, there weren’t always footsteps, Kole’s breath at the door, and it wasn’t always bad, to be raised in the shadow of a lake dubbed Murder and all the talk that went with it. Despite the stories, Murder was pretty as an ink spill. Paige never asked about it, never gave much thought to Mark Troller in his window, or why no one ventured into the water for a swim. She had other worries. Chickens, a skinny-ass goat. Kole counted on Paige to sweep up loose feed. Maybe he’d send her to fetch a beer. Once he brought her a Big Wheel but she was already too big, so he brought her to the hayloft, her body sinking beneath his red-faced weight. Animal, vegetable, mineral.
Fuckers, everywhere.
By high school they’d chuck rocks at river canoes, kids singing songs, sometimes in Hebrew, the foreign tongue echoing in the white-capped valley like a spell. Flash their tits to whole rafts of families, sneak into campgrounds for pie irons and Swiss Army blades. They rotated road signs nailed to trees, Camp Neshama this way, now that, dumped Kool-Aid into Camp Yad V’Yad’s (“yadda yadda,” they called it) heated pool. When Tommy Potts sliced swastikas into the sides of the boys’ bunks, Paige said he’d gone too far. But she understood. Life was a con. The season no longer belonged to people like her and Tommy, but to the influx of outsiders who transformed the Dairy Barn and Pizza Town into kosher joints through Labor Day, mandating weekly closures from Friday through Saturday evening, condemning Paige and her friends to the slab of sloped concrete beneath the overpass.
At the Wal-Mart, where she also worked, summer people looted the aisles, loading up on hammocks and kiddie pools like they’d won a shopping spree, then deserting half of their merchandise by the register for her to re-shelve.
“Nice shirt,” a customer said.
Paige fed the scanner. “Buy one, get one free.”
“Couldn’t pay me to wear that.”
The whole county bent over like the president was coming. Streets swept, playgrounds painted, traffic lights re-strung, menu prices jacked. Bartenders stopped carding. The fountain in the square spouted on the ten like Shamu the whale. It was crackers to feel like a stranger in your hometown.
“Watch, hot plates.” The grabbing begins, a battle for salt, Tabasco. No one says thank you. Easy, maybe, to lust and hate the same thing, but Paige doesn’t want what they have, she only wants to stack as many miles as she can between her and here. Florida is her answer.
“Refill?” Paige lifts her pot.
Finally, they turn. “Wait. Didn’t we have you last summer?”
Tables clear out, crumpled bills, clot of ketchup swirling in a water glass. Paige picks at her shorts as Tommy’s truck thunders into the parking lot. Stupid antlers on top. Saw it in a movie, he told her. Paige doubts he shot the buck. Probably pulled the horns off a dead stag or traded the pair for dope. Tommy leans against the grill, lights a cigarette. From the way he’s twitching she knows he hasn’t slept. Tommy is a fucker too, but he is her fucker. Bells jangle her heart as he plows through the door.
“Get you something else, folks, or are you all set?”
IRA
She is twenty. She is forty. To Ira Lecher, the woman seems almost a child, hair bunched in buns like teddy-bear ears, standard white T-shirt betraying—if it betrays anything—only a lack of imagination. Cut-off jeans, fringed at the thigh, give way to legs, long legs, legs that hook fast to hips, legs that have known their geography but that seem somehow lost, out of practice, ill-defined, unaccustomed to sun. From this vantage point, he can’t be sure, but with girls, it’s never a stretch.
What matters is: she’s here.
He ducks down, chest first, arms pumping at his sides, as if the ground is a surfboard and she is his wave cresting toward him. It is the same each summer. His property becomes his own wildlife park, a controlled environment in which he knows exactly what he’ll find: his new tenant, right on schedule.
Half a mile away Ira heard her round the bend, expecting the usual: black SUV, third row, essentially a minivan but without the stigma. Instead it was one of those gas-efficient cars, light as a toy bouncing over the pebbled drive, struggling to come to a stop. His ex-wife Vivian had the drive installed from the quarry when she’d come up alone with the girls to ensure no surprise visitors. The grass tickles his neck like a hippie’s full bush. Supposedly, that’s the rage again; what’s old is new, life itself one smug circle, but Ira has little use for trends. His eyesight isn’t what it used to be, either. Add that to his stunning list of inadequacies. But if his vision is weak, his body is strong, strong enough to support his own weight as he army-crawls toward her, fifteen, thirty paces, elbows pressing into the earth. There’s nothing sinister about it. He’s but a boy! Reliving his days at Max Mendel’s, deep in the land of pretend. He’s a sniper in the trenches, a hunter tracking a duck or deer, some real-life Elmer Fudd. Oh, come on. Joke. This is 2014. She is not the hunt.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Viv would say, “preying on anything with legs.” At 66, Ira is long past shame. Who’s preying? What harm was fantasy? When has loneliness ever killed anyone? That’s not even funny.
She has a child. The good ones always do. Ira remains confounded by his own adult children. Heather and Hillary. He’s nothing to do with them. Kids complicated matters. Kids came between perfectly decent people, but this kid—honey curls, bare feet—Ira understands implicitly: the boy speaks his language of want. He wants to be put down, but she whisks him up and over to the tall field by the side of the house adjacent to the outdoor shower he built, a simple pine box, akin to what he buried his parents in, door with a rusted hinge. The boy sneezes. Mom stops, drops, peers up the kid’s nose as if it contained all the world’s answers, at which point he breaks free, falling back on the lawn as if onto a mosh pit, as if life were a trust game on which to be buoyed by infinite, cheering hands. As if. The kid beetles the air. Uproots a fistful of dandelions whose fluff he casts with profligate, reckless abandon. A ribbon of dust sails behind him. How the world speaks to the young. Ira feels it in the kishkes: To have one’s whole life ahead! The joys! The sorrows! Next season, his property will be foolish with weeds.
The mother makes trips. Astonishing, what fits in that baby-sized trunk: suitcases, rice sacks, bricks of toilet paper. She feels around the back for stuffed animals, picture books. Dumps everything onto the ground like it’s meant to be tagged and sold off by the piece.
His own mother packed the car to the gills for their bunga-low summers: quilts and trivets and blackberry preserves in chamois jars, a collapsible ironing board. His father would thrash through the gates, ditch their belongings on the picnic table, jaunt off to a quick Sunday card game, then hit the road. Why a sweater salesman would be in such a hurry to head south? Who hankered for his wool in such weather?
This mother seems similarly stricken by kitchen-sink syndrome. As if the Catskills were some charred nuclear pit and not the fertile crown of New York State, she’s brought every provision down to the water, like she’s too good for the tap.
Summer people. Over the years, names escape him but faces cement, faces he’s catalogued, taking them down from the mental shelf periodically like collectibles to dust: a birthmark here, the weepy glass blower in clear braces from last season. Viv kept records. The first time they rented it out, Viv leased to Scarlett Station, the indie jam band, but they trashed the place, prompting her subsequent ban on musicians. Since then, they’ve housed a Swedish mime troupe, a gay couple with twins. There was Sylvia, painter of life-sized Saint Bernards; and Latrice, the lyric memoirist, who kept to herself but whose benefactor roared up on weekends in a classic car like some kind of Gatsby. One time a Wall Street slick secured the place then gallivanted off to Saint-Tropez. No one came that summer. It was awful. Ira, all alone. Like a falling forest tree, did he even exist in the absence of company?
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. His place has a past, don’t we all. A person drowned here. People drown in lakes all the time, but Murmur Lake is Ira’s lake. A woman died—not on his watch, mind you, before they even began leasing—and Viv blamed him. Nearly twenty-four years and counting. That July morning he’d gone to visit his ailing mother, but when the body turned up like a polyhedron in an eight-ball, it became his unlucky fortune. He’d let the girls down; somehow, he’d let everyone down. Should’ve been him to find her, not his children. Like their goldfish floating belly-up in the bowl on New Year’s morning, this was a father’s job.
“What kind of man shirks responsibility?”
“But my mother—” Ira said.
“You and your mother.”
Thus was the mark on his property. The rift in his marriage. Like any proximal horror, it was nothing and everything and that’s all there was. They’d gone back and forth on transparency, hosting siblings with a taste for the macabre, paranormal paramours, forensic hobbyists who roved the grounds with headsets and metal detectors for other morbid pearls, but those tenants gave Ira tsuris, so Viv dropped prices and cast about for the clueless, outfitted the powder room with fussy, wrapped soaps.
As for the others. A father drops dead from a coronary, an aunt throws a clot to the lung. Takes over a half hour for an ambulance to arrive out this way. Two unfortunate deaths in two-and-a-half decades wasn’t terrible, three counting the drowning. Chaya Bloch was her name. Plus animals (one family dog, a mischief of field mice, a pink-fingered shrew.) Eventually, death comes for us all, but it’s easy to get hung up on numbers, easy to forge a pattern, easy to think it’s all about you; the place, somehow jinxed—or chosen. Statistically, for each strike on his property, Ira gets a bye, which means, he can’t help but think, who will be next?
Ira watches his tenant. A quick scan of her surroundings is all it takes—no rats, no broken glass—for her to turn her back on her child and devote her attention to his house.
Her house. As of today she will inhabit his rooms, obtain shelter from his roof, safety from his walls; she will sleep in his bed, cook in his kitchen, rinse her lather down his drain. She will be his very own Goldilocks, a moment that thrills him, year after year. Like jumper cables to the soul, the energy of another body, another presence in his space, another being living—living!—eating sleeping fucking; trimming fingernails with their teeth. They are intimates, yet strangers. The best of both worlds.
She begins. His door—her door—stays open. Ira re-stained it after the cold winter, iron knocker welded into a rakish grin. She schleps from car to house to car, her steps swift, determined, the tethered laps of a domestic kept on short leash. Airs out the funk of the place; the windows, operated by crank, jut out from the custom stone exterior like stunted, awkward wings. Viv insisted he replace the casements, splurge on air-conditioning in three energy-conserving zones. Her upgrades all top-of-the-line, but Ira can’t live with them.
In recent years he’s given up the main house entirely. It’s a hassle, shuttling back and forth with his toothbrush and moccasins. When the weather’s a nasty hell, he’ll surrender for a few nights, hunker down for better insulation, then return to where he belongs: out back where it’s simple, his parents’ summer bungalow transported by flatbed from Max Mendel’s Mountain Village when it closed, hauled into his woods for posterity. This is comfort: among the milkweed and pine, the sexy white birches. Maybe Viv would feel a tinge of pity if she knew: poor Lech, destined for the doghouse. But he never told her. They don’t discuss details. She keeps him afloat with rental income; he spends all year in Sullivan County. If they were rotten together, they are better apart.
Already layers are flying off. A cream camisole suctions her ribs, flaunting the flinty lust of her shoulders. She slams the trunk, slams the passenger side with her hip, scoops up a small pair of shoes, red, round in the toe, slams them against her thigh three times like the tambourine player of a folk band—useless, but gentle on the eyes—calls to her child once more but he does not come. She calls again. Zachary! Ryan! Chase! Their eyes lock, mother and son; it’s a standoff, quick draw, Ira mildly amused, until along comes a bunny. The nervous twitch. Who can deny a rabbit?
The child whoops an echo and runs.
BETH
Beth bleeds as she drives. As she drives she lists: After-Bite, age-defense cream. Behind her, the city is shrinking, the cotton canoe between her thighs expanding, absorbing more of her, of what might have been. Over the George Washington Bridge, the radio spits Foreigner, Taylor Swift. Her son can’t stand product placements, apathetic disc jockeys, any interruption to song, whereas interruption is the air she breathes. Welcome to parenthood. She could kill herself, if only she could complete the thought.
“That’s not how you spell come,” Zach says as Quiet Riot flashes across the dial. Not yet five and already reading, which fills her with pride and annoyance. Zach is a preschool tyrant, his a reductive world of right and wrong. Not that he’s above poop. That’s his gray area. He poops to the beat. She tells him to close his eyes.
“I’ll wake you when we’re close.”
“Promise?” Her son is always making her promise. Like Doug, they feel owed. Can you at least promise to try? Smile, buck up, brighten the long face with toner, with wrinkle repair, with smooth, supple lists: Zach’s EpiPen, his favorite lovey, his spare lovey of his favorite lovey just in case.
“I promise.”
The trip upstate is a last-minute decision. A two-month lease will last through August. After that is anyone’s guess.
