Kids of Appetite (2 page)

(EIGHT days ago)

“The Flower Duet” ended.

“The Flower Duet” began again.

The magic of repeat.

I missed Dad. Ergo, I stood on the edge of the pier. It was the thing to do when I missed Dad like this.

I stood on the edge of the pier a lot.

Hands in pockets, jacket collar flipped up against the Jersey cold (which bit like an angry dragon with long icy teeth), I let my hair whip around in the wind. I didn't care that it got messed up. Not even a bit.

Hair wasn't momentous.

Two things that were momentous:

1. This song, “The Flower Duet.” It used to be Dad's favorite. Now it was mine.
   
2. This dormant submarine, the USS
   Ling
   . A once great and seaworthy vessel, it had been laid to rest in the Hackensack River long before I was born. The
   Ling
   reminded me of this: a retired racehorse sent to one of those sex farms where all they do is procreate with other racehorses in hopes that all the best genetics will win out and produce one Super Racehorse. (Dad took me to one of these places for a tour once; when our guide started in on “breeding phantoms” and vari-ous methods of artificial insemination, I decided it was best I wait in the car.)
   

Unfortunately, there were no other subs in the river with which the
Ling
could procreate.

Ergo, there would be no sub sex.

Ergo, no Super Sub.

This portion of the riverside had been sectioned off as an official navy museum, with guided tours and the like. It was only open on Saturdays and Sundays, which meant I had the place to myself during the week. Most days I stopped here on my walk home from school, which made me wonder what the USS
Ling
looked like at nighttime. I couldn't say exactly what drew me to it. Maybe the fact that the sub's real life was over, yet here it was. I felt I could relate.

My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and swiped to read Mom's text.

Hey. can u stop @ babushka's, grab prosciutto? Pls? :) :)

The shorthand killed me. Mom still had this ancient flip phone where each button had to be pushed approximately one dozen times to reach the desired letter. On more than one occasion, I'd attempted to demonstrate the benefits of the miraculous QWERTY keyboard. It was beyond her.

I typed back the following:

T'would be an honor and a privilege, good mother, for me to fulfill your Venetian salt-cured meat delivery requirements this fine evening. I shall return forthwith and posthaste. E'er your loving son, Victor.

A second later, she responded:

thnx, luv

. . .

Thnx, luv.

I slid the phone back into my pocket, looked out at the
Ling
. Not so long ago, Mom would have played along, called me out on my smartass response.

Things were different now.

. . .

. . .

“The Flower Duet” came to a heartrending chorus in my ears as the wind continued thrashing my hair. I didn't particularly like opera; I liked this particular opera. I pictured those two women, the soaring sopranos, absolutely killing it. They weren't singing; they were
flying
. Dad once said the reason some people didn't like opera was because they listened with their brains and not their hearts. He said most people's
brains were pretty stupid, but hearts could cut through bullshit like an absolute ace.
Think with your heart, V
, he used to say.
It's where the music lives
. Dad used to talk that kind of shit all the time because he was a live-in-the-moment type guy, a genuine heart-thinker.

There aren't many of us left.

I kicked a nearby rock, aiming for the deck gun on the far side of the submarine, missing wide right. I spoke to Dad out loud, knowing full well he couldn't hear me. I couldn't hear me either, what with my headphones blasting the soaring sopranos, but it was nice, saying things without hearing them. Nice knowing my words were out there somewhere in the ether.

I kicked another rock. Bull's-eye. It clanked off the deck gun, and plopped into the dark water of the river. I smiled inside, imagined the rock sinking to the bottom of the riverbed, where it would exist forever, without anyone ever knowing about it.

Dormant. Like the
Ling.
Like my voice in the ether.

Like me.

I turned away from the pier, crossed River Street, one foot then the other, savoring the solitude of the street-hike to Babushka's Deli. It was cold out, the kind you could see, where your breath blossomed like a floating lotus in front of your face. It was the kind of cold where you couldn't tell if it was cloudy, or if the whole sky was just the color of clouds. The cold spoke in sentences, and here's what it said:
Snow is on the way, guys. Gird thy silly, futile selves.

“The Flower Duet” ended.

“The Flower Duet” began again.

The magic of repeat.

God, I missed Dad.

* * *

I leaned over the glass case, trying to remember the difference between pancetta and prosciutto. Not that it mattered. The Benucci lasagna required prosciutto. It would run on nothing less.

“You are small boy, yez?”

I looked around, wondered if the butcher was addressing me. The only other person in the shop was a bulky teenager completely decked out in New York Jets paraphernalia: hat, scarf, gloves, coat. He sat at a small table in the corner, nursing a Coke and a sandwich, staring at me with a look of utter confusion, curiosity, and repulsion.

I knew this look well.

“
You
,” said the butcher from behind the counter, pointing a beefy finger at me. “You are small boy. Yez?”

“I guess . . . um . . . I'm a little small for my age.”

“What? Speak up!”

Behind me, the Jets fan snickered. I tucked my hair behind my ears and tried a shorter response this time. “Yes. I am small boy.”

I am small boy
.

The butcher, whose name tag read
NORM
, went back to the meat on his chopping block. “Okeydokey then. Small boys need meat. Strengthen bones. Make big 'n' strong.” He smiled, flexing a bicep. “Like me! Ha!”

I never knew what to say to this guy. At least half lion, Norm was almost certainly Russian and had hair growing in ungodly places in ungodly amounts. He was fat, yes, but it wasn't just that. It was the
kind
of fat—firm, bulging, meaty—that betrayed a man who had dipped too many times into his own stock. The working theory was that Norm
was ex-KGB hiding out in North Jersey until the rise of a new Soviet regime.

. . .

A little bell jingled as the front door opened, and in they walked.

All four of them. Always together.

I'd seen these kids at least a half dozen times around town. Hackensack wasn't exactly a burgeoning metropolis—there were only so many places a person could go before bumping into familiar strangers. Usually it was incidental, more like déjà vu than fate.

“Hello, Norm,” said the oldest kid. I'd heard the others call him Baz. Probably twenty-five or so, Baz was pretty muscular and six-foot-something at least. His shirtsleeves were cut off at the shoulder, revealing a slew of tattoos running the length of his left arm, a combination that defied more than society—it defied the weather itself. He had a slight accent of indeterminate origin, and always wore a Trenton Thunder baseball cap.

“Yez, Mister Baz,” said Norm, eyes brightening as he wiped his bloody paws on his apron. “I was thinking I might be seeing you today. You give me one minute. I be right back.” Norm disappeared into the back room while I stood off to the side, tucking my hair behind my ears again, feeling every bit a small boy.

For reasons not entirely clear, Norm transformed into a real Super Racehorse around these kids. Even the Jets fan, who just a minute ago couldn't stop staring at my face, had now been chewing the same bite of sandwich since the group had walked in the door. The kids had an air of reckless enthusiasm about them, like at any moment they might drop everything and run. For fun, for the hell of it, for whatever.

“The frak you staring at, kid?”

The littlest of the bunch, a girl of no more than ten or eleven years old, had curly red hair and freckles, wore an oversized coat and mismatched mittens, and could usually be found holding Baz's hand.

“Coco,” said Baz. “Be polite.” He offered me a quick smile, then turned and whispered something to a third kid, who listened, promptly shook his head, and snapped his fingers twice. In his late teens, maybe early twenties, this kid's arms were too long for the sleeves of his Journey sweatshirt, so you could see at least five inches above his wrists.

The last kid in the group was a girl with gray eyes, a fitted turquoise coat with rainbow stripes across the front, and a yellow knit cap; her hair was long and so blond you couldn't tell where the hat ended and the hair began. The yellow, the rainbow, the gray—she was an explosion of color, Matisse gone wild. She stood behind the others, her head in a book as if books had been created for the sole purpose of being read by her in a butcher shop. She was quite the Stoic Beauty.

This was the whatevereth time I'd seen these kids, but I was no more immune to this girl's charms now than I was the first time I'd seen her. Pancetta, prosciutto,
fucking ham loaf
, whatever. Being around these kids instilled a primal sense of excitement: a combination of wonder and fear.

“Okay, you know what?” said the little redhead, dropping Baz's hand and crossing her arms. “You have a serious staring problem, kid. Anyone ever tell you that? Anyway,
we
should be staring at
you
.”

“Coco!” said Baz.

I let my hair fall in my face, and turned back toward the glass case of various salt-cured pork. I was used to those sorts of comments, especially from younger kids. But being used to something is not the same as being immune to it.

Norm returned from the back, carrying a bulky brown
paper sack. He hoisted it over the counter and into the arms of Baz, who smiled, said thanks, then turned and led the other kids out of the store, the four departing as one.

“Okeydokey,” said Norm, turning back to me. “What will you have, small boy?”

Through the shop window, I watched the kids cross the street. Something about their cohesiveness made me wonder if the world wasn't at all what I thought it was.

“Pancetta,” I mumbled, too busy staring out the window to know what I was saying.

“Okeydokey. How much?”

I watched the kids veer off Main Street, turn down Banta, and disappear around a corner.

. . .

. . .

“Hey, small boy. You okay?”

I did not answer.

Instead I tore out of Babushka's, without pancetta or prosciutto, practically knocking the bell off the door as I went, running across the street in a frenzied daze, down Main and around the corner onto Banta. My small boy brain was still processing things, but my heart cut through the bullshit like an absolute ace.

I flipped a page of
The Outsiders
and, once again, wished I could sink into the book. Sinking into fiction: the if-only of if-onlys.

“Häagen-Dazs coffee is good,” said Coco. “Cookies and
cream, rocky road, Italian toffee tira . . . Mad, what's this word?”

I glanced up to find Coco, her nose pressed against the cold glass case, her frazzled hair like a red sun around which a thousand pints of ice cream rotated. “Tiramisu,” I said. “It's like a soft cake. Only there's no actual cake, I don't think. But it has coffee and rum.”

“Shut.
Up
,” said Coco. “Rum, like what pirates drink? What miserable rock have I been living under, I don't know about tiramisu? Ooh, look, there's cookie dough! That's your favorite, right, Zuz?”

Zuz stared into the case of ice cream as if looking through it, and snapped his finger with a
pop!
that echoed down the aisle.

Foodville on Banta was just our speed, an ever-persistent brand of dull. Employees arranged, then rearranged, then rerearranged boxes of generic cereals, chilled pickles, and ramen noodles. They mopped clean floors and tagged already-priced items and tapped their toes to feeble-rhythmic Muzak; they stacked soup can pyramids and hung out by shredded cheeses in the corners where fluorescent bulbs flickered. And in the center of Foodville, we stood in our own little town, the eleventh aisle, staring at frozen dairy desserts as if waiting for the ice cream to choose us.

Baz turned the corner, pushing a half-filled shopping cart, leaning over the top of it like a weary mother of four.

Every family has a normal, but some normal sure seems more normal than others.

“About time,” said Coco, eagerly eyeing the ice cream. “Mad says tiramisu is a soft cake with real rum in it, like what pirates drink. Is that right? Tell the truth.”

“I don't know.” Baz removed his Thunder baseball cap and
ran his hand through his hair. I had seen this move before, knew what it meant. I prepared myself for the shit-storm of Coco's discontent.

“Okay, well, we have to try
that
obviously,” said Coco, pulling open the freezer door. “But we'll need to get a second flavor, just in case soft cake ice cream sucks balls.”

“Sorry, Coconut,” said Baz. “It's not happening.”

She sighed. “Well, if it's just the one, then—”

“No. I mean, no ice cream. Not this time.”

Coco's ratty red hair flung as she spun. “Repeat that please.”

“I don't get paid until tomorrow,” he said. “So this is it for today. We have to come back in the morning for Gunther's stuff, so maybe then. Anyway . . . it's freezing outside.”

“It's not freezing in my
stomach
,” said Coco, turning back to the freezer. She reached for the handle, her voice slightly higher than before, laced with a thick tone of silvery virtue. “I could fit it in my jacket, Baz. No one would even know it was gone.”

I couldn't help but admire how someone so small could swing such heavy bullshit. The thing about Coco was, she wasn't only skin and bones; she was survival and fight and ferocious loyalty that you just couldn't find anywhere anymore. When Coco spoke, no matter how high-pitched, you could almost hear a muted roar lining the underbelly of each word.

“
We
would know, Coco,” said Baz. “You know my rule.”

A towering crash sounded behind us.

There, at the end of the aisle, a kid stood in the middle of hundreds of soup cans, once a perfect pyramid, now scattered around his feet like a demolition zone.

“It's him,” whispered Coco. “That kid from Babushka's. The one with a staring problem.”

Coco was right. Before today I'd seen this kid around town maybe once or twice. He had long greasy hair and sharp blue eyes, but those weren't his defining characteristics. He wore a backpack, blue jeans, and lace-up boots, but those weren't his defining characteristics either. His defining characteristic was his face. For starters, it didn't move. Not a smile, not a frown, not a single visible reaction or emotion. Except his eyes. His eyes were lively and bright, but I'm not sure I would have noticed were it not for the fact that they were currently aimed directly at me.

A teenage girl in a hairnet approached the endcap where the soups had once been neatly stacked. “What the hell, dude? I just finished putting th—” She looked at him for the first time, and swallowed whatever words were next, instead letting out a feeble, “Oh.”

For a second no one said anything. The employee in the hairnet bent down and started picking up the cans. “No worries, buddy. It happens, you know?”

The kid gripped his backpack, gave me one last look, then turned and ran.

“Told you,” said Coco, refocusing her attention on the solar system of ice cream in front of us. “Frakking weirdo, that kid.”

Zuz snapped once.

Baz walked over to help pick up the soup cans while I went back to my book, pretending to read, pretending the blue of those eyes wasn't quite so sharp, pretending not to wonder what the Foodville employee was about to say to that kid, what she surely would have said had his face not looked the way it did.