Marine Park: Stories (16 page)

W
e were heading out to buy a Christmas tree off Knapp Street. I thought we used to go to Marine Park, Lorris said. Tuh, said our mother. We never went there, she said. We haven't been there in years, she amended—They're too expensive. I thought I remembered always going to Marine Park to get our Christmas tree when we were kids, even after—sawdust on the ground, a pile of old cut-up trees in the corner of the parking lot, which would stay there until spring, when the Parks Department trucked them away: same weekend they dragged the baseball fields—but I guess I was wrong. My mother, a school secretary, is nothing if not together. Since Lorris has been in college she's been substituting in math. I'm in the basement, which has its own bathroom, just for a while. My father just kept driving. Is this Katy Perry? he asked Z100.

Avenue R forks like an ornament hook, and we went left onto Gerritsen. You follow that far enough, you get to the end of the world, where Brooklyn drops into the water, where the houses are small and waterproof. We used to play baseball there, Lorris and me, in socks too big for our feet. Across the street from the diamond is the library, where I went a few days ago, sick of nostalgia. Lorris and I had driven over together, talking about our problems. He had become too introspective, in my opinion. Enough
thinking
about what was wrong. Just
do
something instead. Lorris nodded like he tends to, but I don't think he was satisfied. You can't make someone be satisfied by telling them.

The tree was easy this year. They didn't have many left. Got any Fraser firs? our mother asked. We always buy Fraser firs, she confided to the tree attendant in an elf hat. Good trees, he said, the felt ears jangling. Every year, she said. What about this little one? my father said, pointing at a Charlie Brown–size one. It was small and squat, wilting in the warm, unseasonable weather.

We got the tree tied on top of the van, this old green minivan we've had for a long time, and we started driving back. It was all easier than one time I remember—Seven years ago, my mother said. Maybe ten, she added—it was one of those two. That year, we got to Knapp Street and had the tree on top but couldn't make the car start. We called Triple A. Meanwhile, a blizzard started. Soon the snow was up to our ankles, and we were getting cold, and Triple A wasn't coming. I remember walking back to the house, all four of us with our hats and gloves on, looking like a ridiculous collection of amateur snowmen. Avenue R was disappearing beneath our boots. The news said things were happening elsewhere, but we couldn't tell. I almost didn't recognize the house until it was upon us, strange and framed by snowdrifts, crowded in by all the other homes. The Christmas lights were on in the window but there was an empty space in the center, for where we would put the tree.

[Fluffer Nutter]

Thanks to Amy Hempel, who is a force of nature. Thanks to the incredible Bret Johnston and the Harvard English Department. Thanks to Jackie Ko, for expert guidance from beginning to end in addition to unflappable, undying support, along with Diego Núñez and everyone at Wylie. Thanks to Allison Lorentzen, who made this book better than it deserves to be and who knows what you see through the window on the Q, and thanks to Nick Bromley and copy editor Ryan Sullivan and everyone at Penguin. The story “Shatter the Trees and Blow Them Away” owes much to Richard Rhodes's remarkable
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
. Thanks to Andrew Miller and Jenny Jackson, Caroline Bleeke, Sofia Groopman, and Christina Thompson. To the Whelehans. To Emily Moore and the Byrnes family. Thanks to Charlotte Alter, for reading first and last and everything else. Most of all, for my family—my grandparents; aunts and uncles; my parents, Mary and Ken Chiusano; and my brother, Scott Chiusano. Who else to write for but them.