Sag Harbor (33 page)

He handed me a mirror. “You're going to be kissing a lot of girls now.”

I didn't mind being patronized by Helpful Hints from the back of the
Orthodontists' Handbook
. It made sense to compliment the
recently straightened on their new look, to help them appreciate the end result of all their suffering. What ticked me off was the implication that braces were what held me back from age-appropriate shenanigans, the fabled frenching, bra-fumbling, and blue balls. Obviously, it would have been hard for me to kiss fewer girls, basic mathematical properties of the number zero being what they are. In order to improve my portfolio, I needed to dump the braces. But what of the essential me beneath everything? In the logic of my affection, those who would love or kinda like me could see beyond the Iron Maiden embracing my teeth, my incompetent presentation and chronic galoot-ness. None of that mattered. There was something good under there. I had to believe that. If you couldn't see it, you weren't worth being with, right? Not worth kissing. So what people saw of me was a test.

Back at the apartment, I grinned and sneered at myself, practicing with my mouth. I looked at my new smile and wondered what it meant.

I was in the city for four days. On the way in from the island, a perfect orange dome of smog covered Manhattan. The dome kept in the August heat and hoarded the stenches of the city, the decaying garbage and car exhaust, the evaporating essences of those trapped inside. I stepped off the Jitney at Eighty-sixth Street and waded into the bog. It hadn't rained in a while, and miserable puddles fermented along the sidewalks, dark objects bobbing in them and multicolored oil trails hovering on their surfaces. It was late enough in the summer that people were too beaten down by the heat for rage and violence. They gave in, slumping up the sidewalks, martyrs to the choices they'd made.

Reggie had been back a few times to buy records or clothes, but this was my first trip back to the city. My room was a snapshot of my brain circa two and a half months ago, a picture of the mess left behind by the evacuation. Yellowing
Village Voices
lay open to the concert pages, listing the names of bands I hadn't seen and venues I'd never been to. All spring I memorized their addresses and situated them in the amorphous downtown that existed in my head. One day
I'd make it down there after dark, below Fourteenth Street. That hip murk. The records I marathon-taped the night before I left were strewn about, half out of their sleeves, the Birthday Party's
Mutiny
, the first two Stooges records. Stuff I bought because I'd heard it on the mix tape my older sister played when she came back for spring break. Who's that? What's this? Elena was spending the summer away from us, working at a movie theater in her college town. My father made a fuss about that, but what was he going to do, go up there and drag her down?

No one was around in the city, my few friends from school. I wanted to get back to Sag as quickly as possible. I had two more weeks of summer left. I wasn't done with it yet.

WHEN I GOT BACK OUT
, the stagehands had moved everything around. Most people, they leave a place for a few days and are reassured on their return that despite their worry, they hadn't missed anything. The legendary party, the life-changing late-night hangout. Not in my case. Not ever. The world really ramped up its carousing when I wasn't around and I had to listen to all the details when I got back. This was especially true toward the end of summer, when things accelerated as they got drawn into that September gravity. Just four days, and Clive was gone. I didn't care for sports, watching or participating, but Clive's fabled basketball camp impressed me as a special calling—he had a higher purpose, going off to fulfill his dunking destiny. In the tradition of Sag friendships, I wouldn't see him until next year. Bobby was in the city, for a few days or for good, it wasn't clear. His grandfather had gotten sick again, so they were all back in Westchester dealing with that. Which left us without a car, as Randy was working double shifts at the Long Wharf to top off his tuition war chest. It might have been December, the desolation we saw when we walked around.

We had one late arrival to replace those we'd lost, Melanie. She used to come out when she was a little girl, according to NP. NP had inherited the nosy-historian gene from his father, who maintained
an extensive mental database on everyone in the developments. How long they'd been coming out, which parcels their family had bought and traded over the decades, where their kids and grandkids were going to school, and how much they were or were not raking in from their big jobs. Melanie's family was first generation, NP told me one day as we were wiping down the vats in Jonni Waffle, but they'd sold their house on Cuffee Drive ten years ago. “My dad said her daddy made some bad business decisions.” Getting rid of your Sag house, that was unforgivable. Like selling your kids off to the circus for crack money. Mr. Downey was an outsider, you see, and did not understand our ways. How else to explain losing his family's most precious possession?

Now the Downeys were divorced and Mom was trying to reconnect with her heritage. The story was an easy sell in the developments—the wayward daughter back in the bosom and the impostor back where he came from, selling used cars in a cheap suit somewhere. Melanie and her mother rented a house in the Hills, back out for the first time in years. Everyone called her mother “Peaches,” a childhood nickname now reclaimed. Peaches put on a good show, insinuating herself into the little klatch on the beach in front of our house. She climbed up on the Franklins' motorboat and water-skied, the only middle-aged lady brave enough to do so when Teddy Jr. was at the helm. The ladies rose from their beach chairs and watched from the shore as the boat hoisted her from the water. Peaches waved at them like a teenage beauty queen showing off during the talent portion, wobbling only a little on the turn. She even got a letter printed in the
Sag Harbor Express
bitching about the weekend traffic, a gesture of righteous outrage that won over anyone still reluctant to welcome her back into the fold.

Her daughter was similarly adept. She hadn't yet claimed her birthright as a proper Black American Princess, the sartorial markers and debilitating stares, so it wasn't until the following summer that Erica and Devon welcomed her into their gang, but Nick quickly scooped her up. So to speak. She became a familiar sight at
Jonni Waffle, poking her head in to coax Nick out for a break on one of the Long Wharf benches and lingering outside at end of shift so that they could walk back in the dark. Her little wheezing laughter signaled her approach, around development corners and the stoops of houses, and then she came into view. She walked in a style halfway between an amble and a sashay—she was edging toward the sashay, getting it down, learning how to put her big hips into it. Next year, whoo-boy.

I first saw her on NP's back patio, early August. She was straddling their old green-and-white lounger and sipping Country Time lemonade. The unmixed bits of the flavor packet swirled around each time she tipped the glass to her plush lips, her long, curly hair corkscrewing into the air. Melanie was soft and round in a sweet, baby-fat way, with this remarkable ability where she converted everything she wore on her legs into hot pants, the press of her thighs turning prim white tennis shorts into Daisy Dukes, the zipper tab of her acid-washed jeans standing at attention like a needle on a pressure gauge.

I didn't remember Melanie from when we were little, but she pulled off a convincing display of insider knowledge like a well-briefed spy. She talked about the “Dancing Popcorn Box and Hot Dog” ads that used to run between features at the old Drive-In, hypnotizing you into a trip to the concession stand, and name-checked Frederico's and the Candy Kitchen with authority, as if she'd enjoyed an unbroken line of hallowed summers. With Devon and Erica making only strategic appearances in our scene After the Breakup, she was usually the only girl around and wasn't bothered by it. The Nick thing helped. I guess she didn't mind that he was technically a townie, or maybe the fact that her own credentials were out of order brought them closer. She feigned interest in his hobbies like a pro, like she'd been married a couple of times and knew how to tolerate the feeble enthusiasms of men. She watched patiently while he adjusted the graphic equalizer on his monstrous radio, furrowing her brow with concentration during his lectures on how this particular
setting really enriched the beatboxing in “The Show,” but the B side of the single, “La-Di-Da-Di,” benefited from a little more treble, to foreground Slick Rick's vocal dexterity.

Although, right, there was that one afternoon of foreshadowing. The gang was eating slices at Conca D'Oro, the orange drops of grease turning the paper plates opaque. “That's not a sample,” Nick said, “they did it live in the studio.” You didn't want to get Nick started on Melle Mel's studio acumen. I guess Melanie sensed I was looking at her and she turned to me and surgically flicked her eyes to the ceiling. Then she returned, rapt, to his dissertation on “Funky Beat,” that old-school master text. But I saw her.

THAT'S WHERE THINGS STOOD
that day I was alone in the house listening to the radio. It was the weekend, so Reggie was pulling a double at BK, and it was the third cloudy day in a row so the beach was empty except for the one-weekenders, who had to make the best of it. My parents were off at some function in Ninevah. I was killing flies with rubber bands. I snuck up as close as their hundred-eyed heads allowed, then drew back the rubber and let 'em rip. I'd gotten pretty good at the hunt over the summer, leaving tiny red smears on the windows and walls. My charnel house o' horrors. The light was fading, but I spotted one unlucky dude lingering by the handle of the glass door and I stalked over, my tongue tickling my upper right bicuspid … when I suddenly got really depressed. A sadness pumping through my branching capillaries, suffusing my limbs, splashing into the furthest hideaways in my pinkie toes and lumps of earlobe. It was such a profound incident that I imagine the intensity of it left chemical markers in my hair that a high-tech lab could identify, like I'd been smoking some serious reefer, that back-row uptown-theater shit. The fly flew away. I put my hand on a chair to steady myself.

I became aware of the music and understood. I got dinged by LNG, but good. The lyrics carouseled in my head:

Had I heard this song before? Surely I must have in another life. Another house. The singer croaked out his proposal. His was no velvet instrument, but he made up for it in intensity. The desperation that is cousin to passion. I was there with him at the English seaside resort at the end of summer. The coastal retreat past its heyday. It's the last night at the Dime-a-Dance before they demolish it, the last big concert of the season before they shutter the boardwalk. There he is in his one good suit, seersucker, with shiny elbows and stains from twenty wakes, the widower who has been standing along the wall all night, watching her, looking away when she turned her head toward him. This angel in white with her dark eyes and glowing skin. He saw her at the first dance at the start of the summer—he'd gone on a lark, usually he stayed away from such things—and returned every Saturday night to get a glimpse. Working up his nerve. To risk love one more time. Tonight is his last chance and he gathers himself, rubbing the rim of his old derby with his thumbs and digging his winnowed soles into the dance floor.

Had I heard this song before? I didn't know. Was that a clarinet, that farting sound? I listened to the words and tried to go back. When was it? The phantom when. No, it was a saxophone. The sax player waltzed through his solo, he was up on a tenement roof at midnight, playing for all the lonely ones, who drifted from their beds and moved to their windowsills to hear this more clearly. They couldn't see him. It was the moon itself playing those luscious notes. In the morning they weren't sure if they'd dreamed it. They tried to remember the melody all day and couldn't for the life of them. By lunch, they were thoroughly ashamed for letting him down.

The song ended and the volume spiked up to showcase a commercial
for Allen M. Schneider Real Estate. I heard my parents' car in the driveway and dove for the radio, spinning the dial to my mother's Nothing But the Classics. They came up the stairs, and when they got inside my father resumed. It was an argument from inside the car that they'd paused in between closed spaces. Who knew what started it. By then it was deep into the ancient grudges and unforgivable failures. The usual.

I hadn't made any plans. But I did what I normally did not do. I left the house. It was funny—as soon as the door closed, I couldn't hear it. Maybe the wind carried it in another direction. It got windy at sunset that time of year. I was always tormented by the knowledge that the entire developments must have been listening to us, but the screen door wheezed shut and those sounds were gone.

Walking out of the driveway, I tried to get the song out of my head. It didn't work. What if someone came along and heard me humming it? Picking up a ditty from WLNG was hard to explain, like claiming you got VD off a toilet seat in a bus station. You walked around with it to your shame. There were songs that were guilty pleasures, like “Fernando.” That ABBA shit. Everybody had 'em. Then there were songs that betrayed fundamental ideas you had about yourself.
Have I a hope or half a chance
. There could be no accommodation for such exposure. My friends wouldn't understand. Reggie would punch me in my face. Certainly my sister wouldn't approve, but I saw her so rarely that I no longer worried about what sarcastic remark she'd throw my way.

I HAVEN'T TALKED ABOUT ELENA
much because she wasn't there. I haven't talked about her because she went off to college and never came back. I've mentioned the great migration, when you stop coming out to Sag except for the occasional visit. You got a real summer job in the city, or something on campus, or an internship in the office of a family friend. Common rite of passage.
Enough of this bourgie shit
. You left the place that made you to take your chances in the wide world. But Elena did more than outgrow Sag Harbor. She
went off and we saw her on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and sometimes she came back down to New York if she had a longer vacation, but it was never the same. She hasn't been in here much because she'd already moved on.