The Here and Now (16 page)

I laugh. “Yeah, what’s with that? You can’t even look up tomorrow. Who says the Internet is boundless?”

We leave the newspapers in the car and strategize while we walk along the sand. We run in and out of the cold, thrilling surf and make big plans, “big, smart plans,” as Ethan says.

But once we figure those out, we realize the ocean is more fun when you have a bathing suit.

I guess without really saying it, we have the feeling that though tomorrow is a momentous day—nothing less than a day to change the world—today is something pretty momentous too. It’s a little piece of time we can steal before we have to face our lives again.

So at Ethan’s urging we leave Long Island and drive through Brooklyn, then cross Staten Island, heading an hour and a half down the coast of New Jersey until we find a tall pink hotel right on a boardwalk fronting a wide, crowded ocean beach.

It isn’t a beautiful hotel or anything. It is your standard beachside tower from the 1970s with a lot of stucco and balconies, but it feels weirdly perfect.

Checking in is a little awkward. Ethan strides to the counter full of purpose and comes back from it looking confused.

“There’s only one room available. It’s got a queen-sized bed and a pull-out couch or something like that. I’ll take the couch. Do you mind sharing?” This is such unfamiliar territory, he hasn’t quite figured out how to joke about it.

“No. That’s fine.”

Our room is on the seventh floor and has a partial ocean view, which means if you go out to the tiny balcony and crane your neck pretty far to the right, you can see a tiny sliver of it. Mostly the view is of a parking lot and an IHOP, and it is beyond my best hopes.

In one day I went from total hopelessness in a basement
prison to being here, on the edge of the ocean, the edge of a true accomplishment and the edge of a pancake house, for God’s sake, with a person I think I might really love. It is strange and thrilling to know that nobody else is watching what I do, seeing what I see, listening to what I say. For once.

Before I get too high, I think of Katherine. I wish she could taste this.

Two of the walls of the room are white and two are aqua colored. The bedspread is a rubbery floral, and the couch looks certain to be uncomfortable, but the room is bright and clean. There is a rough straw mat under my feet that smells like the beach. I go into the bathroom to check it out. I am euphoric over the little soaps and shampoos.

Do you know what this is like for me?
I feel like shouting.
I can see! I can say what I think! I can use one little shampoo and take the other one home!
I can imagine the future opening up so that none of us knows what’s going to happen anymore!

Ethan throws the duffel bag on the couch and unzips it. In the closet is a safe. I hear him fiddling with it, and then he puts the money and papers in. He comes back and hands me a bunch of fifties and twenties. He tells me the combination to remember.

“We need to get a change of clothes,” he announces. “You stink.”

He takes in my look of horror.

“Penny, I’m kidding.” He laughs. “You don’t stink at all. Or hardly at all, anyway.”

I glance down at the sweatpants and tank top I wore to go to bed two nights ago. “Your hygiene isn’t that impressive
either.” I try to rally. It was easier to be lighthearted when the most serious business between us was hangman.

“Come on. There are stores along the boardwalk.”

I consider. This could be uncomfortable. I don’t know how to think about him. He can’t be my boyfriend, but I can’t pretend there’s not a potent attraction. I can’t look at his eyes or his mouth or his hands with any neutrality, but I can’t lead him on either. I can’t help but begin to notice certain ways he looks at me, especially when he doesn’t know I’m looking.

“Okay,” I finally say. I wash my face and wish I could brush my teeth, and we strike out for the town.

I get some toiletries at a blindingly bright drugstore. Ethan tags along as I pick out a toothbrush, toothpaste and a pink plastic hairbrush. In a distant way I think the old thoughts:
Am I doing this right? Would a normal person buy this? Am I giving anything away?

He knows!
I shout at myself.
He’s known from the very beginning!

Ethan disappears down an aisle and I take the opportunity to buy a three-pack of cotton underwear and a razor to shave my legs. What a lark to think of shaving my legs at such a time, but I do. He meets me again at the counter, somewhat triumphantly holding a pair of bright orange flip-flops, a phone to replace the one I broke, and a pack of cards.

Our next stop is a boutique selling a million pairs of sunglasses and piles of cheap beachwear. I look around uncertainly. I can barely shop with myself, let alone with an eighteen-year-old boy.

Ethan breaks the ice by trying on an absurd fringed shirt with a huge sunburst on the back.

I laugh.

“No?” he says, acting surprised.

I pick out an orange sarong, a pair of denim shorts, a white tank top, a gray sweatshirt, a wide-brimmed straw hat and a bathing suit. We’re loaded, right?

Ethan is trying on oversized white plastic sunglasses as I toss my pile on the counter.

“Done,” I say.

“Aren’t you going to try anything on?” Ethan looks disappointed.

“I don’t need to,” I say quickly.

Ethan picks up the sarong and stretches it out in puzzlement. “What do you do with this thing?”

“You tie it around yourself.”

“Show me?”

I tie it around his hips as a skirt.

“I meant you,” he says.

The sun-beaten, fifty-something-year-old saleslady plucks the bathing suit from the pile. “This is nonreturnable, hon. And the sizes run big. You ought to try it on.”

I look suspiciously at Ethan’s pleased face. It’s as though he and the saleslady are in cahoots. He shrugs innocently.

I grab the bathing suit and trudge toward the fitting room in the back.

What’s the big deal? He’ll see me in a bathing suit soon enough. But my cheeks are warm as I try to make the curtain cover the door without the big gaps on the sides. Why do dressing rooms always have such terrible-fitting curtains?

I shed my clothes hurriedly and pull on the stretchy bottoms. They’ve got the papery sticker over the crotch that
makes a crinkling noise as I move around. The top is a halter held together by a brown tortoiseshell ring in the middle. Of course there is no mirror. I have to slump out to the long mirror between the two changing rooms.

Do I really need to see how it looks? I think of Ethan standing out there. Nah, it’s fine.

“How’s the
fit
?” calls the saleslady’s loud voice from about a foot away.

“Uh. It’s fine.”

“Well, don’t hide in there!” she says boomingly. “You can’t even
see
yourself!”

I look down at my skin, which looks bluish and mottled. Lovely.

This is a laid-back beach town. People here probably go out to dinner in bikinis half the size of this one. They probably go to church in less clothing than I am wearing. They are used to letting everything show, inside and out, and I am used to hiding everything.

I walk out. I try not to slouch into a ball.

“Very nice!” the saleslady exclaims. Nightmarishly, she turns me around to look at me from every angle. “You’ve got a gorgeous
figure
,” she shouts, which is a word that particularly makes me wince.

I look at Ethan like,
Would you get a load of this person?
but his face has more color than usual too.

We leave the store with a full bag, including the fringed shirt and the oversized white sunglasses.

Ethan is jubilant, and I can’t help smiling as we bounce along. “That was by far the best time I’ve ever had shopping,” he says.

We find a place to eat burgers and milk shakes right on the beach. After we finish, Ethan and I drift down to the water and kick off our shoes. I pull my sweatpants up to my knees, he rolls up his pants and we wade into the water.

It is gentle and transparent, and the sunlight stabs right through. I dig my toes into the fine wet sand, trying to think of nothing other than the pleasure of the nerve endings in my feet.

Ethan reaches for my hand. It’s the first time he’s done that when he wasn’t pulling me through a window or reaching to comfort me in some dire place. This time he holds my hand for no purpose, just for joy.

I let the simple pleasure of my nerve endings extend to my hands, my fingers, to the places where my arm brushes against his. I pull us a little deeper into the water. I don’t care that my sweatpants are getting wet. It feels nice. And anyway, I am a girl with a change of clothes.

We keep going like that until we are up to our waists, our clothes hanging heavy and my heart as light, I think, as it ever was or ever will be.

The first good-sized wave comes at us. I scream and he laughs and we both dive under it. We come up snorting and laughing.

We go farther out and just bob in the sunshine for a long time. I know there are scary things under the water, with chomping teeth and waving stinging arms, but I don’t fear them. The surface of the water is too calm and lovely for me to believe in them right now.

Finally we drag our wet bodies back to the beach and lie down on the sand. We stay there for a long time, letting the warm air dry us slowly.

He lifts himself up onto one elbow and leans over me. He lets his fingers drift up my arm. He lifts my damp, salty tank top to my ribs and stares at these new parts of my body. He runs his hand over my hips and my belly button.

I try to keep breathing. “You are going to make it harder on us when we have to stop,” I say to him.

“It’s already harder,” he says.

He sits up, and I stare up at his strong back and the waistband of his patched army-green pants. I’ve wanted to ask him about those pants so many times but shied away. When you ask someone a question, it’s an invitation for them to ask you a question, and I could never afford that. It was one question of thousands I hadn’t let myself ask.

I sit up too. “Where do those pants come from?” It’s such a forbidden delicacy, I can barely line up my words.

I guess Ethan is surprised too. “What did you say?”

“Those pants. You always wear them.”

“Well …” He glances down at them. He’s never looked remotely self-conscious about them before, but he does a little right now. “My grandfather was a member of the Irish Defense Forces in the nineteen thirties and forties. These belonged to him.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. I have his cap badge too. His father, my great-grandfather, fought in the Irish War of Independence. He lost an arm. My dad’s got his medals in the house somewhere.”

I nod. “And your father?”

“He’s an accountant at Ernst and Young.” He makes a slightly sour face.

“And your mom? She’s a designer, right?” I am getting the hang of this, spending my questions like a millionaire.

“Exactly.” He shrugs. “Her family was pretty amazing too.”

“In what way?”

He turns his face up to the sun. “Her father was a Hungarian Jew. He and his wife were sent to the Nazi camps in 1944. My grandfather escaped early in 1945. He tried to save his wife, but she was already gone. He walked all the way across Europe, living in forests, wading across rivers, until he finally got to Paris. He worked for the resistance until the end of the war, and then he moved here.”

“Sad,” I say.

“But he made it. He remarried eventually—my grandmother—and started a business, had kids and grandkids.”

“Doesn’t erase what he went through, though.”

“No. It doesn’t. He’s got the numbers on his arm to remind him.”

I hear myself sigh. I listen to the waves, probably my favorite sound in the world. “Thanks,” I say.

He rolls onto his side. “For what?”

“For letting me ask you questions. I’ve been wanting to for so long.”

“Anytime,” he says.

I put my hand out and Ethan takes it. He rolls onto his back and rests both our hands on top of his chest. For a long time I lose all my other thoughts in the up and down of his breathing.

Lying here like this, I can imagine happiness. Not a kicky,
bright kind, but a full, almost aching kind, both dark and light. I can see the whole world in this way. I can imagine extending the feeling to other places and parts of the day. I can imagine holding it in my pocket like a lens, and bringing it out so that I can look through it and remember again and again the world that has this feeling in it.