Knuckleheads (13 page)

Naomi toasts marshmallows around a fire-pit in the yard by the front door and Old Goat doesn’t eat marshmallows because marshmallows can only be purchased in plastic bags but Naomi likes them and every once in a while she’ll find a stick of appropriate length, pierce a marshmallow through its gut as if she’s stabbing a vampire’s heart, and then she’ll wave it over the hot coals and hold it there long enough for the sides to crisp.

“If they catch fire, they remind me of the Olympic Torch,” she tells me. “I don’t exactly get off on that, but there’s a thrill there, I won’t deny it. “

Naomi helps me carry two-by-fours while Old Goat is rummaging for balloons on the beach. Naomi dismembers bananas in a blender and hands me a Phillips-head screwdriver and an adjustable wrench. At the market, she catches lemons when I lob them to her. When she naps on the side of the porch she can still nap on, her breasts rise and fall like buoys on the lake. She dances in the kitchen, her legs waving like sea-grass, and when the radio plays Belinda Carlisle, she tosses the thick mane of her hair and says, “When I was little, I wanted to be a Go-Go. Sometimes I still harbor that ambition.”

“What’s a Go-Go?” asks Old Goat.

One Sunday afternoon, after I tire of watching Old Goat flail at his keyboard, I tiptoe up the ancient, claustrophobic stairs and find Naomi taping drawings made by her students to her refrigerator. She bites her lip as she presses the tape to the corners until the pictures stick. Later, she escorts me to the ice cream parlor near a park that has an abandoned railroad track running through it. She orders what I order, two scoops of Michigan Cherry. Old Goat remains at home blogging. He doesn’t eat ice cream because of something about cows and methane and greenhouse gases.

In the morning, showered and fresh for work in a flowered-print dress that drapes nearly to her ankles, a crumb of toast on her lips, Naomi kisses her husband’s beard and waves and winks at me. “By the time you get home this afternoon,” I tell her, “it will be safe to stand on both sides of the porch.”

Over the course of seven months, I have sunk all my money into this house, every dollar I got from the sale of my characterless condo. The edifice is now durable. It will stand for another half-century. There is really nothing more for me to do, but when I leave I will have nowhere to live and no job. I don’t often think about the bleakness of those prospects. Neither Old Goat nor Naomi brings up my future. She is grateful I saved her domicile. The Mylar Man is consumed with balloons.

Now, with no more work to do, I walk the beach every night with him and help gather garbage. We don’t bring any bags down because there are no plastic bags in the house except on the rare occasions Naomi buys marshmallows and we are sure to find a number of bags while we’re down there anyway, or at least we’ll find a mylar balloon we can rip a hole in and turn into a bag. We walk in one direction. Naomi runs in the other. I turn around periodically and see if I can spot her in the distance.

“Look at this one,” the Mylar Man says.

It’s a Happy Birthday balloon, a balloon with the faded images of other balloons on it, like a meta-balloon. The Mylar Man says again what I have heard him say many times: “Happy Death Day is more like it.”

I have heard all the Mylar Man’s stories and statistics on numerous occasions, how an elementary school class gathered over 500 balloons in just one half-hour of combing through the sand on the Jersey shore; how in late 2006 a
Celebration 2000
balloon was found still intact on a beach in Cape Cod; how approximately 51,000 balloons are collected annually from he shores of Lake Michigan. “Listen,” he tells me. “If you studied the chemical composition of this beach, you would find traces of plastic in every single grain of sand.
Every single one
.”

Whether what my brother says is true or not, I have options. I don’t have to keep picking up garbage. I don’t have to feel guilt. My arms, back and hands have been transformed by all the work on the house. I am steel and strong. There is no one else on this beach except for Naomi who is far away and growing farther with each step. I can plaster one of these balloons across Old Goat’s nose and mouth and suffocate him, twist the ribbon around his neck and pull. I can shove him face-down into the lake and hold him underwater until his breath stops bubbling. There are dunes where I can bury him and he won’t be found for decades. Unlike mylar, he would decompose. After a suitable period of mourning, Naomi and I could settle down in the newly reconditioned house.

But my brother is already a martyr in his own mind and I won’t give him the satisfaction of becoming a public one. Naomi looks often at the new floorboards, the window-screens, the sturdy rails on her porch, and the day is nearing when she will no longer kiss her husband in the mornings when she leaves the house. She will wave and wink at me still, and there will be a day when her leaving will be my leaving too. The Old Goat can remain, in a house that will give him a good many more years as he scours the beach. We will not feel guilty when we are gone. This day is near. Already Naomi walks close to me in the narrow kitchen, brushes her hips against mine, reaches out to touch my sleeve. There is a tide drifting our skins toward each other. I must be patient and float with the rhythms of the lake. It is nearly unbearable but I must not let my desire grow into a storm that overwhelms. I must be a calm body, a tide that waits. When our skins finally meet, we will not separate.

There is a story about mylar balloons I have been waiting to tell my brother. I have known it for a long time. It’s a story about how administrators in Grand Central Station grew frustrated about the horde of mylars that had been loosed from the hands of kids in the lobby and journeyed to the ceiling. How the balloons lingered for months, congregated into a veritable convention, obscuring the magnificent starscape that had been painted when the building was first erected. The administrators didn’t know how to get the balloons down and contacted some spiritual doppelgangers of my brother, a couple guys who nearly wrecked their marriages when they became obsessed with rescuing plastic bags—“bag-snatching” they called it—from tree-branches. Guys who spent entire weekends combing Greenwich Village with twelve-foot-long aluminum dowels with coat-hooks duct-taped to the ends so they could collect thousands of bags that had once held cosmetics or take-out. “Want to know what these guys came up with?” I ask. “Want to know how they finally got the balloons down?”

The Mylar Man is interested. He tugs shreds of red latex from the sand, a balloon remnant that’s been torn to sharp oblong triangles, like dragon fangs. He looks at me. “How’d they do it?” he says.

I wait. The sun is setting over the lake in a swirl of blues, salmons and oranges. I understand what my brother’s trying to save. He is beautiful and altruistic and a treasure, but nevertheless a lunatic. Ahead of us is the lighthouse, striped like a barber’s pole. Because there have been a lot of balloons today, a lot of digging and clawing, we won’t reach it tonight. Soon, we’ll reverse course and head back home. Naomi will also turn around and we will journey toward each other. She will become larger and larger as we approach, but she’ll still be small, never taller than five feet.

“They clumped a group of other balloons together, a half-dozen or so. Tied the clump to a long string like a giant kite. Then they slathered each balloon with industrial adhesives, buttered their surfaces sticky and sent them to the ceiling. Used the gummy clump like a monstrous fishing rod and, one by one, caught the renegade balloons and pulled them down.”

“That’s genius,” my brother says. “Like a family setting out to recapture its prodigal sons and return them to the fold. I gotta meet these guys.”

My brother never wants to meet anyone.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he tells me as he squints toward the vanishing sun. “I’ve enjoyed these walks with you.”

I’m tempted to pick up a rock and stone him with it. He is a gorgeous Poseidon, shirtless and rippled with the sunset behind him and I don’t want to listen to his rants anymore and I don’t want him to appreciate me. I am a lousy brother. The temptation to pick up a rock is palpable, quivering. The sound against his temple would be a gift, an inheritance. I want it. I reach downward into the sand. Dig with my fingers and encounter some latex. Blue with a yellow ribbon. I claw it from the beach. Give it to the Mylar Man. He bags it.

Tonight Naomi will not run. Last night, she twisted her ankle. A misstep in the sand, a skitter off an upturned rock. She limped back and iced it for twenty minutes with the cubes leaking through a cloth napkin. She will ice the ankle again tonight instead of running. She is a wounded woman and I have volunteered to keep her company. Old Goat is on the beach. We are watching him from the rebuilt porch as he works his way toward the lighthouse. He is a human combine reaping a harvest of latex and mylar. I imagine he is looking up periodically, missing me, how there is no one tonight for him to show-and-tell.

Naomi sits on a wicker chair, her ankle propped on a throw pillow on a matching chair two feet away. She leans over with a napkin full of ice cubes and applies it to the swelling. The ice melts and leaks in streams down her leg and she fidgets and twists and grimaces and tries to refold napkin corners to contain the leaking. The Mylar Man is far down the beach now, barely visible, a slowly moving dot, smaller, smaller, gone.

“I can’t bear to watch him,” Naomi says. “That’s why I run in the opposite direction.”

“Pretty pathetic, isn’t he?” I say, and I wonder if I’ve offended her. She forgets about fussing with the napkin, lets the water stream across her shin. She spends a long minute gazing at the beach, as if she can still see her husband, even though she can’t.

“You’re making a joke,” she says. “You’re saying his obsession is ridiculous, that he lacks dignity. But he is pathetic. It’s sad. He can’t clean the whole planet. He can’t even clean this stretch of beach.”

Naomi’s back curves as she presses the leaking ice to her ankle, and all the fire has gone out of her shoulders. She is uncomfortable, twisting more and fidgeting. What she’s telling me is that my brother is also too big of a beach to clean. Too deep a wound. She can’t dive into it anymore, the canyon of his hurt, and she can’t save him and she’s ready to give up. She wants someone who will take on tasks that aren’t hopeless. A man who can save a home.

I point my finger upward and draw a heart in the air.

She shakes her head, looks out at the beach, then turns back toward me.

A ribbon of hair falls across her face and scratches her cheek. She can’t do anything about it because her hands are holding the ice, and I reach toward her. I lift the strand and when she looks at me her eyes are full. The sun is a ripe blaze. We know how long her husband will be gone, two hours at least.

Naomi is all heat now, still gazing at me, the ice running a river over her shin. If our skins touch, we will not separate. “My back aches,” she says.

I know what she wants.

CALISTA'S IMMATURE IN SOME WAYS. I’m immature in other ways. It’s not a contest, but it’s hell when I lose.

Often, I lose.

Our vacation has been one putrid smoking disaster after another. Every time something new goes wrong, I calm myself with the reminder it was Calista’s idea to spend seventy-five hundred dollars to rent a cottage infested with ticks, mice and spiders for a week on Martha’s Vineyard. Her idea to endure seven straight days of over-priced restaurants, every one of which is too crowded and takes forever.

Waiting too long for a forty-two dollar lobster and its microwaved potato companion is not the same thing as waiting for sex. The build-up, the anticipation of peeling somebody’s thong off, of watching a pair of nipples tune in like a radio signal—when these things come to fruition, the irritation of the previous delay can evaporate. Not so with food that when it arrives tastes only slightly more appetizing than truck tires.

What exacerbates the disaster of our vacation is Jesse, our four-year-old, who’s been crying like a faucet most of the week. He’s not a bad kid. He is, in fact, a tremendous kid—commits all manner of adorable pre-school behaviors like calling Frankenstein
Freakenstein
when our neighbor dressed up as the spark-plugged blockhead last Halloween—but he’s also on the fast track to psychological weed addiction and years of regularly scheduled therapy because he gets far too much attention from his parents. Calista and I focus on him in order to avoid focusing on each other. We know Jesse is our best thing, both our lone successful group-project and our sole remaining chance for redemption, so we try to outdo each other during our special one-on-one times with him. If Calista takes him to the pseudo-farm where kids can pet unhealthy looking goats and llamas, I have to escort him to the balls-out zoo where the orangutans enjoy frolicking with their genitals. If I escort him to the zoo, she takes him to an amusement park and sits next to him on the kiddie rides and wins him a four-foot high stuffed aardvark.

That’s how we wound up on Martha’s Vineyard. Calista called a truce.

We have to put an end to this arms race, she said. We need to do something as a
family
.

So we eat expensive lazily-prepared food as a family, except Jesse doesn’t eat his. He’s so damn hungry waiting, and whining, and waiting, and whining, that he invariably fills up on bread or his fingernails or some old cheese and crackers from the beach bag Calista demands I lug everywhere, and by the time his seventeen-dollar plate of buttered spaghetti arrives at the table, he has nothing to offer it but sneering disdain, which is fair. I bear no ill will toward my son for whining about how starving he is for several hours and then picking at only a couple pieces of his pasta. I am angry only at Calista who glares at me with her nefarious teacher-eyes, the ones that make her fifth-graders feel like if they leave their seats to get a tissue, razor-sharp scimitars will descend from the ceiling and shred them to confetti.