“Yeah, sometimes it seems like we’re living on Pluto,” said Ivan. “What about the park? We haven’t hunted there yet, and that’s where Slutcheon found his black widow.”
“Unh-unh!” I said adamantly. “The Bridge Hoods will be there and might de-pants us.” In addition to smoking, cussing at people, and getting high on glue, the Bridge Hoods were known for this kind of humiliation. Liz said they’d strip girls and de-pants boys. She knew a girl who’d been stripped.
Ivan tried again. “The castle?” Rossdhu Castle was actually the abandoned gatehouse to a demolished mansion with a disgusting brown lake. It was haunted, of course, and kids went there to scare themselves.
“I’m done with ponds,” Max said.
“Well, I can’t go hunting today anyway, ’cause my dad’s picking me up in a while,” I said. “You guys better not catch anything good without me.” I was excited to be seeing my dad and going to the beach, but I didn’t want to miss out on bagging a good spider.
Max said, “You think if we find something, we’re going to say, ‘Oh, it’s okay, cool poisonous spider, we have to wait till John gets back to catch you’? ’Fraid not!”
I was miffed. “I’ll only be gone two days, Max! If you do it, you won’t be my best friends anymore!”
Ivan jumped up and said, “Stop! You guys are making my stomach hurt!” He ran over to a boxwood and threw up. “See?” he said. He pulled up his T-shirt to wipe his mouth. His scrawny white stomach heaved. “Guess I got too upset.”
Max snorted. “Guess you got too full of Zagnuts.”
Ivan did look a little green to me. “You look like you’re from Pluto right now.”
“I think I’m still tired from last night,” Ivan said, his voice very weak. I was concerned, and I knew he didn’t want to go home. But he and Max straggled off to their houses, wishing me goodbye—begrudgingly, in Max’s case. He’d never been to the beach.
8
When our dad lived down on R Street near DuPont Circle, Liz and my post-divorce visits were just for an afternoon movie, or dinner somewhere in Chevy Chase or Bethesda, where, other than the Tastee Diner or Francisco’s and O’Donnell’s Sea Grill, there wasn’t much in the way of restaurants. Less often, we’d go to places nearer to my dad’s apartment, like the Golden Parrot, or downtown to the Touchdown Club for dinner. Liz and I preferred the Touchdown Club because we could play pinball while Dad drank with his friends. But more recently, he liked to bring us to Rehoboth, where he was now living with his buddies, guys he’d gone to St. John’s or G.W. with, including my godfather, a Redskins defensive back who’d been tragically cut because of an injury.
Before she’d gone to St. Elizabeths, my mother had often taken Liz and me on trips with her sister and my uncle and cousins. But those trips were to the Chesapeake Bay, where we’d rent an old coral-colored cottage at Long Beach. It was a very different trip; for one thing, it took half as long to get there. We’d leave home in my mother’s black-and-white ’56 Ford Fairlane 500, traveling through downtown on Pennsylvania Avenue, then past endless tobacco fields and barns, arriving in fewer than two hours. Going to the ocean was fun, but there was more to do at the bay, where we had our cousins, whom we loved, to do stuff with. Our days were spent crabbing off the rocks or the shaky docks at Flag Harbor, poking at horseshoe crabs mating at the lagoon, foraging in the woods for turtles and snakes, and swimming if the dreaded sea nettles weren’t evilly pulsing around in the water. Someone always got stung, causing painful red welts. On sandbars we’d dig buckets of soft-shell clams, which the grown-ups would soak and steam and eat dipped in butter—but they were too slimy for me and my cousins. My uncle had a sweet fourteen-foot runabout, the Sarah Belle, and we fished off it every day, catching rockfish and flounder if we were lucky, and creepy toadfish and blowfish if we weren’t. Schools of breaking blues attracted terns and gulls, who dive-bombed around us. Best of all, at least for me, the bay’s towering cliffs were striated with eons of fossils. Miocene shark teeth, seventeen million years old, washed down from the cliffs, eventually appearing at the waterline, waiting for us to find them. I had hundreds in my collection. Evenings we ate our fish or picked blue crabs and often played the quarter slot machines at Buehler’s store—illegal for children, of course—and spent our winnings on BB Bats, Mary Janes, and Honeymoon ice cream. We all slept in the attic, telling lies and ghost stories, and doing rain dances if there was a storm, until we finally fell asleep. But since my mother had been gone, we hadn’t been to the bay. My father didn’t care for the bay; he said it was polluted. Also there weren’t any bars there.
But Liz and I did love the ocean, too, and were always thrilled to spend time with our father. At the bay, I learned a lot of about natural history and wildlife, but at Rehoboth, I learned about a different kind of wild life. It was always a little…unsettling to me how loose the situation was down there. But everyone was nice to us, and Daddy always had a girlfriend who made sure we were fed and had Noxzema and Band-Aids. By evening everybody would be pretty smashed. My grandparents weren’t particularly vigilant at home, and they certainly had plenty to drink every evening, but the Rehoboth trips had a crazy, anything-goes feeling. No safety nets. Now that Liz was basically a teenager, supposedly with some sense, we were left even more to our own devices. But Liz would often run off to the boardwalk, bribing or blackmailing me not to tell. I spent a good bit of time by myself, building card houses or digging up sand crabs on the beach while the men and their dates played records and cards, and drank and danced and smoked. Liz liked the dancing, I loved all the great records—the newest hit songs—but I didn’t want to be forced to dance and look like a fool. Dancing with Elena or even Beatriz at the Fiesta would be different, I told myself. I just waited around, hoping for some time alone with my dad.
Later in the night, the partiers would pair off and make out in the porch hammock or go down to the beach. Sometimes a couple might still be lying there, wrapped in a blanket, when I got up at dawn to comb the beach. There wasn’t much to find; there were no shark teeth like at the bay, mostly just whelk egg cases—those weird little black things that looked like dancing imps—but sometimes I’d find an unbroken sand dollar or a beautiful whelk shell, all purple and orange, the kind that you held to your ear to hear the ocean. Later in the morning, Daddy would swim with us, and that was my favorite part of every day.
At the appointed time, Dad pulled up in his convertible MG TD—it was British racing green, and looked like an oversize toy, and it amazed me that we could zip along the highway in it faster than all the boatlike cars of the day. Dimma waved from the front door, but Brickie made sure he wasn’t around whenever Dad came by. Liz said Brickie was never going to be friendly again with our father, but it wasn’t Daddy’s fault. She was very attached to him, and it often seemed to me like she wanted to blame my mother for the divorce. I tried not to think about these things. And I tried very hard not to think about whether Liz knew about James—if what Max had said was true—and if that had something to do with Liz’s simmering anger at my mother.
I ran to the MG with my grocery bag of necessities—my toothbrush, a beach towel, and an extra shirt. The babyish suitcase Dimma had given me now housed my rock and fossil collections. Daddy swooped me up. “Hey, pal! How’s it going?” He kissed the top of my head and squeezed me. It wasn’t like the relief I felt seeing my mother again, but I realized how much I’d missed him.