Baltimore Stories: Volume Two Read online

  ‘June 27th, 1932.’

  I wait for him to continue. He doesn’t.

  ‘June 27th, 1932, huh, Grandpa,’ I say, hoping to elicit an explanation. He moves his lips and pulls their prayers.

  I laugh a little. He started this two years ago. Initially, we thought he was talking to himself. Gram and I used to joke with him, told him he was getting senile. But now I think he’s telling stories in his head and doesn’t realize words are leaving his mouth.

  ‘At the general store on Calvary Street,’ and he stops again.

  ‘Wow, that’s amazing Grandpa,’ rolling my eyes a bit. It’s been a rough two days for him, so I have to give him a bit of leeway.

  I look at the life monitor.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  Spike. Valley.

  Spike. Valley.

  He turns to look at me, head cocked, and finally answers. ‘That’s the first time I ever saw your Gram.’

  ‘Oh,’ dribbles from my mouth.

  Four long, self-conscious breaths of trying to think of anything—not even anything poignant, just anything—to say and he saves me from my embarrassment. He passes her hand to his other, and walks me to 1932. Past the cramped aisles of a diminutive general store on Calvary Street, where a tall Georgia Peach with chestnut curls serendipitously knocked him over as he was stocking soda in a cooler. Past the tree where they’d play canasta and whistle with sweetgrass between their thumbs until the summer breeze turned cool on the napes of their neck. Past the pond, where he’d lead her, blindfolded, and read aloud her favorite excerpts of The Great Gatsby, each character with a different demeanor, and hide until her drunken father had passed out.

  *

  He pauses for a minute, looking down at Gram, and I can see his eyes glass over. I start to get him tissues, but he waves a dismissive hand and runs his cardigan sleeve across his eyes.

  I look at the life monitor.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  Spike. Valley.

  After he composes himself, I ask if she came in to see him.

  ‘Nah, she didn’t know me from Adam. Just wanted some pop. I told her later that she’d come in to meet me but hadn’t realized it at the time.’ He tries to chuckle, but the weight of it is too much and it collapses on itself.

  We sit in silence, save for the beep of the monitor and soft wheeze of the respirator. In the two days since we’ve been at the hospital, we haven’t said much to each other. But it’d never seemed awkward, not until now. All of the scenes and questions scroll through my head like animated newspaper headlines on the side of a building. The obvious ones: how will he handle all of this, where will he live, how long will this last, will we lose our Gram? Then the ones that tear like fish hooks through my chest, the ones I might never have a chance to find answers to: if he likes the crust on pizzas, whether he puts water next to his bed at night, what time his favorite TV shows are on. The things that he’s so accustomed to. The things I don’t know.

  ‘She certainly was a great lady,’ I hear my discomfort say. I think he knows that I didn’t say it, and doesn’t acknowledge the comment. I dig the rubber tip of my right Converse into the arch of my left, stare at the floor as if I was staring through it and watch my subconscious arrange the flecks on the tiles into different shapes that begin to look like music notes mimicking the score of the last two days. Spikes and valleys. Syringes and antiseptic. Reheated meatloaf and catheters.

  I should say something. I should stand on my chair, speak in an authoritative pre-Technicolor tone and recite passages worthy of Orson Welles, passages about how Death is a celebration of life and we need to remember what a great woman She was and that we should live out our lives joyously to keep Her spirit alive. But the truth is I just want to feel my Gram. I want to feel her wool sweater against the side of my face as I sleep head-in-lap on her couch and she watches Bob Vila. I want to feel the slippery smoothness of her cow-print dishes as she washes and I dry, to feel her warm, water-swollen hands on my cheek as she play-slaps me for a smart-ass comment, her wrinkled neck in the crook of my arm as I—very gingerly—pretend she’s stuck in my sleeper hold.

  I look at the life monitor.

  Beep.

  Spike. Valley.

  I feel my arm hair stand at attention.

  I feel my eyes match my Pop’s.

  I can’t handle this.

  *

  A cough from down a long stone hallway, cold and damp and weaving from World War II Georgia to a hospital ward in Baltimore, ricochets to my ears and I jolt up in my seat. Blinking the nap from my eyes, I see my Pop, spittle, tears and spent prayers mixing at the corners of his mouth.

  I take a deep, deep, trying-to-process-everything breath. Hand to my mouth, I bite my index finger, try to keep my mind focused on at least something. Flecks in the tiles. The steady tone of the LCD screen. Wheezing respirators gone silent.

  I stare at my Pop. My eyes follow down his arm to his hand, squeezing hers so hard it turns an unnatural white and shakes flaccid in his. Her chin: bobbing slightly side-to-side, out of syncopation with the rest of her body. From her torso to his face, pressed into her neck. His chin: becoming epileptic, beyond the control of his muscular system. He turns his head to me. Someone shot a tiny BB in the top corner of his façade of decorum, and the spider web cracks slink across it at the rate of comprehension. He looks at me and blinks, shattering the glass over his eye, cascading through the wrinkles in his cheeks. I grind my teeth into my lips.

  I look at the life monitor.

  Currents

  An onshore wind blows over a head-high wave as Jacob sits facing the Atlantic, his elbows wrapped around his knees. The windsock tethered to the post of the 48th Street lifeguard chair can’t hold its grip anymore. Its strings break and it sambas down the beach. A chance gale blows Dumser’s hamburger containers, Candy Kitchen ice cream cups and spoons, purple condom wrappers and sand that stings like hail from northern Ocean City almost to the southern Inlet.

  Jacob looks down the beach: 42nd is still breaking nicely; 57th has blown out; and the dredging they did last spring has ruined 35th. He drags his tongue over his wind-burned lips and juts his face to the dimming sky; he can taste hurricane in the air.

  He scoots over to his longboard and runs his palm along the side rails, rounded beautifully as her hip, and over the rosewood colored deck. His hand lingers for a minute over ‘The Old Soul’ written in Parkinson’s cursive in front of the fin. He puts his eye to tail-level and follows the mahogany pinstripe, slender as her Hepburn-wrist, which runs from tail to nose and straight into the ocean. Every plane and curve of the board brings back the touch of memory.

  Though he hasn’t surfed it in a year and a half, his longboard is the second most valuable thing in the world to him.

  One hundred yards out from the beach, the break collapses on itself. Normally, Jacob would be skipping up and down the beach with excitement at a hurricane swell. But now the moths in his gut flap their guilty wings up almost to his Adam’s apple, before he swallows them back to his churning stomach. A picture from Surfer’s Journal washes through his head; a circle of nine surfers on their boards, hands held around the ring, floating up and over the same thirty-foot swell that had drowned another surfer the previous fall. He unwraps the Sticky Bumps and moves the bar with a slight pressure in circles, and practices holding his breath until his lungs catch fire. The wax builds slowly. A few times he scratches his left knuckles hard with his right thumbnail to keep himself focused and not let his mind drift back to her face.

  *

  Kirsten was already on her second pot of green tea when the arctic burst of outside pushed a dusting of an early blizzard along with Jacob through the door of Grasshopper. She wore the same red and black sweater as yesterday, and hunched over a dilapidated chapbook two chopsticks high, held open by an empty Asian-style black teapot accented with gold filigree. Her hands cupped the handle-less matching mug. Her black p
ea coat hung damp over the back of her chair. He trickled to the back of the quiet dining room, taking off his wet gloves, and slunk behind her, raising his hands to her bare neck.

  ‘If you put those ice blocks instead of your lips on my neck, your ass will become well acquainted with my foot,’ she said without looking up, smiling into poetry and paper, her mahogany bob cut nestling her cheeks.

  He stopped short, weighed his options, and went with the lips.

  ‘You are smarter than I give you credit,’ standing and turning to face him with a smile that made his teeth sweat. She put her face into his, then startled back, ‘My god, you’re freezing,’ replacing her face with her mug-warmed hands.

  ‘Sorry I’m late. The T from Emerson, you know,’ he said as he draped one of his jackets on the chair and sat down.

  ‘No worries,’ she smiled. ‘There’s more tea coming in a minute.’

  He looked down at her chapbook, at the red and black slashes and circles through couplets and words scribbled in margins.

  ‘How much more do you have? Coming out tonight, right?’ He poured himself a mug of tea, cupping the warmth as his hands changed shades from Arctic to Savannah.

  ‘All depends. Where is “out,” and how much have you finished of your projects?’ Jacob blew steam from the mug. ‘I will take that as “not very much Kirsten.”’

  ‘It’ll get done, don’t worry. Let’s go out. Let’s celebrate,’ he said.

  ‘Celebrate what, exactly? Jacob these are our senior projects. As in, the end. Fin as you and your film-fag friends would say. We don’t graduate in the spring with everyone else, remember? Celebrate after we’ve handed them in. Fuck, we’re celebrating in San Diego in, what, six days? How many more hours do you have to edit?’

  Fifteen or fifty dribbled through the hand covering his mouth, pooling in his palm. They sat silent for three sips of strong, clouded tea.

  ‘Okay fine,’ he blurted, taking her elegant wrists into his palms. ‘We’ll stay in.’

  ‘No,’ assertively, ‘I will stay in and keep reading. You will go to the film lab and finish your goddamned projects. Don’t make me call your mother,’ she said jokingly, he hoped. ‘Then, after you’re done,’ blood rushed to her ochre speckled cheeks as she tried to conceal a self-conscious smile by dipping her head down to her black mug, ‘we can stay in.’ She looked up at him looking at her. ‘Okay?’

  He sucked his lips into his mouth and gave his best interpretation of thought.

  ‘Alright,’ returning her smile. ‘So are we eating or what?’

  She wielded a chopstick like a dagger before he could finish.

  *

  Jacob finishes the last circle at the tail and looks at the stub of wax barely bigger than half a shot glass, then throws it on top of his bag. A section not waxed well enough catches his eye; slivers of mahogany cut abstracted bobbed hair in the wax. He jumps up, knees cracking, grabs the stub and rubs it onto the board until his finger nails scratch marks in wax, then walks down to where ocean and beach meet to test the water. In the corner of his eye, he sees a flicker that for a blink looks like Kirsten and him playing beach soccer in San Diego, instead of a flock of seagulls chasing food down the beach.

  Standing in the soft flow of dead waves, he looks up and down the deserted beach again, watching the tiny blob that is the only other surfer out, sitting in the lineup around 62nd Street, waiting for a wave. Jacob imagines him with a bob cut awkwardly maneuvering a board for the first time, then looks down to his ankles at a group of circling minnows. He slashes his feet at them and walks back to his board.

  The wind blows a little harder, making it more difficult to change into his wetsuit while he wraps the towel around his waist and cinches it between his bellybutton and lowest rib. He coerces boardshorts from his bony hips to the sand then begins to pull dry neoprene over seawater-sticky legs.

  Two minutes of swearing and struggling and he zips the wetsuit closed, then pulls out a cigarette. A quick fashioning of the towel into a windbreak and Jacob sits, watching. The breeze catches the exhaled smoke as his toes mindlessly dig tiny trenches. He stubs the cherry into the trench, tosses the filter into the small front pocket of his bag then picks up his board and walks back to the water.

  The light current ambles over his toes and pushes sand, changing and reforming the topography of the ocean floor bit by bit. He lets his board float alongside him, his palm nestled around the rail, as the part of the skull behind his ears bristles with anxiety, obligation; redemption. The sandbar sixty feet out calms the thrashing ocean to a docile shorebreak, floats his board gently up and down like pelvises on a spring night.

  *

  The black couch looked infinite enough in the shadows of Jacob’s shoebox apartment to consume both of them. Canary and scarlet washes flickered over Kirsten’s face. His hand traipsed from her smooth hip, over each of her defined ribs like sand ridges, and up to her jawbone, resting where jaw and cheek met.

  ‘Kirsten Hepburn, what am I going to do with you?’

  She exhaled a little laugh. ‘Besides the obvious?’

  She eased her way up as he reached his arms behind his head to the desk and searched for the phantom glass of water. Her skin turned a milky pale blue in the streams of mid-Spring moonlight that flowed through his tattered curtains. Her hips swayed in time to the scratchy Coltrane on vinyl seeping from the turntable in the corner. It was the first time he watched her two pallid seashells bob up and down as she walked exposed across his apartment.

  ‘There’s Brita in the fridge. Don’t drink the tap,’ he said to the ceiling.

  ‘We live in the same city. Thanks though,’ dryly.

  A beach in Mexico he saw in Surfer’s Journal was what she looked like as she was gorgeous in front of the refrigerator; her Pacific shadowed back met at the ribs her pale sand stomach, swathed in fridge-bulb sunlight. The door closed and she was aqueous. She inspected his desk, bending at the waist while fingering pictures. She totally knows how sexy she is, Jacob thought as he bent back his head and took a devouring glance.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ staring at the brown watermark islands from the apartment above. She cocked her head, then hovered six inches over his face a picture of a tan wrinkled man with an ashen beard and a gangly awkward teenager, both with inflatable guitars and posing like Mötley Crüe.

  ‘Oh, that’s me and Rabbit at the Sunfest Carnival six, seven years ago, something like that.’

  ‘Rabbit?’ placing the photo next to a binder printed with VM430: Film Production Workshop Coursebook.

  ‘Yeah. Idunno either, never got a clear answer. He’s one of the oldheads from back home, the guy who taught me how to surf.’

  ‘Ahh. And…’

  ‘And me, Rabbit, and his kid Brer doing our Dick Dale photo is the one next to it.’

  She put her glass of water on his desk and lay next to the older, but just as gangly, version of the teenager, sliding her right leg from ankle to knee between his.

  ‘So your friends are “Brer” and “Rabbit”?’ and bit her lip to not snicker.

  ‘Yeah, well, his name is really Barry, so they called him Bar, which turned to Brer, because of, well, Rabbit, you know.’

  ‘Ah, so,’ wistfully into the bicep nestled under her head. ‘Did you have any friends within 15 years of you or just Uncle Remus and company?’

  ‘No, jerk. I had friends my own age with normal names. They were just twerps. The old surfheads took me in and I would’ve rather hung out with them anyway.’

  The room fell quiet, save for velvet saxophones and soft breaths, refrigerator humming and vinyl crackling, then a quick harsh noise from the corner when ‘Giant Steps’ scratched to the end. Kirsten sauntered to the record player, tossing over her shoulder, ‘What next?’ which bounced off Jacob’s forehead and landed on the floor as her hips commandeered his attention.

  ‘Hellooo? What next?’

  Startled and a bit self-conscious,
he tried to play it off. ‘Sketches of Spain. It’s towards the back of the crate.’

  She plopped to the floor and rifled his records, eventually pulling out ‘17 Seconds’ instead and put the needle into The Cure.

  ‘The other one is the longboard Rabbit gave me the summer before I left for Boston. He said I was a longboard, an old soul. Rabbit was a really spiritual guy in his own weird way.’

  ‘Sounds like it,’ entwined back into him. ‘I’d like to meet him. Maybe he can teach me how to surf, too.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe. Probably not. He’s getting pretty old. He was 55 or so when I met him when I was, Idunno, 11? 12? Something like that. We could go to San Diego this winter and stay with Brer if you want. The break is better in the winter. And, it’ll be warmer than surfing with Rabbit in Maryland.’

  He could see a glint of moonlight flash on her smile. She rolled in closer to him.

  *

  The beginnings of hurricane swell float under Jacob, sitting passive on his board. Three pelicans skim over the water a few feet away. Down through the murky Atlantic, he peers at his barely visible feet and angles his legs up, hooking his toes on his board behind him.

  This used to be one of his favorite aspects of surfing; feeling the slow rise and fall of waves, looking out as far as he can and scouring the horizon for the hump indicative of a good set, trying to discern which hump will actually form into a wave worth riding.

  Sitting, surveying, floating and waiting, with nothing to do but let memory ebb and flow like the underwater currents. Stingrays flap the sides of their bodies in slow motion under the black couch of his old apartment while pelicans rocket straight at the water and dive deep down, the bubbles of their wake flowing up and over like champagne on special occasions, and they surface with a beak-full of green tea. Seagulls squawk impromptu living room poetry readings. A mahi-mahi trains its fish-eye Hi-8 lens on another and chases it around the living room then wrestles it to the ground and harasses it until the other is almost crying from laughter.