with his mother beyond her life with him and his father ended when they left New York, but she never, even after his father left, said anything about returning to it, or anything at all about her family up there, her friends, or her church. Victor asked her once, years ago, when his father was still living with them, why they had moved from New York, and she had said simply that there were better opportunities for his father in the south, and that she liked the warm weather.
But there was more to the move than this, and even as a child he’d sensed it. After the move, Victor saw less of his father, and watched more television than he’d ever been allowed to watch in New York. His mother had slowly and steadily put on weight until her once prominent cheekbones and chin became lost in the swollen roundness of an overweight face. Her dark hair, before always kept set, became stringy and streaked with gray, and her work as a nurse seemed to be constantly interrupted by some illness or injury. And his father would disappear for longer periods of time, during which his mother would only say he was on a business trip, until finally he was gone for good, leaving Victor with the present of a ten speed bicycle and the promise that they would spend every summer together at his new house in South Carolina, and that no matter what he was only a phone call away. “Your mom and me,” his father had said, deadly serious for once, as he sat on the edge of Victor’s bed the day he left, “can’t agree any more about too many things. Sometimes, son…” Victor remembered that his father, at that point made a very characteristic gesture, something he often did when he was tired, of rubbing his entire face with the flat of his right hand, as if he were washing it, or wiping it clean of something that had been dashed into it, “…things just don’t work out, and their ain’t anything anyone can do but say to hell with it. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, son, but I don’t know what else to tell you. All I want you to know, son, is that I love you, and I’ll always be your pop. You got that?”
At that Victor had nodded, feeling nothing but bewilderment. His father’s obvious distress seemed out of all proportion to what was happening. So he was leaving. It wasn’t such a big deal. He was never around anyway.
Sitting on the beach beside his cousin, Victor involuntarily shuddered at the memory. Shelby reached into the enormous straw bag she’d brought along and handed him a small plastic bottle. “The suns getting to you, paleface,” she said. “You better put this on.”
Victor took the bottle from her and looked at the label. It was sunscreen, with a high SPF, and he squeezed a bit onto his hand and applied it to his face and forehead. He was too shy to take off his shirt, though it was only a tank top, in front of Shelby. She watched him bemusedly, and then reached in her bag for something else. “What were you thinking about?” she said.
Victor looks out to sea. “New York,” he said.
“Do you miss it?”
“Not really. I don’t remember it very well. We moved down here when I was about six.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know.”
Shelby pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the bag, offered him one, then took one for herself. “Gum likes your mother,” she said again.
“I know,” Victor mumbled this around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth as he attempted, for the dozenth time, to light it with Shelby’s clear green plastic Bic lighter. It was impossible to sustain a flame in the strong sea breeze. Shelby cupped her small hands expertly over his, and finally it got lit. “My mom likes her, too,” said Victor. “I don’t think my mom talks to anyone in her own family. But she talks to…” he hated to say that silly name, but he said it. “…Gum. Not all the time, but more than she talks to anyone back in New York.”
Shelby turned to him, her eyes wide behind the enormous sunglasses she’d brought with her in her bag. “Why doesn’t she talk to her family? I thought Italian families were close-knit and warm and loving!”
“Not hers, I guess,” said Victor, smiling a little, though, for Shelby’s stereotype stirred a memory of one or several large gatherings of his mother’s extended family, in which food was served in the backyard of a row of houses, and dozens of other children were present, and his father and mother were absorbed into separate clusters of women and men. The memory was a pleasant one, and he remembered being presented to a very old woman, wizened and bound to a wheelchair and smelling of baby powder and urine, a figure so ancient that she seemed to be beyond speech or even thought, but who had seemed pleased with him and had babbled something in what he imagined now must have been Italian and stroked his head with fingers as rigid and fragile as a bird’s claws. All the children there, he remembered, had been older than him, but they had included him in their games anyway. He remembered his mother seemed to be more relaxed than usual at such gatherings, letting the rowdier older children roughhouse in their way with him as if she could trust, somehow, that he would not get hurt. He tried to remember the other children’s names or faces, but he couldn’t, and when he tried to remember who, among the grown ups at the gathering, were his grandparents and aunts and uncles, there was no distinction among them. Only one woman’s face stood out in his memory, a face younger than his mother’s but strikingly similar, though more heavily made up, with long dark hair that reached nearly to her waist. “Her sister!” he said suddenly, “Debbie. She doesn’t like her sister Debbie. That’s why she doesn’t talk to her family. She doesn’t like her, or she had a big fight with her before we moved… Jesus…” Victor shook his head as if to clear it. “I don’t know how I know that, but I do.”
Now that he had called to mind the name and the face of this woman, who was once a part of his life, he remembered her with increasing clarity. She was a salesgirl at a department store in the city, he remembered, she always had Dentyne chewing gum in her mouth, and she was not married. He remembered that even as a little boy he had thought that his aunt Debbie was extraordinarily pretty, and affectionate, as well. His father, he remembered suddenly, with a distinct clutching sensation in his belly, had liked Debbie, too.
A feeling came over Victor like a dark cloud, and he stood up without looking at Shelby. “I’m going in the water,” he said, and marched towards and into the waves that suddenly seemed to crash and hiss like a thousand red hot demons falling from heaven into the boiling cauldrons of hell.
Victor was unprepared for the chill of the water that met him; he stood for a long time at the very edge of the Atlantic Ocean while the shallowest of waves lapped about his ankles. The cries of seagulls just overhead seemed to accentuate the unearthliness of the moment as he hesitated, shivering, his arms wrapped around himself like a straightjacket. There were children in the distance, playing with abandon in water that looked as if it must be a hundred feet deep, but of course it could not be that much deeper than where he stood, even though it was so much further out. Victor eventually trudged forward, marveling at how quickly the cold sting of the salt water gave way to a pleasant coolness. Still, he hesitated to immerse himself totally. The murky greenish salt water had nothing in common with the clear, chlorinated pools he was used to; he could see nothing beneath the surface of the water except vague shadows. As he moved forward, however, the waves met him with greater force, until at last one swept him off his feet and laid him down; he fell back into the shallow water and emerged spluttering, completely wet from top to toe, with the curious sensation of having been, despite himself, utterly liberated. He turned and looked back toward Shelby, and for a moment he felt frantic, for he could not see her, with his salt stung eyes, amongst the dozens of reclining bodies on the beach. But then he spotted her, bent over a book that held her skirt to the ground between her upraised knees, it looked as if she was scribbling something in it. He turned back to the ocean and half hopped, half dove forward, and once again immersed himself in the cool, murky, and strangely invigorating waters. For what felt like hours he flung himself against
