50
The clicking of the bike slows to a sharp staccato as I lean across Newtown Lane and cut toward the park. Herrick Park in East Hampton Village dangles as if by magic in the redolent air, like a tin marionette. It reminds me of the abandoned World’s Fair site off the Long Island Expressway in Queens. My parents brought me to that fair in 1965. I remember running through the grass into my mother’s outstretched arms. And my father, behind her, our three figures pebble-like in the wake of the colossal, skeletal globe. The Unisphere. Besides a brief memory of walking with them beneath a movie marquee in winter, of me with my head against my father’s shoulder and the soft bounce of my mother’s head moving alongside us, that is all I have of the three of us together as a family.
The bike pops onto the curb, tumbling over mounds of grass like a billiard ball. On the bench near the bike rack is an elderly black man in a baseball cap. In his mouth is an unlit cigar. I wonder what he takes when he leaves the house, probably the cigar and the hat, maybe a five-dollar bill, some matches.
By the sun, it is nine. Six hours to go until the service.
A young couple in khakis, loafers, and Lacoste shirts with upturned collars reads the papers while their two children gyrate on the rubber tire swings. I wonder if they have all they ever wished for. It must be nice to have all you ever wished for, if that’s even possible. It might be that every time you get one thing that you want, another wish pops up automatically, like in that hand-stacking game. Not only do the mother and father have matching clothes and haircuts, but they share height. I don’t remember women and men matching so well previously. Somehow it’s a sign of the times—physical equivalency, emotional economy. It all refers to an eradication of risk. Rourke and I would not have been good at matching. That is why we failed. It’s shameful to have failed where lesser people have triumphed. On my womb is a reminder of my insufficiency, an imprint, forever impressed, like a cave painting, like a running horse etched ten thousand years ago.
Sometimes Mark says, “What’s wrong?”
I tell him that my uterus aches.
“Still?” he asks. “Is that possible?”
The swings are free. I take one, tucking the chains inside my elbows. My chest slumps down, my shirt bellows out, and my heels make quarter moons in the dirt. When I was little, I drew a field filled with swing sets on manila nursery paper—pairs and pairs of inverted V’s connected at the top by horizontal lines, very big and very small—small implying distance. I must have been four. It is strange to think about why I would have been experimenting at such an early age with perspective.
“You felt friendless,” Jack once explained. “Friendless when you drew it and friendless into the future, as far into the future as your miniature mind could calculate. And it doesn’t just represent a fear of future friendlessness—look at the clarity of those lines—it represents determination. Sensational!”
I gave the drawing to him. He and Dad framed it, then he hung it near the porthole window across from his bed so it would be the first thing he saw in the mornings. Mornings were hard for Jack. I wondered if the drawing was still there.
The slide is across from me. It swells and recedes as I swing. Slides are deceptive—all that climbing just for a shot back to no place. That was how Jack lived in the end—in a rut, working for the ride. But when you swing, there is no ground to gain, no peak, no low. You learn to linger, to be airborne; you are like a final chord suspended. If nothing comes next, nothing comes full, weighted, exquisite. I lean back, making my body straight, swinging and hanging upside down. I wish my hair could drag on the ground. Sometimes I dream it can.
A little boy chases a ball, and his father catches him, flipping him over his shoulder. The boy squeals. It has been a long time since I’ve heard a squeal. The old black man rolls the ball back to the child, a redhead in overalls. It is a striped beach ball so big that the boy can’t see beyond it when he holds it. I know what it is to hold that ball, to crane my neck but still not perceive my steps, to feel unreliably the path before me, to read the world in terms of hot and unabashed colors, to inhale the sweet ambrosia of melting plastic.
“Goodbye, sir,” I say as I collect my bike.
The man on the bench nods. “Good day, good day.”
I take my leave, slowly clicking away.
Last night I dreamt of the sea. I dreamt of water all around, tossing and rocking a house, my house. It was a dream of Jack. We were in the house, and the water was high, and he sang, and the house rocked. And we rolled, gently also, like babies in a cradle. I rolled, and he rolled especially, and his singing was beautiful.