Sag Harbor

My father went to get him a drink. Mr. Turner stayed on the deck and I kept my head in The Book of Lists to ward off eye contact. Mr. Turner had his own company, selling package tours to Africa and the Caribbean. See the Motherland, get in touch with your heritage, vacation where everyone looks like you for a change. He dispatched fleets of rickety buses to chug-chug up scrabbly mountain roads, kickbacks deciding where they stopped for lunch. He negotiated deals with trinket outposts hawking authenticity in many forms, bead necklaces and fertility symbols, the omnipresent masks reflecting back the faces of sentimental longing. When you went to someone's apartment, you never asked, “Hey, where'd you get that cool African mask from?,” because the answer was always, “Mike Turner's tour.” There were Kenyans driving BMWs up to their mountain villas, big satellite dishes in their backyards, because black Americans needed a little whiff. He provided a service.

  I hadn't seen him since he came over to our apartment to apologize for how things went on our Jamaica trip last Christmas. He'd booked us into a crumbling all-inclusive in Montego Bay where the roaches were as big as lizards, the lizards were as big as bats, and the bats had such an impressive wingspan that you wanted to ask them for a lift back to JFK. Everybody got food poisoning one night at the crappy buffet, except for me because I was working a not-eating-salad angle that winter, inexplicable looking back these years later, but fortuitous. “I don't work with them anymore,” he informed us. “The son has really run that place into the ground.” My father had cursed his name for weeks, but after he apologized they went out drinking and it was like nothing happened. They went way back, like I said.

  My father tossed him a Budweiser. “My son got himself one of those haircuts like the boys on the corner,” he said, making sure I heard.

  “Corner …?” Mr. Turner sucked his teeth. “Man, all the kids have that now.”

  Now I had to go out and say hi. He pulverized my hand, but not as much as usual, thanks to my recent fortifying regimen of ice-cream scooping. “Looking like a man now, huh, Benji?” he said. “You got yourself a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Shit, if I were you I'd be all over the girls they got out here. When I was coming up, shit.” He winked at my father.

  6 Fake Smiles in Benji's House

  To Patronize Grown-ups

  On Hearing Cruel Put-down of Family Member

  False Front of Invulnerability

  When All Else Fails

  Bizarro Form of Cognitive Dissonance

  To Avoid Being Next

  “That reminds me,” Mr. Turner said, lifting his eyebrows, “you know who else is out?”

  “Who?”

  “Mabel.”

  “Mabel Jackson?”

  They snickered.

  “Haven't seen her in years,” my father said.

  “I know she don't want to see you, boy,” Mr. Turner said.

  My father shrugged. “Shit, I can't help what I am. How she look?”

  “Like her husband left her ass for that young thing, what else she going to look like?”

  “Back when, though.”

  “Damn.”

  I went inside to call Bobby. He was late. His mother told me he'd already left. He'd honk his horn any minute and I'd be free. Maybe we'd go by Devon and Erica's or something. Maybe I wouldn't even have to suggest it, he'd bring it up and I could maintain an air of disinterest. I hadn't been inside Devon's house yet, torturing myself that I missed the Hanging Out in Their Basement period, those four fabled days cut short once Devon's father got wind. Word was he was “really strict.”

  “I better go down there and see what these people are getting up to,” Mr. Turner said. He shook his beer can to see how full it was.

  “Come back and get some chicken when you're done struttin' through your coop,” my father said.

  He checked the fire, spreading his hand over coals. “Mabel Jackson is out.” He shook his head and smiled. “Back in college, she was fine …” He stopped. He looked at his palm. “That's why you should marry a virgin,” he said. “People talk about you. You want to be out with your wife and have some fool whistling about what he used to do?”

  “Right. I mean, no.”

  “What you do follows you, that's what I'm trying to tell you.”

  “Right.” He headed for the kitchen. Ash nibbled the corners of the coals. One of my mother's friends walked down to the beach along the side of the house, dragging a beach chair across the cracked paving stones. Early Saturday afternoon, there were distractions. A cocktail party up in Ninevah, or a birthday luncheon at the Salty Dog, but the beach was HQ. Things always ended up on the beach, in front of our house.

  When I walked inside, he was getting out the chicken. CNN was on. I turned back to The Road Warrior. He didn't say anything, but I could've turned on MTV at full volume and he wouldn't have heard. Everything ceased to exist when he spiced up the chicken. His world shrunk to the size of the aluminum tray before him, a type of screen. He scrutinized the limp rows of chicken parts as his hand jagged over them. There are those among us who put their faith in marinades. For others, barbecue sauce—Texas-style tomato-based or North Carolina vinegar-infused—is the order of the day. My father didn't truck with any of that. “Salt. Pepper. Paprika. That's all you need. All you ever do need.” First one side, then he flipped them piece by piece and did the other side. As a concession to the rest of humanity, he'd brush on some barbecue sauce at the end if you asked for it, but it was obviously beneath him and a betrayal of bedrock values. Slap on some store-bought Heinz crap, to show what he thought of you.

  He kept changing the channel out of habit. CNN and the Nightly News were the only things he watched. To him, the faces on the screen—the anchors, the newsmakers, this day's victim, and all the everyday heroes—were a parade of shifting masks. Props of an idea, like the souvenirs our friends and neighbors brought back across the Atlantic. He saw the true faces beneath and called them out. He didn't need a teleprompter; he knew his commentary by heart. A Televangelist snuck his hand into the collection box. “Problem with black people is that they waste all this time praying to God when they should be out looking for a job.” Welfare Moms exposed! “Nobody ever gave me anything. Didn't ask for anything. Some people need to get off their asses.” A Hot Young Thing sued her boss for squeezing her behind. “Women always talking about how they want to be equal, but they get mad at you if you don't hold the door for them.” The Undersecretary of Bullshit explaining why he wanted to bomb some country. “Whitey always trying to blow somebody up. They should put all those warmongers on an ice floe in the North Pole with the penguins, let them blow each other up and leave us the hell alone.” He was our talking head. The only channel we got.

  Tock, thunk, rasp, poomp.

  Nobody ever gave him anything, and he never asked. His parents died before I was born. I didn't know much about them because he never talked about them. I knew his stand on every issue, but his parents were a blank. Except for the fact that they never gave him anything. He washed dishes at an uptown restaurant to pay for college, the first one in his family to go. After that, grad school. “I didn't know I could do anything else,” he told us. “Back then if you wanted to make something of yourself you went into the Sacred Seven”—he ticked them off on his fingers—“Teacher, Preacher, Doctor, Lawyer, Nurse, Dentist. Undertaker. If white people aren't going to do it, we have to do it ourselves. Separate and as equal as we can make it. I looked around and thought, Everybody gets sick. And all the black people I knew, they had bad feet. So I became a foot doctor.” He did two days a week at Harlem Hospital and three days at his office on Morningside Drive. I never saw it. I assume it existed. He made a good living. He was right—black people had some bad feet, although it should be pointed out that he worked with a self-selecting sample.

  I will add here the personal observation that being a podiatrist taught you how to really put your foot up someone's ass.

  My mother returned from the beach.

 
“You finish making that macaroni salad?” my father asked.

  “It's here in the fridge,” she said.

  “Your mother makes the best macaroni salad.”

  She poured herself some white wine. “It turned out to be a nice beach day.”

  “They're all down there?”

  “Where else would they be?” She looked over at me. “You going to stay inside all day?”

  “Bobby's coming over. We're going driving around.”

  “You're going to stay for some barbecue?” my father asked. “I got that good chicken ‘comin’ right up.'”

  “I already talked to him.”

  A shadow crossed his face but then that gene we shared kicked in, the one that said, Don't show it. To see his expression, he was back at his timetables, when to put on what, turn this, take off that. He was a master griller. It was good I was getting out of there.

  The fire was ready. He scraped the pile into an even red layer—none of that hoity-toity direct/indirect heat-zone crap for him. Behind him, this old lady I didn't recognize came up from the beach, her gray-purple hair poking out from beneath a big floppy straw hat. Bet me money and I would have guessed she was in her sixties, but I found out she was twenty years older. She carried her age in her movements, in her tiny hesitant steps and the tremble in her hand as it skipped along the rail. “Gail, is that you?” she said, trying to see into the living room. “Louisa said you might be up here.”

  My mother rushed out to the deck. “Mrs. Russell!”

  “Natalie,” my father said. “How you doing, girl?” They gave her big hugs. She had to be an Azurest old-timer to get this kind of treatment, one of my grandparents' friends, which was confirmed when she looked around and told my mother, “I remember when your father started clearing this lot.” No matter how old you were, you remembered the trees going down.

  “Benji—come out and say hello!” my mother said.

  When I shook her hand, Mrs. Russell winced. “That's some handshake.”

  Was that some kind of a joke? She told me she hadn't seen me since I was a baby. “Your grandfather—he was just the nicest gentleman that ever came out here. A real one of a kind.”

  “Doesn't she look good?” my father asked me. “I swear you haven't aged a day, girl.”

  “I do miss coming out here,” she said, almost blushing. “I should make more of an attempt.”

  “You're always welcome around my house,” my father said.

  “Is that Finns Spirit?” Mrs. Russell pointed out to the water. A big white yacht crawled slowly across the water toward the Long Wharf. I couldn't see anybody on it. Big yachts were a rare sight back then, drifting around like rumors.

  “I saw it out here last year,” my mother said. She went to fetch the binoculars.

  “It's a big one,” my father said.

  “It's from Holland,” Mrs. Russell said.

  “If you got a yacht like that, you might as well show it off.”

  “Is it too big for the yacht club? They're pretty strict there, I know,” Mrs. Russell said.

  After my mother and Mrs. Russell went back down to the beach, my father told me, “That's what you look for in a woman—good DNA. She really hasn't aged a bit. If you want to know what a woman is going to look like in thirty years, look at her mother. It's all passed down.”

  “Right.”

  “That way you don't make mistakes. Her mother, too—she was a knockout. Old as hell when I met her, but still. Classy. A real lady. She was dark. That's why she was always nice to me. I wasn't one of them, either. She wasn't one of these light-skinned pussies they got out here. I don't know where the bitch was from, but it wasn't no Sag Harbor, I'll tell you that.”

  I thought, This is where the day curdles. It was in his posture, this rigidity. He stared down the beach. From up there, it all spread before him, the slow-moving pageant of an Azurest Saturday. “All these bourgie bitches out here …” He lifted the binoculars. “Who's that down there by the Rock?”

  He passed me the binoculars. “That's Sherry. She's friends with Elena.”

  “She's going to be fat when she's forty.” He took the binoculars back and looked at her again. “Gotta watch for that. Don't want people talking about how you got a whale for a wife. It's in the genes, I'm telling you.”

  Bobby honked his horn. I ran to the bathroom to check myself out in case we saw Devon and Erica. Not bad. I was liking my haircut more and more. When I got to the street, the girls were indeed there. Devon in the passenger seat next to Bobby, and Erica in the back with NP.

  It was the first summer Devon's family came out, which was why we'd never seen them before. According to my mother, Devon's father used to come out sometimes in the '60s, so the family had some bona fides, but that was way before my time. I had finally gotten a gander at the famous twosome when NP brought them by the ice-cream store to show them off. I had the usual disreputable smears on my Jonni Waffle T-shirt and was manhandling a sundae. Good timing.

  The answer was obvious: Erica. I'd listened to the Devon versus Erica debate for a long time, managing ever-morphing portraits of them in my mind, each new opinion or report sliding their features around, adding and subtracting baby fat, tinting the flesh. Depending on your hardwired tastes—a little light or a little dark, plump or lean, preppy or an iota less preppy—you sided with one cousin or the other. (Am I talking about chicken? If you delete the preppy stuff, I mean. I have chicken on my mind today.) Erica was skinny, like me. We'd make a nice skinny couple, never taking up too much room and passing the days discussing our spiffy metabolisms.

  I crouched so I could see everybody in the car.

  “’Sup, Benji?” NP said.

  “Hi, Benji,” Erica said.

  “Ben,” I said.

  “What?”

  “What's up?” This was Bobby.

  “Just hanging.”

  “Your dad barbecuing?”

  “Mr. Cooper makes the best barbecue,” NP informed Erica, tapping her forearm.

  “He's a real pistol,” Bobby told Devon.

  “He's a trip,” NP said.

  Erica said, “Oh.”

  “So what …?” I didn't know who to talk to. I'd made plans with Bobby, but I wanted to maintain an easygoing manner for Devon and Erica's benefit so that I looked like a regular guy that people wanted to be friends with, and part of that entailed acknowledging NP's presence, even though NP never should have been there in the first place. I was supposed to be in the back with Erica. My eyes jumped from face to face as I bobbed between the windows.

  “Look,” Bobby said, “we're going to have to catch up with you later, okay?”

  “We're going to the ocean,” Devon said, bored. Yeah, forget Devon. Devon was totally second-tier, especially since Erica had laughed at my joke the other day, bonding me permanently to her. See, we were at Conca D'Oro and NP pulled out his wad of Jonni Waffle pay, riffling through the bills like a big shot, so I said, “What are you, Phil Rizzuto from the Money Store?” and Erica laughed. Her smile was incredible, so incredible that my hand shot up to cover my braces. In my book, we'd been married for years. NP was sitting in my seat.

  “You going to be around later?” Bobby asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I'll drive by later,” he said. “Try to save me a piece of that good chicken.”

  “Bye, Benji,” Erica said, her words barely escaping the window before they pulled away.

  Tock, thunk, rasp, poomp.

  No, it wasn't possible to hear that all the way out in the street. I rocked my heels on the curb. I didn't have to turn around. I could've walked to town for a slice, picked up a science-fiction novel at Canio's and taken it to Mashashimuet Park. Checked out the developments to see who else was around. But I didn't. This was where I lived.

  “You sticking around?” my father asked.

  I nodded. The trays sat on the table next to the grill, the chicken parts in formation on the aluminum like fighter planes waiting for take
off. He whistled “Lady” by Kenny Rogers. Maybe the cloud had passed. He'd had a good time with Mr. Turner and Mrs. Russell, and with Mr. Baxter earlier. I decided to play the odds. I went inside, back to The Road Warrior, the first batch sizzling behind me.

  I'd watched the movie so many times it was shameful. I saw every smashup and crash-up and spinout before it happened, but still got pumped like I was back in the East Hampton theater seeing it for the first time. An alert went off in my head, warning me that this was as bad as comic books, but I put off making a ruling on the matter. Call the movie sci-fi or fantasy or what have you. Now that I'm older, I put it up there with Beckett as pure realism. But then, most days I'm up to my neck in sand.

  My father stood in the doorway. “What do you want? A breast and a wing? A bunch of wings? I'll do those first.”

  “I don't care.”

  “That's not an answer. What do you want?”

  “Some wings.”

  I knew white kids in school whose parents didn't let them watch TV, these urchins with scabbed knees who always had their hands out for crumbs when you mentioned Potsie or Chachi. Still meet white people who crow, “We don't let our kids watch television.” Can't say I've ever heard a black person say that. Maybe I should travel in different circles. Perhaps one day, as the forces of racial progress transform every corner of our nation—can you hear it, the inspirational “overcome” music?—we will cross the color line in TV prohibitions. What black person didn't like laughing at the shenanigans white people got up to on TV? White people were black camp, our native kitsch; white sitcoms magnified the campiness to grotesque proportions. Hug. Talk it out. I'm here for you. What kind of shit was that?

  You could only laugh. Sitcom white folk, movie-of-the-week white folk were our coon show. Judge's Daughter Hooked on Pot, Teenage Runaway Sent to Reform School—these earnest cautionary tales played like pure vaudeville, especially the opening minutes, with the montage sequences establishing the Perfect Home, the Perfect Family. Like, they ate meals together. Come on, now. And then the puzzled reactions once the crisis boiled over. “I found this in your room. Where did you get it?” “I got a call from school today. They say you haven't been in weeks. What's going on?” Things went down differently in our house. These were transmissions from a distant star.