The Worst Thing I've Done (7 page)

“No no…It's food for the…” He grinned at Aunt Stormy. “Wiggeltchen?”

“
Vögelchen,
Mason.”

“That's what I said.” He uncurled Opal's fingers. Flung the corn to the ducks. “See? Like this.”

Aunt Stormy handed him the pail. “Are you going back to school in the fall, Annie?”

I nodded. “Mason and Jake and I are scheduling our classes so that one of us will always be with Opal.”

“I'm glad.”

Mason was letting Opal reach into the pail and feed the ducks. A few times her hands would instinctively go to her mouth, but he'd distract her, weave his hands between hers and detour them till she laughed and gave up the corn to the ducks.

“They're your ducks from now on, Opal,” Aunt Stormy said.

“Wait a minute.” I pretended to be confused. “That's what you used to tell me.”

“They were yours.” Aunt Stormy nodded. “Until a new child came along.”

“You have to share, Annabelle.” Mason tilted his face to me, light on his cheeks, his lips.

E
VERY
A
UGUST
, on the night before the full moon, Aunt Stormy celebrated her own Feast of the Hungry Ghosts. My parents and I would stay with her. Most years we'd bring Mason and Jake along. On the way we'd stop in Chinatown, buy lots of Chinese spirit money for the ghost; tinsel and crepe and streamers; yards of flimsy red and purple tissue paper.

Every year, the ghost would be different, and the one I still liked best was the ghost with two heads. We were seven when we helped Aunt Stormy and my parents build the skeleton from bamboo poles that Pete cut from behind his garage. We filled in the ghost's body with newspaper and papier-mâché. Taped the Chinese spirit money and golden streamers to the ghost's purple robe, which spread out like a tent. To the long bamboo arms, we fastened big bamboo rake hands.

My mother and Aunt Stormy were laughing and talking in German, that familiar singsong below their voices that wasn't there when they spoke English. When my mother ran up the steps to the guest room and returned with her oldest swimsuit, the two of them got giddy.

“Double D!”

“Triple D!”

They cut one big bra cup from the suit and squeezed it into a nose for the woman-head of the ghost. It had a red licorice mouth, red streamers for hair, and a long neck that positioned it a bit higher than the man-face with its paper-towel-tube nose and a forehead made from a horseshoe crab.

“More creature than human,” my father said.

“Horseshoe crabs were around over a million years before dinosaurs started,” Aunt Stormy told me.

The Hungry Ghost was twice as tall as my father, and when we hauled it to the beach, we walked in single file on the boardwalk: Jake and I carried the heads of the statue, my parents and Aunt Stormy the middle, Pete and Mason the ghost's feet.

By the edge of the water, Aunt Stormy's guests were already waiting for us: some of her neighbors and favorite clients; friends from Amnesty International who met every month for letter-writing campaigns; teachers from the elementary school where she used to teach until she opened her first business, taking care of summer homes. She tucked the houses in for the off-season, opened them for the holidays, scheduled contractors and various services to maintain them, and checked in while their owners were away.

All her guests had brought beach chairs and umbrellas, tables covered with Indian bedspreads, amazing food. They took photos of the ghost and of each other
with
the ghost, toasted the ghost with wine or juice. After we'd eaten, we slipped offerings beneath the ghost's robe to send along in the fire: bad dreams and consumerism and guns and sadness and corrupt politicians and entitlement and lies and summer traffic…

What we want the Hungry Ghost to take away.

Aunt Stormy knelt down, her trousers the color of sand, her caftan a brilliant blue, her dark braid dividing her back. Soon, the moon would rise, not full yet, not until tomorrow, when we would take out the kayaks for the second day of the ritual, witness the sun go down and the moon rise in its August fullness.

Lighter fluid in her hand, Aunt Stormy squirted beneath the figure and across the robe. My father squatted next to her, his long thighs parallel to the ground.

“Not so close,” my mother called out, cautious only near fire.

When the first flames curled up around a newspaper photo, clearing a circle in the photo, brown margins, orange flames, my father came to stand behind my mother, who leaned against him as he folded her into his arms, while she folded her arms around me, the three of us facing the ghost. Ablaze, the figure was in motion—standing still, but in motion—the streamers rippling in the flames, the arms already gone. And when the figure leaned into the flame, into itself, it became the flame, a flutter of red and yellow.

“I'
VE MADE
a picnic,” Aunt Stormy told Opal. “For your birthday dinner, sweet one. We'll take it to the ocean. We just have to stop at a client's house to make sure the furnace has been repaired.”

On Noyack Road, a police cruiser was pulling up behind a beige dented car, lights flashing.

“If this were not a Latino driver,” Aunt Stormy said, “the cop wouldn't bother. Makes me want to stop and remind him that all of us are immigrants in this country—except for the Native Americans, of course. It's always the most recent wave that gets it. That cop should go after tailgaters instead.”

“I always notice tailgating more out here,” Mason said.

“Because they're used to driving in the city. Right on your tail.” Aunt Stormy glanced at Opal and lowered her voice. “Guess that's where assholes belong. I used to give them the finger, the entire arm, but then I started hearing about road rage, and now I slow down. Makes them nuts.”

A block from Sagg Main Beach, she pulled in to the driveway of a yellow house with covered porches. “Two sisters live here,” she said, “both in their eighties. Never been apart. Grew up in Westchester and moved out here when they retired.”

“Living together their entire lives…,” Mason said, “sounds so peaceful.”

Aunt Stormy laughed. “You wouldn't say that if you met the harpies.”

“Why harpies?”

“They're always fighting, talking smut with their sharp little voices, trying to impress me with all the famous people they supposedly know. I'll show you.”

In the living room, hundred of snapshots crowded the walls. In each frame two old women—lots of hair and makeup, smiling hard—hovered over one or two people at a table, different people in each snapshot, yet with the same bewildered expression.

“That's what's they do, the harpies…walk up to famous people in restaurants and get a waiter to snap a picture before their victims can say no.”

“So that's why the deer-in-the-headlights look,” Mason said.

W
HEN WE
got to Sagg Main, the lifeguard was blowing the final whistle, motioning swimmers in for the day. As soon as the lifeguard chair was empty, kids swarmed up the ladders like locusts. Jumped down into the mountain of sand the lifeguards had shoveled in front of the tall chair. Then up again.

“I used to do that,” I said and spread out an old bedsheet, while Aunt Stormy unpacked our dinner.

A man and a woman, both heavy with masculine features, arrived with towels and shovels. He was about thirty, she twice his age. When he lay on the sand, facing the water, a towel under his head, she began to cover him with sand until he became this mountain of sand, only his head and neck visible. Walking into the water, she rinsed the sand from her hands, did a few deep knee bends, boosting herself up with her fists against her knees, and ambled to her mountain of sand.

“Help me with the umbrella.” Aunt Stormy poked the sharp end of the pole into the sand.

“Let me,” Mason said.

“We'll need some shadow,” Aunt Stormy said.

I smiled but didn't correct her. My mother too had confused
shade
and
shadow.
In German, both words were the same:
Schatten.

Opal half-walked, half-crawled to the edge of the sea, and I followed her, knelt down, and pulled her into the curve of my arms so that we faced the waves and felt their power…as I had at her age, naked and scuttling toward those white and curling waves that were so much taller than I was, and my father, strong and summer-brown and running, sliding himself on the sand between me and the water, a people-wave stopping the water-wave from getting me. Then, stepping behind me, my father pulled me up by my hands, and the instant the wave was about to knock me over, he let me fly across it—
bird…fish…bird-fish
—and I flew above the wave till he landed me on the sand, my father, shy on land but a hero in the water. He raised me up again so I could fly across the next wave too, each bigger and faster. Not one knocked me over. Because I could fly. And when he landed me for the last time, he turned me toward my mother and Aunt Stormy. I squatted and grasped fists of sand for them.

How do I remember, Dad? From stories you told to me? From what I still feel in my body: the flying…the lightness…the certainty that there is a way across. “A way we haven't thought of before,” you liked to say.

“Fly…” I lifted Opal above the waves, and she gurgled with pleasure. “Fly…”

“Fly…” Mason brought his lips against my ear. “You and I…we'd make fantastic babies.”

“You're not serious.”

“Too soon?”

“I barely know how to take care of one. While you're playing house.”

Aunt Stormy came up next to us.

Mason tilted his head. “Don't be pissed at me, Annie. It's just that—”

“What are they doing?” I pointed to the woman who had buried the man. She was laying her folded towel next to his and stretching out so that her head was next to his, but her body facing in the opposite direction from him, away from the water. Then she started digging herself in, using the smaller of the two shovels to scoop the sand from around her body and heaping it on top of herself. At first she was sitting up, reaching for the sand with her shovel, but then she had to lie down, let the sand sift across her till it was up to her chest.

“It's what they do when they go to the beach,” Aunt Stormy said.

“But why?” Mason asked.

She shrugged. “It's what they always do.”

The woman closed her eyes. Rested. There was something ancient about those two, the burrowing in, something foreign and intimate.

“Are they married?” Mason asked.

“I have no idea.”

“I bet they're mother and son.” I squatted, balanced Opal on my knee, and drew their outlines into the sand.
A man and woman burying each other.
Someone else might see it as a burial. I knew it wasn't. Imagined the delicious weight of cool sand.
What they do when they go to the beach…

“I bet they're married,” he said.

“She's much older than he,” Aunt Stormy said.

“So?” Mason asked.

Aunt Stormy laughed. “Good for you, Mason.”

“I bet you ten dollars they're mother and son.”

“Ten that they're married,” I said.

“And how will you find out?” Aunt Stormy asked.

Mason grinned at her. “We'll send you to ask.”

“Oh no. You two…you'll go broke.”

“Whatever money we lose to each other,” he said, “never costs us anything. And even when I'm winning, I want Annie to win too. Not that moment, but soon.”

“Fly?” Opal was squirming.

I stood up, raised her in my arms. “Fly…”

“Lotte was like you in the water,” Aunt Stormy said, “a fish.”

As Opal's chubby feet kneaded the air above the waves, it came to me that she was not only my sister but also my daughter—links far tighter than either one link by itself—and that, through her, my parents were continuing to live in my arms.

I raised her higher. “Fly…”
Daughter.
And pressed my lips against her back. No longer her make-believe mother. But her real mother.
Now.

My daughter giggled.

Aunt Stormy was digging her toes into the sand, dislodging something.

“What did you find?” Mason asked.

“A critter bit?” I asked.

She bent. Picked up a piece of cartilage attached to a bone and a couple of feathers. “An excellent critter bit.”

As a child, I'd loved searching with her along the beach for wings and bones and skulls and spines.

“Oh dear,” she would say, “those critters have come apart.”

We'd collect the critter bits, carry them to her cottage, and assemble them with string and wire and nails, creating an animal unlike any other; and when I'd try to breathe life into the bleached bones, I'd feel all-powerful. It was there that my fascination with collages began, with the boldness and conviction that I could resurrect these animals as I envisioned them, or—perhaps—as they were destined to be.