15. Jersey Shore #1

For summer vacations, we went to the Jersey shore. We usually stayed in Lavallette, near Seaside Heights. Seaside Heights was where the boardwalk was, with all the rides and games of skills and chance. Lavalette was quieter, really just a string of rental places and motels. There was an awesome beach, though, with great body-surfing waves and enough ice cream places to keep me happy.

Every year we did the same thing: packed up the car on a Saturday morning and made the 2 1/2 hour drive to the shore, then drove around looking for a place to stay. My parents never made any arrangements in advance and never stayed at the same place twice. My father had a theory that he got the best bargains by doing it this way.

We usually had good luck, and found a place and got down to the beach in time for a late-afternoon swim, but this year it was impossible. They were predicting a great weather week—it was in the nineties on this Saturday—and it seemed like everyone had chosen to go on vacation at once. Each time we saw a “To Let” sign, we’d stop at the curb and my mother would go ring on the doorbell. Sometimes they invited her in; mostly she just had a conversation at the door. Then she’d walk back to the car shaking her head.

We must have gone to twenty places. At about the fifteenth I made a joke to my brother about changing all the “To Let” signs to “Toilet” and my father turned around and glared at me. I hadn’t even been talking to him. My mother started talking about maybe turning around and going home and trying again next week, to which my father said something about it not being that easy to just change his vacation from one week to another, he had appointments and customers.

It was getting late. We needed a break so we went to dinner at a hamburger place. My father asked for a table near a window so he could keep an eye on our car, which was still packed up with all our stuff. It was a tense dinner, not much conversation, but at least the place was air conditioned.

“We’ll try until 7:00,” my father said, as we finished up. “If we can’t find something by 7, we’re going to have to drive back.”

It felt like a miracle. The first place we stopped after dinner, my mother came back to the car, so excited. “It’s an older lady. She says she has a basement apartment we can have, two bedrooms, 500 dollars for the week. Do you want to look at it first, or should we grab it?”

It was clear from my mother’s voice which she wanted to do. “That’s a little more than we wanted to spend,” my father said, but we all knew he was going to say yes.

It was a very cool place, probably the coolest place we’d ever stayed. Usually the apartments were so small you couldn’t walk across a room without bumping into things. This place was spacious, and the bedroom I had to share with Jeffrey had two beds. Usually, we had to sleep in the same bed, which I never liked although Jeffrey should have been the one to complain since I was famously a restless sleeper who kicked and clawed his way through the night.

Plus it was in the basement, windowless, which my mother didn’t like but I thought was excellent, like we were in a boat or something.

The weather cooperated. We spent our first few days on the beach and then at nighttime went out to eat and to the boardwalk in Seaside Heights. My mother and father many times remarked to each other what a find this apartment was, and how it had been worth it to spend a little extra.

Tuesday afternoon was when it all fell apart. At first, I wasn’t sure what was going on. We’d come back from the beach, and my brother and I were outside, washing off in the outdoor shower, when we heard arguing. I at first thought it was my mother and father arguing, but it turned out to be my father and the landlady, whose name was Mrs. Fontana.

We hadn’t seen much of Mrs. Fontana during our time in the apartment. We’d been trotted out to her apartment on Sunday evening, just to be polite. She was a small-ish Italian woman, with a tight nest of gray hair and a strong accent. Her apartment was a grandmother apartment, totally different than what you’d expect to see at the seashore. There was big yellow plaid and dark wood furniture and glass shelves holding pictures and religious items. She had a lot of religious items: crosses, pictures of Jesus, pictures of Mary. Right above her television set there was a poster with the Lord’s Prayer on it written in fancy writing.

“Look at you two sweetnessess,” she said to me and my brother as we stood in her living room. Then she gave us each a hard candy.

When we heard the arguing, my brother and I toweled off and ran inside. My mother was on the couch, crying. “What’s going on, Mom?” I asked.

“We have to leave,” she said. “Mrs. Fontana says we have to leave.”

I never got the full story. My mother was too upset, and my father too angry, to ever tell it completely. But what seemed to have happened was that Mrs. Fontana told my mother she’d “forgotten” she had some other people scheduled for the basement apartment for the next afternoon, and that we would have to leave by tomorrow morning.

My mother and father were convinced she’d tricked us: given us the room knowing full well these other people were coming, because it allowed her to get us to pay for an extra few days the room would have been vacant. She knew we never would have rented if we’d known we couldn’t have the place for the full week. It was why she’d never given us a rental agreement to sign, why she’d only asked for half the rental fee, saying we could pay the rest at the end of the week. My mother and father had trusted her, thinking she was a nice old lady.

My father came back from arguing with Mrs. Fontana and we went to dinner. It was even more tense than the dinner the Saturday before. I could see this was all eating at my father, like he felt he should have known something like this was going to happen, like he should have been able to give his family a nice week-long vacation.

I think my mother probably felt like he shouldn’t have let it happen, too. She was giving him the cold shoulder, providing one-word answers to his questions.

“Should we go to Seaside for our one last night?” my father asked at the end of dinner.

“We can’t, Jack,” my mother said with an exasperated sigh. “I have to pack everything up. It’s all all over the place.”

The next day was again gorgeous, but instead of body surfing in the waves we were dragging our stuff out to the car. We should have been grateful we’d had a few nice vacation days, but none of us was. We were all angry and resentful and feeling like we’d been gypped out of our vacation.

Mrs. Fontana came out. My father didn’t acknowledge her.

“I’m sorry, I really didn’t know…” she said.

“You knew,” my father said. “You knew. I hope it makes you happy, to have ruined this family’s vacation just so you could make a few dollars. To have robbed these kids of their vacation.”

Mrs. Fontana seemed hurt by the charge. “No, I didn’t mean to ruin the vacation. It was the book, I just hadn’t written it down in the book. It was an accident…”

“This was no accident,” my father said his most vicious voice. “God will punish you, Mrs. Fontana. God will punish you.”

We drove most of the trip back in silence. But then my mother turned to my father and said, “You got her, you know.”

“What do you mean?” my father asked.

“When you said God would punish her. I was watching her face. It just collapsed.”

My father smiled in spite of himself. “Really?”

My mother smiled back at him, a big airy smile. “It was the perfect thing to say.”

I watched all this from the back seat. My parents rarely talked to each other like this in front of my brother and me. They never smiled like that at each other. It made me feel kind of weird.

14. Car Crashes

The first time, we didn’t even hear it. There was a ring at the doorbell, after dinner. No one ever rang the doorbell after dark. My father went to the door in his pajamas and bathrobe. He used to wear these almost sheer pajamas around the house and a graying terrycloth bathrobe. I was embarrassed he’d answer the door like that.

It was Mr. Zilwich from across the street. “Jack,” he began. My brother and I were pressed against the railings at the top of the steps. My mother was still on the couch, reading a newspaper. “Jack, I hit your car. Backing out of my driveway.”

Sometimes my father parked on the street instead of the driveway, if my mother was going to be leaving early the next morning to go somewhere.

“Really?” my father asked.

“Yes. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t even see your car there. I’m sorry. I can’t even tell if I did much damage.”

“Let’s go take a look.”

My father got a flashlight. It was low on batteries, but there was still some light in it. We went out and looked at the car. It wasn’t so bad. But there was a dent.

It was all of us, me, my brother, Mr. Zilwich, my father. Staring at the side of the car.

“How did this happen again?” my father asked. It was like he couldn’t believe it was true. Like he thought it was going to be some sort of Candid Camera trick.

“I was just backing down the driveway.”

“You’ve seen my car there before, haven’t you?”

“I have. There’s no excuse for it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I can give you all the insurance information.”

He did give it to us. But my father never used it. He drove around with that dent in the car until we sold it.

Mr. Zilwich avoided us after that. My father always gave him a big hello, but he wanted nothing to do with us. It was like he held a grudge against us for his own carelessness.

“Idiot Zilwich is mowing the lawn,” my mother would say, looking out the window. “Run for cover.”
At least we go some laughs out of it.

The second time, I was the one who heard it. This was a few years later. The car was parked in the same place, in front of our house at the curb, though it was a different car.

The crash was loud. I rushed up to look out my window. The car that had hit our car was backing up, driving up.

“Someone hit your car,” I yelled, running out of my room. “They’re taking off. They’re getting away.”
My father was half-asleep watching a baseball game. But he snapped his eyes open and started feeling around for the socks and shoes he’d thrown off at the foot of the couch. He didn’t even hesitate, just ran out the door and jumped into my mother’s car and took off in pursuit.

My brother and I waited there. My mother was already asleep. “Do you think he’ll catch them?” my brother asked.

“No way,” I said. “They were going about a hundred. They’re probably in the next state by now.”

My father returned about fifteen minutes later. My brother and I were excited. “What happened? Did you get them?”

“It was Kevin Reich,” my father said. “Can you believe that? Kevin Reich. He hits our car and then drives away. Doesn’t even have the courage to face us, after as long as we’d know him.”

It really upset him. He had one beer, and then another. I could see how angry it had made him. How helpless it made him feel.

I went to bed. I didn’t want to be around when he started drinking the third beer. I thought about how he’d just jumped up like that and ran out the door the instant I said our car had been hit. Protecting us. Believing me.

13. Traps

Though Lou lived on our block and was in my grade, I never had much to do with him until the summer his father moved out. Lou told me about it himself. I was out riding my bike around the block, doing the whole circle. Our block wasn’t that big but I seldom went to the other side of circle. All my friends lived on my side. Plus there was a big hill you had to climb to get to the other side. I could never make it all the way up the hill and had to stop and walk my bike, which I hated doing in case any older kids saw. But this day was June and sunny and school had let out the week before and the whole summer was stretching out in front of me and I just felt like taking a trip around the block, seeing what was going on around there.
Lou was standing on the lawn in front of his house. As I pedalled by I noticed he had some sort of weird machines laid out in front of him, two or three of them. I stopped, put up the kickstand on my bike. I stood by the side of the curb watching.

He must have noticed me, but he didn’t say anything.

“What are those?” I called out.

“Traps,” he said.

“What kind of traps?”

“For animals. You put them out in the woods and you can trap animals with them. Raccoons or squirrels.”

“Why would you want to trap a squirrel?”

“For its fur. Or to eat.”

“You can’t eat a squirrel.”

“Can. My father made me eat one once.”

“How did it taste?”

“Horrible. I cried and then I threw up.” Lou took a step back from the trap and grabbed a stick from in the hedges. “Watch this.” He poked the stick into the trap, and it snapped shut with a clang that made me jump.

“That’s dangerous,” I said.

“Dangerous for the squirrel. The only problem is, sometimes even if the squirrel gets caught in the trap, it chews off its own leg to escape. Can you imagine that, chewing off your own leg?”

“You shouldn’t be playing with those. Does your father know you’re playing with those?”

“They’re his. But he’s gone.”

“Gone at work?”

“No, gone. He left. He had some things to work out.”

“He told you that?”

“My Mom told me.”

“He’s coming back, though. He’ll find out you’ve been using his traps when he comes back.”

“My Mom’s not sure if he’s coming back. He may never use them again. Why shouldn’t I use them, if he’s not going to?”

Lou didn’t use them, though. He just played with them with them on the front lawn. I went by a few more times, over the next few weeks, in the afternoon after lunch if none of my real friends were around, and Lou would usually be out there on the lawn with his traps, setting them and then snapping them with a stick. One time he had another kind of instrument, like a square made of wires, that he said you used to dry out the skin of the squirrel. “Your father really did that?”

“All the time,” Lou said. “He used to put them right out there in the backyard in the sun, until my mother told him she didn’t want to see them anymore.”

“What did he do then?”

“He put up a tarp over the clothesline, and hid them behind it.”

“Does he come back at all?”

“No. My mother talks to him on the phone though.”

“Do you talk to him on the phone?”

“I guess. But I don’t like the phone much. I never know what to say.”

“You could tell him you’re using his traps.”

“No, I couldn’t. He’d kill me.”

I looked at the gleaming steel trap, imagined a squirrel getting its neck broken. “Have you ever put one of these traps out? Like in the woods?”

“No. We don’t have woods here.”

That was another reason why our side of the block was the more interesting side. The houses on our side had woods beyond the backyards. Up here, it was all cleared out. The only thing beyond the backyards was another development.

“You could bring them to the woods down near my house.”

Lou shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t want to.”

Lou and I hung out on and off for the next month. Always just the two of us, never together with my real friends. If there was nobody around I’d drive up there on my bike and see if he was home. I had this idea that one day I’d ring the doorbell and his father would answer but it was always his mother. She was a tired-looking lady with black hair and dark skin who, as soon as she saw me, would yell out, “Lou!” She never asked me my name or invited me in.

Lou wasn’t into sports or bike riding or exploring the woods. Most of the time we fooled around with his traps, or if we got bored with that played checkers or Stratego on the front stoop of his house. Lou often beat me at these games, but it didn’t bother me because I knew he didn’t have many other friends or a father who lived at home.

In late July, my father took us both to the carnival they had every summer out behind the Mombasha Firehouse. There were rides and cotton candy and those great white lightbulbs on poles that felt to me like a celebration. I don’t know why I asked Lou to come with me. My father said I could bring along one friend, and when I said I wanted to ask Lou he’d given me a look like, why that weirdo? But my father didn’t really care, he was just going to go into the firehouse and have a few beers while we wandered around by ourselves.

Lou wasn’t much fun. He didn’t want to go on the scary rides. He said he didn’t like the taste of cotton candy. I tried to convince him that no one did, it was more the cool way it felt as it dissolved in your mouth, but he still wouldn’t take a bite. He did go into the spooky house, but it wasn’t that spooky, just a bunch of mirrors and badly-amplified screams and nothing even jumped out at you, which I’d heard from the older kids sometimes happened in spooky houses.

Then, on the way back to get my father inside the firehouse, Lou stopped at one of the games of skill and chance. It was the one where there were a whole bunch of goldfish in bowls lined up on a table, and you had to throw a ping pong ball. If you got the ball to land in a bowl and you could take home the goldfish. Like most of the games of skill and chance, it was completely rigged. The distance from which you had to throw the ball meant that unless you scored a direct hit into the water the ping pong ball was going to bounce off the glass of the bowl onto the floor. They’d probably figured out a way to make the ping pong balls extra bouncy, too.

“I want to try this,” Lou said.

“Don’t bother. There’s no way to win these games.”

The guy behind the counter—he was a teenager, not a guy, with bad acne around his sideburns that he was trying to cover up with a New York Yankees baseball cap—gave me a look. He knew I was right.

“I just want to,” Lou said, and offered up a five dollar bill.

He threw three balls. Every single one of them went into a goldfish bowl. It was some kind of miracle. I’d never seen anyone else win one of those stupid goldfish, and Lou had won three in a row!

The teenager scooped out the three bowls in which Lou’s balls had landed and placed them on the counter. In each, a bright orange fish swam contentedly back and forth. If you watched them for a few seconds, it almost seemed like they were trying to swim in time with each other.

Lou dug into his pocket and came up with another five dollar bill. “No, sorry,” the teenager said. “Three’s the limit. Come back again tomorrow and try again.”

On the car ride home, Lou carried two of the goldfish bowls and I carried the extra one. I offered to help them bring them into his house, but he said he could manage, which he did by pinching two of them together between his fingers. In the few seconds of light while the car door was open, I saw a look of such pride on his face.

The next afternoon I came by to see the fish. I was going to insist on entering his house, promise I wouldn’t look anything else. I really wanted to see those fish.

I didn’t have to make this promise. Lou had all three goldfish bowls outside, on a shady part of the front stoop.

“These are so cool,” I said. “You should go back again tonight and get some more. I’ll bet I could get my father to drive us again. Wouldn’t that be so cool, to show up again and get some more?”

Lou shook his head. “I don’t want to go back again.”

“That’s okay. Three is good anyway.”

“Actually, I’m going to let these ones go.”

“No way!”

“Yes.  I hate the way they look in their bowls.”

“That’s stupid! They’re just fish! They like being in bowls.”

“Will you take me back in the woods somewhere?”

“Stupid,” I said again, but I did what he asked. I left my bike at his house and we walked down to my side of the block. I was hoping we’d see someone, because if someone else talked about how cool the goldfish looked it might change Lou’s mind. But we didn’t see anyone, and we eventually got to a little stream. Lou crouched down and dumped each one of the bowls in the water.

I wanted to punch him, I was so mad.

“They’re going to die,” I said.

“Maybe not.”

“They’re not made for out in nature. They’re made for bowls. They won’t know how to get food.”

“Then they’ll have to figure it out.”

I looked down at the stream. The fish were already gone. There wasn’t a trace of orange left in the water.

“Your father never would have done this, you know,” I said. “He never would have let these fish go. He would set those traps for real, too. He wouldn’t just play with them on the lawn.”

Lou nodded, almost like he thought he deserved being talked to like that. We didn’t hang out again that summer. By October, he’d moved away.