Swell

by Jill Eisenstadt

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

When Sue Glassman’s family needs a new home, Sue relents, after years of resisting, and agrees to convert to Judaism. In return, Sue’s father-in-law, Sy, buys the family—Sue, Dan, and their two daughters—a capacious but ramshackle beachfront house in Rockaway, Queens, a world away from the Glassmans’ cramped Tribeca apartment. The catch? Sy is moving in, too. And the house is haunted.

On the weekend of Sue’s conversion party, ninety-year-old Rose, who (literally) got away with murder on the premises years earlier, shows up uninvited. Towing a suitcase-sized pocketbook, having escaped an assisted living facility in Forest Hills, Rose seems intent on moving back in. Enter neighbor Tim—formerly Timmy (see From Rockaway), a former lifeguard, former firefighter, and reformed alcoholic—who feels, for reasons even he can’t explain, inordinately protective of the Glassmans.

The collective nervous breakdown occasioned by Rose’s return swells to operatic heights in an audiobook that charms and surprises on every page as it unflinchingly addresses the perils of living in a world rife with uncertainty.

A Blackstone Audio production.

Release date: June 6, 2017

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 272

Sample

 

HE’S WAITING FOR her to die, Rose knows. She’s no dummy. Every June her son, Gary, itches to inherit her big house on Rockaway Beach. “You’re getting up there” is this year’s catchphrase, as if turning eighty-one begins the ascent. Up and up, she’ll levitate a little higher each birthday, while Gary, Maureen, and the kids fan out on the sand below her waving bye-bye. Gary’s latest brainstorm is he moves in now—this weekend. “We’ll take care of you,” he insists, oblivious to the way this sounds. “Maureen’s a doctor.” (Close! A veterinarian.) “You’ll get to play Grandma. All the time!”

“Oh, he’d love the free child care,” Rose is griping to her new friend Li, a real (if ill) Chinaman, right here under her dining-room table. “But I know those grandkids think I’m boring and smell weird. And I am. And I do. I’m no dummy.”

This strikes Rose as so hysterically funny that soon she has to steady herself on the marble sideboard. Harboring an illegal alien is one of her first-ever crimes (give or take a little parking on her late husband, Vincent’s handicapped permit). She feels Sambuca giddy, puffy with pride. If only Vin could see his favorite shirt (the ivory with black piping) draped big as a dress on this true outlaw. Wouldn’t he be impressed! Donning their cowboy best, Vin and his buddies from the social club used to spend Sunday mornings riding around Belle Harbor on their mopeds. “The Good Guys,” they called themselves, and went out looking for good deeds to do. But Vin had never risen to this Robin Hood level: a good deed and a crime too!

“It was mostly his excuse to get out of church,” Rose explains to her guest and crosses herself, a reflex.

“Yesu Jidu!” Li moans from under the table, where he’d crawled like a sick crab. To hide? So weak; it seemed miraculous that he’d even made it into the house. “Yesu Jidu?”

Is he dreaming with his eyes open? He’s so spacey and emaciated, it’s like taking care of a child again. Like Vin at the end, even wrapped in the same orange crocheted blanket. But this fellow can’t be over thirty. A large bruised head on a skeletal frame and wet-looking hair even now that it’s dried. With one hand he clutches a Ziploc bag containing a small roll of bills and a phone number written on a scrap of newsprint. With the other he points at the iron crucifix from Calabria hanging above the sideboard and Rose’s head.

“Yesu Jidu,” he repeats. “Me.”

At last Rose gets it. “You’re Jesus Christ! No wonder we’re hitting it off!”

And not an hour ago he was on his knees, in his undies, puking up Atlantic Ocean all over her shower house.

For no reason, this memory cracks Rose up all over again.

*  *  *

When the helicopters whirred her awake, the phone was also ringing. Rose fumbled for it in the dark.

“Is the TV on?” Gary panted from his Hoboken apartment. Eighteen years he’d lived there and Rose had been invited twice. She retrieved her bifocals from the white pocketbook she’d begun to take with her to bed. The clock read…“Three a.m.? Gary. It’s three—”

“Are all the doors locked, Ma? A whole boatload of Chinks—”

“Who taught you to talk like that?”

“What’s that? I heard something.”

“Helicopters?”

“Oh, Christ, Ma! Get up! Turn on the TV!”

It was easier to push aside the window curtain and confirm that she was right. Helicopters weren’t at all unusual here on the shore, called in often for drownings, drug trafficking, and bigwig airport transport. And what with that 120,000-pound whale that just washed up in Arverne on Friday? The sky had been pocked with press aircraft all week. But this was a swarm—police, Coast Guard, and media. And this time the giant metal insects were buzzing above the opposite end of the beach, at Breezy Point.

“Get Dad’s gun, in my closet, I’ll feel better.”

“Gary…”

“They’ll be storming our house!”

“My house.”

“Get the gun, Ma, or I’ll come get it for you.”

So what choice did Rose have but to slowly unload herself from the bed? She’d never get back to sleep anyhow. Instead of a robe, she preferred one of Gary’s old, hooded surf-shop sweatshirts. Instead of slippers, flip-flops. Better to accommodate a hammertoe or two.

The pitted gray revolver, still loaded and ready to guard Vincent’s Bootery, was hidden, fittingly, in one of Vin’s old cowboy boots. But which? No sign of it inside either of the pointy black ones, which once kicked and broke Rose’s elbow. Nor was the gun in the fringed white jobs from the ’60s, nor in the scuffed beige-suede numbers Gary wore every day of Brooklyn College. One boot box was crammed with old photographs of Rose’s father’s medicinal-herb garden (the remnants of which still grew out back). Another hid—hmmm—Vin’s Cuban cigars. Still a third had been turned into Gary’s Box of Pain, artifacts from childhood no one normal would collect, like scabs and splints and bloody pulled teeth. It was agonizing, physically and every which way, for Rose to kneel there amid the pinewood-derby cars, shoehorns, and porno magazines. But once she found the correct boot, she lingered, running her hand along the soft, red leather and bumpy white stitching, letting herself miss the husband she’d mostly despised. The gun sagged heavily in her front sweatshirt pocket but the feeling was not altogether unpleasant, a little like a baby there. After Vin died, the bootery space became Rockaway Video, Clothesliner, Sean’s Liquor, the Photo Hub, Pickles ’n’ Pies.

*  *  *

The back door always stuck. To open it, you had to lean with your whole weight, shoulder first, wham. Each time Rose did this, she imagined falling onto the brick patio and lying there in crumpled agony until Gary came by to check whether she’d been drinking and forced her to wear that medical leash with the button to press in case of emergencies.

“You wouldn’t treat me like that,” Rose says now, lowering herself and a wicker tray down to Li. (Can he hear all her joints popping?) “You’d be nice. If you found me out there on the ground?”

Li just bows, or has a cramp. From his fetal position, he tries and fails to reach up for the tray. Never mind. Rose places it beside him on the scratched-up tile. All the while, Li’s shiny black eyes both avoid and study her, as if she’s a phantom or royalty.

“The queen of Queens, Rose Impoliteri, and Yesu Jidu will commence to dine. Choice of Fiberall, orange juice, Sambuca.”

It’s a far swim from the meals Rose used to make for her daddy, then her husband, then her son, for the endless stream of relatives from Italy and Bensonhurst, for Good Guys and Bad Guys, their loud wives, sandy children, pets! On a Sunday like this, she’d be expected to serve the antipasti and the pasta, two meats, a vegetable side, salad, dessert, espresso, a digestif, and mints. She’d prayed for a daughter to help her. When that failed, she’d prayed for an air conditioner. Finally: “I just prayed they’d leave me the fuck alone, excuse my Italian. And here I am. Until Gary puts me in a place. Or that dead whale saves me.”

A bacterial time bomb, the papers are calling the washed-up finback. If the city doesn’t get rid of her before the next high tide, she could infect the whole waterfront. The summer of ’93 will be an environmental disaster, a PR nightmare. Ah, but a blessing for Rose. No one will bother coming near her house if the beach is closed. Rose can live happily ever after for one more summer. Rose and Li—

Sadly, no one’s ever seen a Chinese person in Rockaway other than the delivery boy for Wok ’n’ Roll. People would definitely notice. Li’s oily dark hair and sparse eyebrows are actually a lot like young Vin’s were, but that’s about all for the resemblance. Li has those nearly lidless eyes, high cheekbones, a nose like some kind of exotic sliced mushroom. He sniffs with what might be disgust at the box of Fiberall.

“If Gary trusted me enough to leave my gas on, I’d make you my famous pasta with sardines,” Rose says. “Or soup. I know your people like soup. The nerve of that kid, after forty-five years of scarfing my rigatoni. On a Sunday like this, I’d serve an antipasti and a pasta. Two meats—”

Eyes closed, Li hauls himself up onto his forearm and begins quickly eating the cereal with his hands, from the box, no milk. He’s got a way of chewing with his whole head that Rose has never seen before. And Rose has seen a lot of people chewing.

“I’d go easy on that Fiberall,” she warns.

*  *  *

He ripped through the rhododendron hedge just as Rose made it out the back door. There he goes, she thought. There goes the neighbor’s black Lab, Blacky, off his leash again, en route to pee on her shower house again. And though his bark did sound odd, like a croup, Rose was too busy fuming to dwell on it. No point protesting to his owner, Tim Ray, a man so deeply unoriginal that he’d name a black dog Blacky. A divorced alcoholic firefighter living with his mother, Tim had probably peed on Rose’s property too—mark some more territory. Both houses sat on the same beachfront plot (once owned in full by Rose’s father) but the Rays’ side was half the size. Their wooden house a shack by comparison.

And it wasn’t just Gary or the Rays who threatened Rose’s seaside bliss. All the neighbors were jealous. The Mole-Kacys on her driveway side regularly sent their kids on trikes to spy. Is that old bat still alive? The Fitzwhatnots across the street brought Christmas and Easter cookies so as to get double peeks inside. Rose is no dummy. She can tell her house is watched, this brick house her father built, the house in which Rose was born and has lived—eighty-one years now. They’re watching, waiting…to buy, steal, or tear it down. More room, more view, more parking. Owning things that others covet might make some feel powerful, but it consumes Rose with fear.

In the distance, Ambrose lighthouse pulsed on, off, on; its usual soothing rhythm jangled by searchlights. She heard sirens. Screams? The helicopter din confused the sound. Then that bruiser of a policeman appeared, coming around the side of the house.

Rose clutched at her sweatshirt, alert. She’d been hassled by the law once before, after starting a fire on the beach. Had she actually fallen when opening the back door, this officer would have been the one to find her. Quite by accident, it would have been. His long flashlight roaming enviously over her climbing ivy, decorative inlaid tile, and large picture windows would have suddenly illuminated her, or what was left of her. Rose Camille Joan Russo Impoliteri. A bloodied and desiccated human carcass. An ugly nuisance requiring removal.

“We were ringing, but you were out here, I guess,” said the thick policeman, bouncing in place. Only then did he remember to flash a badge. “Sloane. And you are—”

“Who needs to know?”

Something was moving in the background, down below, on the lawn, where a long wall protected garden from beach. Squinting, Rose made out a second, trimmer uniform, skinny head, loping walk, nightstick. “I know him!” An old classmate of Gary’s, wasn’t he—Kevin? Kieran? But then, they all looked alike, those fair-haired Rockaway boys, lifeguards and rangers, cops and firemen, Coast Guard and sanitation. Almost all of them could pass for larger versions of the St. Francis grammar-school bullies who tagged her son “Guido” and “greaseball,” “zipper-head,” “bait-eater.”

So perhaps it wasn’t the officer but his heartless nightstick that seemed familiar. It trailed down the length of Rose’s plants, pausing now and then to take a random, vicious whack.

“Why’s he doing that?” Rose’s frail voice failed to rise.

“Just checking around,” Sloane said. “You see anything unusual?”

“Yeah. Over there, your partner beating on my foliage. Hey! You! Basta!”

“Any Chinese, I meant. A boatload of illegals just ran aground off of Breezy. The Golden Venture—”

“That’s my cherry!” Rose screamed, starting for the tree. Sloane caught her arthritic elbow. “Oh…”

By the time he released her, the other cop had moved on, the nightstick held up in two hands like an ugly erection. At his back, the ocean moaned along with Rose. Pain radiated the length of her manhandled arm.

Sloane had resumed his bouncing, up and down, off and on the balls of his feet. “Sorry, ma’am. But it’s total mayhem out here. They’re drowning, they’re running. We gotta check around.” Up and down, up and down. Was he trying to peer over her head into her house? Or—“Do you need the toilet?”

“What?” The question caught the cop on the upswing, where he froze and asked, “Anyone else home? Husband? Kids? Companion?”

“I take care of myself.”

Which is when Blacky started up barking again, barking from inside the house next door, the same high-pitched bark Rose was used to. So Blacky wasn’t actually out here, Rose realized. So it hadn’t been a dog that ran past her just—

“Wait,” she called uselessly. Both cops had already gone off down the side of the house to search the garage. “Wait! You can’t do that!”

Rose’s elbow throbbed, but still she followed. “You can’t do that! Wait!” She kicked off her flip-flops, trying to move faster along the rhododendron hedge. “No, I think you’re not allowed to do that. Without a warrant.”

Was this true? She hadn’t the vaguest idea. All she knew for sure was “this is my house!”

*  *  *

The back door sticks; the tile is scratched; the basement floods every time someone cries, Vin liked to joke. But according to that broker who called just this week, the massive brick cube and the lot it’s on is now worth two million, easy. Five thousand was what her father paid in construction costs, back in the 1940s. “Germans came ashore then, did you know? U-boats in Rockaway! I doubt they were trying to immigrate.”

Total strangers regularly hang over the beach wall and call, “Yoo-hoo,” to make offers on the place. Once or twice, they’ve come right up to the house, even peeped into her picture windows. Just thinking about it usually frightens Rose. But here under the table with Li, it’s good. She’s safe.

“I have a mind to fool them all,” Rose tells Li, on a whim. But it’s a whim she believes in. “I’m going to leave this place to you.”

The Good Guys never helped anyone that much. Other than a lady who’d let them load up her car with groceries in the Waldbaum’s parking lot, the Good Guys never really helped anyone at all. Vin said they tried, but no one wanted helping. Even the lady with the groceries, Vin said, probably just felt sorry for them. So the Good Guys took to drag-racing up and down Beach Channel Drive. Then Vin came home to Sunday dinner to alternately sweet-talk and criticize Rose. My favorite flower. You call this turd a meatball? My soft, sweet Rose. Lazy bitch can’t go to Bensonhurst for some decent bread!

“It was that and more, and I took it until the day he says, ‘Rose,’ he says, ‘do me a favor. Don’t serve this grease when my cousins come from Calabria.’ In front of our Jewish friends, he says this, in front of the Baums! He calls my sauce grease!”

Li can’t possibly understand the story, yet he tilts his head at its tone of hurt and even stops eating while Rose speaks. If Gary and his atheist wife ever showed her half the deference Li does, Rose might not mind them moving in, having someone to listen.

“That night, I burned the table leaves,” Rose says. “This table here. I dragged those two heavy planks one by one across the floor—see these long scratches? That’s from dragging them, and, mind you, by myself while Gary and Vin were upstairs watching their shows—detective stories and professional wrestling. Nothing that would interest a world traveler like you.”

At that, Li tries to give Rose the wad of bills from his Ziploc bag and she pretends not to notice.

*  *  *

Once she finally got to the garage, she saw that all the chairs and cushions she’d paid the grandkids to stack at the end of last summer had been tossed across the dirty floor, and still the officers were going at it, knocking over beach umbrellas, tossing paint cans. What would they do if they actually found a person? Rose’s father had come over like this, on a boat from Sicily. And Vin had arrived in an Armani suit on a plane. But those were known journeys. To imagine the suffering of some poor Chinese soul crammed on a freighter for months was beyond her. And when they got here? Forced to kick for survival in the frosty June chop? Hunted down by pigs like rabbits? The thought convinced Rose that she heard that croupy cough again, that someone was there.

“Someone’s here,” Kevin or Kieran said, but he meant Rose. “Hey. Hi, ma’am. You really shouldn’t be out.”

“At my age?”

“At this hour. With that chest cold.” One of his blue eyes was lazy, drifting.

Rose thought to cough again to cover for the stranger. She wondered if the wok she’d long ago ruined had wound up here in the garage. She’d cleaned it wrong and it had rusted or—

“You should get back inside,” the officer insisted, grasping her still-burning elbow. “Mrs.—”

“Don’t you even remember me? Gary’s mom?” The way it came out, it sounded like begging. Of course, it had been years since Rose had been Gary’s mom in any meaningful way. She touched the bulge in her sweatshirt. It had been years since she’d been in her own garage, let alone had a car, driven a car, ridden a bike, fired a gun. How quickly the briny, mildewed stench took her back to mean Vin and all his sticky cousins, the endlessly boiling pots, gritty towels, crumbs, bones, and water rings that had ultimately led her down to the sand dragging those two heavy planks that signified company. Two leaves, two meats, the vegetable side—

Kevin or Kieran claimed not to have grown up around here. But, too bad, he’d kill to inherit a house like this, on the beach. At the door, he gave her his card. In case Rose saw anything unusual. She stuffed it into her sweatshirt with the gun, for safekeeping. Then Sloane whistled for him to move on to neighbor Tim’s house, setting Blacky off yapping for real now.

“Fires on the beach are illegal,” said the policeman who had arrived that first time, smacking his nasty nightstick on the smoldering table leaves. “Burning some good wood there—oak, is it? I should give you a ticket. I should haul your crazy ass in.” When he’d finally gone, it had taken Rose hou. . .