How I Spent My Summer Vacation Read online

  She hung up. “They’re moving us to a suite.” She sounded bemused. “No extra charge. I thought they only did that for really high rollers.”

  “It isn’t possible that this upgrade is in honor of the guy you were here with, is it? The criminal? That maybe they think you’re still involved with him?”

  “They didn’t comp him a suite then, so why now, when he’s dead? And it’s not like they don’t know. It was in all the papers.”

  “Tell me the man died of natural causes. Please.”

  “The man died of natural causes.”

  I sighed with relief.

  “After all,” Sasha continued, “it’s pretty natural to die when there’s a bullet in the back of your skull.”

  I’ve often wondered why Sasha’s incredible bad luck with men doesn’t deter or sour her—or leave her with the slightest trace of post-traumatic shock. She’s no dummy or masochist. Maybe it’s because she has so much fun until each adventure sours. Maybe she’s the world’s last great optimist.

  “We’re not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth,” she now said.

  I hoped that neither the horse nor his teeth nor the walls were capped in silver. One ounce more and I’d start mining it.

  * * *

  The suite was exquisite, leaving me wondering. Were nickel-and-dime gamblers mirrored-ceiling types, while the major players—a group I wouldn’t expect to be particularly elegant—connoisseurs of all that was fine?

  The living and bedrooms were decorated with Asian tansu chests, porcelain, jade carvings, Chinese rugs in soft pastels, and cushiony contemporary furniture. Shoji screens covered the windows. A six-paneled gilded screen filled the wall behind two oversized beds.

  “A Jacuzzi!” Sasha called from the bathroom. “What a shame to be here with you!”

  Understated and quiet, the rooms were the antithesis of the world downstairs. Things were definitely looking up. This in itself could be my retreat. I unpacked in record time, like a creature nervously establishing her turf.

  Sasha dawdled. She arranged her cameras and equipment. She switched to another pocketbook and slowly decided what she’d need. She emptied half her suitcase onto the bed, then worried over the condition of her travel kit. She decided her nails needed polishing and wondered whether she could include a manicure on her expense account. “Did I tell you I’m going out tonight?” she asked.

  I didn’t mind. This was a place in which to vacate, to luxuriate. This was a style to which I wanted to become accustomed.

  I had a four-day vacation and a choice of three books. War and Peace, which has been on every summer reading list of my life, because every autumn has arrived without my having read it. Gift from the Sea, one of my all-time favorites. And a threadbare paperback with negative literary value and a title like Lust and Sleaze. A student had left it behind when she galloped off to summer vacation. Of course, I was reading it purely as research into adolescent interests. But all the same, it might go well with a Jacuzzi.

  “I met this guy three weeks ago, when I was down here. At Trump’s, the bar in Trump Plaza. We made a date for when I’d be back on this job. If he remembers, and I hope so. He reminds me of Cary Grant.”

  In what way, I didn’t dare ask. More dimpled chins? An English accent? A face to die for? A gift for comedy—or, more likely, a lot of wives?

  “He’s elegant. Continental. A gentleman.” She examined her hand, first with fingers curled toward her, then held straight, nails up. “But not stuffy, the way that might sound.” She stood and tossed the nail file back onto the bed.

  She pushed back the shoji screens for a view of a chilly—but inviting-looking—beach and ocean, sighed, and looked likely to stay awhile.

  I suddenly found the room and the situation less comforting. It was too peaceful, too deliberately serene, too incomprehensible and overrich a setting for the facts of my life.

  What am I doing? I don’t belong here. This is wrong.

  This Asian palace was no place to figure things out. Which I felt incapable of doing, anyway.

  What am I doing? What am I going to do?

  The angst itch began between my shoulder blades and rose through my spinal column into my brain. At such times, it’s hard to sit still and impossible to endure Sasha’s glacially slow progress. “How about I meet you somewhere later?” I asked. “Downstairs. Maybe in that bar we passed? I have to…I have to move around.”

  “Going up to the health club?”

  “No. The beach, I think. See you.” I pulled on a sweater and headed out.

  In the living room of the suite there was an odd woodcut. A mythical beast, mostly equine, but rearing on thick bird legs. It had thick-lashed almond eyes that seemed to ask me directly, Do you have any idea what you’re doing? and its mouth was open wide, revealing not horse teeth, but long and lethal fangs.

  I looked at that mouth, those fangs. “Tell me you’re not the gift horse,” I whispered.

  Two

  MAYBE I SHOULDN’T HAVE COME at all. This was most definitely not the beachscape I’d had in mind.

  For starters, there wasn’t a hint of salt and sea in the air. When I was a child, sitting in the backseat of the family car, a unique scent gave advance notice that the separate universe of the ocean was close. A mix of salt, fish, seaweed, and something indefinable, it was my favorite perfume.

  Nowadays, from far off, the seashore doesn’t smell of anything unless it’s massively polluted. I don’t know what’s happened to that aroma. Either it’s been overwhelmed by concrete and competing scents, or my nose has grown old and insensitive, or, according to my most Pollyannaish hypothesis, the childhood fragrance I miss was pollutants that have been removed. Unfortunately, that is also my least plausible theory.

  Despite the homogenized smell of the wind, and its chill, and even this early in the season, when only private schools like Philly Prep had disbanded for summer, the boardwalk was well-populated. People eating pretzels, cotton candy, fudge, and saltwater taffy. People wearing floppy hats and bare tattooed potbellies and faded T-shirts advertising last year’s action adventure movie. Muumuus over flip-flops, and baggy pants over unlaced high-tops. Instead of an ocean flavor in the air, there was the pungency of peanuts, pizza, and hot dogs. Instead of the rhythmic crashing of waves, there were the pop-pops of an electronic arcade, the solicitations of tarot and palm readers, and the repeated warning “Make way, comin’ through” from the Atlantic City coolies—men pushing canopied wicker chairs, oversized porch furniture on wheels. The occupants of the rolling chairs looked mildly embarrassed, but happy to be off their feet.

  Nonetheless, there was an ocean a few yards off. I hurried across the boards and down the steps onto the beach, imagining the time when this stretch of marshland belonged to the Lenni Lenape Indians and wild ducks.

  If I’d been the first outsider to discover the long, windswept sand-edged marsh, would I too have said, “Hey, this is great! Let’s build a resort here and spoil it!”

  “Ocean, emotion, promotion.” Somebody’s choice of motto for the city built on hucksterism.

  Philadelphia was settled by people looking for a new life, new freedom, greater dignity. Atlantic City was settled by people looking for a buck. History shows.

  The marsh was gone, but the beach was still there, slowly eroding, slowly choking on pollutants—but still there. And on this chilly day, I shared it with only one man, who made his stooped way across the horizon with a metal detecting rod. He, too, was still there, a familiar piece of my childhood landscape, the beachcomber searching for lost rings and left-behind coins.

  A haze of wind-agitated sand gave the tan ground a gauzy edge. Nonetheless, I pulled off my shoes and socks, rolled up my jeans, and headed for the ocean. The sand stung my ankles and was chilly under my feet, and the surf was pure ice.

  On the plus side, the beach was relatively clean. No red-bag medical waste floating down from New York’s hospitals, no untreated sewage visibly pouring out of st
orm drains, and none of the heartrending dead dolphins of a few years back. I took a deep breath and, with some relief, watched minuscule crabs diligently wait for the foamy surf to recede, then pock the wet sand with their burrows. Years ago, along with every other child, I had dug up the tiny crabs by the bucketful, and I was comforted that they had survived all of us, that a beach was still a beach, and, even slightly compromised, still good medicine.

  I made my way back to the boardwalk stairs and paused to watch a silhouetted seabird dip and swoop.

  Something hissed. Loudly, distinctly. The bird was too far up in the sky, and I couldn’t see anything else to account for the sound—no cat, snake, leaky steampipe, or deflating balloon.

  The sibilant exhale repeated. The metal-detector man had long since moved on to the next section of beach, and there was no one left except a man in a warm-up suit and a golden retriever in a kerchief, both jogging by the water’s edge.

  Hsssss.

  Was this the fabled singing sand? Another example of poetic hyperbole?

  The late-day shadows under and around the boardwalk suddenly shifted and fragmented, one piece moving forward and translating into a figure in layers of sweaters, socks, and skirts. Her hair, uncovered, was pale brown, fuzzy and thin, reminding me of a doll I had once overloved into baldness.

  Still crouched, as she must have been under the boardwalk, she looked up at me from dark eyes set in a rumpled face, and, having found her balance, slowly drew herself up straight. “Steps,” she hissed. “My steps. Below for a while because it’s nippy, that’s all. I’m still alive, you know, even if money thinks I’m dead.” Her voice darkened. “My place. Find your own.”

  “But—”

  “One part of the beach as good as another.” She waved her hands toward elsewhere. She wore one red and one blue glove. “People are slobs. Cans and bottles all over come summer. You’ll make a buck anywhere. Wherever you are, they try to round you up, roust you out, every night. Here, too.”

  “But I…I’m not…I’m just visiting for a few days. At the casino.” I wanted to think it was funny that my worn jeans and threadbare turtleneck had made her decide I was poaching her turf. But I couldn’t. She was a face for my worst fears, for, I suspect, almost every underpaid, underinsured single woman’s worst fears. To become the bag lady, street person—or, in this case, sand person—alone, homeless, destitute, and perhaps slightly mad. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “You get the winners.” She made a throwing motion with both hands. “Pennies from heaven. Losers, too. What the hell, they say. Understand how it feels. Turn their pockets inside out.”

  “I’m sorry I bothered you.” And I turned.

  “Got a buck, then?”

  At home I carry a bill or coins in my pocket for just this purpose, but I hadn’t thought the situation would arise on the beach. “I only brought my room key,” I said lamely. “I’ll be back.”

  “Sure,” she muttered.

  “No, honestly. Will you be—are you always here?” What’s a nice former girl like you doing on a desolate beach like this? I wanted to know her story—every street person’s story—every step of the way down. If I knew how and why this happened, would I also know ways to keep it from happening to me? Unfortunately, the more stories I heard, the less defined and more easy the slide appeared to be.

  She squinted at me intently, and, as if she’d read my mind and worst fears, she said in a matter-of-fact tone, “I was once like you. You don’t think so, but I was.” She chuckled softly.

  Her words had a rehearsed or at least overpracticed sound, and probably were both, and she sounded slightly cracked and probably was. And that should have made her and whatever she had to say less ominous, but it didn’t.

  “Yes!” She flung mismatched hands toward the heavens. “Ruined!” she shouted. Then she dropped her arms and looked at me, her brow burrowed. “Men, you know?”

  Just exactly how much like me had she been?

  “I watch all day long.” She pointed the red-gloved index finger in my direction.

  “Me?”

  “Everybody. The visitors. Saw The Donald last week. You know who he is? Had a good talk with him about high finance.” She cackled again. Her right incisor was missing.

  Of course that hadn’t happened at all, but nonetheless, I had to ask. “Was he generous?”

  “Generous?” She laughed so hard, she collapsed down in the sand. “Not a penny. Said he never carries small bills!” She flopped onto her back and looked up to me, and then in a world-weary voice said, “Rich men are the worst, aren’t they?”

  I went down the staircase and helped her up, brushing sand off her clothing, which was purely symbolic, given her residence. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’m Georgette.”

  I wondered if that was supposed to be an answer to my question. “And I’m Mandy,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Suddenly serious, she looked me directly in the eye. “Yes,” she said. “I was once like you. I had curtains at my windows, too.”

  * * *

  Sasha was not yet in the bar, but before I went up to retrieve her and money for the sandwoman, I detoured to the ladies’ room to, among other things, wash the grit off my hands.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Georgette, which is probably why I almost plowed into a nervous-looking, fussily dressed senior citizen blocking my exit. I hesitated, expecting her to move in one direction or the other, as in the normal order of business. She didn’t. “Are you leaving?” I finally asked.

  “What?”

  “Leaving.” I amplified my voice. “The door’s behind you. May I use it?” I sounded stupid and she looked fuddled. “Are you all right?”

  “All right. Am I all right?” She tilted her head, the better to consider the issue. Her hair was baby-chick yellow, sculpted into curls that didn’t budge as she moved. “Don’t trouble yourself on my account, dearie. You young people have lives of your own. I’ll be fine.”

  Definitely off kilter and none of my business. I reached around her for the door handle.

  “That is,” she said, “I hope I’ll be fine.”

  I took a deep breath. I had already had my peculiar-old-lady fix for the day. I had people to see, vacations to create. “What do you mean, you hope?” I asked, my big mouth once again working independently of my brain.

  “If you insist.” She folded her arms across her commodious bosom and launched into her spiel with so much gusto, I knew that I was the unfortunate fly this spider lady had been awaiting. “I’m being harassed.” She leaned closer and whispered, “Sexually, like that sweet girl with the judge on the TV.”

  “Anita Hill? What are you talking about?”

  “Why? You think she lied?”

  “No—I just don’t see what any of this has to do with blocking the door. Or with me.”

  “Honey,” she said, “my boundaries are being violated. Just like they say on Sally Jessy Raphael.”

  “Sounds painful, but I’m supposed to meet my friend, so—”

  “You have a heart of stone or you don’t believe me? Which one? You think I’m too old? He’s too old? You ever hear the expression ‘dirty old man’? Or do you think men improve with age, like wine?”

  I took a deep breath. “If you have a problem, report it to one of the guards, or the management, or the police.”

  “Nobody can touch him. He’s beyond the law.”

  “I’m sure that’s not so, miss.”

  “Mrs. Rudy…” The last name sounded like Smirtz. She wiped her eyes and moved on. “My late husband, may he rest in peace, was a good man. Lala. Call me Lala.”

  “That’s quite an unusual name.”

  “A family nickname. My grandmother’s and aunt’s, too. We’re all really named Henrietta. Lala is short for lalapalooza.” She leaned closer to me again. “Tommy is beyond the law. Nobody would dare touch him. He nuzzles my neck and says I have heroic bosoms like a Valkyrie. He says my ankle
s make him weep with pleasure. But me? I’m finished with men since my Rudy passed. Tommy says he loves my spirit, that he’s a romantic and he’ll never give up. He comes down on the bus with me and goes back with me, too. Tries dirty things as we ride.”

  “Why don’t you flat out tell him to get lost?”

  “I’m afraid. He’s connected, you know what I mean? I can’t enjoy my life. I can’t enjoy the casino. What kind of woman does he think I am?”

  “Look, I have to leave. My advice is: take a different bus.”

  She curtly shook her immobile curls. “I’m not made of money, dearie. I’m an old woman, and every nickel—the bus is a charter. We pay eight dollars, they drive us here. A bargain, already, right? But then they give us five dollars for the day and a five-dollar voucher toward the next bus. How could I take another bus?”

  “Don’t come at all.”

  “I’m not entitled to a little fun? A little pleasure?”

  “Well, that’s quite a problem you’ve got.” I hated to be rude to my elders, but I was going to knock her down, if necessary, to get out of here. “Be a modern woman. Risk it. Tell him you’re not interested. Bring a lady friend. Bring a different man friend. Get a restraining order against him. Learn self-defense. Use your common sense!”

  “Actually.” She put her veiny hand on top of mine. Her nails were polished the color of bubble gum. “There is something you could do.”

  “Excuse me?” It is possible that I am actually one of those noisy ghosts who try in vain to be recognized because they don’t know that people can’t hear or see them. “I’m sorry,” ghostly me said. “I can’t.”

  “Such an easy thing.”

  I shook my head.

  “Pretend to know me. Please.” She stepped back and looked up at me. “Save me.” At five-eight, I was a good seven inches taller, and, I assumed, forty years younger.

  “I’m sorry, but—” I’m working on this other case, the lady who lives under the boardwalk, you see. The guilt office has met its daily quota and is closed.