IT WAS six in the morning, miles from where I thought anyone knew where I was, so when I opened Jennie’s front door, I was stunned to see Zap standing there. He grinned at me, knapsack at his feet, through his dark mustache, resembling the person whose name he bore, the Mexican rebel. “What’re you doing here?” were the first words out of my mouth.
A blond woman, the kind he always managed to find on his travels and who was always disposed to go with him, leaned against the porch railing and nodded at me. Zap scooped me up, and as I grabbed for my thin robe, he grabbed for me. “Boy, have I missed you,” he said. He said it a dozen times until I believed him.
I’m the one who named my brother Zapata, though it was our mother who brought him a fake mustache from a giveaway twenty years before. Mom couldn’t resist a bargain, an opening, a free sample. We had drawers full of little bars of new soap, marmalade in plastic boxes, first edition tampons.
She decided my brother, then Bernie, would make a great bandito, so for years I dragged him around with me on Halloween with his scratchy mustache, shoulder holster, and sombrero. He looked ridiculous and he hated being a bandito, because he was always in enough trouble without the costume. But then I saw Marlon Brando on TV and started calling Bernie Zapata. Bernie liked being a hero. The name stuck, later abbreviated to Zap.
His traveling companion was Anna, and he’d met her in a bowling alley in Stockholm. She offered me a rather sweaty, limp hand and I tried to imagine this fishlike body keeping my brother warm through the long Swedish winter. She was built like a weeping willow, with sturdy legs, wispy arms, and long, stringy yellow hair. She nodded in agreement to everything I said. Anna was the kind of person you have to strain to think of something to say, even if it’s just “Hello” or “How was the trip?” I asked her how she was and she nodded and smiled at me. I wasn’t even sure she could speak English.
“She’s got friends near Pittsburgh,” Zap said, speaking for her. “When I decided to come home, she came along, right, Anna?” She nodded. He whispered to me, as I walked out on the porch, “Nothing serious.” He always had a woman but it was never serious.
Zap kept a hand firmly pressed to my shoulder as he led me over to where his motorcycle stood. “How’d you ever find me?”
He smiled. “Now how do you think?”
Anna went off to swing on one of the inner tubes on the old apple tree. He looked her way. “Mom told me.” Anna wrapped her legs around the tube, held on to the rope, and started to swing. She shut her eyes and threw her head back. The motorcycle Zap had bought in Sweden stood in the driveway, an enormous beastlike black bike, wet with dew, which shimmered on its chrome. The sun, starting to break the horizon, a pale violet morning light, shone in the rearview mirror.
I walked barefoot across the grass, little pebbles jabbing into my heels and the balls of my feet. The grass was wet and the air cool, and under my bathrobe I didn’t have a stitch on. Zap patted the bike on its seat like a horse; he sucked in his lips, the way he did when a woman captivated him. “You weren’t in New York. I wish I’d had a set of keys to your apartment. We could’ve stayed there. I called Mom when I finally figured it out that I wasn’t going to find you there.”
“So I’ll make you a set. How come you didn’t call here before you arrived?”
He tweaked my nose. “What’s the matter, sis, don’t you like surprises?”
Tom had heard the motorcycle and was slowly making his way down the stairs in jeans and a ripped T-shirt. “Who the hell is that?” He bent down and peered from the landing. Zap laughed and waved. “Oh, my God, Zap. How’d you get here?” He barreled the rest of the way down the stairs, right arm extended. I stepped aside as they gripped one another in manly hugs. They hadn’t seen each other in over eight years, though there hadn’t been any hard feelings when Tom married Jennie. Zap once told me, “If I was hurt, it was by her. Not him.”
I hadn’t seen my brother myself in nearly a year and we hadn’t talked since just after Mark left me. He’d gone to Europe when he left medical school and said he needed to put his head back together. Zap had been flip-flopping between professions for years. When he wanted to be a vet, our parents weren’t pleased but they knew it beat standing on a street corner, drinking beer—something he’d done for years. When he switched to medicine, they were thrilled. He told them he was going to be a famous cancer research scientist and they believed him. They told all their friends.
When he left veterinary school, I was understanding. He wrote me a letter, explaining his disenchantment. Some of the animals he treated had died. It was true, he’d once saved a boa constrictor with gum trouble, but he’d also stood by helplessly as a collapsed giraffe languished in the St. Louis zoo. He knew, he wrote me then, that he just wasn’t cut out to be an animal doctor.
When he left medical school, he didn’t bother writing to me. Or to our parents. I think he knew what we’d say. He’d always been called a wayward genius and he probably didn’t want to hear it again.
Tom and Zap walked over to the apple trees near the bird feeder. Anna joined them. He seemed taller to me, if that was possible. Perhaps he was leaner, older. His hair was thick, dark, not silky like our father’s, and he’d never go bald.
Jennie opened the screen door and walked out. She was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. “Well, look who’s here.” She smiled and, with great composure, kissed my brother hello on the cheek.
“I’m just passing through but I had to see Debbie,” he explained. “Mom said she thought it would be all right if I gave you guys a little surprise.”
“We’re surprised,” Jennie said.
“Nice bike,” Tom said, walking over to the motorcycle. He flung his leg over the side and sat in the seat, ran his hands over the chrome handles, adjusted the rearview mirror. If Tom felt uncomfortable about Zap’s sudden arrival, he didn’t show it. The metal of the bike was hot now in the July morning and he pulled his hand back when he touched the handles, as if the bike had bitten him. It was a black Arrow, one of the best of the Oriental models, better than Yamahas or Kawasakis in its road tests. Tom straddled the bike and lifted its front wheels off the ground, even though it weighed almost three hundred pounds.
“Hey, sis. How about if we go for a little spin.” Zap walked toward Tom with his arm on my shoulder. Of course it was forbidden. We never were allowed on motorcycles, because our father once saw a girl’s head sliced off when she fell from the back of one. We were barely allowed in cars. “Come on,” Zap said. “You aren’t going in your nighty, are you?”
“I guess not.” I couldn’t think of any excuses, so I went into my room and slipped out of my bathrobe. I dug for underwear, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt. I brushed my teeth but I couldn’t get them clean. My clothes itched and nothing felt right against my skin. I found a jacket. From the window my brother looked like a Hell’s Angel. When he dropped out of school the first time, Mom threatened to disown him. She said he could never stick to anything. My father called. “You talk to him,” he begged me. “He listens to you.” I was, in fact, the only one he listened to, and he wouldn’t listen to me, either.
All my life I’ve protected my brother. Someone told Mom she couldn’t get pregnant if she was nursing, so she nursed me and had him eleven months later. Our sister, Renee, was four years older and, though we were awed by someone who at first seemed incapable of doing anything wrong, she’d never be our friend. I feel as if my life began with Zap; I don’t remember life without him. My first memory in this world is of my brother, staring at me from across the playpen as if he were trying to formulate something to say. We were more than brother and sister and at times it seemed we were more than friends.
Tom, Jennie, and Anna waved at us as we zipped along the driveway, a bumpy, cratered road pocked with holes dug by the dogs and Tom’s pickup. We were moving. Tom, Jennie, and Anna shrank to the size of shrubs, then to nothing at all. Birds became bullets, the wind slapped like rushing water, shafts of wheat melted into a flat shelf of yellow. The clouds were out of time-lapse footage of a gathering storm; the sprawling farms receded. The isolated farmhouses were no longer so isolated, as distances became half of what they’d been. I wrapped my arms tighter around Zap, and the bike shifted into some new gear that seemed able to take us farther, higher. The bike groaned; pebbles shot out the back wheel. In the mirror I saw his face, his eyes squinting, lips sealed, as if he were performing some very private act.
We took the bends and twists of the bumpy road, meshed into the forks, and glided around curves. It was still a dawn light we moved through. The tiny vibrations began at the tips of my toes, eased their way through the balls of my feet, into my ankle bones, up my calves. It wasn’t like being in a car, because you weren’t in anything, and it wasn’t like being on a horse, because you didn’t vibrate like this on a horse. It was a little like love, closer to that, but I didn’t want to think about that now.
It was amazing how things slipped away from you. Mark had slipped away just as all the houses and the trees were slipping away. It was almost six months, and in spite of myself, in spite of how much I wanted to hold on to him and not forget him, he was slipping away. Zap shifted again. Now we were soaring. We were children on an endless boat ride through the maze of the Fox River, our father navigating, telling us to mark seagulls “on right” and us laughing because we knew seagulls were bad markers and they flew away. Peeling oranges and letting the peels drop into the river, because in case Dad really was marking seagulls, like Hansel and Gretel we’d need orange peels to find our way home.
We passed a mall and Zap pulled the bike over and parked in front of a diner. We sat down in a booth and ordered. “I’m exhausted,” I said.
“Me too.”
“Are you going to stay long?” The waitress with lacquered yellow hair and a black skirt barely covering her wide, nearly perfect circle hips put down two cups of coffee with coffee sloshing around in the saucer. We put napkins down to soak it up.
“I’m just staying the day, maybe until tomorrow morning.” He toyed with the wet napkin dissolving under his cup. “So talk fast . . . how’ve you been?”
How’ve I been? I wasn’t certain how to answer that question. I did take someone’s dog home and got hysterical when the owner wasn’t immediately appreciative. I did call Mark and Lila’s number until they had it changed to unpublished. I have been silently plotting revenge. My heroes of late had become John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. “I’m O.K.,” I said to my brother, starting to cry.
He reached across and held my fingers in his. “Guess that answers my question.” Then he let go, smiled, and in a gesture I could recite from memory ran all five of his fingers through his black hair and twirled his mustache. Then he patted me on the cheek. The truth wasn’t easy to admit. If he weren’t my brother, he’d probably break my heart as well.
The waitress brought me a Kleenex, smiled at me with great empathy, and gave Zap a scowl. “Men ain’t all there is in this world, honey.” She walked away on those rotating hips.
“I’m innocent; don’t shoot.” Zap raised his hands.
“And you.” I took his hands in mine. “How’ve you been?”
He shrugged. “I did a lot of soul-searching this winter. I’m going to give it one more try, if they’ll have me.”
“You’re going to finish school?”
“Oh, you know, the family needs a doctor. If only to disprove all the hypochondriacs.” While he spoke, he stared out the window, across the Delphia Mall, squinting as if he were trying to read something. I followed his gaze to a sign that read “The Home Safe Locksmith.”
“What’re you looking at? You want me to make you a set of keys for my apartment?”
He nodded. “I could use them.” He looked back at me. “So what’s next? Have you talked to Mark?”
I shook my head. “I know you never liked him. You don’t have to deny it. I know. Maybe you were right.” I told him how Jennie and Tom had thrown a cocktail party for me and I’d met Joe, whom I liked but who’d never called me, and Sean, whom I didn’t like and who came by to see me all the time. “That’s the way it goes, isn’t it?” He agreed with me that it was often the way it went. “Anyway, I’m not ready to meet anyone, or else everyone I meet is awful.”
“Probably it’s a little of both.” He laughed.
I had my keys on me, so when we left the diner we went across to the Home Safe Locksmith. Zap bought a little key chain of a running shoe that had “Run for Your Life” inscribed on it. When the keys were finished, he put them on the chain.
“You can stay there whenever you want,” I said.
“Thanks,” he replied. “I’ll do you a favor sometime.” Then we got on the bike and sped back to the farm.
If I was ever jealous of Jennie, it was when Zap fell in love with her and when she led the high school marching band, twirling her baton in front of thousands of spectators who also envied her. Sometimes I silently prayed for her to miss, but her composure when she leaped on stage or into the middle of a football field was Zen-like, as if she didn’t know anyone was watching her. Zap used to say he didn’t fall in love with Jennie because she was head drum majorette, but in spite of it. He couldn’t stand seeing her out there in front of all those people. “All those men are after you,” he’d complain. And he was right.
It was as drum majorette that Jennie crossed the lawn with the breakfast tray, strutting and erect. Her confidence at times was appalling. A tray of steaming coffee with cinnamon sticks as stirrers. There was hot toast made from her own home-baked bread, jams made from the blueberries and wild strawberries she’d picked the summer before. Strips of bacon and fried eggs in a little pile.
Zap, now in a pair of cut-offs and a T-shirt that read “Champs-Elysées,” was planing wood with Tom in front of the barn. Anna and I played with the kittens. Everyone paused as the breakfast tray arrived. Tom looked at the tray and frowned. “It’s almost noon.”
Jennie shrugged and proceeded to serve from a tree stump. “No one’s had breakfast yet.” She passed a mug to Zap and their hands didn’t even graze. Her hair was like autumn leaves and her face had the ruddy glow of a finely fermented wine.
Anna was back on the ground playing with the kittens when Sean drove up in his Datsun. The kittens had been born to a vagrant cat a few weeks before. “Good for the rats,” Tom said as he planed wood. The kittens prowled in the shade, eyes intent on the ground like little Sherlock Holmeses searching for clues.
Sean walked right up to Zap and shook his hand. “You must be Deborah’s brother. You look just like her.”
“He does?” I doubted it.
“Around the eyes. So, you still fixing up the old rat’s nest?” he said to Tom.
“Yeah, why don’t you help?”
“Sure, I’ll help.” He poured himself a mug of coffee and made an egg sandwich. “I’m no carpenter; you know that, though. But it doesn’t matter . . . I got a job.”
“Falling off roofs?” Jennie asked.
Sean smiled. “Better than that. It’s not definite yet, but looks like a real behind-the-camera job.” He sat down and leaned back complacently against the tree stump. “I’ve been trying to lift your sister’s spirits with my charms. Any tricks I should know?”
Zap smiled. “Ignore her. She comes around if you ignore her.”
“Ah, I know the type.”
“That’s not true.” I could see they were united against me. I played with a white kitten that rested in my lap.
“So, are you going to tell us what kind of job you got?” I asked Sean.
“Not until it’s definite. I’m superstitious. But it will change my life.”
I tugged at Zap’s sleeve. “Let’s go for a walk. I want to go for a walk with you.”
We headed down the hill toward the woods, past the pond. At the pond Zap picked up a rock and hurled it at the flock of wild geese. I’d never seen him do anything like that before. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just thought they could use some exercise.”
We kept walking but I knew something was wrong. “Where do you want to go?” he said.
“Around the farm.”
He nodded, slipping his arm through mine, and we walked in silence.
Zap bent down and picked up a small insect that looked like a blade of grass. “Look at this,” he said, “the perfect camouflage.” The insect, walking across his hand, looked pretty nervous, without the grass to hide in. He put it back down. “Must get crazy out here, without anywhere to go.”
I bent down and looked at the bug. “You talking about Jennie?”
“She’s not happy. It’s obvious. She’s like a stiff. Hardly talks. You know, I know her pretty well. She hasn’t laughed since I got here.”
“You only got here a few hours ago.” The insect had disappeared back into the grass, and we started walking again. I slipped my arm through his. “Maybe we weren’t ever really friends. We were always so different.”
Zap shook his head. Releasing my arm, he put his arm on my shoulder and I put my arm around his waist. He had the tight, smooth abdominal muscles of a swimmer and, even though he was slim, he was strong. “You weren’t different. She’s just unhappy.”
“What’re you going to do about it?”
He looked at me, surprised. “I don’t know.” He changed the subject. “Tell me about this guy Sean.”
“He’s awful.”
“He doesn’t seem awful.”
I glanced at him. “You liked him?”
He nodded. “Yes, I liked him.”
“Well, I don’t like him.”
“I don’t see why not. He’s got a nice smile and a good handshake. He certainly is good-looking.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“You’re in worse shape than I thought.” He whistled through his teeth. “You don’t even know a nice guy when you see one. So,” his voice dropped low, “has Jennie said anything to you about me?”
“You just got here.”
“I mean before. Did she ask about me?”
I shook my head. “She just asked if I’d heard from you.”
He sighed, as if he’d expected to hear something spectacular after all these years. “I mean, what’d you think she’d say?”
“I don’t know. I thought she might have said something about my letters.”
“You mean you were corresponding?” I found myself growing irritated with him and with Jennie. Why hadn’t she told me they had been writing? And he was acting as if he wanted to find out if I knew something I already knew. I snapped at him. “I didn’t know it mattered so much to you. Then what’d you bother bringing Anna here for?”
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” he snapped back.
“It isn’t serious with her.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t care.”
We reached the stream at the edge of the woods and sat down on two rocks, our feet dangling just above the water. We removed our shoes and socks and let our toes touch the water, which was freezing cold. “I just think you could be doing better for yourself.”
“I always thought you could too. I mean, Anna’s not a civil rights attorney or whatever Mark was, but she’s not a son of a bitch either.”
“There were some very good things about Mark.” I started kicking the water with my feet. “You just never liked him, that’s all.”
“I never liked what he did to you, that’s for sure. It didn’t have much to do with him. I thought he made you act in unnatural ways.”
A school of fish swam beneath our feet and we watched them pass. It used to enrage me when Zap said bad things about Mark, but now I wanted to hear them. The fish kept our attention long enough that we could talk and not look directly at one another while we dealt with a delicate subject. “What ways?”
“Oh, you were always worried. Would Mark think this or that? You never seemed to know what he was going to do. You seemed to be hanging on a cliff for about seven years.”
Zap started skipping stones. I climbed off my rock and waded over to his. I sat beside him. He wrapped his arm around me. “He made you doubt yourself. That’s why I didn’t like him. You never doubted yourself before you married him. Or maybe you married him because you doubted yourself and you thought he was so terrific.”
“I was very young and you didn’t know him well. He really is a very sensitive man, deep down.”
“I couldn’t dig that deep.”
I kissed him on the cheek. “I haven’t been very happy lately.”
“I can imagine.” He laughed. I’d written him long letters about Mark and Lila. Lila to Zap was a vague childhood memory, someone he recalled from the dozen or so women whom I sometimes called my friends. But not one of our close crowd. Just a face that didn’t mean much to him then. He knew Mark was living with her only five blocks away from our apartment. Zap tossed a stone and helped me up. “I just never liked him to begin with.”
“Why did you come here?” I rose and dusted myself off.
“I came to see you. And I came to see Jennie.” He shook his head. “She’s not happy. Look, Debbie, I came to see both of you. But whatever it was between me and Jennie a long time ago, it hasn’t gone away. I can’t describe it.”
I told him he didn’t have to. I knew as well as anyone what he was talking about.
I knew he’d had her once, very briefly, on a mosquito-filled beach the summer before the alewives lay rotting on the sand. Technically he’d lost his virginity with her but she hadn’t lost hers with him. He’d entered her and she told him to pull out, which he did before she could no longer call herself a virgin but not before he came inside of her, and Jennie spent one terror-stricken month, waiting to show signs of being pregnant and refusing to repeat the experience with Zap. He told me this one miserable night during the month when Jennie refused to try it again.
So he pulled out but he’d held on, living with the sense that he had something left to finish. His whole life had something incomplete about it. “I want to spend time with her,” he repeated.
“So spend time with her.”
“Do you think she wants to?”
I shrugged. “How should I know? We should get back.”
“Look, I haven’t seen anything better.”
“Anyone,” I corrected him.
He started walking. “I feel something when I’m with her.”
I paused, with my hands in my pockets. “You know, I married the man I wanted to marry. That’s the truth. I loved Mark and he was exactly what I wanted.”
“What are you saying?”
“Sometimes we kid ourselves about what we feel.”
He put his hands in his pockets. “I’ve had a long time to think about it.”
“Too long, if you ask me. You don’t even know her anymore.” He was walking ahead of me back to the house. “So do what you want!” I shouted at him.
In the afternoon everyone who hadn’t been on the motorcycle wanted to go for a ride. I sat on the porch, sipping iced tea, and watched as they left and returned. I wanted to work on my report but I was too shaken by the talk with Zap. So I just sat and watched as they came and went, and no one seemed to come back the same way they’d left.
Brave Sean returned a little shaky and said with a nervous laugh, “I’d rather drive cars off cliffs, I think. Your brother drives like a maniac.” Tom, who’d left sullen and tense, came back smiling. Anna, who’d gone laughing, returned glum and I sensed there had been some discussion that upset her. And Jennie, who went last and was gone the longest—who left her usual orderly self—came back all disheveled, face dirty, hair out of place. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said.
She returned a little later, wearing a pair of snug-fitting jeans and an Indian blouse with a bright red and blue print and no bra. She leaned on the railing of the porch, combing out her wet hair in the sun. “So who’s ready for drinks? And sandwiches. I’ll make some sandwiches.”
“I’ll help,” Tom offered, rising from the rocker.
“No, dear, you sit. Let me do it.” She motioned him back down and, as if she had special power in her fingers, he sat back down. She returned a few moments later with a tray of tall glasses, gin and vodka and tonic, sprigs of mint, limes. “Honey, can you tend bar?”
“So you think you’ll go back to medical school?” Sean asked Zap.
“What?” Zap looked at Sean as if he’d never seen him before. “School? I think I’ll go back.”
“I kept dropping out of Yale. I finally finished.”
“State schools are different.” Zap spoke perfunctorily.
“Can’t afford school anymore,” Tom put in with unusual force. “I don’t know how I’m going to send the kids.” He was pouring drinks.
“I’m going to make sandwiches,” Jennie said, jumping up again.
“I’ll help,” Zap said. I waited for her to tell him she didn’t need any help but instead she waited for him at the screen door. The door banged shut. Anna glanced at the door when it banged. Tom was passing out drinks.
Sean engaged Anna in a conversation. Or at least he tried to. He began now with how she reminded him of Bibi Andersson with a little Liv Ullmann thrown in. He went on to discuss Bergman’s notion of female fantasies in Cries and Whispers, the meaning of silence, his idea of the Swedish winter. He skipped on to talk about Bergman’s tax evasion, his breakdown, on to deserters and Vietnam, to the Helsinki pact, to Kissinger, revolutions, treaties, disarmament, Swedish women. Tom rocked back and forth, sipping gin and sucking in his cheeks as if he were about to explode. Anna smiled and nodded but it seemed she had nothing to say.
“A lot of suicides in Sweden,” Sean went on. “I hear it’s the largest percentage in the world. They attribute it to the welfare state.”
“Oh, really, I didn’t know.”
“Suicide’s the most selfish thing you can do,” Tom said rather mechanically.
“Well, in Sweden they’re very selfish,” Sean said.
“No, we aren’t,” Anna protested.
“I hear in Sweden a pack of cigarettes costs two dollars.” Tom leaned toward me. “A beer costs five. Inflation is terrible. I’m not going to be able to send my kids to college at this rate.”
He was leaning so close to me that I could feel his breath on my face.
“I think I’ll help,” I said. I got up and so did Tom. “Me too,” he said, but I motioned him down with my hands the way Jennie had done.
I walked through the living room and the dining room and, for some reason, I was completely shocked when I saw them in the corner of the kitchen, Zap with his arms tightly around Jennie, and Jennie with her face buried in his chest. I don’t know why it surprised me so much. I’d seen them kiss before when we were kids. I’d seen them kiss on the rides at Riverview, even on the parachute, where nobody wants to kiss. I’d seen them kiss on top of the bluff where we lived and on the Indian trails, under the old hunchback tree and in tons of parking lots. I’d hung around with them since we reached puberty, sometimes spying, sometimes tracking down their panting breath to save them from discovery.
I’m not sure what I felt when I walked into the kitchen and watched them. I know I felt surprised. Jennie’s spine was pressed against the Formica counter, her hips thrust against Zap’s, and his hands cupped her breasts. She kissed him on the neck and whispered indistinguishable words into his ear. It was dim in the kitchen but not so dim that I couldn’t see Zap’s hands, gliding along her ribs and trying to tear her blouse in two.
Later that evening Sean asked me if I wanted to go with him for a walk by the pond. I didn’t want to go with him, but I also didn’t want to be with anyone else. I’ve always had a difficult time saying no. As we walked, he told me he thought he’d gotten a job as an assistant director on a major motion picture. His agent would let him know in a few weeks. “An Arthur Hansom film, do you believe it?” He lit a joint and said how nice it was to come home to New Jersey once in a while. I’d never heard of Arthur Hansom at the time. “You aren’t listening,” he said to me finally. “What’s on your mind?”
“I like your brother.”
“He likes you.”
We walked as far as the pier, then sat down. For a few moments we didn’t talk. “This job,” he said at last. “It would be a big deal.”
“I’m glad.”
He took his hand and put it under my chin. “May I kiss you?”
“That’s the last thing I want you to do.”
I expected some kind of a struggle. Instead he laughed. “What’s the first thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Usually I don’t ask if I want to kiss someone. I just go ahead and do it. But you look like you needed to be asked.”
“That’s right,” I said, getting up. I started back toward the house. Sean didn’t move. “You coming or staying?”
“I think I’m staying.”
They’d all gone upstairs by the time I got back. Zap had left me warm milk on the stove, with a note that said he’d see me in the morning but he was bushed. We always brought each other warm milk when we were kids. A fire smoldered in the living room even though it was a summer’s night, but because it was cool outside the heat felt good.
I decided to work. I got my briefcase and propped my feet up on the coffee table. Inside my briefcase was a map of Manhattan with several plastic overlay sheets and colored crayon markers. There was another detail map of the Bronx and sev eral aerial photographs of the specific area I was writing about. I would have to describe that area in minute detail.
I knew the maps like the back of my hand, but suddenly they seemed foreign to me. The blue spots marking available building space, the green spots for available landscape space, the red arrows for traffic circulation, and the brown slums, the black spots where neighborhoods had been destroyed—now they seemed like mountain ranges, like jungle habitats. Poor neighborhoods were tropical isles. Puerto Rico, Galapagos, Fiji. I was looking at a pirate’s map. Certainly no place to live.
It needed rearranging. I knocked down skyscrapers, hauled in trees. I erased Eighth Avenue completely and put crosstown subways under Central Park, little red and yellow trolley cars moving above the ground. I gave everyone a view.
In the morning Zap and Anna were ready to head out. Anna kissed me on the cheek. Jennie squeezed Zap’s hand as if she were offering her condolences. Zap took me aside. “I’ve got some things to work out. But I’ll see you soon.”
“Just give me a call before you arrive, all right?”
Tom and Jennie came out onto the porch to say good-bye. “Take care of my little sister, will you?”
Sean was there. “I don’t think she needs much taking care of.” Zap got on the bike and motioned me to come near him. As he hugged me, I whispered “Mind your own business” into his ear. Zap hit and accelerated, and Anna hopped on back. They put on their crash helmets and my brother winked at me. Then they took off down the dirt road and left behind them a trail of dust that took twenty minutes to settle.