An hour later, Amanda and I are camped on the front steps of the house, waiting for Howie and Carly. The granite is still morning-cold but this October Sunday has warmed to T-shirt weather. Atjeh bays from the backyard. She nipped at a baby in a stroller on the morning walk with Papa, and ended up tied to the shedding Seckel pear tree.
I guess we’re getting used to this. The eighth house. The Salem house. When we moved in, Papa and Mama unveiled a freshly polished brass plaque engraved in deep, all-cap letters: THE COVES, and screwed it so firmly to the front door that its face started curving in, like it was vacuum sealed to the house, as if to say, after seven houses in twelve years, this will be the true home.
“New Yorkers think of Salem as a backwater,” my father said. “A cultural and intellectual wasteland. I am here to tell you that we are creating a new reality in the City of Salem. These streets, once populated by small minds, shall be expanded with new ideas, new ways of thinking. We will wage the war on poverty from this port. And if the lid on the coffin of sanctimony and moralizing needs one final nail in it, let us be the ones to hammer it in. Welcome home, family.”
Then he handed me his Canon.
“Get closer. Frame the shot! Wait…”
My parents stood straight, smiled. Mama laughed, sticking out her topographical tongue—that deeply textured part of her we never see—and Papa curled the long whiskers of his handlebar.
We have arrived, they say with their eyes. We have settled.
“Now!” The camera clicks and whirrs.
Amanda fills the time waiting for our guests with speculation about them, pondering the baby girls they may have one day. “I could babysit,” she says dreamily.
“Maybe triplets,” I suggest, trapped beside my lifetime companion whose focus is limited to cute things and stuffed things. “Maybe all boys, all the same age, and all the youngest black belts ever.” She scowls, then drifts off, considering an alternate universe for the imaginary family these people we don’t even know are yet to have, sucking her fingers and watching the passing clouds.
“Remember when Mama made the strawberry shortcake in the tent in the Everglades?” she asks, randomly segueing to a moment I remember well. “How did she do it?”
“I don’t know,” I confess. It was Amanda’s birthday, and we were camping, partway into a three-month cross-country drive from Marblehead to Mexico. The trip was intended to be a break between selling the latest house and all our frivolous possessions and buying some land in the country where my parents planned to begin a new life homesteading. But two and a half months into the drive, Papa reconsidered, and, renewing his dedication to fighting urban poverty, turned tail in Mexico and headed for New York. But in the back of the Jeep Wagoneer, drowned out by the Cat Stevens and Neil Young eight-tracks, my sister and I were blissfully unaware of our changing fortunes.
Amanda turned four in the Everglades. I was six and a half. Papa took us for a walk to look for alligators and when we came back, there was Mama, emerging from the big canvas tent with a double-decker strawberry shortcake. Whipped cream and berries on top. Even candles. No sign of an oven. No campsite refrigerator. But that was Mama, always creating something from nothing.
“That was amazing,” Amanda says through the fingers in her mouth.
“That was,” I say.
A caw beside us shatters the shared memory, “Idle hands!” Glovey Butler, the Old Mother Hubbard lookalike, materializes without a sound. We stare at her, not certain how to reply. “… are the devil’s playground,” she completes the adage, frowning with yet more disappointment, if that is possible. “Why are you just sitting there? Don’t you go to school?”
“It’s Sunday,” I remind her.
“It’s Sunday, Mrs. Butler,” she corrects.
“It’s Sunday, Mrs. Butler.” I sigh.
“I didn’t spend a decade of my life working to put Chestnut Street on the Commonwealth’s Register of Historic Places just so a child of the Lower East Side or wherever it is you immigrated from could scamp up the place. And you,” she lowers a withering glance my way, “neighborhood molester of young women? I’ve got my eye out.”
“Hello, Glovey,” Mama says, behind us. “Actually, we’re from the Upper West Side.” She hands us each a plate with a peanut butter, honey, and banana sandwich and potato chips.
“Mrs. Cove,” Mrs. Butler replies coolly, and turns her back on my mother, slipping into the dark foyer of her own home.
“We’re still hoping you’ll come for dinner sometime soon,” Mama calls after her before Glovey can completely shut us out.
“A formal response will follow a formal invitation,” says Mrs. Butler.
“I understand. Just you wait. I have a new recipe for Moroccan game hen.”
The old crow slams her door. Mama turns her attention back to us. “Guys? I am as excited as you are. More so, probably. But we don’t know when Howie and Carly are going to arrive,” she says gently.
“I’m not excited,” I tell her, “I’m bored.”
“Hmmmmm. Well, you might want to play or do something else while you’re waiting, don’t you think? It could take a long time.”
She’s interrupted by the high nasal honk of a powder-blue Volkswagen minibus gliding freely from one side of Chestnut Street’s extra-wide, brick-lined expanse to the other.
Amanda leaps up and runs to the street, ignoring Mama’s “Wait! Here!”
I stay put, watching. The sound of that bus, the color, the daring weave through this registered historic place … A spaceship is approaching 31 Chestnut Street, only without the mashed potato mountains or mysterious electrical outages to warn us in advance.
Behind the glint from the submarine windows there are smiling faces, and on the front of the bus is a sticker of Minnie Mouse, hands behind her back, skirt in swing, eyelashes batting.
“Hello, bambinos!” the woman who must be Carly calls from the passenger window, her long, straight black hair flapping against the side of the bus as it jerks to a stop in front of our house.
“Hi! Hi!” Amanda is a flurry of giddy words, wobbling on her oversized Stride Rite clogs. “Mama said you weren’t morning people and that it’s six hours from Philadelphia if you don’t stop and that you might not even be here until DINNER! And we’re not even done with LUNCH!”
Carly opens her door and leaps out. Kneeling down, she looks us in the eyes and says, “We are NOT morning people unless we’re coming to see you, but we’re YOUR people. So today, we are morning people because we are so excited to visit!” She opens her arms and Amanda immediately steps forward into them. I hold back, but Carly extends an arm and waves me into the soft embrace. The way she hugs—but doesn’t squish—us makes me melt against her. In a flash, this stranger becomes the object of my desire, her softer skin, her greener grass, her unconditional affection, palpable, fragrant. Oh, I am desperate for it.
“Ooooooohhhh!” She sighs happily, eyes scrunched tight. “You are delicious little dumplings made by the Hunan Princess herself!”
“Who?” I ask.
A low-voiced reply comes from the other side of the bus as Howie strides around and toward us, “The Hunan Princess is your sweet, sublime, beautiful, light-ray mamapajama, hombre.” His arms are outstretched for a hug and the sun makes his hair glow copper, falling in long waves below his ears, upside-down swells curling to frame his square jaw. Strands fall from the top of his head into his eyes, which search my own with what seems to be an honest desire to know me. His smile is infectious, his dashiki completely out of place, as are his brilliant orange silk pants, speckled with white and green Japanese flowers. A riot of color and spirit, he moves toward us, gallant smile turned up, chin pulled down, head cocked to the side. The most handsome man I have ever seen.
I hope Glovey Butler is watching.
Amanda and I swallow a long list of follow-up questions as Howie picks Mama off her feet and spins her until the flowers of his drawstring pants dissolve in a blur and our mother—our soft-spoken, impassive mother—begins to laugh. Uncontrollable, head-back laughter, long straight brown hair set loose in rolling crests, looking straight at the gray autumn sky that hangs skeptically over Chestnut Street.
I’ve never seen her so helplessly happy. Carly grabs my hand, and we begin to spin, all of us a tightening gyre on the front lawn.
“Now,” Howie pulls away, returning my mother gently to earth, and looking at me, “where the hell’s your old man?”
* * *
Pa’s in the kitchen. It’s a tiny L-shaped room, cramped compared to the rest of this dilapidated mansion. Originally a staging area for meals, this little space off the massive dining room was designed to receive meals via the dumbwaiter from the real kitchen in the basement. But for my father, cooking is performance art. He’s not going to do it in the basement.
“El Jefe!” Howie calls, squeezing his way into the kitchen to hug his old friend and take in the view: every open surface covered with spices, knives, bottles of wine and oils, a bronze mortar and pestle, mustard seeds, fresh horseradish, oranges, figs, and a whole fish, head and scales still on. “All hail the chief!”
“Boobie! You made it. And in record time, too.” Papa wraps his arms around his friend, hugging him firmly but keeping his hands at a slight angle to avoid getting whatever’s dripping from them on Howie’s dashiki. “Jesus, where the hell did you get those pants?”
“That’s my lovely bride’s handiwork,” Howie says happily. Papa grabs a long wooden spoon in one hand, the handle of a small saucepan in the other, and stirs whatever has started to boil over. “Well, you look like a fucking geisha girl.”
“Feel even better than that. There’s freedom in the flow. You’ll see.”
“Well, you look good otherwise. Working out?”
“Breaking concrete with a sledgehammer.”
“Make an honest hippie out of you.”
“So what’s for dinner?” Howie reaches for the saucepan, turns it his way, and dips a finger.
“Little Polish thing from the Old Country. Ryba with galarecie. Cold fish in aspic, carrot rings, hardboiled eggs, and lemon slices … Watch the handle,” he adds, turning the saucepan around so the handle faces the back of the stove. “Kids.”
“You’re living the life, Jefe.” Howie pats my father on the back. “I always knew you’d make good.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, boychik.”
Howie’s admiration of Papa sparks an unfamiliar feeling: pride. Something I’ve never really felt about my father. But there it is. His open respect for my father is something I can’t remember other men expressing. Uncle Ricky? Always quick with the comeback. Gramps? He seems to regard his son with a mixture of amusement and a where did you come from? confusion. And Papa’s friends seem more likely to compete with him than to compliment him. And he with them. It’s the one-upsmanship of men. I thought they all did it.
But not this man.
“Are you the same age as Papa?” I ask.
“Not quite, hermanito. He’s like my big brother. Ten years older and a hundred years wiser.”
Later, after our dinner—fish heads and eggs for the adults, jelly omelets, thank God, for us—Howie hangs a sheet on the family room wall and breaks out a box of Kodachrome slides. Mama wraps David in her arms. Amanda sits by her. Papa and Carly talk politics.
“Jerry Brown—” Carly implores.
“Fuck Jerry Brown! He lost last time. What’s the point of trying again? Besides, we have a Democrat in the White House. Everybody needs to stick with Carter. Come on. Jerry Brown … Shit,” Papa says.
“What do you think, Louis?” Carly asks, raven’s-wing hair draping over her shoulder.
“Dunno,” I shrug.
“No? Iran’s gonna be an albatross for old Jimmy. I bet you have an opinion on this politics thing,” Howie says, locking the carousel into place. “I remember you at that party when your folks lived in Georgetown.”
“I was two,” I say softly.
“Yeah, but you knew your stuff. You kept running around the party saying ‘Nixon is a doodie! Nixon is a doodie!’ And you were right, little man. You were SO right.”
“You were there for that?”
Howie nods. “I’ve had my eye on you since you were a wee tumbleweed, Little Big Man.”
“I like your minibus,” I say, eager to keep up the conversation.
“I do, too,” Howie says, transitioning smoothly along with me. “Want to drive it?”
“One day. One day,” Papa says, cupping my face in his hand like I’m two instead of twelve. I pull away, and grimace.
Howie kneels down to Carly, kisses her the way people kiss in movies, not at home. I avert my eyes. She is beautiful, and he may be the most striking man I have ever met. Overwhelmed, I stare absentmindedly at the paperback spines on the shelf so no one will notice me blush. Kazantzakis. Nabokov. Roth. The Joy of Sex. David is asleep now, on the floor beside me.
“We should move to San Francisco,” Papa muses.
“Please don’t make us move again,” I groan.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Mama assures us.
“But the freedom. Think about it,” my father presses.
“Don’t idealize, Jefe,” Howie cautions. “I came to San Francisco the spring after the Summer of Love. Six months is all it took for that dream to curdle. The real hippies literally carried a coffin down the center of the streets of Haight-Ashbury, crying ‘It’s dead! It’s over!’ Now it’s just people spare-changing on the streets and selling hippie shit, making money off it.”
“Who died?” Amanda sits up, alarmed.
“The innocence,” Howie says, standing.
Carly elbows him playfully. “Oh, Howie. It’s still totally alive. You just went down a dark rabbit hole for no good reason.”
“You’re right. Back to business. It’s showtime!” he shouts, flipping off the light switch by the door, futzing with the projector so that the image fills the wrinkled bedsheet.
“Where’s that?” Mama asks as the first photo—a picture of Howie in a bathrobe, laughing with a small group of people—comes into focus.
“Our backyard. Just before the wedding. I’m laughing because if I don’t laugh I’ll probably cry my fucking eyes out and go running.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mama chides. “You look happy. Really happy.”
“It’s a world of illusion!” Howie says with a Doug Henning bucktooth flourish. Finally, a reference I recognize.
The slides continue, tracking the moments leading up to a wedding that resembles none I’ve ever seen before.
“When do you put on your tuxedo and dress?” Amanda asks, sucking as usual at her ring and middle fingers.
Howie chuckles warmly. “It’s not that kind of wedding, Sweet Tush.” Carly snuggles against him, squeezing his arm and smiling as if to say: we know something you don’t, but if you’re very lucky, we might tell you.
“What do you mean?” Amanda asks, incredulous. “Everybody wears a tuxeee … doh?”
The image on the sheet switches from a slide of Howie and Carly facing each other in bathrobes to a slide with the robes lying at their feet, the bride and groom smiling those we-know-something-wonderful smiles. They are very, very naked.
The moment is immense. I have never seen breasts like that. Not in the ladies’ locker room at the Y when I was still young enough to go with Mama. Not in Gramps’s bathroom Playboys. Howie’s penis is small and difficult to find in all that hair. Carly’s boobs, though, are right there. And the two of them, naked on the screen, are sitting right beside us.
Amanda and I say nothing.
“You didn’t!” Mama finally squeals. “You didn’t! Did you?”
“Come on!” Papa says, leaning forward.
“Like the day we were born,” Howie murmurs, as if recalling the greatest moment of his life. And maybe he is.
Gretchen isn’t wrong about my parents being different. They keep The Joy of Sex and Delta of Venus alongside Ulysses and the big American Heritage Dictionary with the blue leather cover and silver embossed lettering on the bookshelf behind us. They went to Woodstock and saw Dylan turn electric at Newport. They smoke pot sometimes, occasionally in front of us.
But they aren’t this different.
The slides continue. Howie and Carly, standing naked. Looking up. Raising arms. Shouting something as a rope attached to a giant wooden bucket above them is tugged by some kind of groomsman, showering them with steaming water. They reach forward, embracing so tightly it’s hard to tell them apart, just a mass of skin and dripping hair. Everyone around them claps, laughs, smiles, shouts. Silent, but so noisy in my head.
“I don’t…” Mama says.
“Far out…” Papa says.
“It was the best way we could think of to come together,” Carly whispers, still clutching Howie’s arm and looking at the photo of herself pressed into her new husband, naked, with nothing between them.
“Was that real?” Amanda asks.
“Oh, honey,” Carly slides back over to my sister and wraps her in her arms, “that was as real as it gets.”
I look at my father, then at Howie. Any man who gets girls to marry him naked deserves to be projected on a screen.
The heat on the side of my head pulls me out of my sudden fixation. It is coming from the glare of Papa’s gaze. Turning to face him, I know that he has sensed, with uncanny accuracy and speed, the germ of a betrayal.
We all have friends, his eyes telegraph in radioactive Morse code, but there’s only one man you should be taking your cues from here.
Message received. No decoder ring necessary.
Howie clicks ahead a few slides. People eating party food. Guests departing. Carly brushing her teeth. Howie in bed. A picture maybe taken by Howie of his knees, his hairy legs, white tube socks with yellow stripes at the top, and Carly sitting at the end of the bed. And then one of Carly, eyes closed, face down. Eating something?
“What’s that in your mouth?” Amanda asks the question I am wondering.
“It’s Howie’s penis,” Carly says matter-of-factly.
“OH-KAY,” Mama chirps loudly. She jumps up and flips on the lights. “Time for bed!”