WHACKING OFF
393
to me, "for being such a hard-working boy? Your favorite winter
meal. Lamb stew."
It
is night; after a Sunday in New York City,
at Radio City and Chinatown, we are driving home across the
George Washington Bridge- the Holland Tunnel is, of course, the
shortest route between Mott Street and Jersey City, but I beg for
the bridge, and I get it. Up front my sister counts aloud the number
of supports upon which the marvelous cables rest, while in the back
I fall asleep with my face against my mother's black sealskin coat.
At Lakewood where we go for a weekend vacation one winter, with
my parents' Sunday night Gin Rummy Club, I sleep in one twin bed
with my father, while my mother and Hannah curl up together in
the other. At dawn my father is already dressed and in his hat and
earmuffs. He awakens me. "Come," he whispers, "I want to show
you something. Did you know I was a waiter in Lakewood when I
was sixteen years old?" Outside he points across to the beautiful silent
woods. "How's that?" he says. We walk together around a silver lake.
"Take good deep breaths. Take in the piney air
all
the way. That is
the best air
in
the world, good winter piney air." In summer he
remains in the stifling city while the three of us go off to live in a
furnished room at the seashore for a month. He will join us for the
last two weeks, when he has his vacation . . . however, there are
nights when Jersey City is so thick with humidity, so alive with the
mosquitoes that come dive-bombing in from the marshes, that at the
end of his day's work he drives the sixty-five miles down the old
Cheesequake-my God, the Cheesequake I- to spend the night with
us
in
our room at Bradley Beach, where there is always a breeze
through the window. Usually he arrives at seven-thirty, and dinner
waits, while he unpeels the soggy city clothes in which he has been
making the rounds of his debit all day, and changes into his swimsuit.
I carry his towel for him as he clops down the street to the beach in
his unlaced shoes. I am dressed in clean short pants and a spotless
polo shirt, the salt showered off me, my hair beautifully parted and
slicked down. There is a roughened iron rail that runs the length
of the boardwalk, and I sit on the edge of it and watch while, still in
his
shoes, he crosses the beach below and neatly sets down his towel.
He places his watch in one shoe, his eyeglasses in the other and then
slowly he enters the ocean. I still to this day go into the water the
