Nicotine (6 page)

Though in fairness they see many people, including nearly all their friends, that way. There is tacit agreement among Norm's followers that they make the world a better place by living in it. They don't change it. They redeem it, through the searching way they live their lives. The cult is populated by realist aesthetes. A cult of personality for those cultivating personalities. Expecting nothing more from life than self-actualization, accepting nothing less. Willing to settle for others' self-actualization if their own turns balky.

Initially it was realist aesthetes in a hurry due to piss-poor diagnostic outlooks. Lately it's realist aesthetes with time on their hands, drawn to the shine in the eyes of the survivors. Captivated by their intensity after Norm (with unspoken apologies to Epicurus) persuaded them death could be ignored.

Most have been to Manaus to see the cosmic anaconda.

Penny wears a shapeless white cotton shift. Also a Cambodian anklet with little jingle bells on it—something meant to help parents locate toddlers, but she likes it. She ties small, white freshwater snail shells into her hair, so that they click when she moves her head. She starts dancing the minute the drumming begins. She is tipsy, it should be said, on cachaça from Norm's stash in the cellar, formerly used to create alcoholic mists for purposes of shamanic healing. Her half-brothers remain on the periphery, talking. For nearly twenty minutes no one else dances.

Because she has special meaning for Norm's devotees, they like to watch her dance. They hope one day she will follow in his footsteps,
as his sons show no sign of doing. (Mourners overhear them discussing the Yankees.) They find her entirely Indio, as though the shaman had managed, in impregnating Amalia, to suppress his own ethnicity—a feat that ought not to be past a shaman, it seems to them.

The older drummers play African polyrhythms. As they tire out, the beat gets fatter and heavier. The students join Penny in dancing, some chanting Norm's name. At twilight the old hippies' wives approach the margins of the service, wearing red hats and carrying big, white drums. The beat becomes bombastic, all skittishness gone.

When the sun goes down, the mood shifts from trance to fury. Everyone is stomping. The West African–style drummers reassert themselves. The sound becomes frenzied. A woman with a strong voice keens a pentatonic song with the text “Norman, find your home, fly free.”

Around eleven, Penny gets thirsty and seeks to exit the mob of dancers. A girl student takes her hand and tugs her sideways. All the dancers find hands to hold, and the dance, which had centered on her until then, becomes a spiral with dancers moving clockwise toward the hub, passing under a bridge made by a man and a woman Penny has never seen, and returning counterclockwise to the margins: a Shaker folk dance.

As soon as this free interchange of positions in the circle arises—this democratization of the memorial service—her brothers, chatting casually about nothing in particular as they have been for hours, leave the yard for the house.

Penny misses them immediately. When she reaches the outermost circle, she drops the hands of the boy and girl beside her to go after them. She finds them in the kitchen.

“Who in hell
are
all these people?” she says by way of a conversational opener.

“You should check your eyeliner,” Matt says. “It's smeared to hell and gone, and your hair is full of random debris.”

“Leave her alone,” Patrick says. “Come here, kid sister. Give me a
hug. I, for one, would like to say that I really admire what you did for Dad, staying with him like that. You're a
mensch
.”

“Thanks,” Penny replies, thinking that too many years on a Francophone island have left Patrick speaking his father's English.

“I hear it was hard for you.”

“Oh yeah. Seriously fucked-up.”

There is silence in the kitchen under the storm of people drumming and chanting “Norman! Fly free!” outside.

“What a bunch of drug-heads,” Matt remarks. “They probably think we're going to break out the psychedelics any minute, like at the Finger Commune. We should tell them there's acid in the tiramisu.” He pokes an aluminum roasting pan full of tiramisu with its wooden spoon. “One hit of acid, and whoever eats the most tiramisu has the best chance of getting it.”

“That tiramisu is
mine
,” Penny says. “Tell them it's in the oatmeal or whatever this shit is.” She nods at a large glass bowl filled with a grayish substance.

Smiling, arms folded, Matt walks out to the drum circle. The music quiets. Young strangers appear in the kitchen to fill their plates, shyly, with heaps of cold buckwheat kasha.

Soon the strangers are festooned around the yard and even the house, where they lie on rag rugs and Colonial-style furniture, looking fixedly at the spines of books, waiting and hoping. Penny sits down next to Patrick on a braided rug to eat her tiramisu. “Aren't they insane?” she asks.

“Definitely.”

Swaying to the music as she eats, she closes her eyes and says, “I really love this place. I love the river.”

“I remember Mom being here. I mean our mom, not yours.”

“What was she like?”

He shakes his head. “I can't really talk about her. It's painful. I just wanted to say that I remember her here. Right here, on this very rug.” He pats the rug. “Playing cards with us. Maybe Uno.”

Finished, she puts her bowl and spoon aside and lies down flat on her back. “Then tell me a story about Dad. Something with Colombia in it.”

“You know I'm a photographer. I don't tell stories.”

“Well, it's his funeral, and nobody's talking about him.”

“That would be bad luck. He's gone. We don't know what he's doing now.”

“Flying around,” she says. “I saw it.”

“You saw his soul?”

She nods.

“Damn, Penny. You're very special.”

“Special. Great word.”

“I mean it. You were always a cool kid.”

A cloud dims the sun in her mind. Always a cool kid? He was twenty when she was born, and living in the Philippines. They hardly know each other. He can only be thinking of the last time he saw her, in this same house, eleven years ago. She doesn't remember whether he ever saw her before that. “Let's not talk,” she says. “I like the music. You want something to drink?”

“No, thanks.”

Penny takes her bowl and spoon to the kitchen and fixes herself a hot toddy (cachaça, lemon, hot water). She rejoins Patrick on the rug and they sit in silence. She no longer tries to feel close. Visitors who glimpse them assume they are deep in intimate familial communion.

Patrick takes out his phone and shows her photos of the beach near his house, his neighbors' children, and their pets.

MATT STANDS IN THE DOORWAY
of what had been Norm and Amalia's bedroom upstairs and says, “May I come in?”

“Please,” Amalia says. She is sitting up in bed, wearing a thick bathrobe over a flimsy nightgown. A Marlboro smolders in an ashtray. She stubs it out.

He closes the door and says, “We need to talk.”

“Sit by me,” she says, patting the bed.

“No. You're a fire hazard.”

She laughs.

“You're going to burn this house down. That's what we need to talk about. Your notions of maintenance.”

“Ha-ha. Everybody says I look great, for an old lady.”

He rolls his eyes and says, “Well, I've been noticing that you've been letting the house go to shit. Not just this place. Even the Morristown house.”

“What?”

“It's my fault for not hiring a yard service after Dad got sick. You can't just let grass go to seed like that. Grass is supposed to be short. Those tall stems get like nylon fishing line. You can't get through it with a regular mower. They'll snag it up. You're going to need a harvesting combine to mow that lawn, if you wait even one more day.”

“The lawn?”

“Not just the lawn. The whole place needs a paint job. And the garage. If anybody could see it from the road, you'd be in violation of the covenant. But you don't even get the yew trees trimmed, so thank God”—his sarcasm has a vicious edge and an anger that thoroughly dwarf his topic—“it's our secret.”

“We have so few secrets anymore,” Amalia says wistfully, trying to be playful.

“I just wanted to tell you,” he concludes.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Are you happy? Are you seeing anyone? I care about you a lot.”

“Can't you concentrate on one subject for even one minute? Yes, for your information, I get in. Maybe not at this party. Dad should have specialized in treating a disease that strikes the young and beautiful—chlamydia, maybe. Something curable, like pregnancy.”

“So you don't have a girlfriend.”

“Amalia. I can tell you're working up a crying jag, so before you start—before you launch into your tantrum—allow me to inform you that I am not lonely. I'm rich enough to buy and sell these girls I ‘date,' yet somehow they never think to ask me for a dime. Do not worry about me. Worry about starving children.”

“You're exaggerating.”

“I'm a businessman. That's why I can't look at our house in Morristown without thinking of the equity you're throwing away every day you don't get that lawn mowed!”

“And I can't look at you without thinking of the love you throw away—”

“Jesus fuck. Shut up! I'm sorry your husband died, but leave me out of it!”

“He was your father.”

He pauses. He opens his mouth and closes it. He turns, stomps out of the room, and closes the door behind him.

“Leave me out of it, too,” she calls to him through the door.

She sniffles, listening to the nails on his boot heels click as he stumbles down the stairs.

PENNY LIES FOR A LONG
time on the rug—even after Patrick gets up and goes in search of a beer. Seeing Matt approaching, she rises and returns to the drum circle. Now it is reduced to its stubborn kernel, Norm's closest living associates. The older men play complex patterns softly. The older women crouch, shuffle, smile.

The sky begins to grow light. At the circle's eccentric center, by the fire, Penny dances. Her body rocks, feet almost still, shells clacking as her hair sways. She feels entirely significant, as though she could be no one else and nowhere else—like nothing else matters, like a pilgrim in Jerusalem. Songbirds arc through the clearing, and sparks and ash
hang in the air, discoloring her dress, burning holes. She looks at her feet. In the gray soil that bears her weight, mixed with spent embers and churned by the stomping, she can see Norm's dead face.

When the sun breaks the horizon, she breaks down, the way she imagined. She screams her premeditated grief. It is Norm's howl of desire to go home. A long roar. But it is not cathartic. Instead of going out of her, the howl goes in—a long shard of something broken, straight into her broken heart.

She stops dancing. She goes upstairs, undresses, and falls asleep in lukewarm bathwater. Amalia finds her there and puts her to bed.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, WHEN THE
guests have all left, Amalia explains her position to her child and stepchildren. “By the laws of the State of New Jersey, your father's property goes to me. I think it's the fair way. You are young, hard workers. I'm an old lady. Time for me to think about the future.”

Matt and Patrick—both older than Amalia—shift their weight on the hard padded benches that line the kitchen. “I don't think that's accurate,” Matt says. “Though I certainly wouldn't pressure you to sell the house right when the market is taking off. By law, you get twenty-five percent up to two hundred thousand, and fifty percent thereafter.”

“I don't begrudge you one dime,” Patrick says. “You were there for Dad all those years. Come on! I was in New Caledonia! I'm still there. I'm doing fine. I can wait to inherit whatever there is to inherit,
whenever
.”

“Beginning with this beautiful place,” Amalia says. “We all have free use of it, of course! But it will be nice if it stays together. I could never support seeing it cut up.”

“You couldn't pay me enough to subdivide this property or let it leave the family,” Patrick says.

“Since I'm unemployed and just got evicted,” Penny ventures, “maybe I could stay here?”

“It was the boys' mother's house,” Amalia says. “I can't give it to you.”

“I don't want to run off with it,” Penny says. “Just sleep here.”

“What's wrong with Morristown?” Amalia asks. “You could help me take care of the house. Mow the lawn.”

“I'm out of college. I don't want to move home. Please?”

“What about the house in Jersey City?” Matt says.

Patrick and Amalia look at him critically.

“What house?” Penny asks.

“Grandma and Grandpa's house, where Dad grew up,” Matt says. “We could finally unload it. Penny could stay there for a while and hold the fort.”

“I never heard of it,” Penny says.

“You can't do that to her,” Patrick says. “It's not habitable. The roof burned, and the basement stood full of water for twenty years. The whole place is rotten. It's probably condemned, or already gone.”

“That was just Norm talking out his ass,” Matt says. “I drove past it twice in the last week. There's people living there.”

“It's an empty shell,” Patrick says.

“What house are they talking about?” Penny asks Amalia.

“A falling-down house in a big slum,” she says. “Where Norm's parents die in a fire because his father is smoking in bed.” She gazes absently at the knotty pine paneling on the opposite wall.

“They died in a fire?”

“Of the smoke. It didn't hurt them. They were very old. But it's real painful for Norm. All the years he won't talk about it, won't do anything about that house. Like it never happened.”