The Glass Factory (34 page)

“I’ve seen this act before. This is the part where you threaten to—”

I smash him across the face with the gun. My feet twist on broken glass as I re-open my stitches again. I can feel warm, wet blood leaking out through the bandages.

“That’s
for leaving my child motherless.”

He’ll carry
that
scar for awhile.

When he recovers, I say, “You know, this is probably my last chance to kill you …”

“What do you want?” he asks.

“I want you to tremble and die.” I press the barrel against his bloody lips. His eyes flit up to meet mine. Oh yeah: He knows I’m not going to miss at this distance. His eyes show it: He
knows
he is about to die. That’s the look I’ve been waiting for. My finger tightens. My lips are starting to form the word, “asshole,” but his arm flails out in a final self-preservationist effort, knocking some framed photos to the floor, cracking the glass.

And I stop.

One of the pictures shows a smiling, white-haired old woman with her arms wrapped lovingly around Mr. Samuel F. Morse.

Only now do I draw back a bit and look at the other pictures scattered across his desk. Family pictures.

“That your mother, Sam?”

Long pause.

“Yah.” A puff of breath.

“What does she think of you?”

Longer pause.

I say: “She doesn’t know, does she?”

He shakes his head once: No.

“She thinks you’re the greatest, doesn’t she?”

Yes.

“Ah,
shit.”

I can’t kill somebody’s kid.

And I strike a deal that makes me sick. “You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone.”

“Okay.”

“That means tearing up that summons, erasing the tapes and telling your ‘lawyer’ you cut yourself shaving.”

“Okay.” Barely audible.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“That’s better. And get your mother something special.”

In the van, I just let it out: “He’s covered a hundred different ways and he
knows
it!
Dammit! ¡Carajo! ¡Maldito malu jillu! ¡Cay isma allcucuna!”
and I pound the dashboard in frustration.

Gina says, “Well, I’m glad to see you’re not getting emotional about this.”

“Take me home.”

“Right.”

Gina drives me back to Minoa, where I check into the Heartbreak Hotel and stay there in the bluest room for five days. Billy helps drive me up to the hospital twice a day for chemotherapy that makes me nauseous.

One morning Morse’s picture is in the paper, and Antonia says to me, “He’s bad.”

I say, “That’s right.” But how did she know that? I didn’t tell her anything.

No answer. Elsewhere in the paper, three pounds of heroin were seized in a Central Islip couple’s basement, and gang members shot a sixteen-year-old girl in Mineola, mistakenly thinking that she was calling the police to rat on them.
Madre de dios.
And a congressional panel probing a housing scandal involving the junior senator’s Long Island office was indignant after the town official skipped out on his testimony and left them interviewing an empty chair.

Stan tries to be encouraging, saying that the dark blotches on my lungs don’t appear to have advanced any, that I might be going into remission because of the chemotherapy and I’m beginning to accept it, but I’m still at about the lowest point in my life, alternating between being in a depressed stupor and angrily reprimanding myself for being in a depressed stupor, when I get a call. It’s Kelly.

“You want to go to the beach?”

“Sure, I need a break from all this riotous living.”

Kelly drives down to pick us up. My feet are getting better. Stan said it was okay to walk, but I can’t go in the water yet. Kelly is amazed that I still have to carry a whole bag for Antonia’s snacks, beach toys, extra clothes in case of a bathroom accident.

“I always travel light,” she says. “Carry-on is the only way to go. No hassles.”

“Except you can’t carry weapons in carry-on luggage.”

“Uh, true … Fil, are you okay?”

“No, but I guess I will be, soon.”

That stops conversation for a while. We go to the Old Town beach. It’s got amusements for kids, and I push Antonia around on one of those small merry-go-round type things. Sheesh! Who needs drugs when you’ve got this thing? Leaves
me
wasted. In fact, I have to get off and sit down and suppress the urge to retch again. This chemotherapy is really getting me down.

But Antonia’s in a good mood. After she’s tried all the rides, the swings, the slide, the rocking duck, we walk down the beach. She’s just happy to be with me again.

I tell Kelly: “You know what I love about kids? They love you for who you are. No payoffs, suck-ups, or sweetheart deals. They love you because you’re mommy.”

Kelly nods.

I ask, “So how’s your work going?”

She sighs. “I feel like I’m an assembly line worker in an information factory. And they keep lowering the admission standards. You know, ninety-eight used to have to be your average, not your body temperature.”

I tell her, “It could be worse. My schoolteacher had to teach four grades at once and scrub the floor afterwards.”

“Yeah, well we’re coming back to that.”

I stand and stare at the wide expanse of water that might as well be the ocean. “A one-room schoolhouse in the Andes. All they cared about was keeping us quiet, separating the boys from the girls, and putting us in alphabetical order for
everything.
Buscarsela. I was always second or third. I
never
had time to be ready. To think. I always fucked up. As you can see, it scarred me for life.”

Kelly laughs. “I was always right in the middle, so average and boring. Even when we went in size order.”

“That never worked for me either—a tall girl by
mestiza
standards. No, all we had were muddy boots, rubber stamp–wielding bureaucrats and hundred-year-old textbooks that tried to pound Colonial-style order into our little heads.”

I swing Antonia through the air and let her down. We walk along the beach holding hands. “Oh, I’ll be watching out for Antonia in school.” From wherever I am … “I don’t want her to have her sensibility crushed by standardized tests and fascist administrators.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“She’s almost four now. That means I can’t screw up anymore, ’cause she’s old enough to remember it now.”

“Is that why you’re so upset about giving up?”

Silence is my answer.

After a while, I say, “It’s clear in my head, I guess, but I don’t know how to put it. That kind of thinking always loses something in translation.”

“I’ve got news for you.”

“What?”

“Plato had the same problem.”

“He did?”

“Yes.”

“My, my. Thank you, Kelly.”

Kelly says, “I’m going to go in. Want to come?”

“I can’t.”

I sit and watch her swim while Antonia goes around collecting shells and throwing rocks into the water. She comes to me with something in her hands. It’s a syringe covered with seaweed. I tell her it’s garbage and throw it away.

“Here’s a shell with some purple in it.”

“Cool!”

That kid. She’s sifting water with her hands, trying to bring it to the beach.

She observes, “We get it and we don’t get it.”

I just sit on the beach watching one medium flow into another.

If you stare long enough, things begin to come alive. You see more than just water, carbon, minerals, green stuff. You see yourself. It’s what we’re made of, too. In the same proportions the planet has.

There are always other ways of making the pieces fit.

I admire Kelly’s swimming. If she were an animal, she’d be a dolphin—sleek, vivacious, flexible, and full of youthful energy—and the most intelligent animal in the sea. She swims a few imaginary laps, then comes out, wet and glistening and brimming with the brightest eyes. We all sit holding hands until she dries off.

Kelly points to the horizon. “On a clear day you can see the Bridgeport stacks. That’s nearly thirty miles away.”

“You mean, on an unpolluted day you can see the source of all the pollution?”

“I guess that would be the cynic’s way of putting it …”

I throw a rock and watch it splash.

Kelly says, “It took that rock four hundred years to cover that distance and now look what you’ve done. Shakespeare was alive when that rock was last out there.”

“Sorry. Four hundred years?”

“Sure. During the Pleistocene ice age, the glaciers advanced this far, stopped here, melted and created Long Island. It’s called a ‘terminal moraine.’“

“How do you know that? I thought you were a literature student.”

“Eighth grade earth science. Required on Long Island.”

“Oh.”

She picks up a wet rock.

Antonia says, “They’re so pretty.”

Kelly says, “That’s quartz, baby, commonest rock on earth. They were smoothed by the glaciers over ten thousand years ago.”

“Ten thousand
years
ago!” says Antonia, astonished, as if no number could possibly be that big.

“This granite came all the way down from New Hampshire.”

“Wow. How long did it take?”

“Well, they move slower than an inch a year, if I remember Mr. Lattimer’s lectures properly.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“See those dunes? That cove was created in 1930 when they dug up the beach sand and shipped it to New York City to mix into the concrete for the Empire State Building. There’s a piece of this beach in the Empire State Building.”

“Really.”

“And the sand and gravel deposits left by the glaciers created the underground springs, which is why we have such good drinking water.”

“Until now.”

“Hmm.”

“I mean, my fate is sealed. But what about Antonia? And Billy? And you? You ever get the feeling God is going to show up one day like a parent in a teenager’s bedroom and say, ‘Will you
look
at this mess? You are grounded, young humanity.’“

“‘No more space flight until you straighten this place up.’“

“Exactly.” We get up and start walking some more.

“Personally, I’d like to keelhaul the frigging lot of them,” says Kelly.

“No, don’t do that. Nail some of the suckers to the mast.”

Kelly laughs. “Yes, but you have to remember to blunt the points first. When you nail someone to the mast, you don’t want to split the mast.”

“Boy, Kelly. Isn’t that the stereotype? That all you old North Shore WASPs know all about sailing?”

“I guess. Funny. When you’re a WASP, you don’t really think of yourself as belonging to an ethnicity.”

“You’re as ethnic as I am, Kelly.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Say, you know what we’re near?” she says, pointing up the dunes to the tree-covered hills.

“No, what?” All I see are some enormous faraway mansions overlooking the water. I’m not picky. I’d take any one of them.

“That’s the old Shore Oaks place.”

“Ohh …” I wouldn’t say I’d forgotten it, I just haven’t thought about it in a while.

I’ve never seen it from this angle.

“Too bad it burnt down. We used to have a lot of fun there.”

“You did?”

“Sure. When I was fifteen, sixteen, we all used to sneak onto the grounds at night from the communal beach to party and make out.”

“Hmm. That ain’t in no town files.”

“Of course not. We saw plenty that ain’t in no town files.”