Beach Ball

Christopher Torockio

She had finally begun to get her figure back, so when Roger suggested an afternoon at the beach, she thought she might be ready to attempt something like that. She looked out the living room window where a fine blue-white sky shimmered above the near treetops. The air conditioner had been humming all morning; the baby’d been asleep for the past ninety minutes. He’d wake any time now.
    “Sure,” she said. “Why not. Sounds good.”
     Roger sat in the little alcove between the living room and kitchen, their monthly bills spread out on the table around him. He glanced up at her.
    “We’ll need to get everything ready,” she said.
    He nodded. He arranged the bills into orderly piles and stood. They looked at each other across the room as if unsure of what to do next. The carpet beneath Elise’s bare feet felt cool and pleasant. Finally, she went to the closet by the front door and took out Frederick’s diaper bag, then moved through the apartment filling it: two diapers, a third diaper, baby wipes, a bottle, two spare nipples, a Tupperware cup of premeasured powdered formula, baby sunscreen, sunhat, rattles, teething gel, a couple changes of outfits, socks, bibs, a little bunny book of heavy cardboard that Frederick was particularly fond of staring at. Roger followed her around with his hands in his pockets.
    “Should we bring a couple of beers?” he asked. They were standing in the kitchen as she tried to stuff a bottle of Evian water, to mix with the powdered formula, into the bag.
    “If you want,” she said.
    “Do you want?”
    “If you do, sure. Maybe. Go ahead.”
    She felt him watching her for a few moments. Then he exhaled and opened the refrigerator. There were no beers. “Takes care of that idea,” he said and closed the door.

Outside, it was much hotter than they ever could have expected. It was already September, less than a week before Labor Day, the final fringe of summer. They’d only walked from the front door to the car and already Elise saw sweat drip from Roger’s nose onto the baby as he leaned over to insert the car seat into the base. The locking mechanism wouldn’t catch, and Roger struggled with the seat belt for a time, grunting, while Frederick blinked erratically from the sun glinting off the Civic’s trunk. Finally the seat clicked into place, and Roger straightened.
    “Christ,” he said. He looked at Elise across the top of the car, dabbed his forehead with the back of his wrist. His cheeks were pink, like broken blood vessels. “You okay?” “Sure.” She opened the passenger door and got in, already feeling the seams of her still-too-small one-piece wedging into the crack of her backside. This, she thought, could be a colossal mistake.
    They lived seven miles from the beach, a fifteen-minute drive with all the stoplights. The air conditioner roared, spraying streams of cold air onto various parts of Elise’s body—her kneecap, the crook of her left elbow, her right ear—but failing to cool the inside of the car itself. On Military Cutoff traffic started to back up leading into Wrightsville Beach. They came to a stop. The Wachovia Bank sign across the street flashed 102 degrees.
    “Bridge must be up,” Roger said. He tapped the steering wheel. “Could be a while.”
    “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” Elise said. As she watched the bank sign, the temperature jumped to 103.
    “If you don’t want to go, just say so.”
    “No,” she said. “I do want to go. I was just thinking—” It occurred to her that she didn’t know what she was thinking.
    “All right, fine, we’ll turn around.” He put the car in gear and checked the rearview mirror, but there were no openings. They were sealed in.
    “I didn’t say that. I didn’t mean—Roger.” She took his hand, which he’d positioned on her headrest so that he could more easily pivot and look around behind him, and placed it back on the steering wheel, roughly. “Why must you think everything I say has an ulterior motive?”
    “I can’t imagine.”
    She didn’t feel like arguing. “Just go,” she said, then clarified, “to the beach.” She could feel a slick layer of sweat beginning to form along the backs of her knees. Out on the sidewalk a young man and woman, wearing just bathing suits and sunglasses, muscles moving beneath their tanned skin like smooth little stones, rumbled past Elise’s sealed window on a motor scooter. The woman held on lightly, her fingers through the belt loops of the man’s shorts; her blonde hair trailed behind her like confetti.
     “Great,” Roger said. “Let’s go sweat our asses off then. I got nothing better to do.”

It took forty-five minutes to travel the mile and a half from the Intercoastal drawbridge to the main drag of Wrightsville Beach. At one point Elise got out of the stopped car, laid Frederick down on the back seat, and, leaning inside, changed his diaper. The heat was a presence, like her weight, or the eyes of God. It pressed on her as it radiated up from the street. Her toes swelled against the straps of her sandals. She wondered if there ever came a point where the body couldn’t sweat fast enough, literally, physically, couldn’t keep up with the body’s heat, what would happen, because she felt close to that point already. And she wondered if the heat could have any negative bearing on her son’s narrow esophagus. Would he have a harder time taking in air? The pediatrician had given them a list of precautions, but they all involved Frederick’s eating habits. Nothing ever was said about breathing, or if excessive heat might affect it. The thought chilled her. She got back in the car and shut the door.
    There were no parking spaces. They idled through the loop of metered spaces in the circular lot off of Lumina Avenue then crawled up Lumina itself, occasionally turning down one of the side roads lined with apartment buildings and timeshares, hoping to get lucky. Roger leaned forward, his chest against the wheel, his head on a swivel. At one point, on Greensboro Street, they fell in behind a man wearing shorts and a golf shirt, carrying a bag of groceries. They followed for a block or so, hoping he’d stop and get into a car, but he just kept walking, every few steps glancing over his shoulder, right up to less than a block from the ocean. When the man walked up to a double-parked van with the slogan Maid-4-U printed across the side and began talking with the driver, Roger hit the brakes and orchestrated an angry sixor seven-point turn in the middle of Greensboro Street.     Frederick began to cry.
    They finally found a place on a side street toward the north end of Lumina, near Clarence Foster’s restaurant. Half the day was shot, Roger was irritated (at her?), and when they finally got out of the car and popped the trunk, they realized they’d forgotten to pack the stroller. Roger just stared into the dark trunk, seemingly visible heat leaking out into the world. He closed his eyes. Very quietly, he said, “Mother fuck,” then bent down, picked up a baseball-sized rock from along the sidewalk and heaved it, with a grunt, the length of the narrow street in the direction of the ocean. The rock seemed to hang suspended in the air for much longer than it should have before crashing down in someone’s front yard with an echoing metallic clang against something—a Dumpster perhaps or a car—hidden from their view by a small stand of dogwoods. They waited, Roger frozen in his follow-through, like a pitcher waiting for the umpire’s call, for someone to come out of the house—a sky-blue, high-shuttered bungalow built on stilts—but no one did.
    “Nice job, Rodge,” Elise said. She held Frederick against her and patted his back. “Well done. There’s nothing quite as inspiring as a cool head under pressure.”
    Roger turned to her. A rough breeze swept in off the ocean, and for a brief moment, Elise could smell a mixture of fish and motor oil. Roger wiped away some sweat from his eye sockets. “I’ll carry him,” he said calmly. “In the car seat. And the blanket, too. I can get that if you can get the other stuff.”
    “Sure, honey. Of course.”
    “Thanks, honey,” he said, taking Frederick from her. “You’re the best, honey.”

At first she’d pinpointed—or thought she’d pinpointed—the sudden collapse of their relationship (she would not allow herself to say marriage) to her getting pregnant, which was ill-timed, she’d be the first to admit, but lately she’d begun to understand that it had more to do with Roger’s failed—utterly failed—freelance writing business and his subsequent acceptance of a job selling insurance for Gordon Bros. & Co. They’d soon be moving up to Charlotte, where the company was based, at the conclusion of Roger’s fourteen weeks of training. Wilmington was supposed to have been their big move, the one that would put them over the top (the top of what, though, she wasn’t sure), the one that finally established them as official card-carrying members of the American middle class. But they were more in debt now than when they’d moved here just eighteen months ago, and twice as bitter.
    In Roger’s defense, he’d had dreams. Five years of writing trite, tiresome, semitruthful speeches and product line literature for Society Bank in Cleveland had put dreams in the poor boy’s head. And these dreams, whatever they were, all seemed to point south. So okay, they’d go south, the two of them, a team. Roger’s writing business would take off—every business, everyone, seemed to be taking off in Wilmington—and they’d live on the beach and furnish their house with antiques and funky art and eat in restaurants when they felt like it and pay in cash and procreate, and friends and family would come to visit and envy the life they’d magically carved out for themselves. Maybe he’d write a book (he’d talked about doing that, though she hadn’t seen him read one in months), and then—watch out! They believed in the curative powers of place.
    Instead, he would sell insurance—life and accident, mostly—and he seemed to hold this against her. True, she had a tough time working up any sympathy for him. But, come on. Did he think he was somehow too good to sell insurance? Please. What in God’s name put that idea in his head? What had he ever done to suggest that selling anything was beneath him? She’d admit there was a point in their lives, their mid-twenties, say, when she might have sympathized with him, supported him, a time when she would have said, You’re right, honey, this isn’t what you want in life, this isn’t what we want, don’t settle, don’t sell yourself short, I won’t let you sell yourself short, we’ll get by, we’ll make it all work until you find your niche in the world, nobody’s gonna dictate to us how to live our lives. And, in a sense, that’s exactly what she did say; it was the whole reason they came here. Wilmington was supposed to be that niche. What more did he want from her?
    She had dreams, too.
    Sometimes she’d look around their apartment, at their beige walls and discount-store furniture, and get dizzy as she realized how thoroughly and categorically wrong they’d been about everything. Then last week, while Frederick slept, without telling Roger, she’d taken all her jewelry and piled it on their bed. She picked up each piece one by one—a Longines watch Roger’d given her for her twenty-sixth birthday, a silver chain-link ankle bracelet she bought in Key West, a jangly turquoise necklace she picked up when she thought she might be into that sort of thing, an old cameo pendant with gold trimming of her grandmother’s— and separated out the stuff she, at that moment, didn’t see herself wearing that much anymore. She sealed those things up in a ziplock baggie and took it to the pawnshop on South College where she received $132 and change. It was only jewelry, she knew this, but as she pushed that baggie across the counter she had the distinct sensation that she was trading her life away. Afterward, she went straight to the bank, deposited the cash, went home, and wrote out a $120 check for their VISA card—the minimum payment. What was life like, she wondered as she licked the stamp, for people who didn’t have to worry about such things? For people who returned each evening to a home they knew they could pay for next month? People who picked up the phone knowing there’d be a dial tone? Who didn’t have their car insurance suspended due to late or missing premiums? As long as you had the means to live, how could anyone be unhappy? Beyond an operation to repair his narrow esophagus, the baby needed diapers—they were almost out. The twelve bucks left over from the pawning of her jewelry would barely cover a forty-eight-pack of Pampers. The thought made her want to cry, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. The act just seemed out of reach to her—too draining, too customary, too useless, too late.

The beach had a funny slope to it. The angles were all off—too severe—and the water looked too far away. And, somehow, above them. They came up over the rise from the parking lot and looked around. Roger, his drenched T-shirt pasted to his skin, carried the baby in the car seat, like a picnic basket, with the canopy pulled over the top. A family of five or six had commandeered the gazebo. Elise watched them. The father wore blue jeans and a tattered undershirt with grease spots. He drank from a can of Coors; between sips he’d rub at his mustache with the palm of his hand. The mother was short and shaped like a bowling pin. She stood by watching the kids with plain disinterest as they ran around yelling and kicking sand at each other. Elise could see thick sprouts of dark hair peeking out the sides of the lowest regions of the woman’s bathing suit.
    “What the—what’s going on here?” Roger said, panting. He shifted the car seat to his other arm. “Something’s not right.”
    “Maybe we’re in a different place,” Elise offered. “Is this where we usually go?”
    “Of course. Hold on. Just give me a minute.”
    Elise looked out toward the ocean. Because of a slight rise in the land between them and the water, she could not see the coastline itself. Waves swelled and then disappeared. For a moment a helpless sensation overcame her, and she felt herself panic.
    “Must be some sort of renovation,” Roger said. “Look.” He pointed northward with his elbow, and Elise saw beneath the mound of sand a bit of exposed coppery metal that seemed to extend, like a giant burrowing snake, down the entire east coast of the country. They tramped toward it. People were lying out on the far side of the mound, and Elise wondered what the point was: you couldn’t even see the water from there. When they ascended to the top of the mound, things began to clear up for her: it was a pipe, a big one, at least eight feet in diameter.
    “It’s a pipe,” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    “Why? What’re they doing?”
    “Moving the ocean,” he said. Then he said, “Erosion.”
    She knew he had no real idea; still she did not challenge him.
    They found a spot between the pipe mound and the water. Elise laid out the blanket, and Roger set Frederick down facing away from the sun. Then he went to the surf shop to rent a couple of beach chairs. Elise sat down on the blanket. She touched Frederick’s cheek with her index finger. Quickly she calculated his exact age: twenty-one weeks, nine days. For so long he’d looked like no one—neither Elise nor Roger. Just a baby. But lately she was beginning to see a hint of Roger in Frederick’s facial expressions. The way he dropped his chin to smile, the crinkling of his nose just before he cried. She’d never seen Roger cry, but if she ever did, she knew this is what it would look like.
    Frederick opened his eyes, looked around, squinted, and went back to sleep. A distant radio played some Carolina R&B—shagging music, she’d heard it called. It faded in and out.
    A group of four college-age girls occupied a blanket just in front of and to Elise’s left, all wearing particularly miniscule bikinis: two black, a yellow, and a teal paisley. The girl in the teal suit, a petite blonde, flipped over onto her back and lifted up on her elbows. She leaned her head way back, letting the tips of her hair skim the sand behind her, feeling the warm breeze blow in off the water. Elise could see little beads of sweat trembling on the girl’s stomach, and it occurred to her that she and Roger hadn’t had sex since she was four months pregnant, more than ten months ago now—good Lord, almost a year. She unzipped her shorts and began to take them off, then thought better of it and zipped them back up.
    Elise used to run at least one 10k a year, often more. She’d been steadily improving, her last race clocking in at just under forty minutes. That, too, was more than a year ago. At her last appointment her doctor told her she was under no restrictions, she was good to go, whatever she wanted to do, exercise-wise, was fine. Still, she had yet to dig her running shoes out of the closet. Why? She wasn’t sure. Sometimes she thought about it, thought, I should go for a run, but then she didn’t. She had the time; she just lacked something else, some other interior quirk or feature or physiological composition she was unable, or unwilling, to put her finger on. Now, though, with the image before her of the young woman’s flat belly quivering in the heat, she felt ready. She looked down at her white, wrinkled knees, and when she glanced back up, she saw that the four girls on the next blanket were now drinking from cans of beer wrapped in foam coolies and entertaining a ravaged seagull that had hobbled over to them. The bird was very nearly bald on its head, exposing a patch of pallid beige bird-skin that was flecked with tiny white spots; one wing hung slightly lower than the other, as though the bird had recently undergone a stroke. The feathers it did have stood out crazily, frayed like cotton, the remnants of a recent plucking perhaps, and by the way it staggered, as if drunk, Elise guessed it was missing a couple of talons on one foot. It was a pathetic, frightful sight. It hung around the girls, though, and they ooh’ed and ah’ed at it and pitied it and fed it little bits of tortilla chips from a bag. Elise felt her eyes begin to dampen, and she thought, Now what in the world.
    Then the girls, all four of them, turned and looked at her. She froze, searching her mind for a viable excuse as to why she’d been staring at them, when gradually she came to realize they were not in fact looking at her but at something just beyond her. Their jaws dropped; the girl in the teal suit wrinkled her forehead, squinting against the sun. One of the girls in black said, “Oh, shut uh-up!” in a syrupy Southern drawl, presumably in response to some offhand comment that had been made, then broke into a fit of giggles. The others soon followed suit, laughing into their hands, beer splashing out the tops of their cans and trailing down their wrists. The seagull, now ignored, stumbled away toward the ocean.
    Elise checked Frederick, made sure he was breathing all right, then shifted around to look behind her and saw a family of four near the dune at the top of the beach, headed toward the underground pipe mound in her direction. At first she couldn’t tell what the girls had been laughing at, then she saw the way the father of the group, much like the damaged seagull, staggered around unsteadily on his feet. The other three, the mother and two kids, a boy and a girl, were packed tightly together, moving in a close circle, as if they’d been corralled. The mother wore a full-length white cover-up and carried a mound of stuff: a Playmate cooler, a semi-inflated raft, two or three folded beach chairs. A woven straw bag dangled from her elbow. The father walked a couple of steps behind, kicking up sand. He wore a horizontal-striped tank top; his suntan ended at mid-bicep. His black hair was meticulously gelled and slicked and combed in big arching waves, assuming a sort of aerodynamics, like the tail fins of an old De Soto. It shimmered in the afternoon sunlight. He had a red inner tube around his neck, and as he walked, or tried to, he kicked a blue and yellow beach ball a few steps ahead of him. He carried in one hand a short stack of folded towels and in the other a boom box, which he held by the handle. It swung from side to side as he stumbled. The boom box was not turned on, a fact Elise did not notice until she heard the man begin to sing—or, more accurately, scream: “Be . . . all that you caa-aan be. In thee arr-rrr-meee!”
    The girls beside Elise spilled into raucous laughter.
    The rest of the man’s family ignored him, kept walking.
    Just then Elise noticed Roger returning from the surf shop with the beach chairs, along with a six-pack of Rolling Rock, which he must have bought at the snack bar. He stopped to watch the man and his family as they approached the underground pipe mound. By now everyone in the area was watching. The mother and children ascended the mound and stood waiting, presumably for the father, who had dropped a good ten yards behind, though they did not turn around and look at him. The man was having trouble coordinating the kicking of the beach ball with his zigzagging steps. He stopped and raised his chin to the sky. “Be . . . all that you caa-aaa—”
    The mother turned sharply and said something to the man that Elise could not hear. She gathered her children, and they slowly descended the near side of the mound, scanning the beach for spots.
    Roger set the chairs up on either side of the blanket and sat down in one, shifted it back toward the mound, cracked a beer. “This is gonna be good,” he said. “Got the sunscreen?”
    Elise dug through the diaper bag. “What’s wrong with that guy?”
    “Wasted,” Roger said. “Plumb out of his mind.”
    She’d never heard him use the term plumb in this way before. She looked at him. The heat piled between them made him appear miles away. She held the sunscreen out to him and felt weirdly caught off guard when he took it.
    The man approached the mound cautiously. He kicked at the beach ball— more of a swat with his foot really—and the ball bounded halfway up, curved away, and began rolling back down at him. He lunged at the ball, the lower half of his body disappearing from view, the belongings he carried thrashing around him. Then slowly he stood again.
    “Holy crap,” Roger said.
    Again the man kicked. This time he got some air under the ball, and it sailed over the pipe mound, caught a gust of wind, and bent right toward Elise and Roger’s blanket. Elise put her hands up to cover her face, then remembered Frederick. Before she could think of what to do, though, the ball caught a breeze and corkscrewed downward, landing between their blanket and the four college girls’. Sand flew up.
    “Christ,” Roger said. “Son of a bitch.” He was halfway standing.
    “Roger,” Elise said. “No. Leave it alone.”
    The college girls began complaining about sand stuck to their oiled skin, sand in their cooler.
    The mother and two kids ignored the father. They spread their blanket and removed their tennis shoes. Nobody spoke.
    The man stood at the base of the mound and gazed up at the top, as though preparing to climb Everest. After two steps he teetered, and the entire beach seemed to hold its breath. He caught himself, took another step, then leaned forward. Two-thirds of the way up, he paused and collected himself, swaying uneasily. He bent at the waist and held still for a moment, and Elise was sure he was about to vomit. But then he straightened again and blinked erratically, shiny black hair reflecting the sun. He was no longer singing but simply speaking the army song in an ordinary conversational voice, though he still drew out the words can and army. Elise wondered why she should be afraid of this man, on a crowded beach packed hip-to-hip with people, her husband sitting not five feet away. But she was. She felt the uncomfortable sensation of seeing too much of this man, seeing something in him that he himself could not see, something transcendental—the moment that makes the life—and, frightened as she was, she found that she was also strangely jealous.
    The man adjusted the inner tube around his neck and pressed on. She watched the lower half of his body slowly rise from behind the mound. His legs were hairless and as white as his shoulders. He took a cautious step onto the top part of the mound, and as his back leg followed, someone off to Elise’s right kicked or threw or punched or catapulted the beach ball back at the man. The wind was blowing so hard that there was no danger of the ball hitting him, or even coming close, but he glanced in its direction and followed it with his eyes for a split second, which threw off his equilibrium just enough to send him tumbling back down the far side of the mound. Elise saw a tangle of legs and elbows and ankles, then sand flying up, then nothing. This is a joke, she thought. Has to be. And the laughter all around her seemed to confirm this.
    The little girl, the man’s daughter, pulled her shirt over her head and called toward the mound, “God, Dad. Why do you have to do this every time?” She waited. “Every time!” She folded her shirt and set it on their blanket.
    Frederick stirred, and without waiting to see if he’d wake up, Elise unbuckled him from the car seat and lifted him to her shoulder.
    “Well, that was something,” Roger said. He opened another beer. “That was worth the three days we spent looking for a place to park.”
    “That was awful,” Elise said.
    “Oh, right. Awful. Of course that’s what I meant. Thanks for correcting me.” She patted Frederick’s backside. “He feels pretty wet.”
    Roger stood. “Is that code for ‘take this baby and change his diaper’? Here, give him to me.”
    “You’re an asshole,” Elise said calmly, as if some unequivocal truth had been magically illuminated before her. “My God. That’s all you are.”
    “Right. Asshole. You’re right again, dear. Nail on the head. Give me the baby, please.”
    “Don’t.” She shrugged away from him. “Just don’t touch him.”
    “Are you kidding me with this?” He let out a barking laugh and stood holding his beer, free hand on the back of his hip, gazing out at the ocean. Then he blinked, several times very quickly, as if somehow forming his mind around what she’d said, accepting it, and sat back down in his rented beach chair.
    When she turned back around, the man was again standing precariously on top of the underground pipe mound. He looked a bit tousled but otherwise very much as he’d looked before: inner tube around his neck, boom box in one hand, towels, now sandy and tangled, in the other. The blue and yellow beach ball had deflated and was tucked up under one armpit.
    “I want to go home,” Elise said.
    Roger stayed where he was. “Fine. Let’s go home.” Then he said, “Where’s that?”
    As if on cue the man took one more step and went down again, hard. He fell over himself like a crazy tumbleweed, down the near side of the mound. Nobody laughed this time. It was as if he’d taken an old joke one step too far. For a time the man just lay in a heap, belongings scattered all around him. He appeared to be lying on his chest, face down, yet his knees and feet seemed to be pointing skyward. A sandal had popped off and landed by his head. Much of the inner tube was pinned beneath him; what was exposed bulged up against the sun, glimmering. Before long Elise could see that the man was asleep.
    “You know what,” Roger said. “I’m with you. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
    They began collecting their things. Elise put Frederick back in the car seat and shook sand from the blanket. She felt herself growing light-headed from the heat. The four college girls, she saw, were lined up in a neat row, lying on their backs, oiled up, the outlines of their ribs showing through their skin. Elise hadn’t even removed her shorts. She felt defeated. Whatever she’d agreed to come to the beach for, she hadn’t found it.
    “Glad I paid eight bucks apiece for these chairs,” Roger said. “That was worth the—Hey!”
    She looked up, followed Roger’s gaze. Two guys knelt over the sleeping drunk father at the foot of the underground pipe mound. The guys—like everyone anymore, it seemed to Elise—were tan and young and muscular. Absolutely sure of themselves, she could tell at once. Both had squared-off jaws and high foreheads. One had a stylishly shaggy mop of bleach-blonde hair while the other featured an odd five o’clock shadow, the same length of stubble blending from his face around to his head. Both wore long, baggy surfer shorts. They whispered something to the man, straightened, then smiled at each other and began moving the man’s limbs around, as if reassembling him. Even from here Elise could see in their faces the spark of adult mischievousness—they were not opposed to hurting someone for their entertainment—and Roger must have seen it, too. He started toward the guys.
    Elise could not hear what was being said above the surf crashing behind her and the hot wind in her ears and the people chattering all around. The surfer guys, still crouching, squinted up at Roger, who stood with his pale arms at his sides. The wind swept a pile of hair up onto one side of his head. Next to these two guys he looked woefully overmatched in every way Elise could imagine. Still, his lips kept moving. At one point he held out a hand and stabbed a finger in the air. It was then that the guys’ expressions changed from what Elise could only interpret as indifference mingled with just the smallest recognition of threat to— boom, just like that—enraged agitation. The stubble-headed guy stood and stepped toward Roger. Elise felt her flesh tighten around her. She lifted up onto her knees, pulled Frederick tight to her. Roger was now chest-to-chest with this man. He looked like a child, determined yet unprepared, trying to puff himself up, and Elise, though unsure of the source or the object, felt a fiery jolt of lust move through her. She couldn’t help it. Her mouth went dry. She licked her lips but was too aware of how she must look to those around her, so she stopped and let her lips pulse as she watched the stubble-headed surfer put his hands on her husband’s shoulders. Roger tried to shrug them off but the hands stayed. The floppy-haired guy pushed his face forward and laughed. By the time Elise found herself standing and then heading toward the three men, she heard, and then saw, from off to her left, a lifeguard’s ATV rolling purposefully up over the rise of the underground pipe mound and heading in their direction. People on spread towels leaned out of its way.
    Frederick was awake now, quiet but squirming in Elise’s arms. Her skin percolated; she detected a puffiness under her eyes. The floppy-haired guy glanced at her, noticed the baby in her arms, and his smile vanished.
    “What’s the deal here, people?” the lifeguard said, swinging his leg over the ATV. He was tanned beyond comprehension, the deep, rich, permanent tint of high-grade potting soil. He wore an orange tank top, orange trunks, and hiking shoes with the tops of his socks poking out the top. He was maybe twenty-one.
    Stubble-head did not take his eyes, or his hands, off of Roger. “Tell him, Duff.”
    The floppy-haired guy—Duff—looked again at Elise briefly, then turned to the lifeguard. “Nothin’,” he said. “This guy,” he motioned toward Roger, “he just starts, you know, getting all over us, man. No reason. I swear; he must be drunk or something.”
    “What about him?” The lifeguard nodded toward the still-sleeping man at their feet.
    “Him?” Duff said.
    “Yeah, him. What’s his story?”
    The father slept deeply, mouth open, deflated beach ball tucked under his arm like a security blanket.
    “Him?” Duff said again. “He’s asleep, that guy.” He caught his buddy’s eye, and they both smiled. “We were just helping him up. Right, Todd?”
    “Horseshit,” Roger said.
    “Hey,” said Todd, pressing in tighter against Roger’s chest. They looked to Elise like unfamiliar dance partners trying to coordinate their steps. “Nobody asked you.”
    “Well then how about somebody asking me,” Roger said.
    The lifeguard stepped forward. “Fine. Have you been drinking, sir?”
    For the first time Roger looked away from Todd. His eyes seemed to swirl for a moment, unsure of where to go, then reaffixed on Todd’s face. “Huh?” he said.
    “Alcohol,” the lifeguard said. “How much would you say you’ve had this afternoon? Ballpark.”
    “Ball—? Hey, wait a minute. That’s not the point. These guys—I saw them. That man’s someone’s father.” He pointed down at the sleeping man. “Okay? They were going to—”
    “You don’t know,” Duff said, then a tremor of some unexpected knowledge appeared to come to him, and he said calmly, “All right, go ahead. Tell him. Tell him what we were going to do. I’d love to hear this. Really.” He folded his arms across his oil-smooth chest.
    “Look,” Elise said then. “We don’t want any trouble.”
    The lifeguard turned to her. He seemed suddenly bored. “And you are?”
    Oddly, she was at a loss for how to reference herself. “Elise,” she managed.
    “That’s your child?” the lifeguard said. “Awfully hot day to take a baby outdoors.”
    Now that Elise thought of it, Frederick did seem to be breathing a bit heavily, as though sleeping with his eyes open. “What’s that to you?”
    “I’m just saying, I don’t think I’d be taking any baby of mine out on a day like this. Hot as it is.”
    “Well I don’t see how my baby is any of your concern there, skippy.”
    Duff spat out a quick laugh.
    “So this child is yours then.”
    “Of course.” She could feel her stomach growing hard. She added, “And his.”
    “Then you should know better, pops,” Todd said to Roger, smirking. Elise noticed for the first time that Todd’s cheeks were severely pockmarked, like a sponge. “You got to know your limitations.”
    “Fuck my limitations,” Roger said and gave Todd a stiff shoulder-shove, knocking him across the chin. Todd’s head flipped back, and in the next swift motion he reached out and clamped both hands around Roger’s neck. Roger’s arms flailed at his sides; they flexed and wriggled, fingers clutching at the air. His legs moved beneath him, as though running in slow motion, then settled, and he was all at once being held totally upright, all his weight, by the neck. Elise heard herself scream—two or three nonsensical syllables—and, afraid she’d drop him, straightened her grip on Frederick.
    Todd did not shake Roger back and forth; he did not throw him to the ground or even lift him higher into the air—which he surely could have done, had he wanted to or thought of it. He simply held Roger by the neck, arms extended straight out and perfectly still, squeezing. And Roger, his air passages surely blocked by now, managed a couple of swats at Todd’s forearms and then hung there, limp. They looked like statues, or some sort of human exhibit, which may have accounted for why no one immediately reacted to what was happening— until Elise called out, “He’s killing him!” because it occurred to her quite abruptly that that’s exactly what was happening.
    Duff and the lifeguard both put their hands on Todd’s shoulders, trying, rather apologetically, it seemed to Elise, to detach him from Roger. Just then the little girl belonging to the passed-out man walked over, lifting her legs way up high, like an egret or a heron or an osprey, to accommodate the flippers on her feet. She was a pretty girl, Elise noticed now—blonde, green eyed, smooth skinned and freckled. She nudged her way through the men, all of whom went visibly slack, as if embarrassed, when they saw her. Todd, though he did not let go entirely, loosened his grip on Roger’s neck, and Elise could see Roger taking in air, gulping it like a fish. They watched the little girl bend over her sleeping father, take hold of the deflated beach ball, yank it out from under his arm, and lope casually off, blowing into the air tube.
    “Stop it!” Elise yelled, startling everyone, including herself. “Let go of him!” She walked up to Todd, Frederick teetering tenuously in one arm, and removed Todd’s hands from her husband’s neck. She had to peel a couple of his fingers one by one, but he did not put up much resistance, and before long Roger dropped to the sand, gasping and rubbing at his throat.
    “All right, guys,” the lifeguard said. “Beat it.”
    Todd and Duff exchanged knowing, satisfied glances, then sauntered off together down the beach. Before they were out of earshot they were giggling.
    “That’s it?” Elise said. “He tried to kill him.”
    “What do you want?” said the lifeguard. He was climbing back onto his ATV. “Want me to call the cops? Drunk guy picks a fight. You really want me to get this ball rolling? And, with all due respect, ma’am, I think kill is a bit strong.” He started the ATV’s engine. “I’d think about getting that baby into the shade,” he said and roared up over the mound and out of sight.
    Elise could not move, not right away. She was frightened and relieved and still, shamefully, aroused. Finally, she moved over to Roger and knelt down next to him and touched his forearm. He sat with his legs splayed in the sand. His eyes were red rimmed and watering. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Can you breathe all right?”
    He nodded slowly, coughed. “I think so. Can he?”
    At first she thought he meant the man, the other father, who was now sleeping on his side, eyelids squeezed tight against the sun, one arm folded and tucked under his head. But then she realized he meant Frederick.
    “I think he might be laboring a little bit, yeah.”
    “Okay.”
    Out over the water she saw the gauzy residue of a jet contrail, the vapor losing its shape, beginning to spread and rib out, a fizzling ice trail that would soon melt into the hot blue sky.
With all of the sleeping he’d done during the day, it took a while getting Frederick to finally go down. Until then, they’d moved slowly around the apartment, like old people. Roger sat on the sofa, the ring around his neck turning gradually purple, while Elise fed Frederick, then they put Frederick in his swing and wound it all the way and ate their own small dinner of salad and Italian bread. Afterward, Roger took a bath—something he almost never did—and stayed in there soaking for more than an hour. At one point Elise considered getting in with him, but then she pictured herself in there, sitting, all the folds and flaps and bulges, and couldn’t bring herself to do it.
    Roger turned in shortly before ten. She couldn’t remember the last time he had gone to bed before her. He said, “I’m beat”—and though he obviously did not intend it, she couldn’t help but perceive the duality of that declaration—and shuffled up the stairs. She didn’t think she could sleep, so she busied herself tidying up the kitchen. She put the clean dishes away and washed the dirty ones. She took the rotating Pyrex plate from the microwave and washed that, too, then she scrubbed the inside door, the top, and the other three walls, where everything splatters. It was awfully disgusting. She sprayed 409 on the counters and wiped them down. Then, since she was in there anyway, she mopped the floor. She filled the sink with warm water and added disinfectant and went over the linoleum twice, just to be sure. She was thorough. She vacuumed the throw rugs and the corners along the baseboard and under the refrigerator grille.
    When she was finished she had a pile of rags and paper towels caked black with grime. She bagged them and carried the bag outside to the Dumpster between their building and the next one over. One of their neighbors was having what appeared to be a dinner party that was carrying late into the evening. She could hear voices—not loud or frantic frat-party voices, just a slight murmur above ordinary conversation, adults in the throes of adult merriment. Music played. Just beneath the surface of the voices she could make out the dull thrum of a subtle bass line. Jazz. She saw human shapes flitting behind the venetian blind of the living room. The layout of this apartment, she figured, must be the mirror opposite of hers and Roger’s, and she tried to imagine the furniture, the arrangement of chairs and shelves and lighting fixtures, the paintings on the walls, where the veggie dip was placed, where everyone stood and mingled. Was there a makeshift bar set up somewhere? Did the hosts offer drinks, or were the guests familiar enough with each other to go to the refrigerator themselves and get what they wanted?
    She tossed the trash bag into the Dumpster. It landed softly. The air was still warm. Low sky, no stars. Maybe tomorrow it would rain.
    Back in her kitchen she felt sweaty and sanitized. The smell of bleach clung in her nostrils. Everything around her was so clean she felt dirty, so she went upstairs and got in the shower. She stood and twisted beneath the spray, letting the water hit her everywhere, all over, thinking that if she could negotiate a way to position herself so that the water hit every last square inch of her body at once, she would put herself in that position. Then it came to her. She sat down on the floor of the tub, gingerly, and lay back. She rested her head at the foot of the tub, her arms down at her sides. The tub was a little too short for her so she lifted her feet up onto the faucet. She closed her eyes. Water sprayed down, pelting her, drumming her face, her shoulders and collarbones, her arms, her breasts, rib cage and stomach and thighs and pelvis. She stretched out her torso, made herself longer. She did not feel at all heavy. She arched her back, felt the inch or so of water slide beneath her, and listened to the spray—which had an entirely different pitch from this low vantage point, loud and clangy and internal as the sound rattled around the basin of the tub, boring through her, it seemed. She had no desire to get up. The water fell on her, kept falling, and she thought, If everything went black now, if it all just ended, that’d be fine with me, just fine.
    But she did get up. She did get out of the shower and turn off the water and wrap a towel around her wet hair. Later, she would not remember those acts themselves, the standing up or the shutting off, just that she’d done them. She did not put on her nightgown. She’d found herself, for the first time in her life perhaps, feeling that her body was quite possibly the perfect temperature, and she did not want to offset anything.
    On her way to bed, she felt along the walls of the dark hallway to Frederick’s room and peered in at him over the crib’s railing. There was no moonlight showing through the window, and Elise could not see her son’s face without turning on a light, which she would never do. She listened, straining above the drone of the air conditioner, for his breathing, and she thought she detected a slight gurgle coming from somewhere, some slight airy whine, but it soon faded into the hum of the room, so Elise turned and made her way back down the hall.
    By the time she slid into bed next to Roger, she was chilly. She pressed against him, her chest to his back, and as his body heat warmed her, she felt another, entirely separate sort of heat rush through her. She could feel the warm push of blood moving thickly through her veins, seeping out into her muscles and limbs, and just beneath her skin, the deep, inky redness, an electrical sting. She swallowed—it wasn’t enough. She swallowed again, slid a hand under Roger’s T-shirt.
    “Are you awake?” she said.
    “Are you kidding?” His voice was gravelly, smothered. “What time is it?”
    “I don’t know. Late. Not so late.”
    He took a breath, and she felt an expansion in his side, just below his armpit, arising and falling. She moved her bare legs in the sheets.
    “So how about that guy,” she said.
    She could have been referring to any number of guys, it occurred to her, but he said, “Yeah, how about that.”
    “Be—” she whispered, and he finished, “All that you caa-aaan be.”
    She breathed into his neck, laughing softly.
    “Do you think we messed up? Bringing him into the sun like that? I mean—it seems, in retrospect, like, you know, a really stupid thing to do. Doesn’t it? To not know not to do it?”
    “It probably was stupid,” he said. “But we can’t know these things ahead of time. We’re not those kinds of parents.”
    And it occurred to her that, on this day, they’d narrowly avoided smashing their lives to pieces.
    “Does it hurt?” she asked.
    “No. I can’t even feel it.”
    “What were you trying to do?” She worked at keeping her tone neutral. She was not accusing him of anything, and she wanted him to know this.
    Roger sniffled and wiped his face across the pillow. “I was trying—” he said. “I don’t know what. I don’t know what they were going to do to the guy. Probably nothing. That’s probably the truth of it. Maybe they’d mess with him a little, put him in a goofy position, steal his radio, pull his pants down. I don’t know, pee in his ear. What’s the worst they could do, really, if you think about it? Who knows? I don’t know. Either way, he wouldn’t have even known it’d happened when he woke up. But I couldn’t—” He pulled his knees up into his chest and then slowly lowered them again. “That beach ball. It made me mad. God, I was ashamed. Ashamed of that man and ashamed for him and for what it would be like to be him, and the long and short of it is, I wanted to kill those fucking guys. Really. Snuff out their lives. But they almost killed me. My life in a nutshell.”
    She started to speak, found she didn’t have enough air in her lungs, something not quite right in her windpipe. She regrouped. “I want to go to a gay pride rally,” she said.
    Surprisingly, she felt him nod.
    “Anything. Join a committee, fight a cause. And I want to have friends,” she said. “Not a million of them. Just a couple real good ones. I want to fit in and belong. To anything. I don’t even care. I want to be a part of something. I want things to be important to me that are important to other people. I want that feeling.” She lifted her knee and let her thigh lay across his hip. “I used to be that way. Remember? We were a part of the world.”
    “I know,” he said. “When we get to Charlotte it’ll be that way again. I promise. I’ll have colleagues then, and we’ll be able to, well, you know, we’ll get him the operation, and then—”
    She tried to help him out. “Just don’t leave me. Us.”
    He laughed, all breath. “Where else am I gonna go? What else do I have going for me?”
    Immediately he caught his mistake: what he’d said hadn’t come out right, and his body tensed. He wanted to take it back, she could feel it, and so, this time, she let him. She let him touch her calf and slide his hand back along her leg, all the way up to her hip. “Hey,” he said. “You’re not wearing any clothes.”
    “That’s right, pops.”
    “No clothes at all. Bare-ass nekkid.”
    “And you’d better get used to it. Things are going to be a whole lot different around here from now on.”
    She rolled onto her back and guided him to her, positioning him with the insides of her knees. She felt spirited, in control. In no time his clothes, too, were gone, tossed aside. They were face to face now, finally, breathing into each other’s mouths; she felt his hands moving over her, under her, five of them he must’ve had, and she heard groans, familiar and foreign at the same time, coming from somewhere inside her. She closed her eyes, opened them, and at that moment a car drove by on the road outside, spreading a beam of light across their bedroom ceiling, and in that light she felt an odd sorrow for time itself, the flip and tear of calendar years, the digits that compiled her age, the textures of unmeasured time that she knew were lost to her now. The light swept across the ceiling and disappeared, swallowed into shadow, but she kept her eyes open, she kept looking, past her lifted hand and into her husband’s pinched, determined face.

Christopher Torockio is the author of a story collection, Presence (St. Andrews College Press). His fiction appears in Denver Quarterly, the Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, Northwest Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He teaches at Eastern Connecticut State University.

“Beach Ball” appears in our Winter 2004 issue.