In the car, Gina studied her father’s face. She had wanted to drive, but no one trusted her behind the wheel. For once she had been allowed to sit up front: semi-adult, now that she had filled out, so they gave her front-seat privileges sometimes, occasional woman privileges. Her mom and Bertie were in the back, Bertie playing with his Game Boy, her mom with her earphones on, listening to music so she wouldn’t have to hear the plinks and plunks of the Game Boy, or talk to her ex, Gina’s dad, the driver, half-committed to his divorce, an undecided single man, driving the car. He would fully commit to the divorce when he found a girlfriend he really liked, which he hadn’t, yet. Gina had met one of the girlfriends whom he had only half-liked, a woman who tried way too hard to be nice, and who looked like a minor character on a soap opera who would eventually be hit by a rampaging bus.
Gina had mentioned Gordy Himmelman to her dad, and her dad had said yeah, it was way too bad.
She was interested in her father’s face. Because it was her father’s, she didn’t know if he was handsome or plain. You couldn’t always tell when they were your parents, though with her friend Gretchen Mullen you sure could, since Gretchen’s father looked like a hobgoblin. At first she thought her own father had a sort of no-brand, standard-issue father face; now she wasn’t so sure.
He was possibly handsome. There was no way of knowing. Her dad was a master plumber. Therefore his hands often had cuts or grease under the fingernails. Very large hands, made big by genetic fate. His hair was short and brown, cut so it bristled, and near his temples you could see a change in color, salty. On his right cheek her dad had a crease, as if his skin had been cut by a knife or a sharp piece of paper, but it was only a wrinkle, a wrinkle getting started, the first canal in a network of creases-to-come, his face turning slowly but surely into Mars, the Red Planet. His teeth were very white and even, the most Rock Star thing about him. His eyes were brown and spaced wide apart, not narrow the way teenaged boys’ eyes are usually narrow, and they drilled into you so that sometimes you had to turn away so you wouldn’t be injured by the Father Look. Her father’s beard line was so distinct and straight it looked put in with a ruler, and was so heavy that even if he shaved in the morning, he usually needed another shave around dinnertime, an interestingly bearlike feature of the masculine father type. His nose was exciting. His breath had a latent smell of cigarettes, which he smoked in private. You couldn’t find the boy in him anymore. It wasn’t there. He was growing a belly from the beer he drank nights and weekends, and most of the time he seemed comfortable with it, though it seemed to tire him out also. He didn’t smile much and only when he had to. He had once told Gina, “Life is serious.”
On winter weekends he watched football on television speechlessly.
He looked like a plumber on a TV show who comes in halfway through the program and who someone, though not the main character, falls in love with, because he’s so manly and can replace faucet washers. He would be the kind of plumber who wisecracks and makes the whole studio audience break up, but he would be charming, too, when he had to be. But then sometimes at a stoplight, or when he saw a car pull in front of him, her dad’s face changed out of its TV sitcom expression: suddenly he grimaced like someone had started to do surgery on him right over his heart without anesthetic, and he was pretending that nothing was happening to him even though his chest was being cut open, bared to fresh air. And then that expression vanished like it had never been there. What was that about? His pain. His secret squirrel life, probably.
Still, there was no point in talking to him about Gordy Himmelman.
At the lake they settled in on their beach towels. Bertie, who was oblivious to everything, went on playing with his Game Boy. Gina’s mom stretched out on her back in an effort to immerse herself in lethal tanning rays. Her dad carried the picnic basket into the shade and started to read his copy of Car and Driver, sitting on the picnic-table bench. Gina went to the concession stand to get herself an ice cream cone, which she would buy with her own money.
The stand itself had been constructed out of concrete blocks, painted white, covered overhead by a cheap corrugated roof. Under it, everything seemed to be sun-baking. Behind the counter was a popcorn machine with a high-intensity yellow heat lamp shining on the popped kernels in their little glass house, making them look radioactive. The sidewalk leading up to and away from the stand, stained with the residue of spilled pink ice cream and ketchup, felt sticky on the soles of Gina’s feet. The kid who worked at the stand, selling snack food and renting canoes, was a boy she didn’t recognize — about her age, maybe a year or two older, with short orange hair and an earring — and he stood behind the counter next to the candy display, staring, in pain and boredom, at the floor. He was experiencing summer-job agony. He had a rock station blaring from his battery-powered radio perched on top of the freezer, and his body twitched quietly to the beat. When Gina appeared, the boy looked at her with relief, relief followed by recognition and sympathy, recognition and sympathy followed by a leer as he checked out her tits, the leer followed by a friendly smirk. It all happened very fast. He was like other boys: they shifted gears so quickly you couldn’t always follow them into those back roads and dense forests where they wanted to live with the other varmints and wolves.
Raspberry, please, single scoop. She smiled at him, to tease him, to test out her power, to give him an anguished memory tonight, when he was in bed and couldn’t sleep, thinking of her, in the density of his empty, stupid life.
Walking back to the sand and holding her ice cream cone, she started to think about Gordy Himmelman, and when she did, the crummy lake and the public beach with the algae floating in it a hundred feet offshore in front of her, she felt weird and dizzy, as if: What was the point? She kept walking and taking an occasional, personal, lick at the ice cream. There weren’t too many other people in the sand, but most of the men were fat, and their wives or girlfriends were fat, too, and already they had started to yell at each other, even though it was just barely lunchtime.
She kept walking. It was something to do. Nobody here was beautiful. It all sucked.
The lake gave her a funny feeling, just the fact that it was there. The sky was sky blue, and her mother had said it was a perfect day, but if this was a perfect day, if this was the best that God could manage with the available materials, then. . well, no wonder Gordy Himmelman had shot himself, and no wonder her mother had put up that picture of Switzerland in her bedroom. Gina saw her whole life stretched out in front of her, just like that, the deck of fifty-two cards with Family Day printed on one side, like the picture of the lake in Switzerland that she could barely stand to glance at, vacuuming her up. Why couldn’t anything ever be perfect? It just wasn’t possible. This wasn’t perfect. It was its opposite: fect. A totally fect day. Just to the side, off on another beach towel, somebody’s mom was yelling at and then slapping a little boy. Slapping him, wham wham wham, out in public and in front of everybody, and of course the kid was screaming now, screaming screaming screaming screaming.
Everybody having their own version of Family Day.