Grace somehow managed to sneak around with boys behind Dad’s back. She would make up excuses about the yearbook committee or student-council meetings and tumble in long after the nine o’clock curfew, and Suzy knew where she had been just by looking at her rumpled skirt and tangled hair. Grace had always been the daring one until she found God and moved to New Jersey. Suzy, on the other hand, never even kissed a boy until her freshman year in college, when she moved out of her parents’ house into the dorm. His name was Brad. Suzy never even knew his last name. He was her first roommate Liz’s boyfriend and stayed over every weekend; each time Suzy turned to the wall to sleep, she would hear moans and giggles from the other bed. Then, one day, Suzy came back from class and found him waiting for Liz. It was awkward to be puttering about with him sitting on Liz’s bed. The silence hung heavy as Suzy sat facing the desk, still feeling his eyes on her. It was when she decided that she’d had enough and began gathering her books that she felt his hands on her shoulders. He said nothing at all, and Suzy just froze. He slowly turned her around and kissed her without hesitation, not the sweet and soft kind, but the forceful probing of a tongue that was confident and mechanical. Then he walked away from her and lit a cigarette and asked when Liz was coming back. “Any minute now,” Suzy answered without looking at him, and threw the books in her bag and walked out. He never kissed her again, and Liz never knew.
Later, Suzy would recall that first kiss as if it were an omen. What was it about her that marked her as the other woman? What did he see?
What Suzy never forgot was the smell. It was a sick smell, like something dying almost, like instant powdered milk, nondairy creamer, the milky-baby smell but fake. It leaped into her throat and would not wash away, no matter how fiercely she rinsed her mouth afterward. Each time she kissed boys after that, she looked for the smell. She pretended to kiss them and looked for the smell. Sometimes she would sniff the awful smell and would push the boy away violently and never speak to him afterward. But when the smell wasn’t there, she would be curiously disappointed. It was as if nothing quite erased the initial shock of being kissed by someone who was not hers, a kiss that was stolen, claimed from her flippantly, a kiss so abrasively illicit that she seemed to deserve it, as though she was not worth much to begin with. It stuck with her, the shame, the smell, and came back at odd moments, such as when she stood on the steps of St. John the Divine and saw in the older man’s eyes a clear reflection of herself, terribly young and terribly dissatisfied.
Damian would later confess that he had indeed followed her from the lecture hall. What made him do it? He would never say. He might have been bored, or simply tempted by a young woman who seemed as unmoved as he was by his wife’s lecture, or, more likely, he really had nowhere he wanted to be on that afternoon. Perhaps he wanted Yuki Tamiko to notice him following the girl; that Suzy reminded him of Yuki at nineteen was a minor detail he would have preferred not to see. But he did follow her, which was embarrassingly impulsive for someone so much older and supposedly more sensible. He followed her all the way down the College Walk and along Amsterdam Avenue, to stand before her finally with an awkward smile, which only accentuated his lone dimple, and seemed to her somehow heart-breakingly sad. His stare did not waver, and she stared back, because she thought it might make her appear less young. Finally, one of them burst out laughing—Suzy is not sure which—and soon both were laughing like kids who had cut class and gotten away with it.
Ten years since, and it seems impossible now that she should be alone, no parents, no Damian. She thought that the choice was one or the other, and it was up to her to decide. It never occurred to her then that she would lose both, that she would not be able to keep the one even after sacrificing the other, and that the choice was never really there from the beginning.
All around her, people are gathering their things. 11:37 a.m., Montauk. Outside is the November beach town, empty and forlorn. Between the rain streaks on the windowpane are her parents buried at sea, half rising to meet their daughter here at last.
6.
NOTHING IS AS DESOLATE as a late-autumn beach. The motels with “Vacancy” signs wear the dejected face of the abandoned. The fish-and-chips stands have pulled down their shutters, closed for the winter. Fickle and selfish, the rest of the world has skipped out. Gone are the flirtatious smiles, the bronzed bodies, the neon beach balls flopping down on the bluest water. Girls with names like Tracy and Cindy and Judy no longer hang out at McSwiggin’s, which is the only bar near the train station still open for business.
Even at this early hour, a few men are stooping at the bar, nursing pints. They glance at Suzy but soon look away with the stolid faces of small-town men. Most fishermen hang out at the dock, on the other side of the town, where many bars remain open, lobster and swordfish being their prime catch this season. But the nonfishing locals, mostly Irish descendants, prefer the bars in town, where the grime and sweat of the fishing crowd remain far away, where they might hang on to their Montauk as a sort of Hawaii for Long Island’s working class.
It is lunchtime when Suzy enters. “Catch of the Day = $4.99” seems underpriced, and Suzy points to it immediately upon settling on a stool. The bartender is a grinning man in his mid-forties. She has seen him before, the same time last year, when she peeked in for a cup of coffee. Suzy remembers thinking how perfect that he should be called Bob, such a compact guy with a barrel chest and permanently tanned forearms.
“You want that poached, right?” he asks with a good-natured hearty smile.
“Pardon?”
“Lady, I told you we don’t poach our fish, just fried, plain and good!” He is still smiling, so he is not annoyed, perhaps teasing a bit.
“Fried, yes, that’s fine.”
He must be confusing her with someone else. He thinks she’s been here before, which she has, but a year ago, just for coffee, could he remember that?
“And coffee, right?” He is already pouring a cup. He then brings her packets of cream and sugar and says, “Oh, I forgot, you want Sweet’n Low, sorry, we’re out.”
Suzy stares at him awhile before reaching for the mug. She takes a sip and winces at its burnt aftertaste. The coffee’s been brewed for much too long. Black, which is the only way she takes her coffee.
“No seltzer with a straw today?” Bob taunts with a wink.
Grace it must be. Grace must have been here recently. Grace, who never touches fried food and never takes sugar, who never drinks anything without a straw—he must be confusing her with Grace. When was she here? Does she come here often?
The sisters look fairly alike. When they were young, they often passed for twins. “Stupid fucks,” Grace fumed, “they think all Asian girls look alike!” But Suzy was secretly happy, for she knew her sister was a beauty. They had similar features, but Grace had longer eyelashes, a finer complexion, sleeker cheekbones, poutier lips, and blacker, straighter hair. At first sight, there was no doubt that they were sisters, perhaps even twins to those who did not have an eye for beauty. But upon a closer inspection, it was clear that Grace had far superior features, the sort of face a man might die for, as Suzy thought and often witnessed through high school, when the boys would steal glances at her older sister, who remained aloof and haughty, as though her beauty were reserved for far better things than a mere boy with his dad’s Toyota. The odd thing was that Grace had a reputation for being easy, but only with the older boys, the sort of boys who had cut out of school long ago, who hung in front of the local pool hall on their motorbikes, which probably did not even belong to them to begin with, who waited for Grace outside the school gate with helmets on, not for the sake of safety but to remain faceless, Suzy thought. Grace managed to hide it all from their parents. This must have been because the family moved so often. Before Grace could settle in with any of her troubled boys, they moved again, and Grace would find yet another pool hall, to which she would disappear on evenings when her parents worked overtime. Even more impressive was that Grace kept up her grades. Grace would sit by herself in the corner of the cafeteria and study furiously, while Suzy was cozily tucked in with her set of meek friends. Grace would never sit with Suzy. She said that it was embarrassing. She said that Suzy with her geeky friends embarrassed her. Everyone called Grace a stuck-up bitch, especially the girls who could not stand how their boyfriends kept looking at the new girl in the corner. All Suzy felt was distance. They must have been close once, but that seemed impossibly far away.