Read Online Rockaway by Tara Ison - Free Book Online

Oldies celebration, WCBS 101.1 FM, New York’s Oldies station, live broadcast, she’d get a kick out of it. Marty Zale & the Satellites, he and the guys, going back a long time, twenty years they’ve been doing this, just for the fun. You oughtta come, you’ll have fun, come.
    She’d professed great reluctance—I’m really on track with my new painting now, I don’t want to break the momentum, she told him—but finally gave in, pleased by his insistence. Her little sketch of a shell has made it onto a canvas in her room; it is now a few charcoal strokes, some vague, preliminary daubs of ivory and iron oxide black. She likes its clumsy little shell foot, just peeking out. It is a slow but good beginning, she’d thought. Good enough that I’ve earned a break. Have some fun, maybe, yes.
    â€œâ€˜You taking the kid?’” Marty exits the Marine Parkway Bridge, heads down Flatbush Avenue.
    â€œWhat?” Sarah asks.
    â€œThat’s what Julius asked me. `You taking the kid?’”
    â€œDoes that mean me? I’m ‘the kid’?” This delights her; she suspects it will continue to.
    â€œYeah.” He bobs his head. “You’re the kid.”
    â€œI like that.”
    He shrugs. “Whatever.”
    â€œI’m too old for Julius,” Sarah says. Marty smiles slightly at her—he only ever smiles slightly at her—and adjusts the collar of his brown leather jacket. She wonders if he gets the joke, that Julius is fifty-eight, and she is therefore almost twenty-five years younger, but that this is still too old. That Marty, too, is fifty-eight, and so it is meant both as a joke and as a provocation. “You know, right?” she continues, to make sure. “You know I’m thirty-four?”
    â€œYeah, I know,” says Marty, looking back at the road. “But I can’t do anything about that.”

    HE HAS BEEN taking her places for over a month now: more shabbes evenings at Itzak’s, where Darlene serves margaritas and he and Itzak reminisce about acid trips from the late sixties; day trips into Manhattan and a boat tour to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island; recording and editing sessions for two movies he’s scoring at tiny studios in Williamsburg, where he ignored her for hours at a stretch while she tucked herself in a corner among abandoned coffee mugs propped on speakers, read The Village Voice and told herself she was doing research, like her shell book and walks on the beach, deepening her vision, gathering experience. Gatheringlayers, yes, allowing herself time. There is still plenty of time. He has taken her to dinner at a kosher Chinese restaurant, and to a vegetarian Israeli cafe. He insisted on buying her a new, unspattered color wheel and a seventy-five-dollar Isabey sable brush from an art supply shop in Park Slope, which, feeling guilty about her little shell painting waiting for her back in her room, she had reluctantly accepted. Saturday afternoons they have promenaded back and forth along the Rockaway Boardwalk, without bumping into each other, with their own separate bottles of water. When he runs into guys he knows from shul he leaves her standing to one side, shifting from foot to foot, while they talk. He likes to drive around Brooklyn neighborhoods and show her Orthodox Jews, the old men with sidelocks and tall hats trimmed with black fur, the heavily clothed women carrying stringed parcels and flocked by children in lisle knee socks. They fascinate him; he slows the car to a crawl, his hands splayed on the steering wheel, his mouth open, as if they’re driving through a wildlife animal park.
    What am I doing here? she sometimes says aloud to Marty. Who is this guy? she says, rhetorically, meaning him. This always gets one of his slight, amused smiles; she spaces saying this out carefully, to keep him amused.
    She went to watch him play handball with his friend Saul, who is