Read Online Rockaway by Tara Ison - Free Book Online Page A

battling melanoma and whose thick, mascara’d-looking eyelashes appear bold and hale against his chemo’dscalp. She was the only woman, only girl, on the crowded playground in Riis Park; they were all men in their fifties and sixties, thwacking rubber balls hard and low around the court, breathing in rasps, sweating, all wearing gloves of thin leather with tiny holes like those in old men’s fancy shoes. She sat on a bench and watched. A few times, when she caught Marty watching her watch, she held out her thumb like artists did once upon a time, squinting, tongue at the corner of her mouth, pretending to paint, to measure him in scale against the world; he posed for her in a position of mid- thwack and the guys, winded, gave him little shoves, knocking him out of the composition.
    She wondered who or what they think she is to him. A niece, the daughter of a friend?
    When one of them missed a ball and swore the others poked him, and jerked their heads at her. She was joined on the bench by a guy named Albie, who wasn’t allowed to play; he showed her the inch-long scar on his thigh from a recent angioplasty and the Aztec-design pillbox in the left pocket of his shorts where he kept his nitroglycerin pills. No problem, she reassured him; her father keeps handy a bottle of those same infinitesimal white chips, she knows about angina and putting one under the tongue. She remembered coming home from eighth grade and finding her father gray, lying on the bathroom floor, rigid and limp with pain, her mother stumbling, rummaging in cabinetsand drawers and babbling, Sarah, thank God you’re here, do something, do something!
    She’d told her mother to calm down, call 911, and she’d tipped her father’s head back, dropped in the pill, assured and cradled him until the paramedics arrived.
    She told Albie about her father’s prostate cancer, that the hormone therapy and radiation seem to be working, that he’s still able to play a lot of golf. Albie told her about a prostate piece in the Times , quoted statistics on morbidity and aging, then mournfully watched the other guys play. Marty gave her a clownish grin, waved, and went back to the game.
    Once, walking down a block of musicians and street vendors and coffee houses in Greenwich Village, he stopped in front of a post-waif girl with chromate yellow glasses, on her knees, flipping through a slanted stack of weathered record albums.
    â€œOh, wow,” he said to Sarah. “You’re not going to believe this.”
    He leaned over the girl and pulled an album out; the cover was an overexposed black-and-white photo of a young man with wild, curly dark hair, handsome, bare-chested and somber, his eyes soulful, leaning against a big tree. He handed the album to Sarah and tapped the upper right corner: M ARTY Z ALE .
    â€œThis is you ?” she asked.
    â€œYeah,” he said, sheepish but pleased. “My Jim Croce era. Wow. This thing is over thirty years old.”
    â€œAre you going to buy it?”
    â€œI’ve got it,” he said. “I got it at home, I’ll show you. I’ll play it for you. The sound quality, it’s different. You probably never heard the real thing.” The album’s cardboard shine was mottled, its corner tips worn gray and furred. He read the liner notes, nodding.
    She was nonplussed by the old, young, exposed image of him. “It’s sort of a relief,” she said finally. He looked at her quizzically. “It’s proof you are who you say you are,” she said.
    â€œYeah.” Then he regarded her a moment, baffled. “Aren’t you ?”

    â€œSO, WAIT, ARE you sleeping with him?” her friend Emily asked on the phone.
    â€œNo. I don’t even peck him good night on the cheek. He’s never once touched me.” She felt vaguely embarrassed, not knowing how to explain this . . . relationship? She doesn’t even know what to call it. “Which