Marine Park: Stories Read Online Free PDF

don’t know why we had dark curtains. It seemed heavier than it should be. I couldn’t see behind it. The curtain kept dancing. Slowly we walked toward it. I could hear everything from outside, the scrape of a door, the sound of people running, a horn beeping, twice. I raised my hands, I felt my knuckles pop. And suddenly there was a hand grabbing my arm and I turned around and swung.
    It was Lorris, laughing, who ducked the punch, and ran shrieking into the living room, but I followed him, running, threw him down on the floor and hit him with both hands. His stomach, so the wind got knocked out, his shoulders, his face with my palms. He was shouting, scratching at me, my face, my mouth, my eyes. The packages were strewn around us. I pinned him, so he couldn’t move anything, and leaned my head down close to his. Close your eyes, I said. No, he said, get off me. But then I hit him again and he did. I did too. I could hear the creaking of the walls, the rush of the bus going by outside the windows. There were no leaves for the wind to rustle on the dead trees. Lorris whispered, What are you going to do?

VINCENT AND AURORA

T hey had lived alone together for many years, since their sons moved out to get married. It was a house on Madoc Avenue, where the backyard opened onto the water, and a wooden dock extended from the porch out into Dead Horse Bay. In the summers they left their motorboat there, the
Napoli
, and they’d take it up and down the canal, past the salt marsh, its high grass and swampy inlets, sometimes all the way out to Rockaway, under the Marine Parkway Bridge.
    They weren’t rich and they weren’t poor, although when Vincent turned sixty-five their children, Tommy and Salvy, threw him a surprise party and sent a check for five hundred dollars. Aurora wanted to rip it up. Vincent collected Social Security and she had always saved her earnings, from working at the voting polls at PS 222 for decades. Democrat or Republican? she’d ask, and hand them a white sheet or blue sheet. This year it was Bush and Clinton. Vincent had had his candy store, but then he’d sold it to the Benduccis. At Christmas, they always had a live tree.
    The house was painted white, with little flecks where tree branches had kicked off color during storms, and a flat roof that the kids liked to go onto when they were teenagers. Once Vincent found cans of PBR in the gutter when he was cleaning out the leaves, and he sat his sons down to talk to them more about their indiscretion than anything else. It surprised them, his sudden sharpness, all the more so when they found that he wasn’t angry about the beer. Who hadn’t tried to get away from their parents on a summer night, the breeze coming off the water, the sky clear to Manhattan, Vincent had put it. He understood. But where he was raised, in Carroll Gardens, with the Irish cops, you had to be more careful—and he wanted them to understand this, to take a certain amount of care. He didn’t tell Aurora about the beer.
    It was a row house, connected to other houses on the side, differentiated from a suburb, though you’d be hard-pressed for what to call it. Marine Park was the part of the city, Aurora often said, least served by the train and bus system. If the oceans rose like people said they would, this part of Brooklyn would be the first to go. It was an hour with the walk to the Q train and the ride into the city to see a Broadway play, or to go to the Museum of Natural History, which meant lower real estate prices and a bit of sleepiness. One neighbor was a drug addict, supported by unknown funds. There was the neighborhood drunk, who was in and out of the house. Across the street the eldest son of a large family—who marked his adolescent growth year after year with new tattoos, sprouting in strange places across his body, reported one after another by a gleeful Tommy, who knew him from school—was gone one day after the