Rockaway Read Online Free Page B

oyster. She wonders if he ever cuts himself by accident. She wonders if the lemon juice from all those wedges burns.
    He asks if she has any kids, and she tells him No, but she is very close to her parents. They’re a very close family. Her parents are just wonderful. They’re getting older,though. She tells him her mother is in poor health now, liver problems and maybe a transplant down the road, that her father has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. But early stage. They are treating it with hormone therapy, she adds, sipping her martini, and are all very hopeful.
    â€œYeah,” he says, nodding enthusiastically. “Hormone therapy. They say that works great, can sometimes do the whole job. Or maybe with the radiation they do. The younger you are, that’s when it’s bad. But you get hit at sixty-five, seventy, you’re okay, you know? Something else’s gonna kill you first.” He seems contemplative and informed on this subject, and she realizes, after all, that he probably isn’t that much younger than her father. “It’s nice they got you to depend on now,” he adds.
    â€œYes,” she says. “I live, well I lived , just down the street. I do their shopping, take them to their appointments, stuff like that. They’re fun to cook for. I like to make them special meals, healthy things, you know. Nonfat sour cream. Hide the vegetables.”
    â€œSee, that’s really something, a daughter like you. Really something.” He nods approvingly at her, and she smiles, basks a little, then waves away the compliment.
    â€œOh, they’re wonderful. They’re doing great. Really strong. They’ll both probably live a long, long time, yet.” She takes a healthy swallow of martini. “Thank God.”
    The shrimp cocktail arrives; a rhomboid dish of thickcrimson sauce, the shrimps clinging to its glass rim like drowning people clutching at a lifeboat.
    When the check comes she pokes her hand at it, but Julius bemusedly slaps a credit card on top, away from her. The oyster pirate smiles knowingly at her and she understands, with Julius paying for the evening, that she now has a duty to be a charming, attentive companion. She needs to stop discussing stupid and unkind things like prostate cancer and oyster shell bridal spoons. The thought of the rest of the evening still to go like this exhausts her.
    â€œYou look a little like Anthony Quinn,” she tells him.
    â€œYeah?” he says, pleased. “Hey, see, then I got time yet. He was still having kids up till the end, right?”
    â€œRight,” she assures him. “Never too late for a fresh start.”
    Before they leave he loudly asks the manager where to go for real Italian food around here; she thinks this is meant to underscore for her that while he once was from here, he is now from Manhattan. The manager snaps up a card from a large clamshell on the counter, scribbles, and hands it to him. “Marino’s,” he says. “Eighteenth and a hunnert sixty-seven. Ask for Dean. Tell him Larry from Lundy’s sent yover.”
    Julius gets lost. They drive through brightly lit Little Odessa, on a tunnel-like street beneath an elevated train, where they pass pierogi stands selling homemade borscht and Russian nightclubs advertising acts in neon Cyrillic letters. That was a great trip, she says, when I was in Russia,and launches into the story of traveling Europe the summer after college, before she was supposed to move to Chicago for grad school, the tour meant to study Balthus’s naked little girls at the Pompidou, Goya’s witchy women, gouaches in the Prado—she remembers roaming careless and carefree, lightweight everything tossed in a nylon backpack, the gossamer-float sense of skimming trains—and tells him how, the funny thing of the story is, really, that her most vivid memory is standing in line for hours outside the Hermitage to get real Russian