Marine Park: Stories Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MARINE PARK

  MARK CHIUSANO is a graduate of Harvard University, where he was the recipient of a Hoopes Prize for outstanding undergraduate fiction. His stories have appeared in Guernica, Narrative, Harvard Review, and online at Tin House and The Paris Review Daily. He was born and raised in Brooklyn.

  Praise for Mark Chiusano’s Marine Park: Stories

  “In clean, honed prose, Mark Chiusano gives us an intimate tour of a neighborhood of Brooklyn not offered up in fiction before. His explorations of loyalty within a family, and the breach of it, are startling and affecting—his sense of story is impeccable. Marine Park is a debut worth a reader’s close attention.”

  —Amy Hempel, author of The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

  “The stories in Marine Park are funny and touching and elliptical, and all about coming of age at the edge of the city and on the margins of the good life, with some moving forward and others left behind. Mark Chiusano is wonderful on how our minds can be elsewhere even when we wish to be wholly present, and on the oblique ways in which we therefore often have to signal our indispensability to one another.”

  —Jim Shepard, author of You Think That’s Bad

  “One of the most subtle, tender, emotionally powerful books that I’ve read in a long time. Set mostly in Brooklyn, but its subject is the whole of America. If you’ve never been to Marine Park before, by the end of this collection you’ll feel like you’d lived there your whole life. This is a stunning debut.”

  —Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of When Skateboards Will Be Free and Brief Encounters with the Enemy

  “Here’s the spirit of dear Sherwood Anderson in Mark Chiusano’s Marine Park, another village brimming with all of the odd drama of families and loners. There is something a little old and wise in this talented writer’s debut. At times the stories read like the news, letters from a friend, and at times the tales seem elegiac glimpses of a lost world. Mr. Chiusano is writing family from the inside out and he makes this world an aching bittersweet pleasure. Here is the kind of affectionate particularity which marks a fine writer.”

  —Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine

  “In Marine Park, Mark Chiusano shines a light on lives that are too often left in the dark. He shows us, with humor and deep-hearted compassion, the complexities of growing up and growing old in the blue-collar shadows, and he gives us, story after story, the chance to see ourselves in his longing, hopeful characters. This is a wise and affecting collection, and it marks the arrival of a voice we’ve not heard until now, one that will carry through the streets and alleys of contemporary literature for years to come.”

  —Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published in Penguin Books 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Mark Chiusano

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The following magazines published earlier versions of several stories in this collection: The Bad Version (“Vampire Deer on Jekyll Island”), Blip (“Why Don’t You”), The Harvard Advocate (“Air-Conditioning,” “Car Parked on Quentin, Being Washed,” and “We Were Supposed”), The Harvard Crimson (“The Tree”), Harvard Review (“To Live in the Present Moment Is a Miracle”), Narrative (“Heavy Lifting”), and The Utopian (“Shatter the Trees and Blow Them Away”).

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Chiusano, Mark.

  Marine Park : stories / Mark Chiusano.

  pages cm

  eBook ISBN 978-1-101-63203-1

  1. Marine Park (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.H5745M37 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2014006051

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my mother and father, and for Scott

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Praise for Marine Park: Stories

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  HEAVY LIFTING

  AIR-CONDITIONING

  OPEN YOUR EYES

  VINCENT AND AURORA

  WHY DON’T YOU

  VAMPIRE DEER ON JEKYLL ISLAND

  TO LIVE IN THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MIRACLE

  CLEAN

  SHATTER THE TREES AND BLOW THEM AWAY

  FOR YOU

  HAIRCUT

  ED MONAHAN’S GAME

  WE WERE SUPPOSED

  PALMS

  ATTACHED

  CAR PARKED ON QUENTIN, BEING WASHED

  THE TREE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  HEAVY LIFTING

  Lorris turned the key in the garage door lock, and I pulled the door up. Look, said Lorris. Icicles, he said. They were hanging from the metal runner on the bottom.

  There were three shovels in the back of the garage and Lorris picked two, grasping each at its center to test the weight. He handed me the longer one, the slightly heavier one, for breaking up ice patches. He was too small for that. Then we closed the garage door.

  Outside, on Avenue R, the snowdrifts went up as high as the information boxes on the bus stop poles. The fire hydrants were completely buried. We tried to put our boots in the few footsteps in the middle of the street. If we dug down we’d be walking on the double yellow line. The plows weren’t out this early. I carried the shovel on my shoulder, blade up. Lorris dragged his behind him. Every once in a while he’d pick it up to knock off the snow sticking to the end.

  At the first house, Lorris waited at the bottom of the stairs. You go, he said. I took off my glove to ring the bell. Shovel your walk? I asked the old woman who answered. Kenneth, she yelled behind her, before she disappeared into the warmth. A man appeared in his undershirt. Move along now, he said.

  We only went to houses with driveways, for the possibility of extra work. Ones with cars in front, to say that someone was home. Often the windows with no Christmas decorations, because non-Christians paid better for this kind of thing. The rest of them shoveled little pathways down their own steps on the way to mass. Lorris was good at spotting mezuzahs nailed to the wooden frames.

  At the third house a little girl answered the door. She was even younger than Lorris. She still had her pajamas on. Is your mom home? I said. Lorris looked up from the bottom of the stairs. A beautiful lady came up behind the girl, wrapped in a wool blanket. Is something wrong? she asked. Do you need some shoveling? I said. I pointed at my shovel with my bare hand.

  The lady looked behind her, into the house. What’re you charging? she said.

  Twenty bucks, I answered. I could hear Lorris suck in his breath.

  I�
�ll give you ten, she said.

  I need fifteen, I told her. She played with the hair on top of the girl’s head. Clean our driveway out too? she asked.

  We were always good shovelers, Lorris and I. I think we came out of the womb doing it. Lorris used the small one for finesse work—the stairs, the edges under railings, the wheel paths of cars. He did the salt, if people had it for us, though he made me carry the bags from their doorsteps to strategic central locations. I didn’t like my gloves getting blue from the chemicals. I was the heavy lifting man, could carry three times my shovel’s maximum load.

  At the corner of Quentin, off Marine Park, a Jeep was stuck in the crosswalk. There were other crews of kids carrying their shovels on their shoulders. A big-chested man rolled down the passenger-side window and shouted into the cold: Twenty-five bucks if you get us moving. Two crews raced across the street to get there first, and because they made it at the same time, they both just started digging. A couple of early drinkers came out of the Mariners Inn without coats on, trailing steam behind them, to watch. Lorris pulled on my sleeve and said, I think Red Jacket’s the best. We leaned on our shovels while the Jeep’s wheels spun and shrieked, the gray slush shooting up into the shovelers’ faces. One kid was jamming the shovel blade right into the rubber of the tire, and the passenger-side window rolled down again, and the man said, Hey, knock that off.

  Once the Jeep lurched forward a little, a twenty-dollar bill came flying out the window and landed in the snow. Two kids dove on top of it. One of them had a Hurricanes football sweatshirt on. On the back it said, GIVE ’EM HELL. The Jeep screamed away, toward Avenue U and the Belt Parkway. Come on, Lorris, I said.

  It was twelve o’clock when we finished our usual streets. Someone with a snowplow was revving his engine on Thirty-Sixth, ruining our business. A group of three men, in heavy blue sweatshirts, jogged by us with shovels. The one in the front had hair on his face. ’Ta boys, he said. Can we go home now? Lorris whined, hitting my back with his shovel handle. Almost, I said. He unwrapped the Rice Krispies bar he kept in his pocket for emergencies.

  The house didn’t have a doorbell. You could have told that even before you were on the stoop. Part of the front window had cardboard over it. Come inside, the man said when he opened the door. We’re not supposed to, Lorris called from the bottom of the unshoveled stairs. Shut up, I told him. He followed my boot prints up.

  Get the snow off your feet, the man said. I don’t want water bugs in my house, he said. We stamped our feet on the rubber mat. We followed his wide back through the dark, into the kitchen. Here, he said, and put two mugs in our hands.

  We sat at the kitchen table. Lorris looked at the man, and the man glowered down at him. His chest was sweaty and his firehouse T-shirt stuck to it, bleeding black through the blue. His crucifix chain hung over his shirt. I need you to do my backyard, he said.

  Out the screen door, we surveyed the job. Deep, thick drifts, nowhere for good foot purchase. Fences too high to throw the snow over. A hundred dollars for the whole thing, he said.

  We waded into the middle. Lorris and I started back to back. The man had put a windbreaker on and was sitting in a foldout chair with his feet up, watching us. That’s it, he said. That’s right. Our shovels hit the ground. We pushed off from each other, Lorris shoveling his snow to my side, where I snared it and tossed it off under the high porch. That’s it, the man said.

  It got so hot that we took off our jackets. The sun was higher and higher. The sweat was dripping from the blue beanies our mother made us wear. When I looked up at the man sitting there his mouth was slightly open, like he was waiting for something to happen, like he didn’t think that we would finish. But we got all the snow off. We shoveled that yard until just the bare garden was showing beneath it, the soil hard as concrete that when we reached made our shovels ring.

  AIR-CONDITIONING

  For a while there was only one air conditioner in our house. It was in the living room, and we put it on during birthdays or the Fourth of July. It covered the heat in the kitchen from my mother burning things, like the half-sausages, the hot ones, which had a black crust on the bottom from where they touched the pan for too long.

  Lorris slept in my room during the summer, even though he had his own room, because mine had a ceiling fan. It had wooden slats with small holes at the edges so that in the winter we could hang our model planes and cars off the ends. After our mother had dusted the top of the slats, we would set the fan going on a low frequency and the planes and race cars would spin around, getting higher and higher with the centripetal acceleration, until the Lego ones started to break apart and Lorris ran shouting from the room.

  Our parents had been arguing in the living room, with the air conditioner masking the noise a little, and we were building Lego cars in my room, when finally I came and sat on the stairs and started reading a poem I’d written the week before about how cold the pancakes were that morning.

  The pancakes, I said, were cold this morning. I was sitting with my knees together on the top step and Lorris was lying on his stomach clutching the two-by-two Lego piece I had asked him to find. I started over: The pancakes were cold this morning.

  That’s enough of that, said my father.

  I’m just trying to help, I said.

  Jamison’s just trying to help, said Lorris.

  It’s none of your business, my father said. This is an adult conversation. From downstairs we could hear the kitchen cabinets being slammed shut. Conversation, he repeated.

  • • •

  One day my father came home carrying a second air conditioner. He was carrying it the way you carry birthday presents, as if someone was about to stack more boxes on top. He had to put the air conditioner down to ring the doorbell, even though Lorris and I had seen him through the upstairs window, and our mother went to answer it, us behind her, her shoulder and neck cradling the portable phone. She put a hand over the receiver to say, I don’t even want to know.

  My father was a driving instructor. He worked at the place on Kings Highway under the train tracks, where the storefronts grow on top of each other until one of them covers the other. The office for the Kings Highway Driving School was on the second floor, and they were ignoring Department of Health requests to make it handicap accessible. They posted a sign that said, FOR HANDICAPPED, PLEASE CALL UP. WILL COME DOWN AND GET YOU. So far they’d never had to do it.

  I was thirteen at the time, and taking any seconds in the car I could get. Technically I was too young, but if we went in the practice car and lit up the sign on top that said STUDENT DRIVER, no one said anything. Everyone in our neighborhood was a cop, and they knew me and my father pretty well, so we always drove out toward the sanitation plant on Gerritsen, the shit factory, where you could make the widest turns. Sometimes we let Lorris in the back, because he always begged to come, and he took his favorite Hot Wheel, the red one with the white stripe down the middle. It was always the fastest on our yellow racetrack. He held it in both hands, mimicking the turns and motions I made while I drove.

  My mother didn’t like the idea of me driving, especially with my father, because she said that someday we would get caught and it would go on my permanent transcript. That was the kind of thing she was always ragging about, things on my permanent school transcript. Even though I was about to graduate, and Madison doesn’t turn people away. She thought that those kinds of things ride on your bumper forever, and maybe they do, but I try to ask as few questions as possible. She wasn’t around when we drove anyway, because she worked eight to six as a school secretary.

  My father lounged around most mornings, doing his shifts in the office three days a week, but other than that he stayed at home until four, when the first lessons were usually scheduled. Sometimes he’d paint the basement just for something to do, or sweep the stoop. I got off the cheese bus from school around three, which left almost an hour for driving. Some days, if L
orris was late at an after-school program, we’d go pick him up. Our mother liked that the least. How could we explain ourselves picking a nine-year-old kid up at school and say this is still a lesson? She was mainly just unhappy because she thought our father wasn’t a good driver, and that it was terrifying that he was teaching the whole borough below Fulton Street. Technically she might have been better, but he was confident about it, and didn’t worry about hitting the brakes too hard or conserving gas. She was always stopping at yellows.

  When he brought the second air conditioner home it was April, but one of those hot Aprils that remind you what summer’s like, before it rains again. In Brooklyn we waited for thunderstorms. Once our father left for work and before our mother got home, I’d get the key for the garage and open the heavy door slowly, hand over hand. Lorris would be drumming on the metal as it went up. We’d pull our bikes out, his fire-yellow, mine blue and white, and race down the side streets to Marine Park by the water. There were trees on the outside of the park, basketball courts near the street. In the middle, a wide paved oval studded by baseball fields, their backstops open, facing each other across the grass. At that point in the afternoon you could feel the heat through the handlebars. We’d make it one lap around the oval, 0.84 miles, before we heard the first thunder, and then Lorris would yell and dart ahead even though he’d just gotten his training wheels off. The rain came down all at once then, and all of a sudden it would be cold, and this was the best part, when I pulled over by the water fountain and Lorris circled back to me. I pulled the two red and blue windbreakers out of my bike basket and we put them on, invincible. We rode two more laps in the storm until racing each other home.

  • • •

  Dad put the second air conditioner in his and Mom’s room. It was just the bathroom and a closet between their room and mine, and if we had the fan on low Lorris and I could hear the air conditioner clearing its throat all night. That’s what it sounded like—like it was constantly hacking something up from deep down in its throat. Sometimes if I was awake after going to the bathroom in the early a.m., I could hear our mother wake up and walk over to it, and turn it down a few settings. It took them a long time to get the hang of how high they wanted it to be. It would be too warm when they went to bed, but then freezing by morning, unless Mom got up to fix it. We could tell when she hadn’t gotten up, because when we went in before school to say good-bye to Dad, on the days he was sleeping there, he’d have the white sheets all wrapped around his head from the middle of the night.