Page 7 of On Fire Island

“Oh,” she had said out loud in the elevator of the Brighton Beach apartment building where both of their grandmothers lived.

Andie and Pam had known each other since they were kids, and the last time she had done something scandalous in the elevator with Andie, they had gotten chased by the building’s super forpressing all the buttons. At ten, she thought it quite thrilling. Their kiss topped it.

Andie took a step back.

“Oh, what?”

“Oh my God,” she clarified.

They both laughed. The Q train could not make it to the city fast enough after that. They spent the rest of the weekend in bed.

When Pam relayed their meet-cute story to me, she riffed on the famous Billy Crystal quote at the end ofWhen Harry Met Sally: “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with women, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

Pam’s grandmother—Bubbe Bertie, as she liked to call her—recognized something in Pam that she had yet to let herself discover. When I spent time with her bubbe, the few times I had, I figured that looking at her granddaughter may have been a bit like looking in the mirror. My guess was that Bubbe Bertie would have lived a very different life if she were born a few decades later and that she wanted more for her granddaughter. In the spirit of another eighties rom-com,Crossing Delancey, Bertie fancied herself a Jewish matchmaker and invited her neighbor and her neighbor’s granddaughter (Andie) for Shabbat dinner one night, when Pam was coming from the city, hoping the two women would reconnect.

When hearing of the surprise guest Pam said, “Bubbe. This is awkward. I haven’t seen her in years.”

“I think you will have a lot in common,” Bertie insisted.

There was no use in arguing. There was never much use in arguing with Bubbe Bertie.

As kids, Pam and Andie were thick as thieves. Both girls grewup in the suburbs, Pam in Jersey, Andie on Long Island, and both were shipped to their grandmothers’ apartment building in Brighton Beach on school vacations, while their parents worked. What may sound like torture held some of their greatest childhood memories.

For two kids from the suburbs, an apartment building in Brooklyn may as well have been Disney World. They played sidewalk games with the neighborhood kids, like hopscotch, jump rope, and handball, while the bubbes sat on lawn chairs, relishing the faint sea breeze coming off the ocean just a block away. They rode their scooters up and down the boardwalk, and when the weather was bad they scooted in circles around the lobby. When they were old enough to cross the street, the bubbes gave them a couple of bucks to walk over to Mrs.Stahl’s Knishes, a tiny shop tucked under the elevated train on Brighton Beach Avenue. Pam still dreamed of the crispy cushions of mashed potatoes and onions. Andie would always get the smelly kasha flavor instead of potato—even though the neighborhood kids would turn their noses up at her “old lady” choice. She didn’t care. She had always danced to the beat of her own drum. It was one of the things Pam admired most in her. Pam, on the other hand, had always been a conformist.

As they tell it, on one particularly hot spring day when they were around sixteen, Andie smuggled a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine in her overnight bag and the two of them snuck out in the middle of the night and headed for the beach to escape the heat of their grandmothers’ stifling apartments. They took off their shoes under the boardwalk, dug their feet deep into the sand until they reached the cold layer, and passed the bottle of cheap sweet wine back and forth till they felt light and tipsy. They lay back on the sand. The wind had picked up a bit, and Andie turned on her side and looked into Pam’s eyes with a serious expression. She reachedout and tucked a few errant hairs behind Pam’s ear. Pam felt a stirring in her groin that she had never felt before, and it frightened her. She jumped to her feet to counter it.

“Let’s go,” she’d insisted, already on her way back to the building. Sixteen-year-old Andie followed, feeling as if she had crossed a line but still too young and inexperienced to put it into words.

After that, other than quick hellos in passing during Jewish holidays, they didn’t see each other for years. Until that kiss in the elevator, when everything changed.

“You hungry?” Andie asked Pam now, at the ferry dock.

“Not really,” Pam replied.

“White or red chowder?” Andie inquired.

“White.”

We all laughed.

Hungry or not, the first ferry ride of the season was not complete without a cup of clam chowder from the snack-bar window. Nothing compares to that first spoonful after months of longing for it—thick with chunks of potato, bits of bacon, and dollops of nostalgia. I would have been envious but, lo and behold, I seemed to have lost that emotion as well. C’est la vie, c’est la mort.

•••

We stepped in line at the snack counter behind Matthew Tucker, the sixteen-year-old son of my across-the-street neighbor Renee—the one who shuddered at her ex-husband’s touch at the funeral. I looked around for Renee but didn’t see her or her ex, Tuck, anywhere. I was surprised Matty was on his own, though he wasn’t completely—his cat, Houdini, was strapped to his back in one of those pet carrier backpacks. It was usually Renee’s job to bring Houdini out at the beginning of the season. I looked around for her again, then imagined her trying to keep herdistance from Tuck at the shiva at our apartment in the city. I was sure she was questioning what she was doing there since Ben was nowhere to be found. I was sure that many people were wondering the same thing right about now—especially our friends and work colleagues. For Ben’s sake, I hoped the widower card was on par with the cancer card—I hadn’t done anything that I didn’t want to since my diagnosis.

The kid behind the counter looked at Matty familiarly.

“Extra crackers, right?” he asked.

“Yeah, thanks,” Matty responded, adding the obligatory, “how was your winter?”

“Awesome, man. You?”

Matty knew there was little worse than asking the standard question “How was your winter?” and receiving the shit truth in return.

I hoped no one would ask Ben the “How was your winter?” question. I assumed that my death was common knowledge by now, while Matty’s problems, I thought, were more on the q.t. Not for me, by the way: his mom had fully shared every hideous detail of their divorce as it transpired.

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