All This Heavenly Glory (25 page)

Fail to reach Jenna, your stepdad, your cousin, your stepbrother Chris in D.C., a dozen other friends. Call Dad even though
he lives in Iowa. Try e-mail. One way or another, by the end of the day, get through to/get word of the safety of everyone
you’re close to who still lives back east. Feel as though you abandoned New York/as though New York has a personality and
that it has just been wounded very badly/that you should have been there/that this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t abandoned
New York/guilty for having previously thought that it was New York who abandoned you and spit you out like a bad grape. Feel
relief/horror/despair/gratitude/dread simultaneously. Wish for one day/afternoon/hour in your entire life with only a single
emotion, preferably one of the good ones.

And then this:

Jenna calls to say that the Dans are missing. You haven’t seen the Dans in fifteen years, but it’s neither here nor there.
Dan Parker worked on the 103rd floor. Dan Julian was at Windows on the World. Maintain belief/denial for nine days that people
will be found, try to think of any good reason why Dan P’s family would go ahead and have a memorial service on the seventh
day when there are surely hundreds or thousands of people alive and well in a giant air pocket in the basement living perfectly
well on Jamba Juice and Cinnabons.

Remember this:

You and your best friend Jenna Ritter are twenty-one. Actually you’re twenty-one; Jenna will remind you for the rest of your
life that she’s four months younger and at this time, only twenty. Explain repeatedly that this does not make her a year younger
four months out of the year, even when she tells you
Shut up
. You are a guest at the Ritters’ house in Seaview for the summer, working as a cocktail waitress at McDonough’s restaurant
in town (aka Ocean Beach, the next community over).

Do this every day: Put on purple striped bikini. Eat cereal. Go to beach. Walk several miles in both directions. Swim. Read.
Achieve unprecedented Coppertone tan. Hang with lifeguards. Develop severe crush on tall blond but somewhat silent Dan P.
Flirt with less silent Tico and Jack and Gary and Donnie and Dan J. but rebuff any serious advances from any of the above
even though Jack tries to insist you need mouth-to-mouth
preventively
and Dan J. calls you
legitimately gorgeous
and despite the fact that for several summers you’ve had a separate but milder crush on Dan P’s friend Donnie who says things
like
the caliber of that bikini, and the wearer thereof, is high
. Leave beach only for
Days of Our Lives,
lunch (turkey sandwiches on a poppy-seed roll with lettuce, tomato, and too much salt), recap of current crushes with Jenna
(recently extricated from intense five days with Gary, currently hot and heavy with Dan P.’s college friend Andy). Understand
that on Fire Island there are certain unwritten laws to maximize Fire Island experience:

1. Wardrobe must be limited to: One bathing suit. One outfit/uniform, preferably something well-worn, modified only by addition
   of a light jacket in the event of rain or a cooler evening. Come to know people simply by what they wear (e.g., neighbor in
   polo shirt down the street known only as Pink Man). This summer, your outfit is a Fiorucci jean miniskirt and a well-worn
   work shirt with a tank top underneath. Jenna’s is a pair of carpenter pants (
   carps
   ) with the well-worn white Stones t-shirt you gave her that belonged to one of your exes that you’d rather not be reminded
   of every single day except she won’t leave the house in anything else. (She’ll try, there is a ritual of trying, a more or
   less daily ritual of trying that involves a series of well-worn t-shirts of her own, but they are always abandoned after a
   very long hour in which you are required to be present for some sort of advising that never takes hold, in favor of the original
   Stones tee. Additionally you will be required to stand by in a similar way with relation to Jenna’s hair, which is almost
   always a pointless exercise given the inevitability of “Fire Island hair” [some mutation of unseeming size/frizz setting in
   almost as soon as you set foot outdoors].)
   
2. Do not attempt to stay friends/keep in touch with more than one person from F.I. per
   winter
   (aka, all seasons that aren’t summer)
   off the island,
   but use this person to keep apprised of everyone’s whereabouts and well-being. Do this for the rest of your lives.
   
3. Try to understand that as far as dating goes, it is extremely casual, even if you think it’s serious, and that there will
   be overlap insofar as over the years you and Jenna will end up being able to say that you made out with four of the same guys,
   whether you wanted to or not. You have already both made out with Jack and agree that he kisses like a bird. (Gain unfortunate
   knowledge later that Jack’s brother Chase also kisses like a bird, leading to a long discussion with Jenna about the basis
   of the birdlike kissing given that neither you nor Jenna has ever kissed a bird, and whether or not kissing styles are genetic,
   or whether it has something to do with the shape of the tongue, if the birdlike tongue prevented any hope of non-birdlike
   kissing or whether retraining would be possible [if you were interested, which you were not, based on their personalities—you
   will end up kissing Jack one more time ten years in the future at which time he will tell you he needs you more
   as a friend
   to which you say,
   We haven’t been in touch in ten years, to which he says, Okay then let’s keep making out,
   at which time you remember rule #2].) If possible, avoid overlapping in same summer. (Do not attempt overlapping off the
   island. Learn this by attempting to overlap off the island when Jenna comes to visit you at college and sleeps with the guy
   you had a secret crush on for two years, on the technicality that you tried to fix them up in the first place, not to mention
   that she didn’t really know about the crush. Make this worse before you graduate by sleeping with him yourself under the worst
   but hardly unusual sort of circumstances in which you are both very drunk and you are the third person he’s asked to go home
   with him when the bar closes, all of this resulting in two fights with Jenna about
   how she should have known
   [your expectation of Jenna’s mind-reading capabilities having fully set in right around this time and mostly having to do
   with
   considering your feelings
   (not realizing until long into the future that she’s often been way better at this than you)], followed also by never speaking
   to the guy again starting the morning after. Forget this experience entirely but learn it for good six years later after she
   fixes you up with the guy she eventually ends up marrying [who you found to be incredibly inconsiderate of your many feelings].
   Make sure this leads to near destruction of the friendship so that lesson-learning is complete.)
   
4. Find yourself unable to ever re-create the F.I. experience anywhere else and if you’re a
   native,
   return to F.I. every year and stay with your parents until you have children of your own and then keep returning with your
   children. If you’re a
   moocher,
   move away from New York and always wish there were anyplace else like Fire Island anywhere much less within a few hours of
   Chicago, which there isn’t. Wonder if you could be some sort of reverse Robert Moses somewhere and replace roads with sidewalks
   and get all the old gang to buy houses there and start all over again. Obviously not.
   

Do this every night: Drink one or two free pitchers of frozen banana daiquiris after work (always waking up the next morning
without a hangover because you are twenty-one and thus giving you one more thing to add to the list of things that feed your
denial for another nine years, e.g., you don’t drink every day/never missed a day of work/always remember to pull your hair
back when you throw up/get the notes from someone else after you sleep through class/never had an accident [never mind that
you don’t have a license and therefore don’t drive]/stopped adding downers to your alcohol after the Karen Ann Quinlan thing)
and head to the Alligator to meet Jenna and dance with Tico and Donnie and Dan J. and Dan P. Tico and Dan J. admire your moves
and make you feel ready to call up Denney Terrio/Don Cornelius and boogie down on syndicated TV Dan P. doesn’t dance and looks
uncomfortable just watching people dance but you imagine he is silently aroused by your advanced disco. Struggle for conversation
(e.g.,
Are you excited about going to Europe? Totally,
nod a lot), but feel the love when he buys you a beer. Do this every night until Labor Day weekend, then walk home with him
on the beach after a beer bash and make out by the dunes. Enjoy this on many levels excepting Dan P’s two-day beard and ask
if maybe he could shave the next time. Report back to Jenna that you and Dan P.
French-kissed
. Jenna reports to you that Donnie and Dan J. both have crushes on you, wonder if it would be a conflict to date/French-kiss
all of them. Ask Jenna why so many guys have crushes on you on Fire Island but not off the island. Jenna explains that on
Fire Island the crushes are rampant/overt/in constant rotation but also that chances are there are just as many guys who like
you off the island and you just don’t know about it. (Find this suspect at best in spite of Jenna’s sincere and indestructible
optimism.) Do this the next day: Pretend like you’re cool. Make much out of the fact that Dan P shaved the next day even though
there’s suddenly not much to talk about and you will never French-kiss him again. Make much out of the one postcard you get
from Dan P. during his semester abroad that says
See you soon
. Read an encyclopedia of his unspoken feelings in between
See
and
you
and
soon
. Under the influence of alcohol, try to forget Dan P. by sleeping with your fucking buddy who’s also everyone else’s fucking
buddy. Swear off men and alcohol until Dan P. gets back from overseas until three weeks later, and then, under the influence
of alcohol, try to forget Dan P. by sleeping with your fucking buddy who’s also everyone else’s fucking buddy. Graduate college.
Go to one F.I. reunion party in the city a few years later and remember how cute Dan P. was when he tells you you look great
and say to each other,
We should do something soon,
but then never see or speak to him again.

Snap back to:

Jenna’s report on the memorial service, how many people were there, how Fire Island will never be the same. Tell her you love
her, expecting her to say
Cut it out
even though she tells you she loves you too. Realize the number of times you or Jenna have said this to each other since
seventh grade might add up to the fingers on one hand, that this may be the only area where either of you are in touch with
your masculine side, in your belief that the hug is overrated, that it is your right as New Yorkers to decline any unwarranted
hugging, which you believe there is a lot of. Realize you might be wrong.

Discover a week later that Jenna had had another fight with the pernicious, narcissistic, unclean boyfriend regarding her
behavior the morning of the 11th in which she rushed to her son’s school to pick him up before thinking to call p/n/u to say
there was a change of plans, in which p/n/u noted that her ex-husband was lucky to have dumped her inconsiderate ass (which
was um, more or less extremely the opposite of what happened) and condemned not just Jenna but
all mothers worldwide
as being evil and unkind (Jenna Ritter being hardly perfect but about as far from evil or unkind as is possible—you’ve always
said that the difference between you and Jenna is that Jenna’s nicer, that she’s not the kind of girl who says
fuck
in the morning, even though she has plenty of reasons to right now, even though she’s had plenty of reasons to before, even
though you’ve sometimes been the reason, e.g., when you skipped her wedding because you took it personally that she married
someone who was inconsiderate of your feelings, she’s the kind of girl who says
yay
in the morning, and has plenty of reasons to, starting with her awesome ten-year-old who took one look at p/n/u before the
abuse set in and said,
He seems like a nice guy but I think he has a lot of anger inside him
), and although Jenna is willing to concede that she wasn’t necessarily thinking straight on that particular morning, agree
with her that under the circumstances she deserves understanding. The city exploded. A mom went to get her kid. Somehow, a
guy took this personally. Start a letter to p/n/u using adverbs like
extremely
and
utterly
and
absurdly
to modify words like
sinister
and
self-obsessed
and
vituperative
but realize your anger may be somewhat misdirected six pages later when you get to
evildoer
. Pray for him instead. Fly home six weeks later. Survey the gate for people who might be willing to kick ass on an as-needed
basis. Make note of most silent moment you’ve ever experienced when the skyline, or absence of it, comes into view. Forgive
your stepfather for remarrying. Go back to being exactly the same as before, only different.