SELFIES
Genie Sue Walker asked a lot of questions in class—whether the Kurds gave their name to cottage cheese, why the European Union didn’t email refugees back to Syria, why Africa had so many epidemics when it was so beautiful. This was in our night class in foreign studies at Galveston College. Most of the students were older than we were, and some were foreigners—Asians who worked in the shrimp industry, a lost Hungarian, two Croats, and an Egyptian—all of whom, by some mistake, had found their way to the East Texas coast.
We were in this class and one in English literature to better our lives. That’s what we said to each other. “It’s never too late,” Genie Sue said, though I had my doubts. Her father was an ex-NFL quarterback for the Houston Texans, Tugboat Walker, so named because his father towed tankers into the port. Tugboat owned three Subaru dealerships in Houston and one in Galveston, so Genie Sue had nepotism on her resume. My father ran a hardware store.
Needless to say, she was better-looking than I was, but also more conniving. I was a little overweight, lazy up to a point but overall cheerful, so she liked having me around. In high school she’d told me about her dates, and I’d told her about lacrosse practice. That’s how we got along. Now we both worked for her father, and in the five years since high school I’d worked my way up to assistant service manager. Genie Sue was in the main office, where she played games on the Internet and did errands for her father.
She had her own apartment, while I lived with my parents. I didn’t complain. I paid minor rent and saved money – to buy a husband, my father said. He was sour because he needed a counter person at the hardware store, and I could have worked for him. My mom did food prep at the elementary school, and my brother Harvey was a middle-of-the highway nerd, addicted to video games. He wondered if he’d ever grow a beard.
We were ordinary. Our dinner talk was about what had happened that day, which was nothing.
My mother had chopped a million carrots in her lifetime, and my father had weighed a million pounds of nails. Except for the immediate family, no one would miss any of us if one of us died.
That I recognized this and thought about it was exceptional.
In high school I played lacrosse, basketball, and in track threw the discus, but I wasn’t good at any of these sports. I got Cs. I slept in history, tweaked my underwear in math, and passed notes to Genie Sue in social studies. I rarely did homework. I paid moderate attention in English because Mr. Groff had once been an actor in Atlanta, and he read us Shakespeare. I had no boyfriends.
Genie Sue, though, ran on hormones – Daryl, Dave, Dwayne, each with a different hairstyle. She had her lapses – an unwanted pregnancy (fixed in Houston), a series of breakups and pills she took afterward (I took her to the ER), a hookup with the tennis coach (I had to keep it from getting into the newspaper). She and her parents owed me, which was why I got hired at Tugboat Motors.
Five years of earning my own money made me a different person. I became responsible for determining what happened, and I used my brain more efficiently. People came to me with their problems instead of the other way around. At service repair, I was more organized than the leering manager; I schmoozed with the mechanics so I could talk engines to customers; I learned computer skills, which wasn’t that hard if you knew the vocabulary. In other words, I made myself indispensable and acquired power. It was comforting to know I was competent.
So one Wednesday night we were in English class, and Genie Sue raised her hand. The students tittered – they knew the routine – and professor Spitzer paused in his lecture. “Is there something amiss?” he asked.
Genie Sue waved from the back row. “If Shakespeare was so famous, why didn’t he do something worthwhile, I mean, like, fix cars or TVs. Or, if he liked astrology so much – he wrote a lot about the sun, moon, and stars – why didn’t he get a pilot’s license?”
Professor Spitzer smiled. “Shakespeare has provided employment for his admirers for four hundred years,” he said. “Shall we move along?”
Genie Sue wasn’t offended or embarrassed. She wanted attention. After class she asked, “Was I too obvious? I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Spitzer didn’t know what you were about,” I said.
“There’s a guy who sits in the row across and down,” she said. “Who is he?”
“Francis Bacon,” I said.
“I mean, he is a thunk.”
“I was taking notes,” I said. “What’s a thunk?”
“A thunk is a hunk with testosterone.”
“I didn’t notice him.”
“That’s why you’re who you are,” Genie Sue said, “and why I’m me.”
Not long after that, I had to go to a family gathering at Crystal Beach. I hadn’t been to one of these occasions in five years, and everyone I knew then, the kids, I mean, were threatened by ignorance and ill-health – genetic blessings from their parents – with poverty thrown in after. In the intervening time, they’d got more or less retarded, older and taller and wider, and less beautiful. Beauty was the measure by which we’re taught to evaluate other people. So, fearing the worst, I invited Genie Sue to keep me company. Why she accepted was a mystery. Darryl or Dwayne must have been hunting, or maybe she was more afraid of boredom than I was.
Crystal Beach was a grim collection of houses on stilts across the channel from the Galveston Peninsula, and twenty miles farther along Texas 87. Midday Friday, we loaded my father’s Dodge Ram and my mother’s Toyota Corolla with suitcases, salad fixings, pies and cakes, and two cases of booze. We crossed from the island on the ferry, the gulls coming close to our empty outstretched hands, and drove off at Port Bolivar.
The coastal prairie on either side of 87 was flat brushland that every few years was devastated by hurricanes. To the north maybe a mile was a scalloped horizon of salt-tolerant trees. To the south a few hundred yards was the Gulf of Mexico, invisible beyond the dunes.
The event was hosted by my mother’s sister, Tina, who was the quintessence of riffraff. She was five-six, two hundred pounds, and wore three articles of clothing – bra, underwear, and house dress. Occasionally she put on flip-flops. She paid no attention to her hair or jewelry, but she had three indecipherable tattoos on her arms and legs. As far as I knew, she’d never read a book or set foot in a classroom, nor had she heard any musical instrument that wasn’t played behind a country-and-western band. Her husband, Dodd, a.k.a. Dud, ran a pool hall in Texas City.
Their kids were named for royalty – Charles, Beatrice, and Alfonso – who, as I recalled from last time, were more upbeat than they had reason to be. Charlie had become a personal trainer, Bea a hairdresser, and Alfonso a carpenter. So my mother said. She claimed they admired me because I was smart. I admired them for having survived Tina and Dud.
Dud’s brother’s family was also coming, a crew of miscreants, daredevils, and abusers the likes of which I rarely saw up close. Some of them had done time in jail, but they were providing the music. Several times I retracted my invitation to Genie Sue, but she likened the occasion to slumming. “If I drink too much,” she said, “call the police.”
My aunt’s house had red shingles, and my mother parked on the shell driveway next to the clunker cars lined up along a dry drainage canal. Dud’s brother was unloading his Caravan – several musical-instrument cases, duffel bags, and liquor. His wife was a sultry, forty-something, stringy-haired blond who’d have been beautiful if she’d stayed off the meth. Kids from six to sixteen were throwing two frisbees on the dead grass, and neighbors flocked in from both directions carrying covered dishes.
“Let’s steal the Corolla,” I said to Genie Sue. “We’ll drive to Winnie, drink beer, and watch the Rockets. Or we could get a motel room in Beaumont. Or what about Florida? Neither of us has been there.”
“I want to hear the music,” Genie Sue said. “Where’s Florida?”
My father was a little behind us on the ferry, and now he turned in and nudged the Ram up to the steps to unload the heavy stuff.
We had to help.
How could I describe what went on that weekend? I was still shaking. I was sitting at my desk at Tugboat Motors figuring out a billing document that came to $2,873 for a transmission no longer under warranty. I didn’t want to talk to the car owner about it, didn’t want to take in any more Subarus for repair, never wanted to speak again on the phone to a disgruntled customer. I scanned across the pictures in my cubicle – mom and dad, a niece, Genie Sue’s high school prom-attendant picture, the Crystal Beach family picture from five years ago in which I was a miserable, chubby chump. Everyone else was younger, too, of course. Why was I smiling?
I remembered Daddy had gone fishing at Rollover Pass for speckled trout, and he and my mother argued about who should clean them. “You caught them,” my mother had said. “They’re your responsibility.
“But you’re going to cook them,” he said, “and you’ll think they’re delicious.”
There was yelling about master and slave, women’s rights, and who paid for the rod and reel and bait. I wanted to blame the fish for being so stupid as to get hooked.
I examined the faces and picked out Alfonso, who was sixteen, a beauty even then. He had long dark hair, a rebellious slouch, and brooding eyes. Maybe he was angry. I’d liked to have read more into his expression – rebellion, maybe – but how could I know? I interpreted a soulful feeling like Hamlet’s and an artistic temperament. He was adopted – I knew he was better than Tina and Dud – but he’d had drug problems and issues with girls. That’s what I’d heard, but so what? I could forgive.
Then Jeff, the manager, came into my cubicle, acting as if he were in a hurry, and asked if I had the paperwork on Bixler’s Outback.
“I had it last Thursday,” I said. “You told me to hold onto it.”
“Now I need it,” Jeff said. “The guy is after me.”
“I don’t blame him. You’re a jerk. His car was ready a week ago.”
Jeff stopped being in a hurry. “What are you saying, Irene?”
I clicked a couple of keys, and my printer whirred and spat out papers. “I’m saying your precious papers are ready.”
“We value you here, Irene. You’re my best girl.” He paused. “Just because you have ties to management doesn’t mean you can be insolent.”
I looked up at Jeff’s beer-fattened face and bureaucratic eyes. “Fuck you, Jeff,” I said. “I’m out of here.”
“Wait a minute,” Jeff said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean. . .”
“Finish your sentences, Jeff. And ‘sorry’ is such a pathetic word.”
I yanked open my desk drawer and pulled out tissues, a first aid kit, and a clipboard of homework assignments for my classes. I stripped the pictures from the walls. I had a tote bag I carried my lunch in, and all my stuff fit into it with room to spare. I was surprised how little of myself was here. “The job I’ve done,” I said, “I expect a good severance.”
“When you quit, you don’t get a severance.”
“If I don’t get severance, I’ll sue. I’ll file harassment charges against you.. You think about what I might say.”
Jeff backed off, and I hoisted the tote back to my shoulder.
***
Twenty minutes later I was driving random streets – Market, left on 28th, left on Church – and in the midst of my escape, I got a call from Genie Sue. “What’s going on?” she asked. “I heard you quit.”
“I made a leap forward.”
“You mean backward.”
“I feel better right now than in my whole previous life.”
“That wouldn’t be hard, Irene. Come on, you were making thirty-five thousand a year. What’ll you do?”
“So far I’m okay.”
“Where are you?”
“In my car.”
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere else.”
“So you’re upset about the weekend. I admit it was surreal. But you can’t let that determine your whole life.”
“Why can’t I?”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
I made another couple of turns, got on Winnie Street, and passed Adoue Park.
“Say something,” Genie Sue said.
“Who said it was my fault?”
“Nobody, but you were the one closest. You talked to him last.”
“You and I, we used to be friends,” I told her. “Not any more.”
I clicked off. She called right back, but I didn’t answer.
My Toyota was the third car waiting when the ferry pulled out from the dock. I had no good reason to cross over, but my alternatives were to go home, which seemed impossible, or to go to a bar. That might have offered solace, but I doubted it. I clicked on the radio and rolled down the window. The music was an old song by Foreigner, I want to know what love is, I want you to show me. I turned it off.
The sky was diffuse clouds, a little blue, a little gray. A sea breeze wafted in through the window, and gulls wheeled overhead screeching hunger. I imagined myself as one of them, so I could see things from the air.
I had to wait almost an hour, and the sea was out there, as far as the eye could carry. I had no choice but to replay that day at Crystal Beach. Genie Sue and I had got out of the car amidst the general fracas in the yard and proceeded with our groceries and duffel bags past Daddy’s truck at the stairs. We climbed the zigzag steps to the kitchen, where Aunt Tina was telling everyone what events there were going to be. She laughed about my shaggy hairstyle, said to put the groceries on the counter, asked if I had a boyfriend. Genie Sue knew immediately what to do. She got a beer from the cooler and walked through the house to the screened-in porch with a view of the Gulf.
Of course, I got caught up in hugging and hellos and kitchen tasks. I put the cole slaw in the fridge, got out hot dog and hamburger buns, sliced tomatoes and onions. Finally, a couple of the younger kids dragged me away to a bedroom where cousin Thella was supervising charades. I had no credentials for being loved, so it was pleasant to be older and the idol of ignorant others.
What I’d missed out on was Genie Sue’s progress out on the deck beyond the screened-in porch. She was talking to Warren and Alfonso, who, when I’d last seen them were boys. Now they were men. Warren was shirtless, a marginal thunk, but creepy as always. He was one of Dud’s brother’s kids. He had muscles and a scuzzy beard, and rumor had it he’d served two years for burglary, but you couldn’t see that in his hands, which floated a blunt up to his lips. Alfonso was twenty-one now, skinny, dressed in baggy pants and a orange-and-black-striped T-shirt. His hair was shorter and in unruly curls, but his eyes still had that hurt look.
Hurt from his real parents’ abandonment, hurt from what had happened since, hurt from Tina and Dud? There was more to him than beauty, more pain, and, what I saw, the capacity for joy.
They’d detached three beers from a six-pack and were taking selfies with Genie Sue’s phone – each of them alone, Genie Sue with Warren, and Genie Sue with Alfonso – all of them squint-eyed and smiling like imbeciles.
I couldn’t tell what alliances had been formed, what Genie Sue’s strategy was or what she was maneuvering to have happen.
“Get in a picture with me,” Genie Sue said. “Come on. Get over here.”
“No, thanks. I don’t do selfies.”
“Here,” she said, “do this.” She handed me the blunt.
“I have enough troubles without frying my brain.”
“Oh, Irene,” Genie Sue said, “have a little fun. Take a toke. Drink some suds. You won’t die.”
She raised her phone, took another picture of herself, and toked on the roach.
It was a clear afternoon, sunny, not many clouds. The Gulf was a placid expanse like a bathrub – no surf, little breeze. A few people were walking the shoreline, but the Crystal Beach crowd didn’t come here to exercise. Grill smoke drifted from decks on either side of us, and laughter ebbed and flowed in the humid air.
“Let’s do something,” Genie Sue said. “Anyone want to swim?”
Alfonso shrugged. “There are jellyfish.”
“He means are there sharks,” Warren said.
“The Gulf is a sewer,” Alfonso said. “I don’t want to swim in it.”
“It can’t be that bad,” Genie Sue said.
“Does anyone have a swimsuit?” I asked.
“I wear underwear,” Warren said.
“I do sometimes,” Genie Sue said. “Let’s go, before we’re nabbed to help out.”
The boys ambled down the stairs and through the high grass toward the dunes. Genie Sue looked at me. “Are you coming?”
“No, I’m just breathing hard.”
“Ha ha,” Genie Sue said. “You don’t even know what that means.”
Genie Sue walked barefoot down the steps and along the sandy path. I followed, but I felt like an interloper. I didn’t want to stay behind, either, though. I wanted to see what would happen.
It was a hundred yards through the dunes, but the beach wasn’t pretty. The sand was littered with plastic bottles, washed-up tires, and driftwood. Up and down in both directions were houses on stilts, mostly new ones since the last hurricane, but Genie Sue didn’t notice any of this. She stopped and looked out over the water, as if gauging her next move. I walked over to Alfonso, who was studying something in the low surf.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Murk,” he said. “The water’s poisonous. I mean, oil rigs are out there. Cities dump their garbage in the Gulf, and Mexican cartels throw in the bodies of their victims.”
“It’s huge expanse, though,” I said.
I heard Genie Sue whoop and laugh, and Alfonso and I glanced around. Genie Sue had taken off her shirt, and Warren kicked away his shoes and was stripping out of his chinos. She dropped her shorts, and in a few moments, they were both naked and racing toward the water.
Alfonso looked as if he’d been struck in the chest. Warren and Genie Sue were maybe twenty yards away, waist-deep, ducking under and teasing each other.
Alfonso took a last pull on the blunt and threw it into the fuzz at the edge of the water. He pulled his shirt over his head, unfastened his shorts and took them off. “Are you with me?” he asked.
I wanted to be natural, but I didn’t know what to do. I was embarrassed by my body, whatever the reasons – movies, magazines, the Internet, TV spots showing curvy women selling cars and beer. How could I take off my clothes? I backed away onto the dry sand higher up.
Meanwhile, Warren and Genie Sue had moved farther off. They were shoulder deep, and she had her arms around his neck and her head was thrown back. Alfonso looked over at them with a terrible, dark anger, and then, surprisingly, he turned around and looked at me. That was the moment I remember. He waved for me to come in with him. Nothing frantic. Come on, he was saying, be with me.
“I’m going out,” he said.
“Wait,” I said. But I couldn’t reveal myself.
Alfonso waded into the deeper water.
Was he was concerned about me? He must have understood my reluctance to take off my clothes. I interpreted his gesture as encouragement, so I took off my shirt and slid my pants off. But when I looked up, he’d turned toward the horizon and was swimming away from the beach. He swam in determined strokes, one pull after another, breaths in between, pull, breath, pull.
I knew right away what he was doing. “Alphonso, don’t,” I called to him. “Come back.”
Alfonso kept swimming.
***
An hour later, at the house, I recounted all this to the police. I told them how I’d seen Alphonso swimming out, that I’d waded into the water half-naked and got my cousin and my friend – Warren and Genie Sue – to pay attention. They couldn’t have helped. By then Alphonso was too far out. I watched his determined thrashing of arms and legs, how he’d got smaller as he’d swum farther out.
The police asked other questions, but I didn’t know very much. I didn’t say anything about the marijuana. And I didn’t know what Alfonso thought. Later, I wished I’d told the police Alphonso and I were lovers, which is what, I realized, I’d wanted us to be.
The weekend was ruined. People carried away the food they’d brought or left it for my aunt and Dud. Tetherball, the sack race, and frisbee toss never happened, and neither did the music. The neighbors fell away, though the immediate family stayed around telling stories about Alfonso, though these were subdued and no one laughed, even at the ones that were funny. He’d kissed a teacher once because she’d given him a B. He’d cared for a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest in their neighborhood in Texas City. Once he’d been taken to the ER for an overdose of pills. Alfonso was a troubled soul who hadn’t got a foothold in the world, but he was sweet. He needed time, which was what I had to offer.
The ferry appeared, but was still a half-mile from the dock. I’d traveled back into another time, but now I was here again in the line of cars waiting. Genie Sue in all this was who she was. She’d played Warren and Alphonso both, so she got to choose, but she couldn’t have known the consequences. She hadn’t made Alphonso swim out to sea.
I drove onto the ferry, and in a few minutes we were out past Pelican Island, leaving one shore, approaching another. Gulls followed in the air, and passengers offered them popcorn and bread, which the gulls took from their hands.
On the Bolivar side, I clanked down over the metal ramp. The weather was a hazy and hot, but storm clouds rose beyond the inland trees. In a few miles was the sign for Crystal Beach, but instead I drove on a few more miles to Rollover Pass, where my father had caught those fish. The pass was a nothing place – a bridge crossed the inlet there – and there was a bait shop, a line of turquoise port-a-potties, and a boat landing. Car tracks crisscrossed the sand on the inland side, and even on a weekday cars and RV campers were parked by the water.
I drove out to the point of land where my father liked to fish, and I stopped and looked over Galveston Bay, alive in the breeze. The coastal prairie curved around, and distant trees were muted by the humid air. My father knew what he liked to do and who he was – a simple man who ran a hardware store – but I’d never known such an easy solution for myself. I was smart enough to be more, was learning to see through the low-level bullshit of friends and family, but had no direction into the future.
So am I lost without Alphonso? I hardly knew him. He was a troubled, beautiful man, and we’d had a moment together at the beach, when I might have saved him, and he might have saved me.
I drove back from Rollover Pass to Crystal Beach, and the clouds moved in. Rain splashed on the highway. The inland trees disappeared, and the Gulf was pale gray. Coming up on the left was Blue Horizons, the development where Alfonso had worked – skeletons of houses on pilings, like the ones at Crystal Beach. Developers knew how willing people were to fool themselves, because in a few years, the houses would be weathered and mildewed. Someday a hurricane would wash them away.
Crystal Beach was three miles farther. I drove out of the rain, but low clouds still swirled across the prairie. I turned at toward Crystal Beach and wended my way through the rows of houses scattered over the sand and low myrtle. At my aunt’s house, I turned in on the crushed shells and parked by the stairs. Sometimes the house was rented, or friends used it, but no one was there, so I walked under the house to the beach-side and climbed the steps to the deck. The gulf and the sky were a wide sweep of gray, neither discernable from the other.
I rested a moment and breathed deeply. Alfonso was out there somewhere – his body hadn’t washed ashore, at least that anyone knew. I wanted to be the gull with vision across the sea, but I was bound by who I was. From the deck, the gulf extended into eternity. So how had Alphonso had the courage to keep swimming? He was strong from lifting lumber and pounding nails, but what was in his head? Could his mind have been so addled by marijuana? He couldn’t have loved Genie Sue in a mere hour in the expanse of time? Had he meant to come back? Had he been attacked by a shark? Why would he have kept swimming out into poisonous water until he was so far out he couldn’t get back?
No one was around. I took off my shoes and socks, my jacket and shirt – it wasn’t that warm because of the sea breeze – and then my pants and underwear. It started to rain, a drizzle that got harder. I took my phone from my pants pocket, flipped it open, and pushed my hair from my face. I turned toward the house and held the phone out away from me and conjured up an expression of love and fear. The gray of the sky, the rain’s starting, and the Gulf was in the background.
Another masterpiece.