SNOWBIRDS, Part I

EDITOR’S NOTE: For the next three weeks, we will be featuring fiction by Emma Straub, Flatmancrooked’s first LAUNCH author. If you like what you read, you can invest in Emma’s future. Head over to her LAUNCH page for more details.

Read “Hot Springs Eternal, Part I” here.

Read “Hot Springs Eternal, Part II” here.

Two days after Christmas, Alex and Jenny flew into the West Palm airport, a small affair with two terminals and new leather seats. Because the airport also flew to the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, it was billed as an international hub, which was something that Alex’s stepmother Sherry liked to remind him of when booked his holidays flights. She’d call and say, “Your father wants to see you. I already booked it. Just come,” and he’d have no choice but to dutifully arrive.

The most jarring moment of any trip to Florida was always the first one unmitigated by air-conditioning. Alex led Jenny and her wheelie suitcase out of the baggage claim and to the waiting cars and taxis, surprised again by the blast of humidity.

“Whew!” Jenny rocked her suitcase into an upright position. Once upon a time, the bag had been a bubblegum pink, and although it still bore traces of Hello Kitty icons around the top and the bottom, the color itself had been dulled with use. The tips of Jenny’s shoulder-length hair flamed a much brighter shade of pink, a color found more often in fright wigs at the circus than in the natural world, and it snuck out of her otherwise dark brown hair like a flash fire, bright with heat.

Enormous, gleaming cars drove slowly on a circuit past the doors leading out from the baggage claim, a never-ending Secret Service motorcade. Alex looked over Jenny’s head for his father’s car, one of the fleet.

“It’s like the jungle!” Jenny said, smiling. She shrugged off her wool coat and let it drop to the ground before turning all of her attention to wiggling out of her tight sweater. A few seconds later, when the car pulled up, she was only halfway out, with the fabric still wound tightly around her arms and head.

Alex saw his father through the tinted windows of the car as it slowed to a halt. Mel had been fifty when Alex was born, and it seemed unremarkable both on the Upper East Side and in Southern Florida, where older men routinely went for several bouts of procreation. There was a half-sister twenty years his senior living in Colorado, and a half-sister twelve years his junior attending middle school in suburban New Jersey, each of whom he had met twice. When asked by new acquaintances, Alex routinely said that he was an only child. Any more accurate genealogy would have brought up too many gaps, too much blank space, too much time.

Mel opened the car door slowly, and stepped down from the raised seat of the SUV, already extending his hand. Jenny finally freed herself, and clutched her sweater in front of her chest like a bridal bouquet as she watched Alex greet his father. They were both slim, with hips smaller than their shoulders, and stood an inch or two below average height. The waves of Mel’s dark hair had lightened into a silver confection worthy of a ten-layer cake, with elegant peaks and valleys. Alex shook his father’s hand by the open door of the car, thinking that maybe, next time, he would come alone.

“And this must be Jenny,” Mel said, pulling free. His grip was strong and practiced, that of a businessman. Jenny did a squat little curtsey, bowing her knees out to the sides like the chunkiest of childhood ballerinas.

“You have the same nose!” she said, pointing to her own. “Only Alex’s is a little smaller.” She giggled. “But they keep growing, right? Maybe you’ll catch up,” she said, and making herself laugh, she reached over to pat Alex on the arm. This—the shared nose— was a fact Alex’s mother always mentioned when her own genes seemed to be overlooked in a discussion of family traits. “You can thank me for that later,” she liked to say, turning back towards the window, or the Christmas tree, or whatever else was in her line of sight. Now that Jenny was free of all her external layers, with her hair pulled back into a short paintbrush of a ponytail, Alex was acutely aware of her bare arms; bare but for the colorful tattoos she wore on her skin permanently: the animals, the celestial matter, the impulsive and miscellaneous. From the driver’s side, Sherry leaned over the open cavity of the passenger seat. He watched her eyes do a quick scan of Jenny before turning, more sweetly, to him.

“Hi, Alexander, you look great!” Sherry patted the steering wheel. “You guys hungry?” Before she’d married her first husband, Sherry had worked as a flight attendant, although “stewardess” was the word she used most. She knew how to soothe the masses, by putting something in their mouths in as short a period of time as possible.

Lugging both of their bags to the trunk, Alex left Jenny by the side of the car with his father. He could only imagine what they might be saying, and then realized, as he again rounded the corner, that they hadn’t said anything at all, both instead waiting for him to return, their necks swiveling in unison like two spectators at a tennis match.

Jenny was older than Alex by five years, and at twenty-eight seemed unimaginably self-sufficient. She’d lived on the Lower East Side with a roommate since she was seventeen, having escaped the horrors of suburban Long Island two days after her high school graduation. She worked cutting hair at Sticky Fingers, a salon on Ludlow that looked more like a crackhouse than a place to get a trim. The salon was painted black on the outside, its windows almost opaque with generations of tags and other messages scratched in, with ancient fissures in the glass held together by duct tape. Jenny’s name was on the window—she’d pointed this out to Alex after their second date. It was enclosed in three different hearts, accompanied by three different names she’d written in herself.

They’d met when Alex walked in and bravely asked for an appointment. Jenny had been filing her fingernails with an emery board behind the counter, and couldn’t hear him over the Siouxsie record playing on the salon’s decrepit speakers, which were suspended from the ceiling by heavy-duty chains. Alex had been wearing his most destroyed article of clothing, a button-down shirt from Brooks Brothers, the stripes of which had long ago faded into nothing more than soft veins in the cotton. It had a hole near the left cuff, through which Alex liked to stick his thumb.

“Um, I need a haircut, just a trim, really…” Alex raked his tented fingers across his scalp, sending soft brown waves dancing in both directions. There was a smell he couldn’t quite identify—half cat-urine, half his mother’s bathroom. It took him a minute to realize the whole place stank of bleach. At least it would get rid of some of the germs.

Jenny squinted, and puckered her lips into two red, reclining question marks. “Huh. Okay. Come over here,” she said.

Instead of directing him towards one of the other stations, Jenny steered him in the direction of her own. She had a holster slung low around her hips, from which hung her combs and scissors. “Where you from?” she said to him, in the mirror.

Alex leaned back and let her cover him with a cheap plastic smock. “Seventy-fourth street.”

“Huh.” Jenny shook her head like a wet dog. “Do this.”

He shook.

“Oh, boy, you don’t need a trim, you need a surgeon. Lucky for you, I happen to be a professional,” she said.

“A professional surgeon?”

Jenny stopped looking at Alex’s hair and stared back into the mirror, catching his gaze. She paused for a moment, as if startled. “Why, yes,” she said. “You did want the vasectomy, correct?” She tried to suck in her smile, holding out for him to follow suit. When she did open her lips wide enough to let out a laugh, Alex thought he saw a gold tooth shimmering somewhere in the back of her mouth.

Over his right ear, an errant curl twisted out of place. Jenny zeroed in on the offending creature, and snipped it off with the tips of her scissors. Alex tried to keep still. He usually went to his mother’s stylist, a swishy gent in his fifties who cut hair on the parlor floor of a townhouse on East 66th Street. This was better—more downtown, more street.

No one ever swam in the Elysian Cove community pool except around the holidays, when children and grandchildren flew in from points north, bathing suits and inflatable water wings in tow. The term community pool, perhaps, is what kept people away, when in actuality the pool was as well-cared for as at a five-star hotel, with stacks of fluffy white towels at the ready, and an eager, uniformed staff on call to bring resting swimmers Coca-Cola and bottled water. Jenny and Alex drove the golf cart. On the passenger side, Jenny’s body was wrapped in a sarong, the orange and red cotton knotted behind her neck. She raised her arm and put it around his shoulders, leaning her head against him as he took the well-engineered curves of the sidewalk. Alex knew this meant that the right side of her neck was exposed, that side of Jenny’s neck, a blood-red cartoon of a heart, was stretching, beating faster as it grew. Alex had never, to date, seen a tattoo within the boundaries of Elysian Cove. As his stepmother had told him, the management company did thorough screenings to prevent such body modification amongst its staff. Among other things, visible tattoos, piercing anywhere apart from the lobe of the ear, personal websites, hairy legs, criminal records, and dreadlocks were reasons to be passed over in favor of another applicant. This seemed to apply to the residents as well. Alex thought about telling Jenny this, as a warning, maybe, just a heads-up for looks she might receive while passing through the breezeway that connected the spa to the pool and the clubhouse, but he didn’t. It had been hard enough explaining the Cove in the first place, its prefab cul-de-sacs and rows of identical houses made to look like Italian villas that had simply had the good fortune of sprouting up in Florida instead of Tuscany.

“We’re here.” Alex puttered the golf cart down a colonnade of palm trees and into the shade. It was warmer than usual, even for Florida. Alex couldn’t stand the heat, never could. That was the reason people came, though, for the sun. Every winter, the population at Elysian Cove alone doubled in size. Alex’s stepmother called them the snowbirds—people who were escaping things happening other places; icy roads, divorce, loneliness. Sherry had lived in Florida her entire life, and had spent the last three decades living in gated communities. Alex wondered if she remembered what the outside world was like, how it felt to not know how much money your neighbors made.

“Yippee, I’m sweating like a monkey.” Jenny jiggled her elbows like wings, increasing the flow of air to her armpits.

“You don’t look like a monkey.” She didn’t. She looked like a parrot, or maybe a clown, her skin colored as it was with bright, permanent ink. In addition to the heart on her neck, there was a small galaxy of stars on her right shoulder, a spider on her left hip, Deborah, her mother’s name, in cursive across her right wrist, a small portrait of her childhood Labrador Retriever between her shoulder blades, and a small X on her left big toe, which at sixteen she had given herself as proof of her dedication to the straight-edge lifestyle. Jenny was wearing a cheap lycra bikini, and the closer they got to the pool, the smaller the bits of fabric shrank in Alex’s imagination. In reality, many of her tattoos were still well-covered by her sarong and the beach towel she was carrying around her shoulders like a mink stole. Alex half-expected some kind of alarm to ring when Jenny chose a lounge chair and unceremoniously dropped her belongings, stripping down immediately.

“Are you coming in?” Jenny hopped from foot to foot, the white slate too warm for the pads of her feet. Maybe an egret, Alex thought. Maybe a flamingo. Her stomach, which hadn’t seen the sun in at least six months—as long as he’d known her—looked impossibly white, a doughy pillow extending slightly from the top of her bikini bottom. The pink polka-dots shifted from side to side as she hopped, dancing and unafraid.

“In a second.” He sat and slowly began to untie his left sneaker, something he almost always bypassed in favor of just squeezing his feet out, one at a time, by stepping on his own heel. “You go ahead,” he said.

Jenny walked lightly on the balls of her feet, her hands perched at her side as though walking a tightrope. The concrete steps into the pool were wide and shallow, offering a gentle, gradual immersion for the cowardly poolgoer. Jenny took one step, huffed a loud breath, and dove. It was only when she was under the water that Alex allowed himself to take in their neighbors.

On previous winter holidays visiting his father and Sherry, Alex had never observed more than five of the fifty-odd lounge chairs occupied. Today there was hardly an empty seat. “Jesus,” Alex said under his breath. All around the pool, in the ring of lounge chairs Jenny had selected, small clumps of people in sunglasses formed various familiar Floridian tableaus: the boy learning to swim, his eager mother clapping and cooing from the sidelines as daddy hovered behind; the sprawling families, with strollers and car seats strewn around them like miniature middle-class refugee camps; the sullen teenaged girls who were mortified at seeing their parents in bathing suits. Large, lazy palm fronds waved overhead. Jenny’s head popped up near the middle of the pool, which was neither a rectangle nor a kidney bean, but freeform, with eddies and straightaways; something for everyone. She was nearest to the side just across from the steps. Three open-mouthed fountains spat recycled pool water behind her bobbing face. The water had darkened all of her hair to a uniform shade of wet. Alex almost wished it could do the same for her skin, temporarily dye her limbs an even peachy tone.

“Hey, it’s amazing, get in here!” Jenny was loud, even with water gurgling in and out of her mouth, competing with the fountains for most spittle released. Alex wasn’t sure if people actually turned to look, or if they were just turning, taking in the blue sky, following a gentle whiff of chemically-treated water. The surface of the pool was clear enough for Alex to see Jenny’s legs kicking under the water. Her white thighs looked bigger, distorted. He watched the spider dance, engorged, and tried to erase it from her hip with his mind. He’d had to wait until their fourth date to see that spider, and he recalled the satisfaction he’d felt as it was unveiled, one spindly leg at a time, as Jenny worked herself out of a tight pair of blue jeans, shifting side to side, moving the denim inch by inch. The remembered thrill made the skin under his bathing-suit twitch.

“Yeah, yeah.” Alex tugged his t-shirt over his head and hopped into the water, taking the steps one at a time until the cool water was up to his neck, and Jenny was only a few feet away. She swam towards him like a frog and put her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist.

“Hello.” Jenny’s face was wet and gleaming, her cheeks, her lips, her teeth. Her breath was warmer than the water, and held remnants of breakfast; his stepmother’s weak coffee, a soft egg. “I was thinking maybe we should move in with your father, what do you think? I could cut hair, you could go to school. Be tan. Eat oranges.” The sun painted a little blotch of pink on her otherwise pale visage, just over the bridge of her nose. Alex thought of Indian brides and dotted foreheads. He had not yet met her parents; they didn’t like the city. Her father had driven a truck delivering cookies to convenience stores; that was all Alex really knew, and he didn’t ask for more.

“We’ll see.” Alex spun Jenny around in the water, glad to feel her weightless against him, as though, if they stayed in the pool forever, there would be no pressure, no energy to exert. She leaned back, letting herself float on the surface, her legs still wound tightly around Alex’s torso. The stars on her shoulder looked like something that could be skimmed off, along with the lost insects and fallen palm leaves. Over her head, the two teenage girls looked at them from over the tops of their glossy magazines. Alex could make out one of the headlines: Pregnant and Alone. The girls were thirteen, maybe fourteen, and staring at Jenny with their tiny bird-mouths ajar. One flipped a swath of blond hair over her bare shoulder as she turned to her sister-friend to further discuss. Jenny’s eyes closed and a half-smile appeared; Alex knew that she didn’t mind people looking. He closed his eyes in hopes that it would make him feel the same.

By Emma Straub