Come Together
by Fred Bubbers © 2006

The year that Miriam and I turned fifteen, my mother died in Saint Charles Hospital in a room overlooking the harbor. It was early May and the there were campus riots and teargas on the TV. My father, my brother, and I were in the room with her. It was 8:05 PM. I remember the time because the year before I had had my appendix out there and every night, five minutes after visiting hours, they broadcast a prayer over the hospital PA system. Although I had privately decided that I was an atheist, and my family wasn't even Catholic, that prayer had comforted me during my three nights. The soothing voice and gentle words of Sister Mary Somebody seemed to be a good way to end the day, whether God existed or not.

Sure enough, as they were announcing the end of visiting hours, my mother was drawing her last shallow breaths. Then she just stopped. My father, my brother and I were silent and unable to move. Then we heard the sound of Sister Mary Somebody's opening, "Heavenly Father..."

My father collapsed across my mother's shrunken form, sobbing softly. Tommy put his arm around me and pulled me close, trying to comfort me as an older brother should, but I was beyond comforting. I thought I was supposed to cry, but I couldn't. Instead, I just put my arm around Tommy and comforted him and wondered why my insides had turned to stone.

In June, Miriam's brother Ben escaped to Canada. At first, she didn't know exactly where, but by the end of the month, she had received, addressed specifically to her, a post card with a picture of a fishing boat from Halifax.

We all quietly soldiered on with our lives and never spoke about what had happened. My grandmother cooked for us and kept the house straight, but our meals were taken mainly in silence. Tommy tried to lighten things up by telling of his exploits in school, but my father simply said, "That's good, Tommy." My father seemed as though he wanted to be engaged in our lives, and it hurt him that he wasn't, but he seemed distracted and unfocused, moving through his days as if he were sleepwalking.

He still had the nightshift at the paper. When he woke up in the afternoons, he sat on the front porch in his pajamas smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. He listened to Mets games on the radio and watched the young kids in the neighborhood playing in the street until long after sundown, when it was time for him to dress for work.

Tommy, who was determined to make sure he had enough money to go to college the next year and secure a deferment, worked two jobs that summer. During the day, he worked the soda fountain at "Grandma's" on Main Street. In the evening, he would leave the ice cream parlor and walk up the hill to the Esso station where he pumped gas and cleaned windshields until midnight.

Miriam and I turned on and dropped out. After her father moved out, her mother had taken a bookkeeping job, so she was not home during the day. On most days, I went over to her house and we spent the afternoon in her basement, burning incense, smoking dope and listening to Abbey Road over and over again. The album had been left behind by Ben. We stole the dope from her older sister Sara's stash.

It was during "Because" on side two one day when she let me kiss her mouth and slide my hand down the front of her cutoff jeans for the first time. We soon became skilled at jumping up from the old sofa and scrambling for our clothes when we heard her mother open the front door at five-thirty when she came home from work.

At night, we hung out on Main Street, watching the mix of summer people, college students, and bikers crowding the streets and the bars. We were too young to get into the bars, so we loitered on the sidewalks and in the street in front listening to the music and making a nuisance of ourselves. Denying my mother's death, I smoked cigarettes that I bummed from frightened and uptight middleclass couples hurrying home from some of the more sedate restaurants on the street.

A few times, when it was really crowded, we managed to sneak into one of the clubs and groped each other on the dark, sweaty dance floor while the band blasted out deafening covers of "Sunshine of Your Love" and "Purple Haze."

Most of the time, however, we had to party outside. Miriam was fearless. She had no problem at all walking up to a complete stranger and asking him to buy her a bottle of Southern Comfort or Seagram's VO from the liquor store. Her tiny bare feet, her lustrous mane of black hair that reached down to her ass, her worn cutoffs, and her gauzy, translucent tops never failed. She'd snatch the brown paper bag with the bottle, blow a sweet kiss at the oversexed idiot of legal age she had picked out the crowd for this errand, and then run back across the street giggling. Knowing he was still watching her, she'd complete his humiliation by wrapping herself around me and kiss me deeply while her hands reached down and grabbed my ass.

When all the noise and people on the street were too much for us, we'd get a basket of fried clams from the takeout place at the bottom of the Main Street hill. We'd cross the street to the marina and sit at the end of fishing pier or near the water on the small beach next to it. After we finished the clams, I'd light a joint and we'd share it. We watched the Bridgeport ferry coming and going until the early morning and the crowds grew quiet and thinned out. We talked about Nixon, and the war, and if we thought the Beatles would break up. And how we wanted out. Out of school, out of Port Jefferson, out of all of it. We didn't want to march and we didn't want to fight. We didn't want to protest. We just wanted everything to stop -- the war, the teargas, and even time itself. If only the world could stop turning, if only for a moment.

On one humid night near the end of August, we were sitting on the beach drinking some beer she had acquired for us and she began reminiscing about the old days, when we were all younger and still together. There was a neighborhood block party that turned into a massive water fight. Ben had started it by tossing a water balloon at Tommy. Tommy ducked and it had hit my father. My father looked as though had been about to loose his temper when my mother picked up the garden hose and sprayed Ben down. Then she sprayed my father down. The soaking and spraying spread to four other families on the block and the battle grew bigger and bigger every time the story was told for years afterward. Nobody escaped, not even my poor old grandmother. It was the only time I ever heard my grandmother laugh when my mother turned the hose on her after she had avenged my father's soaking by tossing the half-melted contents of an ice bucket at her.

"You dumped a whole pitcher of Kool-Aid on my head," Miriam remembered.

"It was all I could find. Besides, you had already gotten me."

"Yeah, but that was only a water balloon," she said. "You were mean to me."

"I didn't mean to be," I said.

I lay down on my side and pulled her down next to me on the sand. "I'm very sorry." I ran my fingers through her hair and touched her cheek. "Do you forgive me? Friends? Forever?"

"Forever," she answered. She wrapped her arms around me tightly. "Just don't let go," she said, burying her face in my chest.

"Never," I whispered in her ear. I clung to her and inhaled the salt air and the scent of sandalwood incense from her hair.

High on the bluff at the far end of the harbor, I could just make out the brightly lit cross on the roof of Saint Charles Hospital through the haze. I wrapped my legs around Miriam and buried my face in her hair, wondering when the tightness in my chest would pass.

END

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