The Sea Beach Line Read Online Free Page A

molded, red cement piece. Alojzy had seen real bombed ruins as an Israeli soldier during the War of Attrition. And though he never spoke of it, Warsaw must have still been full of rubble from World War II when he was a child. It was no surprise he had so little patience for such a fabrication, which contained the narrative but not the pain.
    Two old men sat on a park bench arguing in Russian. These were the types of men Alojzy sat and chatted with. They spoke slowly, considering their positions, and I was able to make out the gist of the discussion, a debate about the likelihood of the city filling the bay in with cement. Their paranoid fantasy was completely real to them.
    Emmons Avenue led me along the bay. The bay was connected to the ocean, and the whole wide world of adventure and chaos, but as it was squared off against the avenue, it still held the safety and domestic comfort of a residential block. It seemed as if the bay was once just another street, but on a whim a miracle worker had turned it into a body of water. Moses had turned the Nile to blood. Surely some lesser prophet could turn pavement to brackish water. Boats sailed in from the ocean, and anchored parallel to the cars double-parked on Emmons. Once they got out past Breezy Point, nothing stood between the sailboats and the coasts of Morocco and Andalusia. A wooden footbridge curved over the bay. On the far side were the mafia castles of Manhattan Beach, with their columns and towers.
    Beside and below me, ducks and swans swam together. There was plenty of food for all, even though most of the food was just garbage. A fisherman sat in a low beach chair, drinking from a carton of orange juice. He had three fishing rods—two big ocean rods and a little five-foot freshwater rod—propped against the railing, their lines stretched taut out into the water.

    I remembered the first time I visited Sheepshead Bay, when I was eleven. My mother, sister, and I had been out in Nassau County for about a year and a half. It had been two years since we last saw Alojzy, at our old apartment on East Ninety-Second Street. Neither my mother nor my sister mentioned Alojzy, and so I didn’t either.
    Alojzy had sent my sister and me a few postcards from places like St. Louis and Las Vegas when we still lived in Manhattan. He was never much for writing, and aside from a few words here and there, he mainly filled the backs of the cards with little sketches of him andus, or of the places he was writing from. We hadn’t received any since moving out of the city, and it didn’t seem that the old postcards had survived the move. Maybe he didn’t know our new address. We had Bernie, who was childless until we came along, and was more attentive than many actual fathers. He was more consistently attentive than Alojzy had ever been, in fact, so we didn’t feel a glaring absence. But I still missed Alojzy.
    People where we lived liked to talk about Israel a lot. It was some sort of fantasy world, not quite real, but terribly important, where they were a stronger and purer type of people. The word was spoken with slow reverence, and conversation ceased when the region was mentioned on the news. People walked around fearlessly in their green Israel Defense Forces T-shirts, as if the thin fabric were bulletproof. They stuffed cash into preprinted envelopes in the belief that it would blossom into trees as soon as it arrived in Eretz Yisrael .
    When I heard the word “Israel,” I saw my father, because he had actually lived and even fought in a war there. He was the only real thing I could associate with the place. But I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t part of the fantasy too.
    Bernie called my sister and me into the dining room. We came in to find him and my mother sitting at the table. We ate there on holidays or when we had company; otherwise we sat at the table in the kitchen. The only person who used the room on a regular basis was Bernie, who would