If they feel more ambitious, they pile into cars and drive over to Gilead—fifty yards by water but fourteen miles by road—where there are some larger bars that almost pass for clubs and where the Morettis don’t expect and never receive a drink bill. Then they go home to their cottages and Danny and Terri either pass out or mess around and then pass out, and wake up late and do it all over again.
“I need some more losh,” Terri says now, handing him the tube.
Danny sits up, squeezes a glob of the suntan lotion onto his hands, and starts to work it onto her freckled shoulders. Terri burns easy with that Irish skin. Black hair, violet eyes, and skin like a porcelain teacup.
The Ryans are darker-skinned, and Danny’s old man, Marty, says that’s because they got Spanish blood in them. “From when that armada sank back there. Some of them Spanish sailors made it to shore and did the deed.”
They’re all black Irish, anyway, northerners like most of the micks who landed in Providence. Hard men from the stony soil and constant defeat of Donegal. Except, Danny thinks, the Murphys are doing pretty good for themselves now. Then he feels guilty thinking that, because Pat Murphy’s been his best friend since they were in diapers, not to mention now they’re brothers-in-law.
Sheila Murphy lifts her arms, yawns and says, “I’m going to go back, take a shower, do my nails, girly stuff.” She gets up from her blanket and brushes the sand off her legs. Angie gets up, too. Like Pat is the leader of the men, Sheila is the boss of the wives. They take their cues from her.
She looks down at Pat and asks, “You coming?”
Danny looks at Pat and they both smile—the couples are all going back to have sex and no one’s even being subtle about it. The cottages are going to be busy places this afternoon.
Danny’s sad that summer is coming to an end. He always is. The end of summer means the end of the long slow days, the lingering sunsets, the rented beach cottages, the beers, the fun, the laughs, the clambakes.
It’s back to Providence, back to the docks, back to work.
Home to their little apartment on the top floor of a gabled three-decker in the city, one of the thousands of old tenement buildings that went up all over New England in the height of the mill and factory days, when they were needed to provide cheap housing for the Italian, Jewish, and Irish workers. The mills and factories are mostly gone, but the three-story houses survive and still have a little of the lower-class reputation about them.
Danny and Terri have a small living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom with a small porch out the back and windows on every side, which is nice. It ain’t much—Danny hopes to buy them a real house someday—but it’s enough for now and it ain’t so bad. Mrs. Costigan on the floor below is a quiet old lady and the owner, Mr. Riley, lives on the ground floor, so he keeps everything pretty shipshape.
Still and all, Danny thinks about getting out of there, maybe out of Providence altogether.
“Maybe we should move someplace where it’s summer all the time,” he said to Terri just the night before.
“Like where?” she asked.
“California, maybe.”
She laughed at him. “California? We got no family in California.”
“I got a second cousin or something in San Diego.”
“That’s not really family,” Terri says.
Yeah, maybe that’s the point, Danny thinks now. Maybe it would be good to go somewhere they don’t have all those obligations—the birthday parties, the first communions, the mandatory Sunday dinners. But he knows it won’t happen—Terri is too attached to her large family, and his old man needs him.
Nobody ever leaves Dogtown.
Or if they do, they come back.
Danny did.
Now he wants to go back to the cottage.
He wants to get laid and then he wants a nap.
Danny could use a little sleep, feel fresh for Pasco Ferri’s clambake.
Two
Terri’s in no mood for preliminaries.
She walks into the little bedroom, closes the drapes and pulls the bedspread down. Then she peels off her bathing suit and lets it drop on the floor. Usually she showers when she gets back from the beach so she don’t get sand and salt in the bed. Usually makes Danny do the same—but now she don’t care. She digs her thumbs into the waistband of his swimming trunks, smiles and says, “Yeah, you’re worked up from that bitch on the beach.”
“You too.”
“Maybe I’m bi,” she teases. “Oh, feel you when I said that.”