Brad and I spent almost two weeks in Denton before change came to Gray House. We spent mostly quiet nights together before Rosie and I got tired of our long days and went looking for our newest suicide pact.
I don't exactly fear change, but I do fear consequence, and sometimes I wonder if there's a difference. I don't think there's anything wrong with change, but I think it should be reasoned, and measured, and weighed against the probable outcomes of various alternatives. Rosie takes a decidedly different approach: she doesn't decide change, God does. So there's nothing we can do and if it's time to move on, it's time.
I felt the beads inside the great kaleidoscope of the House moving in small and incremental clicks with Rosie's sharp eyes on the horizon, and I thought about Jack.
Jack had once said to me that Rosie would always allow everything to change, and often for the worse. Stirring the pot, and creating drama. The obvious fact always seemed to escape Jack that when living in Gray House with those beings who make and unmake worlds, knitting would never be the nightly ritual, and Jack so wanted to knit. I think what Jack always wanted was for his story to end, and maybe that's what I wanted with Brad, in Denton. To parcel up all our loose ends into some immovable thing I was allowed to study and understand for the rest of time.
I think that's called a happy ending, but I almost don't remember anymore. I remember watching Jack struggle with the idea of being an endless creature of will. So... you get married and then... you like, have a baby... and then... the baby grows up...
More often than not, Jack conflated change with conflict and I think that's how and why he broke so many of our hearts. He would knit himself into the definitions of a relationship under glass, unchanging, and then the only way forward was out.
Well, Brad and I had gotten married, and we'd even had a baby. That baby had grown up. When Rosie said she wanted to make a change at home, I wanted to throw my arms skyward and ask, "Well, what NOW, JACK?" as if he could stand in the place of God and tell me from the outside what to do next.
Rosie and I had decided we needed to start the second Gray book, and we decided what it would be. But growing the bones of a book has always been easy for us. The meat and the magic is a little harder to agree on, in terms of how our artistic vision varies. We decided to hold the house hostage until the book was complete, as incentive to write it. Where we were held would change as the book was written, but the first location, decided by secret ballot, was Coney Island.
One by one, we all submitted to the pact. We were allowed to go to the House proper and the surrounding few acres, and Coney Island, and no other place. When we vowed to uphold the pact, I crossed my fingers behind my back.
"It's okay, Evie," Brad assured me. "We're gonna have a lot of fun here, you and me."
I took steady breaths. Brad and I exist outside of the flash of the bomb of us. Brad and I exist in Denton, but we can exist anywhere. We can exist, if we try.
Coney Island is a 4-by-1/2 mile stretch of New York residue persisting just above the surface of the gray Atlantic. Each season there smears into the next with filthy clouds and low fog breathing reminders of the days the land was covered in reeds, and not filigreed park benches.
The weight of Manhattan has always terrified me, and the listless way in which the skyscrapers sweep nonchalant into the harbor and just end, there. Life as we know it might end there, with the industry of civilization trailing off into the sea like an unfinished thought. Manhattan holds its cityscape like an overflowing handful of jewels. Brooklyn makes more visual sense, all its structures shrugging off responsibility as they creep toward the water.
The park itself is suspended in a timeless place, where all your childhood memories of vacations take place, over and over again, on a sun-bleached reel-to-reel. I stood in the low morning mist of the overcast dawn with Brad, looking at the slow and endless turn of the Wonder Wheel, knowing the mist would lift to expose a perfect sunlit afternoon, and felt the loneliness of the cold off-season all at once. Every day, like Sunday.
When we passed the Wonder Wheel, it felt more creature than machine; maybe the seaweed twisted gears and cogs that keep a dream like summer alive to begin with. As long as it's turning, deep under the earth new dreams are being made of first kisses.
Brad's dress shoes hit the boardwalk with a certain sound I know only from movies. He keeps his eyes on distant horizons when we walk, dropping his head and skewing his shoulders for a single step, and then pushing all his hair back when he's righted himself. He puts his hands in his pockets. He feels easy and unafraid.
"Most of us are picking some place in the park to go to sleep," he tells me.
"But we're going to stay together, right?" I ask him, right out loud, because fuck all these politics we've been chaining ourselves to.
"Yeah," he says, his voice softening as he takes his dip in his stride, and pushes back his hair. "Yeah, I want you to."
I breathe a little easier and I feel the Family moving around to the places I know they'll go. Rosie vanishes under the boardwalk; Grady becomes little more than his can of spray-paint, blasting the walls with pointed but bewildering questions like, "HAVE YOU DRIVEN A FORD LATELY?"; John sighs and slips between buildings and alleys, to Disappear Completely.
I sometimes wonder how much a certain place can alter who I am on a fundamental level. Do I change completely, from room to room? If it were possible anywhere, it would be possible in Gray House. We feel it intrinsically, and instinctively. Who I am in Coney Island - who we all become - would be influenced by the summer on the air and the anonymous promises of any theme park or carnival. As I walk with Brad, I can feel a change in our shoulders from the tight vigilance of Denton to something easier, and younger. Something as lean as the jot of land it stands on; a type of hunger born into someone who never leaves the same 4 mile stretch he's inherited.
While we walk along the boardwalk, the steel frames of Luna Park shift in the rising sun to the wooden beams of the Steeplechase, and back again. Hotels shiver through the heat like mirages, and graffiti marks painted and sun-bleached concrete tables outside of the ice cream shop. The corrugated metal protecting all the store-fronts and midway games begins to roll up, a little at a time, and the music stuck in my head all night is made substantial on the breeze.
"It's the happiest prison on Earth," I tell Brad, and he laughs.
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