head straight ahead to water.
Down at the beach, the spoiled, foolish John and the hand-
some J.J. took off their shoes and headed into the water, fully
dressed. They pushed their way through the rough surf, which
was sometimes waist high, sometimes chest high. They pulled
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Come and Fetch These Stupid Kids
their legs up and over and through the water, struggling as
though passing through dense, fast-moving mud. John got
knocked over immediately by the first wave, but J.J. dived right
into it and came out on top of another. John surfaced and
cheered and was knocked over again.
Margie stripped to her underwear, but Peg took off only her
skirt. Margie ran in after John and J.J., holding the Dumbo tube
around her waist and screaming.
Peg stood in the surf for some time and let the tide bury her
feet. Two waves was all it took to sink her over her ankles. There
was enough dark and rain that she could not see very far past
the three heads of her friends out there. She pulled her feet out
of the sand and made her way to the surf, right into the face of
a wave that stood for a moment above her as high as a chain
link fence. The wave fell, and she relaxed and let it roll her.
When Peg came up, she was on top of another wave. She saw
John and J.J. and Margie in a valley below her, their mouths
open. The trunk of Margie’s Dumbo tube stuck out of the water
like a periscope. A bigger wave came down on Peg, and on her
friends, too.
When Peg surfaced again, she could not see her friends. She
treaded water and ducked under three waves before she got
high enough on a swell to see that they had gone farther out
into the ocean. Her boyfriend and her two friends were out to
where the waves were rising but not breaking. J.J. was separated
from John and Margie, and he was floating on his back. Margie
saw Peg and beckoned to her. In ten minutes of swimming, Peg
made it over to them. John had lost his ponytail holder, and his
hair was floating all around him, like seaweed.
“Isn’t it loud?” Margie shouted. “No?”
Peg was out of breath, so she nodded. A long strand of
Margie’s hair was stuck from the corner of her mouth to her ear,
making a black slash across her face, like a wound from a knife
fight. They were all treading water gracelessly, spitting seawater
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p i l g r i m s
and stretching their necks to stay above the rough surface.
Except for J.J., who was never graceless. J.J. swam around easily,
his stroke as even and strong as though he were doing casual
laps in a YMCA, instead of struggling with a storming ocean.
“How deep do you suppose it is, sir?” John shouted.
J.J. laughed, riding on a swell.
“Twenty feet!” J.J. shouted. Then the swell dipped, and he
shouted, “No! I take it back. It’s ten feet!” A new swell rose, and
J.J. said, “No! It’s eighteen feet!”
Peg held her nose and went under, pushing herself down and
seeking bottom. When she did touch, her foot first hit stones,
then something soft. She panicked and kicked until she was at
the surface. She tried to wipe the seawater from her eyes, but
the rain pushed it back again.
“This would be easier if we were a species that didn’t have to
breathe,” Margie said. Margie, with her Dumbo inner tube
supporting her slightly, was less tired than her friends. She was
the most cheerful, the least out of breath.
“John, honey?” Margie asked. “How long can you go without
breathing?”
“Last time it was three hours,” John shouted back.
“Goodness!” Margie said.
John laughed and got a mouthful of water, which gagged
him. He coughed wetly. Peg looked around and saw that they
had been pulled out far past the jetties, a great distance down
from the house. Without saying that they were doing so, the
four friends began swimming toward the beach. They were
trying in a casual way to head home. They were all getting tired,
but nobody wanted to speak about it. For some time, they tried
to swim toward shore but did not seem to make any progress.
They stopped joking with each other and then even stopped
speaking.
After a long while, J.J. said, “Oh, fuck.”
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Come and Fetch These Stupid Kids
“What?” Peg asked her boyfriend; she was breathless. “What
is it?”
“Jellyfish.”
Another considerable silence. By this point they had stopped
pretending that they weren’t aiming for shore.
Then John shouted out, “J.J.! My friend!”
“Yeah,” said J.J.
“I’m getting . . . um . . . rather tired.”
“Okay,” said J.J. “We’ll go in, then.”
John rolled his eyes, almost with annoyance. “My legs are
killing me,” he said.
“We’ll go in now,” J.J. said. “I’ll help you.”
“My legs are very . . . um . . . heavy,” said John.
“You’ve got to take off your jeans, John,” said J.J. “Can you do
that?”
The rain was cold right through the scalps of the friends, and
their breathing was wet and sloppy.
John grimaced, trying to get his jeans off. He was going
under, coming back up, going under again. J.J. swam behind
him and held him up by sticking his arms under John’s armpits.
John squirmed around more, and then his jeans popped up to
the surface, where they floated for a moment, dark, like the hide
of a shark, and then sank.
“We’re going in,” J.J. shouted. “If you girls can make it in,
then go. If you can’t make it in, don’t get tired. Just stay out
here.”
Peg and Margie did not have the breath to answer.
The boys swam away, and a wave immediately separated
them from their girlfriends. The girls watched them for a while.
It looked as though the boys couldn’t make it past the jetties.
Margie’s teeth chattered. Peg swam over to her and grabbed
Dumbo’s inflatable head.
“No,” Margie said. “Mine.”
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105
p i l g r i m s
“I have to,” Peg said. Her legs ached from the cold water.
When she kicked hard to warm them, she kicked Margie. Mar-
gie started crying. Margie and Peg were pulled up on a wave,
and they could see then that John and J.J. were not much closer
to the beach. Peg held her breath and shut her eyes. A wave
slapped her. She opened her eyes into water and breathed water
and swallowed it.
“We won’t make it back,” Margie said.
Peg kicked her.
“Shut up!” Margie shouted, although Peg had not spoken.
Peg kicked Margie again. The girls treaded water and tried to
see the progress of John and J.J. toward the beach. Which, after
a great passage of time, the boys did reach. John and J.J. did
eventually reach the beach, and when Peg saw this, she said to
Margie
, “Look!”
“Shut up!” Margie said, and kicked Peg.
Peg could see J.J. pulling John out of the water. J.J. was in fact
dragging John from the sea by his hair. A caveman and his wife.
J.J. lugged John up the beach and dropped down beside him.
Margie did not look. Her eyes were closed and her mouth
was open. Then Peg did not look anymore, either. She could
imagine J.J. slouched over John, who may or may not have been
breathing. She could imagine J.J. taking some time to throw up
the seawater from his gut, lean his forehead against the sand,
retch a little.
Then J.J. would stand on his strong and handsome legs, a
little shaky. Peg could imagine it. J.J. would look out at the
water to where Margie and Peg should be. He would probably
not be able to spot them. His ragged breathing would continue,
and he would stand, hands on his hips, slightly hunched over.
He would look very much like an exhausted and heroic star
soccer player, after a remarkable save.
J.J. would stand there. He would have to decide whether to
come out after Margie and Peg or telephone the coast guard
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Come and Fetch These Stupid Kids
and wait for help. It didn’t matter what he decided, because he
would hate Margie and Peg either way. Whatever he decided,
he would certainly hate them for it. Peg was sure of that, as she
was treading water with her eyes closed. Peg did not have to
watch more of this scene unfolding. No, she did not. Peg did
not have to see it happen to know what would happen.
J.J. would hate Peg and Margie for demanding that difficult
decision from him, just as Peg now hated Margie for crying
in the water beside her. Just as Peg now hated spoiled and
foolish John for taking his friends out there in the rough ocean.
Just as (most of all) Peg now hated her handsome boyfriend
J.J. Peg hated J.J. for standing on the beach while she herself
got dragged out deeper to sea. She hated him for being a strong
swimmer. She hated him for wondering what to decide and
for catching his breath, and she hated him (most of all) for
hating her.
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107
The Many Things That
Denny Brown Did Not Know
(Age Fifteen)
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No fault of his own, but Denny Brown did not know very
much about his parents and their work. Denny’s parents
were both nurses. His mother was a nurse in the burn unit
at Monroe Memorial Hospital, and his father was a private duty
nurse, also known as a visiting nurse. Denny was aware of these
facts, naturally, but he did not know much past that.
Denny Brown did not know the extent of horrors that his
mother encountered daily in her work at the burn unit. He did
not know, for instance, that his mother sometimes cared for
patients whose skin was essentially gone. He did not know that
his mother was considered an exceptional nurse, who was fa-
mous for never losing her stomach and for keeping the other
nurses from losing theirs. He did not know that his mother
spoke to every burned patient, even the doomed ones, in cool
and reassuring tones of conversation, never hinting at the agony
of their prospects.
Denny Brown knew even less about his father’s nursing ca-
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p i l g r i m s
reer, other than that it was unusual and embarrassing to have a
father who was a nurse. Mr. Brown sensed his son’s shame,
which was but one of the many reasons he did not talk about
any aspect of his work in the home. There was no way, therefore,
that Denny could have known that his father secretly would
have preferred to have been a psychiatric nurse rather than a
private duty nurse. Back in nursing school, Mr. Brown had
trained at a large mental hospital, in the men’s ward. He had
loved it there, and his patients had adored him. If he’d not
actually felt that he could cure his patients, he’d certainly be-
lieved himself capable of bettering their lives.
However, there was no mental hospital in Monroe County.
Therefore, Denny Brown’s father had spent his married life
working as a private duty nurse instead of the psychiatric nurse
he ought to have been. He worked purely out of economic
necessity and did not enjoy his assignments. His talents were
unrecognized. His patients were old, dying people. They did
not even notice him, except in spare moments, when they came
out of their death marches only long enough to be suspicious of
him. The patients’ families were suspicious as well, always ac-
cusing private duty nurses of stealing. Society as a whole, in fact,
was suspicious of male nurses. So Mr. Brown was met with
skepticism in every new job, in every new home, as though he
were something perverse.
What’s more, Denny Brown’s father believed that private
duty nursing was not nursing at all, but merely tending. It
frustrated him that he did more bathing and wiping than he
did nursing. Year after year, Denny Brown’s father sat in home
after home, watching over the slow and expensive deaths of one
wealthy, aged cancer patient after another.
Denny Brown did not know anything about any of this.
regretted the rough things that she often said. She’d had a wise
110 ✦
The Many Things That Denny Brown Did Not Know
mouth as a little girl, and she had a wise mouth as a grown
woman. She also had a dirty mouth. The wise mouth had
always been with her. The dirty mouth came from her year of
nursing in Korea during the war. In any case, she often said
things that she didn’t mean or later was privately sorry for. Very
privately sorry.
For instance, there was a young nurse named Beth in the
burn unit where Denny’s mother worked. Beth had a drinking
problem. One day, Beth confessed to Denny’s mother that she
was pregnant. Beth didn’t want to have an abortion but couldn’t
imagine keeping a child on her own.
Beth said desperately, “I was thinking of selling my baby to a
nice, childless couple.”
And Denny Brown’s mother said, “The way you drink, you
could sell that baby to the fucking circus.”
Mrs. Brown was instantly mortified at herself. She avoided
Beth for days, secretly asking herself, as she often did, Why am I such a horrible human being?
At the end of Denny Brown’s sophomore year, he was in-
vited to the Monroe High School Academic Awards Ban-
quet. Denny’s father had to work, but Mrs. Brown attended.
Denny got a handful of awards that night. He was a very good,
though not exceptional, student. He was a smart kid, but he did
not excel in any particular subject, as he did not know yet
whether he was very good at any particular thing. So Denny
received a small handful of awards, including a certificate of
merit, honoring h
is participation in something called Youth Art
Month.
“Youth Art Month,” his mother said on the ride home.
“Youth Art Month.”
She pronounced it slowly: “Youth . . . Art . . . Month . . .”
She pronounced it quickly: “YouthArtMonth.”
She laughed and said, “There’s just no right way to say that, is
there? That’s just an ugly goddamn phrase, isn’t it?”
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p i l g r i m s
And then Denny Brown’s mother recognized her son’s si-
lence. And she too was silent for the rest of the drive.
She drove on. She did not speak, but she was thinking of
Denny. She was thinking, He does not know how sorry I am.
Denny Brown did not know, at the beginning of his sixteenth
summer, what he was going to do for a job. He did not know
what he was interested in. He did not know what was out there
for work.
After a few weeks of looking, he ended up taking a part-time
job at the Monroe Country Club. He worked in the men’s
locker room. It was a fancy, carpeted locker room, fragrant with
hidden deodorizing agents. The distinguished men of Mon-
roe Township would use the locker room to dress for the golf
course. They would put on their cleated golf shoes, leaving their
dress shoes on the floor in front of their lockers. Denny Brown
did not know anything about golf, but this was not required for
his work. It was Denny’s job to polish the men’s dress shoes
while the men themselves golfed. He shared this job with a
sixteen-year-old boy from his neighborhood named Abraham
Ryan. There was no apparent reason that two people were
needed for the job. Denny did not know why these men needed
their shoes polished every day, in the first place. Denny did not
know why he had been hired.
Some days, Denny and Abraham would have to polish no
more than three pairs of shoes during the entire course of their
shift. They took turns. When they weren’t working, they were
instructed to stay in the corner of the locker room, next to the
electric shoe-polishing machine. There was only one stool in
the locker room, and Denny and Abraham took turns sitting on
it. While one sat, the other would lean against the wall.
Denny and Abraham were supervised by the Monroe Coun-
try Club sports and recreation manager, a serious older man
named Mr. Deering. Mr. Deering would look in on them every