Treyf

In Gloucester, my father, whom my mother said should really be locked up, liked to take me lobstering off the Long Beach rocks. Underwater, he could hold his breath forever, gliding down into the boulder fields in a few swift kicks, all lines smooth, as I frantically swam after him, and I'd have to see stars whirling at the corners of my vision before scraping for the surface.

One of those times, a couple of months after my parents had separated, I found myself standing waist deep in the shallows. The water, cold even in July, goose pimpled your skin and set your teeth chattering. Dad was using his fingers like scissors on the choppy hair at his neckline, as if he was measuring the length. Ma used to cut his hair. I could tell he was thinking hard about something. He needed quiet. At his leather coat factory, any time you almost formed a clear thought the thunk of the leather cutter would chop it in half and then band saws would grind it into a pulp. Here we couldn't hear anything but the gulls.

I had my mask on, waiting, staring up at Dad. He had one of those deeply unsettling plump moustaches, and I guess the sun caught his face just right because this lustrous specimen seemed to contain my father's very Ch'i, as if the moustache grew the face and not the other way around.

But what kind of sick man, a Jew no less, in the late twentieth century would wear such a moustache. That's what my mother said anyway. Of course, she's the one that found it so attractive in the first place, so you can't trust anybody.

Right then Dad turned toward me. A strained look of concentration on his face.

"Peeing," he said.

I started inching away.

"—and thinking," he added. "Okay. Now I'm done both. Mostly." He nodded like he'd come to some kind of big decision. Then he put his mask on, placed the snorkel tab into his mouth, and garbled something I couldn't understand.

I nodded. Then we dove.

People outside of New England don't know you can catch lobsters with your hands. They don't know a lot of things but that too. In order to catch them, first you got to be willing to get bit. You look under the rocks or in crevices for the flicker of antennae and then you reach in with your gloved hand and wiggle it around until you feel a sharp pinch. The neoprene gloves are thick enough, but you still feel their claws, and then you yank them out of their hole and stuff them in the net.

After a few hours of diving, we dragged our nets up onto the beach to examine our haul. Out of the five we caught, two were obviously under the legal weight, but when I went to throw them back, Dad stayed my hand.

"Keepers," he said.

I sighed, knowing that meant a visit to the Shellfish Constable up on the wharf in the Harbormaster's office. So we trudged up the beach. I went over and Dad went through the split-rail fence edging the parking lot, and we dried off with towels warming on the hood of my parents' Volvo station wagon.

The lobbies scratched, writhed inside the Styrofoam cooler once I'd loaded them up.

Dad nudged the cooler with his toe, saying, "Don't tell your mother," which made no sense because Ma had given up trying to keep me kosher years ago. Plus she ran a Greek restaurant where they served lobster all the time, even if she herself would never touch this treyf, the thing I'm sure she wanted but wasn't allowed to have.

"Got it?"

I nodded.

Out of his wallet, he took out two twenties and handed them to me.

"Go on."

I hesitated. I hated paying off the Shellfish Constable when we went over quota or kept what we called chickens, the underweight ones. I could see him sitting in his lawn chair outside...