seafood by the ton, often imitated, never duplicated
a City Island story—
There are many strands of fishing line strung high across the airspace above the patio, but I don’t know that. I see shimmering air, that’s all. The lines are there to keep me up here, but I don’t know that. It’s working. I watch.
The tables are covered in golden shellpiles, steamers and lobster tails and smelt, scallops, shrimp, dredged in something, what, I don’t know. It’s almost sandy. Trays with plastic tubs of tartar sauce, ketchup. What I desire the most is the bright-red cherry on top of the icy slush in their cups, which shines like the wet belly of a clam pried from the hard rock. Or like a gumball. It’s so red, I can’t stop my mouth from falling open, tongue hanging. I feel like throwing back my head and screaming.
Once, one of them knocked their cup off a table near the fence and some of it spilled onto the rocks by the water. We descended on it—all of us who had gathered just outside the perimeter. Someone else got to the cherry, but I was able to pick at what was left. It tasted like City Island, sun-ripened and love-drunk.
Oh, I’m a local, if you don’t know that—I was born here many years ago on the roof of a building not far from the bay—it was the only place my mother could find. Real estate, right? Some others I know like to say the island has changed since then, when we would still follow the boats out from the marinas every morning, but I’m not so sure. We keep coming here every Saturday, every Sunday, and we’re watching the same chattering lines going in and out with their battered trays, the paper plates that blow away under the next table over. Many summers I have been coming here; many summers I have watched them through the languid shimmer.
It’s a place I don’t understand all the way, a ritual place, at least for me. There is something about it, how they all gather here at the island’s poky end, arms and legs squished together around the laden tables. We, too, do something like this, a feast after the catch. A feeding frenzy, to borrow a term from what the sharks do. I can see the scene almost from above, the bobbing caps and running children, and the water lapping at all sides.
I elbow my neighbor who is sitting next to me, uncharacteristically silent. I gesture with my head. There is a basket of soft-shell crabs, there, on the far table. If only we could get there, I say. If only there was a way in. We could scoop it up quickly, take it with us to Orchard Beach. We could take it to the pier, or to the rocks over there with the view of the sound. We could tear in together, can you imagine the crunch? Can you imagine? My neighbor shuffles a bit, says nothing. I think about things like that often, but only briefly. I could come here every summer day and watch the happy people eating and be happy, I know it.
A group of them is playing cards within earshot. The water looks so calm today—I can’t believe it’s already September—I dealt so it’s your turn, wait, no, it’s yours. Johnny’s Reef, seafood by the ton, often imitated, never duplicated. “That’s on the sign outside,” one of them says. But I don’t know that. I don’t know what they are saying at all. All I can understand is crunching batter and the squawking quarrels and nervous shifting of my companions, all of us in a row on the top of the fence.
Someday, one of us will learn the trick of the fishing lines. Until then, we must eat with our eyes.
would order again: fried clam strips, fried smelts, fried calamari, fried soft-shell crabs, fried anything, henny coladas (2 minimum)