In Yaphank, In Broad Daylight

by Janelle Greco

We’re sitting in Yaphank counting cars. I look at Grams’s hand and her wrinkles and veins make me think of the mountain ranges on my globe, of all the places that aren’t here—cities that don’t move at the pace of a thick syrup, towns that aren’t on an island measured in phrases like “out east” and “south shore.” The condensation collects in droplets on the side of Grams’s glass of vodka, and I wish it would rain. Instead, the yellow yolk of the sun looks as if it’s about to break and the rotten vegetable stench of the landfill rises up with its heat, reminding me that the place where everyone dumps their trash and old machinery, their rusted metal and broken toys, is only a few streets away. 

It’s too hot to be outside, but we’re manning the farm stand and Grams says we won’t be able to hear people beep their horns over the air conditioner. We watch a family of deer across the street, and I think how they’ve overrun this place. We put up fencing, cover the plants with chicken wire, spray chemicals, but they always see the spots we missed. Grandpa keeps telling us that they’ve munched the heads off his zinnias again and he’s had it for the last goddamn time. I beg him not to shoot them. I beg him to spare something. 

“Sure,” he says. “Let them eat all my vegetables. Why not.” 

The deer run out into the road alongside the wild turkeys, and I bite my lip. People don’t stop in Yaphank for animals or sightseeing or shopping; they drive through. They only stop at the farm stand to pick up tomatoes and dahlias and peppers for frying. They pass by the deli and the polluted pond and the firehouse. They zip past the historic houses, the old Shell gas station, and the darling gazebo at the corner of Main Street and County Road 87. “Quaint,” people say, but a place always seems different when you live there. 

There is room in Yaphank and people like that. Room for sprawling lawns of dried-up grass, room to run in sprinklers and ride dirt bikes and play catch. People feel free to speak their mind, to tell you that you’re ugly and throw dirt clods at your feet like Jimmy and Kevin did to me the other day. I found out through a town history project for eleventh grade last year that, in addition to the sod farm and minimum security prison down the street, the town also once made room to hold Nazi camps and rallies here. Everyone in the photo on the town’s history website is smiling and wearing swastikas. This part of Yaphank is called “Germantown,” and everyone is fine with it still being called that. Everyone is fine with a lot of things here, and I wonder if a place can get scarred like a person. 

People wear cowboy hats and drive big rusted trucks as if we are in Tennessee or Georgia, but we’re not; we’re on Long Island. We’re an hour and twenty minutes by train from New York City where people pronounce the town’s name wrong, making the “ph” into an “f” sound or skipping the word entirely. No one has ever heard of us; they think we are upstate somewhere. But no one here cares that we’re not a destination spot. Deer ticks and Lyme disease are the biggest concerns. I think about hopping on a train to the city one day—riding toward all those skyscrapers, meeting people who might be like me, having my own apartment—but there are things I love here. Take the geodes, for instance—the ones my dad brought home and cracked open with a wet saw. Grams is also in this town and there is the way the strawberries taste after being warmed by the sun or how the light filters through the dogwood leaves in the backyard. The gladioli are just beginning to bloom. 

Everyone knows everyone else here because people don’t leave Yaphank. It sucks them in like the sinkhole on Mill Road or like the pneumatic tube at the PNC bank on Main Street. This is why when a woman was found stabbed to death in the woods, where people ride quads and smoke weed and hunt deer, everyone was shocked. For weeks after, I went directly to Grams’s house when I got off the school bus, scared that something horrible could happen to me too, that someone could be lurking in the woods, waiting for me. When the murderer got caught, people were relieved that they could leave their doors unlocked again, as if no other murderers existed beyond that one. People went back to complaining about the deer. 

Grandpa has the head of one mounted in the living room. It watches us eat pot roast and listen to the television on full volume and play games of solitaire. Today I take a break from playing rummy to pick up Grams’s binoculars and spy on the doe across the street. I see her black eyes and her ears swivel, and I hope like hell that she knows better than to come out here in broad daylight. It’s quiet now—quaint, even—but I know how it goes. People keep guns here, and the diesel trucks come barreling down at sixty miles per hour. Just when you think you’ve gotten across the street, you see the headlights and you freeze. 

Published August 9th, 2020