Days

by Mary Robison

  “I haven’t slept,” Camilla said. “All right,” she said after a moment. “Thank you.”

  “Bye-bye,” Anne said, and Daniel waved at Camilla.

  CAMILLA WENT BACK TO HER apartment, to her bedroom. She pushed open a window. The air that blew into the room was sharp and cold, full of the sounds of voices and cars.

  She tried to sleep, but the little stand by her bed, by her pillow, seemed too close to her face. She got up and moved the nightstand. She unplugged a floor lamp and moved it back, too. She tried lying on the bed with her face toward the door to the hallway, but it was not her usual sleeping position. She lay on her back, and pulled deep breaths into her lungs. She heard a city bus with tire chains on the street outside, and the ring of a runaway hub cap.

  In an hour she heard laughter, and the clack of a woman’s shoes on the stairs, then a beating on her apartment door.

  She left the bed. “Coming right away,” she called.

  She stopped to see her living room on the way to the door, and it was clean except for an open jar of apple butter that was stuck with a bread knife. She put the jar on a window ledge, behind a metal blind.

  The fashion model kissed her own index finger and touched it to Camilla’s nose. “You look like we woke you up,” she said. “We are done with this man’s taxes.”

  Daniel winked at Camilla. He said, “I spread a rumor that you have a piano down here.”

  “We want to use the piano,” Anne said. “You’ll let us, won’t you?” They came into the living room, holding hands. “This is a nice place. You didn’t tell me it was so nice, Danny.”

  Daniel said, “Sure. Captain’s got a nice place. She has amber bulbs in her lamps.” He was carrying the whiskey bottle by its neck with his free hand. He gave the bottle to Anne, who gave it to Camilla.

  Anne threw off her high-heeled shoes and climbed onto Camilla’s couch. Camilla laughed, watching the fashion model shake her shoulders and flat belly.

  Daniel sat on the bench before the piano. He exercised his fingers like a concert musician.

  “Oh, I see,” Anne said after a while. “You can’t play the piano. You don’t know how.”

  Camilla drank a lot of the whiskey, very fast.

  “Showing off?” Anne said. She took back the bottle and had some swallows. The low gray light from the window washed over her cloud of hair and the silver dress. Her mouth was open and she crooned.

  Camilla got the bottle and drank more. “Be careful of my floorboards,” she said, seeing the fashion model’s bare feet. “Rospo sanded off my varnish. You’ll have splinters.”

  Anne said, “What else did you buy, besides the coat?”

  “This is the first time I’ve seen you out of your elevator uniform,” Daniel said. “Including the time I took you to Keppler’s for clam chowder. Me for chowder, rather. I think you preferred the navy bean.”

  Anne said, “Try on whatever else you bought.”

  “This coat is all I bought to wear,” Camilla said. “I bought a magazine.”

  “Try something on,” Anne said. She blew hair from her nose. “Let’s see you in your other clothes. Model them for us.”

  “All right, I will, I guess,” Camilla said. She went into her bedroom and closed the door. She removed her uniform trousers, pulling them off by the cuffs. She stood before the closet, barelegged in socks and underpants. She took a white blouse and flannel skirt from the closet hangers and laid them on the bed. She put more clothes on the bed—Jamaica shorts, a black sweater, cotton pajamas. She dressed at last in the black sweater and a pair of leather chaps.

  “Those are Rospo’s,” Anne said when she looked at the chaps. “He wears them when he rides his motorcycle. I’ve seen him in them.”

  “I don’t dress so as to be noticed,” Camilla said. “I’m not as pretty as you. Where’s Daniel?”

  “He went up to my place and conked out, probably,” Anne said. “He left his bottle for you, though, since you were having such a good time with it. Wasn’t that nice?”

  “Did you tell him anything?” Camilla said. She made noise sitting down in the leather pants.

  “Of course not,” Anne said. “He was just being nice. He is nice. He buys me everything new. My whole apartment.” She put her head on the sofa arm and looked dreamily at Camilla. She said, “It’s so lucky for me.”

  Camilla’s phone rang from the bedroom and she moved to answer it. “Hello, hello,” she said, hoping it was Daniel.

  “What’s up?” Rospo said. “You sound happy.”

  “No. I’m low. I feel like I can’t get a breath today,” Camilla said. “I must have emphysema.” She stood in the bedroom doorway, holding the phone receiver, and watched as Anne slid off the couch and began to crawl on all fours. “Daniel was here before and left,” Camilla said in Italian.

  “With Anne? What’d they say about your apartment? What I did with the wallpaper.”

  “Watch out for your knees,” Camilla said to Anne.

  “I’ll make it,” Anne said.

  Camilla told Rospo in Italian: “Your whore from upstairs is going to cough up whiskey all over the floor you have never varnished.”

  “Drunk?” Rospo said. “It’s eleven o’clock in the morning.”

  “Thank you for coming,” Camilla said to Anne. “Come again and stay.”

  “I’m so sick,” Anne said. She had reached the door. “See you later.” She crawled through.

  “I could kill you,” Camilla said into the phone when Anne was gone. She sat on the bed that was strewn with her clothes. “You repeated to Anne every word I said about Daniel.”

  “That was a mistake,” Rospo said. “They’re very happy, you know. You don’t have a chance with Daniel.”

  “Thank you,” Camilla said. “But sometimes things can change. Nothing’s permanent.”

  “No, it was a mistake,” Rospo said. “Those two are just alike and they’re very different from you. They are like me.”

  “Okay, then,” Camilla said.

  “They’re not like you.”

  “Okay, Rospo,” she said.

  “At least Anne’s nice about your interest. Did she see your new coat?”

  “Yes. I think it depressed her,” Camilla said.

  Widower

  “I’M UP NOW,” NICKY SAID, before our dad came in. Nicky was still under the bedcovers, his hair twisting around his smallish face from under his Phillies cap.

  I was already at the window. We lived near the Atlantic then, in a wooden one-story. I was trying to read the sky.

  “It’s nine-thirty, lazy bums,” Dad said. “I can never get you stirring, Beth, without this.” He gave me a half cup of coffee.

  Dad was a dentist, a big bald man with powdery hands and a pinched mouth full of gold-crowned teeth. “I can never get Nicky stirring at all,” he said.

  We looked at my ten-year-old brother. He was barely sitting, held up by his arms, staring at his collection of beach shells.

  “He does seem to need help,” I said.

  Dad ran a finger along the seam at the back of Nicky’s overturned starfish.

  “Five more minutes, please,” Nicky said. He turned back the bedclothes. He was wearing orange underpants with white piping. We both had burns from rubber-rafting in the surf the day before. Our eyebrows were bleached, and so was the down on my thighs. My skin felt crisp and too tight.

  Dad left and I took the mug of coffee from the dresser top and drank. Nicky put on canvas shoes and a yellow polo shirt.

  “Here he comes again,” I said to Nicky. Dad came back and stood outside the door, whistling, and jiggling the coins in his pockets.

  “Yep, I hear her coming up the drive,” he said. “Her car tires spattering the gravel—”

  “He cannot,” I said to Nicky. “It couldn’t be later than nine o’clock. She isn’t due yet.”

  “Who isn’t?” Nicky said.

  I said, “Mrs. Clark.” Mrs. Clark was one of Dad’s girlfriends.

>   Nicky groaned and he cut his throat with his pointer finger. I leaned into the hall.

  Dad was swiping at the shaving soap on the backs of his jaws. “It’s Nicky that worries me,” he said. “He isn’t wearing trousers.”

  “I’m waiting for you to stop hectoring me,” Nicky said.

  I drained my coffee cup and Dad handed me a stub of paper, a grocery tab. On the back, in pointy scrawl, was a list. “Things to talk about,” he said, “if the conversation gets stalled.”

  “It won’t,” I said, reading the list. “‘Books, tackle and bait, beach moves.’ What does ‘beach moves’ mean?”

  “Just how every year the sand gets pushed around and the landscape is different here,” Dad said. “The same conversation you had with Nicky at dinner last night.”

  Nicky said, “Beth, what do you think is the best tackle for marlin?”

  “All right, all right,” Dad said, retreating down the hall.

  “If the damned beach would quit moving around, I might be able to opine,” I said.

  “All right,” Dad called.

  Nicky got out of bed and came across the room and performed what I thought was a startling and eerily correct impersonation of Katharine Hepburn. He said, “Oh, kiss me, Stewart.” He pulled off his baseball cap and drew a forearm across his brow as he had seen pitchers do on television. He spat something from the end of his tongue.

  “For you,” Dad said. He had come back, with a tumbler of citrus juice, which he held out to Nicky.

  “Thank you, no,” Nicky said. “Give it to Beth or drink it yourself. I think you put mashed-up aspirin in it for my sunburn, which doesn’t hurt.”

  “Your loss,” Dad said, and gulped the juice.

  When Dad and Nicky were gone, I got into my swimsuit, and then I put a sundress with patch pockets over it, and stepped into rubber beach thongs.

  Dad was leaning against the mantel in the living room. He had the Inquirer quartered and was studying the editorial page. Nicky was in the swivel rocker, eating dry cereal from a Sugar Pops box.

  “This is something,” Dad said. He looked up from the paper. I knew he wanted to tell about what he was reading.

  “What do we do with Mrs. Clark?” I said. “Is she a swimmer?”

  Some of Dad’s girlfriends refused to go to the beach. They were in their fifties mostly, like Dad, and didn’t want to be seen in bathing suits.

  “Swims better than you do,” Dad said. “Roller skates better, too.”

  “I’d like to see that,” Nicky said. He snapped a cereal bit in the air and dropped it into his upturned mouth.

  My father coughed through his nose. “She’s a good swimmer, though,” he said. “I hope you’ll give her a break. Hell, I’ve been up since six o’clock this morning. I’ve got everything ready—the awnings up, the outdoor shower fixed. I raked down the lawn. Do you hear me?”

  “We’re listening,” I said.

  Nicky said, “Didn’t I meet Mrs. Clark at the Star Market?”

  “She liked you very much,” Dad said. “But she hasn’t met Beth here. You two are alike in a lot of ways, Beth.”

  I sat down on the sofa, which was bristly on the backs of my burned legs. I was radiating heat. I noticed Nicky squinting at me.

  “They are alike in ways,” Nicky said, and went back to crunching cereal.

  “What’s her first name?” I said.

  Nicky said, “Hammerhead. Hammerhead Clark.” He laughed until the veins were standing out on his neck.

  “Okay,” Dad said to him.

  “Helen Highwater,” Nicky said.

  “Her name is Helen,” Dad said.

  I went to the kitchen to poach an egg and toast a slice of bread. I poured my morning teaspoon of Maalox and swallowed it. I was fifteen years old and I had an ulcer that was just beginning to heal. I could hear Nicky still laughing in the rocker.

  Dad came in. “What’s going on?” he said. He put a fingernail beside a tooth and cleared away a thread of orange pulp.

  “Just Nicky,” I said.

  “A real nitwit,” my father said. “Here’s something I found last night in a box in the attic, under the awning poles.” He handed me a Kodak snapshot of Mom. Mom held a tissue in the photo and was wearing her hair in a French twist. “She was crying in that picture,” Dad said, “but you can’t tell it. That was in Springfield. She’d been hacking up onions for a stew.”

  “I don’t remember,” I said.

  Dad said, “You weren’t here yet.”

  Nicky joined us, wearing my pair of red-framed sunglasses under the bill of his baseball cap. He made drum noises with the spittle in his mouth while our father talked to us about Mrs. Clark. Dad called Mrs. Clark Helen.

  “I was a patient a long time before I was a dentist,” he said. “I know a little about suffering. Okay, Nicky, cut it out.”

  Nicky had imaginary pliers in both his fists and was yanking and wrenching at one of his own back molars and whimpering with pain. He did this whenever Dad mentioned being a dentist.

  “Helen’s suffered a little and her loss was more recent than ours. She’s still a bit tender.” He lifted his head and the several chins under his jaw smoothed. “I know I go on too much with you two. You’re my only audience.”

  “That’s a big lie,” I said. “You blab to everyone you get in your chair.”

  “They don’t listen,” Dad said.

  I ate at the kitchen table, trying to chew each forkful eighteen times. Still, I got up from the table with a fierce point ignited just above my navel. I marked on the back of my hand the time for taking my stomach tranquilizer, and then I stood at the sink and rinsed the dishes. I got out the vacuum cleaner.

  Dad was in my way as I tried to sweep. He was restacking magazines, adjusting furniture. He spent a long time lining up the rolled bottoms of the bamboo shades on the screened front porch.

  I was pushing the sweeper back into its utility closet when I was sprinkled with cold water. Nicky was back in the rocker, absently squeezing little lines from his squirt gun.

  “Better stow that,” I said.

  “Beth,” Nicky said, very seriously.

  “Nicky,” I said.

  “Don’t you hurt?” he said. We compared sunburns. His stomach was nearly tomato-colored. My chest and my nose were bad.

  “Eleven o’clock,” Dad said. “Time for Helen.” He came across the living room and into the short hall that led to the bedrooms. He went into his room and shut the door.

  “It’s Helen time,” I said to Nicky.

  HELEN WAS A SHOCK-HAIRED WOMAN with dimples that bracketed her lipsticked mouth when she smiled. She wore owlish glasses, and she was tanned a rich mud color. She had swimmer’s legs. She smelled of peppermint, and she was chewing gum. “Let’s sit on the porch,” she said. “By all means.”

  “Dad’s making himself beautiful, Helen,” I said. “Do you want a drink of something?”

  I fixed vegetable juice cocktails while Helen talked to Nicky on the front porch.

  “Solarcaine,” Nicky was saying when I joined them again. Nicky was shivering all over. He hugged himself.

  “The only thing that works is a tea bath,” Helen said. “It takes the sting out of a burn.”

  “Dad said it would wreck the tub,” Nicky said.

  Helen said, “Piffle.”

  I sat with my elbows on my knees and my dress drawn up off my hot legs.

  “Your father thinks I’m a reader,” Helen said. “He thinks I read all the time and I never do. It’s an impression I never bothered to correct.”

  “I won’t tell him,” I said.

  “Tell me what?” Dad said. He had changed his clothes and was stepping onto the porch. He wore a white collarless shirt I had never seen and bright blue trousers. Five or six dark spots appeared on the belly of the shirt, and I twisted to see Nicky, but Nicky had his arms folded.

  “Who squirted me?” Dad said.

  “That’s for making me wait, Doc,” Helen sa
id. She had Nicky’s water pistol.

  “Don’t tell me it wasn’t worth the wait,” Dad said. He turned his thick body to model his shirt. On the back of the shirt, in several bright colors of thread, were embroidered Mexican flowers and leaves.

  The phone rang and Dad said, “Beth.”

  I answered in the kitchen.

  “Dr. Maurice?” a man’s voice said.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Well, I’m here at the shore for a week,” the man told me, “and last night at dinner I broke off three-quarters of a tooth on a bone in a pork chop—a big piece of filling. It hurts. The pain is really devastating.” The man laughed a little. “I need to see someone and, I guess, have an extraction.”

  I explained that Dad was on vacation, and that he only worked Thursdays and then out of the office of Dr. Eisenstein.

  “I know. I called Eisenstein, and his wife said he was in New York and that if it was an emergency I could try Dr. Maurice. I think it’s an emergency. When I close my eyes I see red.”

  Dad came up behind me, scowling, and took the phone from my hand. I went back to the porch, where Nicky was telling Helen about a movie we had seen on the boardwalk.

  “He’s just waiting on top of the mesa,” Nicky said.

  “The first guy or the second guy?” Helen said. She seemed to be interested.

  “Is this the Clint Eastwood?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Nicky said. “Clint Eastwood is just waiting on top of the mesa for the second guy.” He told Helen most of the movie, and only when it was winding up did Helen start to look out the screen at our yard and at the big wooden tourist home across the street.

  From the kitchen, I heard Dad saying, “You’re telling me a sad story, but I don’t even have my technician today. You should go to the mainland. I see. Well, without X-rays . . . Why? Why do pregnant women see OBs instead of GPs?”

  Helen said, “Beth, do you know I’ve got an ulcer, too?”

  “Right now?” I said.

  “I’ll always have it,” she said. “But right now it’s stopped hurting and I eat just what I please.”

  I said, “Do you know what really helps me?”

  “Swimming in the ocean,” Nicky said in singsong.