Don didn't go. I took them by myself, and I was planning to stop that first night farther along the road—maybe in Albuquerque or something—but the girls were so restless and bored and getting on each other's nerves and I was afraid they'd kill each other, so I decided to just pull over. We'd only gone a little ways down the main drag when India started hollering about the motel.
“The Blue Swallow!” she crowed in my ear. “Stop! Stop there!” Like it was the Taj Mahal. She read about it in Life magazine or something. She was such a fiend for Route 66 that it's weird she doesn't even remember now that she had begged for months to go down the highway. Like she doesn't remember the language now, either, and she and Gypsy were driving me crazy with it that trip, chattering in secret to each other, sounding like they were mentally retarded whenever we stopped in a restaurant.
Truth is, too, I had a headache like a hammer was banging on my skull, probably from smoking too many cigarettes and thinking too much. All I know is that when I wanted to reach out and slap both my girls for doing nothing more than just being little girls, I knew we had to get out of that car.
We pulled into the Blue Swallow, India screaming and jumping up and down in the seat in her little cowboy outfit. She even had plastic spurs on her boots, and a six-gun holster around her skinny hips, and sometimes she'd say her name wasn't India, and I should call her Tex. It made her daddy laugh and laugh, and he'd say, “C'mon over here, Tex, and help me rustle up some biscuits.” He encouraged her, because he was plumb crazy for westerns. That's where they both got it, India being the cowboy, Gypsy being the Indian, when it plainly should have been the other way around.
Gypsy was in one of her moods. Dull, sleepy, grumpy when she didn't get her way. She'd taken her turn between the seats and had a mark on her cheek where her face rested against the seam of the leather. Her hair stuck out, and I made her come over and let me smooth it down before we went into the motel lobby. “We need a room, please,” I said to the woman behind the counter.
“You got your hands full, don'tcha?” She grinned down at the girls. “You two twins?”
Gypsy ignored her, going over to finger the brochures lined up in a container against the wall. India nodded, but turned around and rolled her eyes at me. I couldn't help but smile, but I pushed her over toward her sister so I could get up to the counter. My heart was racing as I pulled out my driver's license and let her write the number down. When she saw what I'd written for the model of my car, she whistled. “Fifty-seven Thunderbird? Mind if I take a look?”
“Go ahead.” It wasn't as pretty then as it had been, but it was still a beauty. Don saw to the upkeep, and even though it was nearly sixteen years old and covered with dust from the road, it was a fine sight in front of that motel.
Standing out there, I got a memory that shoved right through all the things I had in place to keep it where it belonged. It was the bird, turning itself on in the late day, the neon buzzing to life. I thought about how staring at the blue bird all one long night, clear until dawn made it fade into nothing. My heart started racing again and I took out a cigarette.
The woman from the motel walked clear around the car. She was a little older than me, but dowdy in the way of so many small-town women. I could see her hunger when she looked at the inside, at the leather seats. “How long you had it?”
I took a drag of my cigarette and smoothed down my avocado-green skirt. “Drove it off the lot, brand new.”
India, who'd trailed us out in a clatter of spurs, said, “My mama used to be a showgirl in Las Vegas!”
The woman gave me a look, up and down, to see if it could be true, I suppose. “Isn't that something!”
“Mama, can we have pie for supper?” India asked.
Gypsy had come out behind her. “I want to play with the Magic Fingers!”
“Me, too! Can we, if we're really really good, Mama? Please?”
“We'll see, girls.” I smiled at the woman, who said, “Let me get your key.”
We got all settled into the room, which thankfully wasn't the same one I remembered from when I was sixteen, then the girls were bouncing off the walls and we walked down the street to a little café. It made me smile, walking in there. Country music was playing on the jukebox, and there was a wagon wheel on the wall, and the lights were wagon-wheel chandeliers. The air smelled like biscuits and chicken-fried steak. “Can we have a booth by the window?” I asked the young girl who came up to us with a smile on her face.
“Right this way,” she said, the syllables as twangy as Elk City.
I ordered a Coke and lit an L&M and started to feel better. The girls had root beer floats, and grilled cheeses since Gypsy wouldn't eat a cheeseburger, but I nixed the pie. They'd be crazy all night long as it was. I wanted to have a martini and sit with my book for a while before I went to sleep, and the sooner they were in bed, the better I'd be.
Which made me think of a phone call I needed to make. Couldn't do it right now, and I couldn't do it from the room. “Did you girls bring your books?”
“Course!” India said. Like me, she couldn't imagine going anywhere without a steady supply. “I have four: A Wrinkle in Time, Trixie Belden, Cherry Ames, and The Mistress of Mellyn.”
I smiled. “Good for you. And what about you, Gypsy? What did you bring with you?”
She twitched her shoulders in a shrug. Reading wasn't something she loved. “I brought my notebook and crayons. And The Forgotten Door.”
“Well, that's real good. In a little while,” I said, “I'm gonna look around a bit here in town. You girls are big enough to stay on your own, aren't you? Just for a few minutes or so?”
India tried to keep her face steady, but I could see she didn't much like it. “What if—” She looked at her sister.
“What if the bad guys come?” Gypsy said for her. She stuck her straw paper to her upper lip and wiggled her nose, deepened her voice. “You can just shoot 'em with your six-gun.”
India giggled, and said something in their language, which made Gypsy snort and then they were back and forth, putting the mustaches on, then beards. I looked out the window for a while, wondering what they were saying. I tapped my cigarette pack on the table, round and round, watching the green L&M menthol triangle turn up, then down, like an arrow.
India started laughing so hard she choked. I banged her on the back and she stopped. Then our food came and they were back with me, chattering about jackrabbits.
I got out of the room easy by promising we'd go to the TeePee Curio shop the next morning, which India found a flyer for. She made me cross my heart and hope to die and stick a needle in my eye. Nothing would do but that. She had to be there, stand inside, after seeing the big cement tepee shape of it on the street.
I promised. So I could get out for twenty minutes and make my phone call. I felt jittery and nervous as I did it, like I was lying or something, and I wasn't.
It half broke my heart to look at her face as I was leaving, those big old eyes like her daddy's all soft and sad. She always seemed practically certain something terrible would happen. I kissed her head. “You're a big girl, and I won't be but a minute, baby.” I pulled out quarters for the Magic Fingers, and she finally let go of me.
Who I had to call was their daddy. I walked back to the diner and waved at the girl behind the counter and went over to the pay phone on the wall and put in my quarters. Don answered and accepted the reverse charges. “Eldora,” he said, real mean, “what the hell are you doing?”
Hearing his voice made me feel kinda seasick. It was so normal, so real. I leaned my head on the wall. “I just need some time to think.”
“Are you meetin' him somewhere?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Eldora, I'm no fool.” His voice sounded tired, and that made it worse than if he'd been mad. “I know you've been seeing someone the past few months.”
I didn't know what to say. I try not to lie directly unless there's no way around it. “Don, I—”
Something hot bubbled around my chest then, like acid. It made me feel crazy and mean. “Don't be so dramatic, Don. People don't die of broken hearts.” Just saying it made me see how bad I'd become, and I banged my head against the wall, once, to remind myself to stop it. “I'm sorry. That's not what I meant. I just don't know what to do or think anymore. I'm going crazy. I can't breathe.” What I couldn't say was, I don't want to end up like my mama.
“I know, sweetheart. But this isn't the answer. We'll take a trip somewhere. How's that? We could go to Bermuda or Hawaii or even to Europe. You could see castles. We'll go alone, a second honeymoon.”
I thought of us, walking on some beach, me in my bikini, him with his pot belly and plaid shorts, his hair going all gray and wispy now that he was fifty He looked old. He smelled old. I couldn't breathe around him anymore.
“No,” I said. “I have to think. Just give me some time to think, Don, all right? Can you just do that?”
“Take all the time you need,” he said. “I haven't much of a choice, have I?” He sighed. “Just don't drag the girls into all of it, Eldora. I have a right to ask you to take care of my daughters properly.”
“That's true. And I promise you this, Don Redding. I'm taking good care of them.”
“Are you? Put them on the phone, then, let me talk to them.”
I thought of them next door in the motel, India looking all worried and tense and big-eyed, and wanted to slam the black receiver against the wall until it shattered. “I couldn't talk in front of them, could I? They're right next door. I can see them through the window.”
“Eldora, don't ruin your life, baby. You're just confused right now. That man doesn't care about you or your children.”
“You don't even know him.”
“Don't I?” he said quietly and hung up.
I rested there in the corner for a long minute, trying to find my breath. I lit another cigarette and tapped my foot on the floor. Maybe I was trying not to make the next phone call, but I did it anyway. This voice was deeper, more liquid. The sound of it melted my hips, just like his tongue melted my spine.
“What am I doing, Glenn?” I asked him, my voice thin with terror.
“You're living your life, Dora. You'll rot out there in suburbia, you know you will.”
I could see him. next to me on that imaginary beach, all right. Tall and lean, his belly firm as a dolphin's body, his skin tanned like cinnamon. He was thirty-five, two years older than me, and he made love like he had five hundred years to touch every inch of me. I let go of a breath. “That's right. I miss you. This is hard.”
“I'd be glad to meet you anywhere you like, sweetheart. Stay there and I'll come get you.”
“No. I don't know. My girls …”
“They'll get used to it. Las Vegas is a land of opportunity.”
“I know.” It had been, once upon a time, for me. It was for him, now.
We met on a dance floor, Glenn and me, at The Hogan nightclub in Colorado Springs. I'd gone there with one of my girlfriends, and Glenn was in town visiting his mother. I saw him the minute I came in, and he saw me.
Which led to this, with my girls in the other room, and Don's heart back home breaking, and me doing this stupid thing. “I'll call you tomorrow,” I said.
“Dora, darling,” he said. “Let me meet you tomorrow. Santa Fe? How would that be? You don't have to do anything else or decide anything. We'll just talk. How's that?”
“This is just crazy. I can't … they're … I just can't do this.”
“You're a good woman, Dora. I respect you for that. At least let me say good-bye, all right? Will you let me do that?”
I took a breath. “All right. But I'm going home. You hear?”
“Dora.” His voice was rough. “I love you. I don't want you to do anything that isn't right for you.”
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“How about I pay for a nice room for you and the girls tomorrow night, huh? You can even stay there a few days if you want to. La Fonda, right on the plaza. The girls will love it. It's on the way home, and, well, at least we can say good-bye properly.”
“You don't have to do that.”
“I want to.”
I couldn't think. Squeezing my eyes shut against all the pictures flowing through my mind, I sighed hard. I knew I shouldn't. I knew I should hang this phone up and drive right back to Colorado Springs first thing in the morning. Instead, I said, “All right. I'll see you tomorrow.”
“Dora, I do love you,” he said, and the damnable thing about it was, I knew he really meant it.
“I know.” I went to the ladies and blotted my face, and lit another cigarette and stood there smoking it, staring at myself in the dinged mirror. A lot of other faces floated around me in the air. Glenn's, Don's, India's, and Gypsy's. Others, too. My chest felt tight with them all.
“God,” I said aloud. “What am I doing?”
And it seemed perfectly idiotic, now that I was standing here by myself in a public restroom with my little girls alone in a room next door. I was leaving a perfectly good home where they set up a lemonade stand outside on the lawn, where their daddy took them to movies and I cooked them oatmeal and cream of wheat every morning. I was leaving the kindest, best man I ever met, and even if I didn't have that passion for him and never really had, I did care about him. He'd given up a lot to be with me. I owed him.
Determined, I dropped the cigarette in the toilet and flushed it and went out to the restaurant to buy some pie for my girls. We'd head to Santa Fe tomorrow and I'd meet Glenn and tell him my decision. The girls and I could go right home from there. Everything would be all right.
In the spring darkness thirty years later, I breathe out a lungful of smoke and stare at the clear, dark sky. Stars sparkle, thousands and thousands of them, and the sight makes me lonely. My glass is empty and I stand up, feeling the long day of riding in the small of my back. I pour a very, very small measure of bourbon into the glass and add lots of Coke. This'll be my last for the evening. Only three, and one of them very small. India won't know that I've been good, but I will.
She's bound to be asleep by now. I open my suitcase and unzip the top layer—it's such a fancy suitcase! Don bought it for me when we went on a cruise the first time—and lay out the dresses I brought with me. There are four of them.
Tonight, I take out a cream-colored silk with threads of turquoise around the hem and neckline. It looks Moroccan or Egyptian or something. A man bought it for me to wear to the Sands—he always did have a silly sense of humor—for an anniversary we were celebrating. It had a sweetheart neckline that showed off my bosom in a fine way, and I'd had it in my bag that night with my girls.
Gypsy makes her descansos all over the place, and it gave me an idea when India said she'd take me on this trip. I decided to make my own.
But now I'm standing here with the dress, and all I feel is stupid. What difference can it make? Only I'm going to know I did it.
My friend Candace and I do a lot of craft work, and lately we've been painting with glass paints. I have tubes of it in my bag, in a special plastic container so they won't ruin my other stuff, and I figure, what the hell? I'll just do it.
I cut the dress and stain it. I almost can't do it. Mess up something so pretty. But I do, and I place it in the bathtub. Afterwards I take a lipstick out of my purse and take it to the bathroom. On the tiles that witnessed my grief, I write only ELDORAWAS HERE. Then I'm embarrassed. How foolish! How small!
But then I think, oh, who'll ever see it but the maid who cleans the bathroom?, let it just be there. I take a sip of my watery drink and admire my handiwork, and think about it some more. What if I'd just gone home to Don, all those years ago? How would our lives all have been different? It makes my stomach hurt.
What if, even before then, I hadn't run out of Elk City with nothing but the shirt on my back? I think of my poor aching legs, that deep, fiery pain, and the damned blue neon swallow burning through the window all night long.
Chapter Sixteen
India
In the half twilight of almost awake, I hallucinate that Jack is beside me. I can smell his skin, feel his smooth soft belly hot beneath the covers. In my fantasy he nuzzles closer, loops an arm around me, pulls me close. His hand settles over me.
When I start awake to the reality, the empty bed, the motel room with the sound of the road beyond, I feel like someone scooped my heart out of my chest with a shovel.
Damn.
Here I am, lonely and lost, and what can I do but let it all come flooding in? I was probably lost that first night, when I walked into that pub and saw him in his leather jacket, his hair unruly on the collar.
Your picture does you no justice, he'd said, and pathetically charmed, I'd swooned at the sound of those lilting syllables. If foreign men knew what accents could do for their love lives, America would be crowded shore to shore with plain, lumpy, oatmeal-colored guys whispering in the ears of lovely women.
But Jack. Ah, Jack. He had the most wonderful laugh, the chuckle soft and ironic somehow, coming from low in his lungs. An ex-smoker who missed it, he often took a cigarette from someone and pretended he was going to light it, and in the gesture, I could see the serious smoker he'd once been. He had a way of glancing at me beneath one arched eyebrow, the gray of his eye glinting in an intimate inclusion.
Oh, just stop it!
I roll off the bed in a pique with myself—if there's one thing I hate, it's a woman moaning over a man!—and look for my robe. The quick move is a mistake first thing. Nausea slams me so hard I have to race to the toilet and throw up. Impressively. It leaves me shaky and cold, and I sink down on the edge of the bathtub. My forehead is damp. My bare legs are freezing.
Lady Luck's Map of Vegas Page 11
