Bright Angel Time

by Martha McPhee

  I was embarrassed by the camper, and even by the Eldorado, so hidden with dust. And by us, dirty, smelly, hair unbrushed. Dwayne in his orange robes. My hands were sticky. I looked at the hotel and had the urge to be clean. In the fountain in front of the lobby a marble Venus balanced on one foot, spurting water from her mouth and I leaned beneath her quickly and rubbed my hands in the water and splashed my face. The water was cold, dissolving the stickiness. A lot of change sparkled up at me, big change quarters and half-dollars and I bet there were silver dollars in there as well and I was tempted to steal lots of it, but I only got a quarter.

  At the desk the receptionist thumbed through a book, licking her finger before turning each page. She was trying to find Dwayne’s and his parents’ reservation. It was fall. The busy season had begun. She studied Dwayne and then us, littering the lobby.

  “Dwayne Dyer the Third?” she asked, chin high, finding Dwayne’s reservation. “Dwayne Dyer the Third, that’s you?” She didn’t seem convinced. Nicholas stepped forward and verified that Dwayne was in fact Dwayne Dyer the Third.

  “The Third,” Nicholas stressed, placing his hand on Dwayne’s shoulder. He repeated ‘the Third’ a few times, making fun of the name. Nicholas was always teasing everyone. I bet Dwayne Dyer the Third wasn’t really his name. The woman looked at Nicholas, who wore his raggedy tuxedo tails, and then at Dwayne. A golden name tag sat erect above her left breast, pinned into her golden gown. Her name was Candice and Dwayne kept calling her Can-dice and that annoyed Candice. Her lips puckered and wrinkles fanned out around her mouth from puckering too much. “I’m afraid your parents are not here,” Candice said, her mouth smiling slightly, relieved. She wanted to get rid of us. “Could you have the wrong hotel?” That was stupid because there hadn’t been another hotel in miles. She studied us some more, trying to control us with her eyes. James was making cigarettes and Timothy kept shouting, “Can you dig it? Can you dig it?” He’d just learned that expression and loved it. Jane had stayed outside in the shade to read. She read all the time now, crouched over novels. I couldn’t read novels. I tried, but I couldn’t absorb the words. I couldn’t concentrate. There was too much else to think about.

  Guests walked through the lobby. Women in bikinis toppled on heels. Coconut oil glistened on their skin and the air smelled sweet, like you could drink it. Little bells rang and the low murmur of money wafted through the open doors: heels clicking on marble, the thrumming of water, forks and knives and the chin-chin of clinking glasses from the poolside café. I wanted to stay here. Valets unloaded cars and carted suitcases on trolleys into elevators, off to plush rooms I could imagine. I wanted to be taken care of. I looked at Mom and she didn’t look at all beautiful. Her eyes were tired, a little sad, and that made me sad. She needed to rest. Anton studied a menu.

  “I sure don’t know what could’ve happened to them,” Dwayne said, with his head bowed to the floor. “How could they do this to me?” He buried his face in his hands. I thought he might cry. Then I thought about the FBI leaflet and touched my pocket to make sure my hundred was still there. I could just tell he was lying.

  “How ‘bout a little drink?” Anton suggested, ignoring Candice. He slid his fingers through Mom’s hair. She smiled a tired smile at him. He kissed her on the forehead. “You’re tired, babe. We’ll take a minute to decide what to do.” I knew by now that a ‘little’ drink would lead to a ‘little’ snack and then a ‘little’ dinner. I thought about the two-dollar limit for a moment, but I’d given up figuring out how Anton spent money. It seemed we always had it, somehow, when we needed it. He either went to a bank and cashed a check or ran into an old patient and did therapy.

  Just then Julia got sick.

  Her face turned pale and her eyes rolled to the back of her head, leaving the sockets white. She had been saying she didn’t feel well all day, but nobody had really paid attention. Her body trembled and she clutched her head as if to steady herself. “I feel awful,” she said to Mom, who studied her. Julia could make anything she did look beautiful. Her body shivered and goose bumps rose on her skin. “I can’t see right,” she said. “Everything’s funny. I can’t hear right.” Tears came to her eyes and then she started heaving, vomiting first putrid green then air, heaving until she couldn’t anymore. Anton scooped her into his arms and Mom smothered her with kisses, not knowing what else to do. I was scared for Julia.

  “She’s faking it,” Sofia said. She already had her bathing suit on. She knew her father. She knew that one way or another we’d be staying here awhile. “She just wants Dad’s attention.”

  But I thought Julia might die. I’d read in Poisonous Dwellers of the Desert about insects that crawl in one ear and out the other, eating your brain on the way. I thought of the amoebas from the sulfur baths, which reminded me of what Nicholas had said, about one of us dying soon.

  “Is there a doctor here?” Anton asked Candice, who was horrified by the disturbance. People were looking at us. James had come over, crouched down to see if there were anything he could do to help out. Anton smoothed back Julia’s curls with his big hands, wiping the vomit from the corner of her mouth with his handkerchief. She cried hard now, complaining that she couldn’t see right. “Can we get some rooms?” Anton asked, impatiently. His face puffed, swelling. For a second I worried about Candice. He plucked several hundreds from his wallet and thrust them at Can-dice who said that there was Mr. Dyer’s room, but that it wouldn’t be suitable for all of us. She refused the money saying she’d have to speak to the management because otherwise the hotel was ‘complet’. She liked that word. Complet. She said it a couple times. The bills dripped limply between Anton’s fingers. His eyes caught mine and I blushed. I wondered if he knew about my hundred. I kept looking at him, my face twitching, afraid if I looked away he’d really know. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was spotting Cynthia Banks, a San Franciscan millionaire he knew from Esalen. A tiny woman with an enormous stomach and bleached blond hair, bronzed skin and blue-shadowed eyes that were very, very round. She wore lots of gold and she got us the rooms we needed.

  ♦

  Julia’s room had a terrace overlooking the pool and the dunes. Diaphanous curtains danced through the sliding glass doors and the refrigerator was filled with snacks and drinks and the scent of bougainvillea flooded the air. Cynthia Banks arranged for a doctor, who gave Julia an enormous shot of Tylenol. He said she’d be feeling better in a few days. For now she needed rest.

  Anton took Dwayne’s room and two other rooms and told the management that the rest of us would stay in the camper at a campsite. But none of us did. After all that traveling it was so nice to have a bed, even if three or four of us shared one.

  That was one thing about Anton, why it was hard not to love him: just when it seemed you’d be stranded – on a deserted road without gas, without food, with a hitchhiker, in the arms of the police – things changed, leaving you wide awake, feeling grand like you’d won something, the world.

  ♦

  The sheets were cold and starched and pulled tightly over the bed; slipping between them with Sofia and Jane made me feel like I was back at home again in my bed with the sheets pulled taut and tucked with hospital folds. But it had been a long time since any of that.

  Outside Mom and Anton and Nicholas and James and Cynthia Banks and Dwayne Dyer the Third sat by the pool, chatting, becoming fast friends over a bottle of special wine. I heard Mom’s gentle laugh and Anton’s deep voice, Texan tonight, telling stories about his childhood, and Cynthia Banks’s hyena giggles. ‘Oo-la-la’ and ‘simply divine’ was her reaction to everything Anton said and Mom gently encouraged him. I could just picture her, smiling, nodding. Anton tried to talk to Nicholas and James about Vietnam, but James said he didn’t think that was a good idea. Dwayne talked about gimmicks and money-making theories, which interested Anton and ‘oo-la-la’ rose above their conversation and everything was ‘simply divine’ and I was glad. I was grateful to Cynthia Banks and wanted them all to
get along.

  The mint from my pillow dissolved in my mouth and I heard my mother’s beautiful whisper, which soothed me like her lullabies had when I was still tiny.

  “How long do you think we’ll stay here?” I asked.

  “As long as we can keep Julia sick,” Sofia replied.

  “How can we do that?”

  “Shsh,” Jane said, almost asleep.

  “I’ll come up with a way,” Sofia said. And I believed that she would. I loved Sofia then as much as I loved Julia and Jane. I was happy about that and wanted to tell Mom. Sofia lay between us. Her warm skin, dry, touched mine. “How long do you want to stay here?” she asked and ran her fingers through my hair. My legs were sore and tired. My knees ached. I wanted her to run her fingers over my legs.

  “A hundred million years,” I said. I felt as if everything in the world was exactly as it should be.

  ♦

  James and Dwayne added two more to the eight of us, making ten. “Treat them like brothers,” Mom said. Ten brothers and sisters; I said it to some of the old people who liked to talk. “I have ten sisters and brothers.” That amazed look swept over their faces like when I said my father was a Gestalt therapist and had been a Jesuit priest. He actually had never been a priest. His novice master had suggested he leave the society before he’d become a priest because of his visions of the Virgin and his affair with the nun. But priest sounded better, like more. Ten sounded better than three, as if just the number could protect you. I was like Mom in that way. I believed in more.

  “All these children from one marriage?” an old lady asked. They were busybodies, the old ladies around the pool. They watched us. There was always somebody watching us.

  “My mother was married before,” I said. “But my first father died. He died in a gold mine in South Africa. He was a geologist, you see, and he went 6,800 feet down into the ground in an elevator and the elevator malfunctioned and fell. The cords snapped. A free fall,” I said. My eyes were wide and teary. They beamed down on me with sympathy. I loved telling stories. I loved all that attention. “A Utopia,” I’d say.

  ♦

  I tried to remember my father and I couldn’t. I couldn’t see his face. I saw only a blot of white nothing, as when you look into the sun and you’re momentarily blinded. I saw our old blue VW bus being lifted by a crane from the belly of an ocean liner. My sisters and I watched it, amazed at how vulnerable it was up there suspended in the air in the claws of the crane.

  I remembered a picnic one day in the spring, one of the times I had had pneumonia. My sisters and parents rode bicycles and I was in the blue VW with the Irish au pair and she was driving me to the hospital to have an X-ray. I watched them out of the rear window, receding. The picnic basket was on Mom’s bike and she wore checked slacks and had a sweater over her shoulders. A yellow wool sweater with pearly white buttons and leather patches over the sleeves and her curled hair was back in a bandeau. All her weight was on one foot while the other rested on a pedal and she waved as we drove away, getting smaller and smaller until she vanished. Dad was there too, but I hadn’t been looking at him. I thought memory was like a murky photograph and if I’d been looking at Dad he’d be in my picture now instead of Mom.

  ♦

  By midweek Cynthia Banks was part of the family, paying for treats here and there in exchange for therapy with Anton. She was a big fan of his and had taken several of his workshops over the years at Esalen. Anton told her she didn’t have to pay, but she insisted. “You’ve got all these children and I’ve got all this money,” she’d say and laugh her hyena laugh. Her purse was a crocodile purse with a big golden clasp that clicked as she opened it, pulling out bills as if they were tissues, with those fattened fingers of hers. I liked Cynthia Banks. With Cynthia Banks as a friend the hotel respected us and I marched around pretending I was a little princess. I sent my dresses to the cleaners and wore my nightgown as if it were a dress. It was frilly, of thin cotton, cooler than the velvet and sexier. I loved the way air blew right through it to my legs. They wouldn’t let me wear my gun, though. Guns, no matter what kind, weren’t permitted in the hotel. So I wore just the holster in order to have a place to keep my cash. In the boutiques I figured out that I could charge to my room just by signing and I was charging up a storm. I’d already bought a bikini, a towel, several T-shirts and one crocheted shawl and a pair of clip-on earrings that turned my lobes black. Then I figured out that I could return the items I charged and get a cash refund so I had lots of money, loads of it. All I had to do was make sure I never went back to the same salesperson. I wanted to steal another hundred. I was happy here now, but I knew what money could do for us and if we ever got stuck out in the desert again I wanted to be prepared to get us home.

  Finny came with me to charge, but I didn’t worry he’d say anything, since he still wasn’t speaking.

  At the pool in the late afternoons we sipped Virgin Marys, and almost every night, early, before the buffets were picked over, Finny and I had dinner, eating all we could eat of the all-you-can-eat buffets – mountains of shrimp cocktail followed by tastes of four or five desserts. I liked the way the waiter bowed down to us, his face lit by the flickering candle on our table. A gentle smile slid across his lips, smiling at us like we were somebody, like all the other people eating calmly at their tables.

  Cynthia and Anton did therapy in the hot springs beneath the stars, late, after we’d gone to bed. Mom was proud of Anton, of his reputation. “She was beaten by her husband, you know,” Mom told Jane, Julia and me in confidence. Sympathy flooded her eyes. “She needs therapy.” Her thumbnail pressed her lips.

  “You don’t have to put up with this,” Jane said. Jane had stopped speaking to Anton again and lately she’d been talking about running away.

  “Be generous,” Mom responded. Julia lay in a huge bed with many pillows. Mom walked around the room opening windows and the doors to the terrace. Julia’s mints stood in a stack by her bedside table. I stole them.

  “Everything hurts,” she said, her eyes closed. It made her dizzy to keep them open and it really hurt when she rolled them. She couldn’t take penicillin because it didn’t work for her. When she was four she’d had rheumatic fever and had had to take so much penicillin that she was immune to it. Her curls had gone flat when she’d had the disease and Mom had worried they’d be lost forever. So the doctor here had had to use Tylenol, but that didn’t seem to be working. Julia looked ugly and pale and her curly hair was flat and greasy. Mom put her palm on Julia’s head. Her temperature had been up to 104.2 degrees.

  “Do you think you’ll die?” I asked.

  “Kate,” Julia sighed, but I could tell it made her laugh. She knew I didn’t think she’d die. Mom and Jane said ‘Ka-te’ too. I liked it being just the four of us. I felt I could be more like my old self.

  “He’s sleeping with her,” Jane said.

  “Jane, that’s really gross,” I said. It made me feel dirty just thinking about it. I looked at Mom to see her reaction. She was silent, running that thumbnail over her lip.

  “We can leave,” Jane suggested. Her hair still hung in those dopey braids. I wanted her to shut up. For once things seemed to be going so well.

  ♦

  Dwayne and I had a thing.

  “You need a G, Kate,” Dwayne said.

  He understood I liked money.

  “What’s a G?” I asked.

  “A gimmick, an ingenious angle,” he said. “Like a square egg. A G always sells.” Light played on his white eyelashes, turning them a glittery platinum. Dwayne liked me because I was the only one who’d listen to him. He told me lots of stories about his girlfriend, who’d left him for a man she’d met while they were on a religious retreat. I suspected his religion had more to do with her, since he didn’t wear the orange robes anymore, but wore black jeans and a black shirt instead. “Basically people are stupid and will buy anything as long as it’s equally stupid.”

  I looked into the pool. It wa
s a blue I’d never seen before, and placid. The sun bit into my back. I could see the reflection of Nicholas, who was drunk again. The day before, he’d thrown up in the flowers and Anton had gotten mad at him. Not because he was drunk, but because he’d driven the car without asking. Nicholas didn’t care about his features anymore. Mostly now he just cared about a drink.

  “A G is something that’ll sell just because it’s neat, like a specially designed straw you can plug into an orange to suck up the juice. No bother squeezing. No sticky fingers.” He flashed his hands to demonstrate. “You need to invent a product that people don’t need but think they do, and that’s cheap enough for them to buy on a whim.” I thought about what he said.

  There were people all around, some mothers with very young children, but mostly older women, who waded in the water slowly, pink caps covering their white hair. The older women were all a bit fat, and Sofia said that was because they’d stopped getting their periods and that when that happened you got fat. She’d fallen in love with an English doctor who was there at a doctors’ convention. Sofia had brought him around to meet Anton and Mom and Anton had gotten him stoned and they’d talked for a long time on the patio. The English doctor had taken to Mom, and now they spent afternoons chatting by the pool – evenings too, when Anton was busy with therapy. He checked in often on Julia for Mom. The English doctor was tall and devastatingly handsome. That’s how Julia put it, “devastatingly.” He had thick dark hair with dashes of gray, and bright, light brown eyes. His face was tanned and a little weathered. His jaw strong. He practiced in third-world countries, trying to help the poor and starving. Sofia hated that the doctor liked spending time with Mom. “Your mom’s going to stop getting her period soon and she’ll swell up like a balloon.”