The Unfortunates: A Novel

by Sophie McManus

  Down to Dotty’s room. Knock, knock, knock.

  “Come for a walk?” she asks.

  “I’m tired,” Dotty says. “Let’s play cards.”

  23

  But how to account for the hours? For it’s another day and they are still or again playing cards. As if no time has passed, as if no other experience has intervened. The humidity’s climbed. In the distance, the shabby racket of thunder. They are playing gin with the air-conditioning on and the window closed. In CeCe’s opinion, Dotty, being from Arizona, is excessively interested in temperature control. Dotty in the recliner. As they play, black-winged clouds roll high above the lake, churn inward, bring sideways sheets of rain.

  “—no other way you and me would have become friends,” Dotty’s saying, moving on from an elaborate oral diagram of the politics and allegiances of her church. “You hiding in your room. Good thing I don’t have a dime’s respect for the wrong side of a closed door. Otto and I got lost in Mexico one time, in San Cristóbal, and I marched right up to—”

  “Your discard.”

  “Oh, yes. Have you been to Mexico?”

  “Once.”

  “Then you know what I’m talking about. Breathtaking!”

  They have become friends, CeCe realizes, with a disagreeable twining of mortification and gratitude. It’s as if she’s known the scrap of Dotty’s brow and the puddle of Dotty’s mouth opening and closing forever. How many times already have they double-caned it down the lawn to the water, CeCe scanning the landscape for her friend from Yemen, this woman like a bundle of white rags, ruffling at her side?

  Dotty uses her good hand to pull a card from the fan she’s arranged in the waxwork of her stroke arm and drops a two of spades.

  “We have much in common,” CeCe says. Better than talking to the wheelchair or the wall. Onward and upward.

  “Back home they call us Dotto because his name is Otto and my name is Dotty, from when there was Deano and Dingo and names like that going around in the popular—”

  “A dingo is a dog.” CeCe says, not paying attention. The landscapers are not in sight. Dotty is telling her for what might be the fifteenth time that Otto is in charge of the Spanish-language division of Greetmark Greeting Cards, and would you believe, it’s bigger than the English-language division, and she can get CeCe as many cards as she wants for free, and Otto is bringing his famous chef salad tomorrow, he’s doing such a good job being on his own, flying out to visit every other weekend and never complaining about the trip.

  No Yasser. They don’t work when it rains. But the blimp that harasses her sanity is there, floating above the horizon in a bath of light, far beyond the storm. Floating as it does every weekend, moseying a circle. It’s silver with a red bull’s-eye logo she can’t make out. She’s been told it’s the name of a brewing company.

  “Isn’t that pretty. Over the football stadium. Watch your cards!”

  CeCe’s fingers have slackened without her noticing. Her hands tremble. Now that Dotty’s brought the situation to her attention, she can feel the jerking sting that connects the tip of her index finger to the inside of her shoulder socket. The jack and queen and king of diamonds she’d organized at the left corner of the fan loosen and slide over her shuddering thumb onto the table. She scoops them back up and switches hands. It’s awkward, like playing from inside a mirror.

  “I don’t think there’s a football stadium around here,” she says.

  “No? Let’s keep going, I’ll pretend I didn’t see. Anyway, knock on a strange door in a strange land, that’s how we met our Fernanda—my honorary Mexican granddaughter—now we do a house stay every year. To keep familiar with the culture. Even the oldest traditions change here and there! Fernanda was in the Christmas pageant, two feet tall and wearing a beard and a sheet and carrying the urn for the myrrh. Nearly toppled each step she took to baby Jesus. They have a special day for the Three Kings? The sweet little children leave their shoes out at night and find presents tucked into the toe in the morning. Otto’s done a whole line of cards called ‘What’s in your shoe, pequeña?’ Wouldn’t it be nice if we woke up one day here and had presents in our shoes?”

  How is it that even in front of this prattling and vacuous woman she’s ashamed to have lost control of her hands? How can she endure another moment of this chattering—from her only companion, of her nervous system? Her head’s shaking too, agreeing, despite the disagreement of the mind within.

  “If I woke up here and found a present in my shoe,” CeCe says, trying, mostly successfully, to keep the anger from her voice, “I’d consider myself terrorized, and I’d look for a way to escape before the arrival of breakfast.” The trembling ebbs. “Gin.”

  “Will you look at that. Can you shuffle, do you think?”

  “Yes, I’ll try.”

  “When I get the shakes, Otto calls me his hummingbird. Every moment he isn’t here I miss him. Passionately. Know what I mean?”

  Maybe Dotty will die instead of me, CeCe thinks. “Do you think,” she ventures cautiously, for they’ve never discussed it, “the Astrasyne is having any effect on us?”

  “How would I know?” To CeCe’s surprise, Dotty’s voice rises. “Oh, I can’t tell!” She chucks her cards onto the table.

  “I ask only because you look much stronger lately,” CeCe says quickly and untruthfully. “Pinker.” She pats Dotty’s hand.

  “Really?”

  “Really.” If Dotty dies, it will be simple because Dotty believes in God and Dotty has a husband. God will hold her spirit and Otto will hold her body and that will be that. “I myself feel much better.”

  “That’s great. Come to the pool with me today? Don’t say no!”

  “I swam when I was young. But I don’t want to swim here.” As a girl, CeCe had an instructor who wore a floral bathing cap and treaded water with a cigarette puffing out her mouth, while clutching an umbrella to keep the wrinkling effects of the sun off her skin—an elegant and rakish feat of synchronization CeCe admired. Many Saturdays, CeCe dangled over the lip of the pool, under the glass ceiling on the top floor of her childhood home, now repurposed as a recital space for the John Stepney Somner Library. When the instructor wasn’t present, Toto or a maid would sit on the edge of a lounge chair. Toto’s hem was starched and the mica-speckled concrete glinted and the lines on the bottom of the pool shifted blue. “I was a strong swimmer. Or was I? Maybe I was a poor swimmer and it’s only they told me I was strong. I don’t know.”

  “I forget lots of stuff. Facts. But nothing physical like that. Not memories you can feel.”

  CeCe returns to her room and lies down. She wants to be awake when they bring lunch. She’ll close her eyes a few minutes—and. In her dream, she’s Fernanda of Mexico. She’s also a nurse. She’s in a hurry to get dressed for work. With a gathering desperation she searches for her puffy white nurse shoes—she’ll be fired by Dr. Orlow if she’s late one more time. But she can’t make rounds barefoot, and how will her feet survive the pilgrimage to Jesus over the hot sand? The shoes must go under her robes, her costume for the pageant. She’s the king that carries the myrrh. She’s sure she remembers setting the shoes neatly beside the bed. They must be under the bed! Carefully she bends and ducks her stiff head through the hanging blankets, but the shoes are gone. They were there, she’s sure of it. Instead, here are the red sands of the desert, stretching for miles. She sets out across it, the myrrh in her hands, scouring the shimmering landscape for her shoes. The myrrh releases a reddish-brown sap that makes her hands sticky and drips onto her legs and her frying feet. For a flash, her father’s hog-gum trees are in the dream and she’s his nurse, whispering a filthy deal to him in the dark, ushering unsuspecting little Fernanda into his room. The shoes must be in the closet! She rushes to the closet. Gone. God, why, it’s God. He’s playing a mean game with her. God keeps moving her shoes. Just as she discovers their location—now on the windowsill, now buried in the red sand, now on a shelf too high for Fernanda to reach, he put
s them somewhere else.

  George. The wife, by his side. They are leaning over her, calling her from sleep. Why, she isn’t put together! And she hasn’t yet decided how to be! She will—she pretends she can’t be woken. She watches through her eyelashes as they bend upright and confer.

  “Go get someone,” Iris whispers.

  “She looks okay to me,” George says. “How about lunch and we come back later?”

  From the side of her eye she sees George turn away, his fine, firm profile, handsome, though still a copy, less the rangy verve, the beautiful glint of his father. George could almost be a stranger to her in his middle age, except for the nervous way he’s raking his hair, his oldest habit despite all her corrections. She’ll forgive him. Not right away, but forgive him she will. Her son. And Iris, wearing something ugly.

  “Wait! Stay. I’m awake.”

  24

  He’s been mulling how to ask her for days: “You appreciate opera almost as much as I…” or “I’ve been working on the libretto to this new…” or “As a patron of the arts, I know you will…” and “In an age of diminished public funding for innovative, independent…” or “When an increasingly conglomeratized media control the very institutions that might serve to question…” (this from one of Vijay’s early e-mails, and probably the wrong tack). And “If you ever doubted me, I want to thank you, because it’s only pushed me to test my courage, and tested it I have…” His skull jangles like a bell. He’s not slept. He has no reason for sleep, in his now-usual state of wired exhaustion, with his increasing appetite for everything and nothing. He watches his mother wave away Iris’s help, prop herself in a chair at the table, tidy a pile of blue-backed playing cards into a stack beside some magazines. He tries to hide his restlessness, to keep his foot from tapping, his leg from bouncing. Her mobility is confusing him. He ducks over the table to kiss her cheek. She receives him without comment. Her hair, usually so neatly flipped, is fluffed in the pale halo of the aged and napped behind the ears. She’s perfumed, though, her same perfume that smells of orange rind and violets and that he’s always vaguely thought of as Soviet. In the old days, her habit had been to spray it in the air and step through the sinking mist, wearing one of the bouclé suits she favored for meetings in the city, but now she’s stuck squirting it right on. In the last year, he smelled her illness underneath the perfume—a different kind of sweetness, like molasses crossed with the odor pennies leave on the fingers. Today this is gone. Maybe she really is improving.

  “Seriously, you look fantastic!” Iris says. “How do you feel? Tell us everything.”

  “Strong as an ox. I’m walking every day.”

  “I’m so happy for you. I can hardly believe it.”

  He should say something too. He forces himself to sit on the stool beside the bed, to pin his shaking hands. The midday light branches across the sheets. It had rained most of the trip but cleared as the car wound up the drive, the sun breaking through as they parked. He doesn’t feel well. Queasy. Why doesn’t anyone ever show an interest in how he’s feeling? His mother won’t look in his direction.

  “There was a woman sitting in the lobby who guessed right away who we were,” Iris says, looking at George. “Tiny and round? She seemed nice.”

  “Probably Dotty. Isn’t she, though.”

  “Mother,” George bursts forth, “so great! You look great.”

  She does not turn her attention from Iris. Not even a sidelong flicker. She seems, however, to gather some almost imperceptible light and strength to herself upon the sound of his voice. She smiles at Iris. “My word, look at this blouse you’ve worn! How is it not the first thing I saw? Isn’t it festive. You’re like a glass of sangria. Did you leave your paper umbrella in the car?”

  “My what? Oh, I just got it. The top. The top and the joke, I guess. It’s new. Can we take you out to lunch? Are you hungry?”

  “Of course it’s new. So many new things! Naturally it’s due to your athletics you can wear any unpredictable item and look so lovely. When I was your age, we didn’t have gyms. Or, there were a few. But they were for—boxers, taxidrivers. Men, anyway. A pity!”

  “Huh, thanks, I guess. We’re just so glad you’re finally letting us visit.”

  “Did George tell you—did George suggest I didn’t want you visiting?”

  This is trouble. How had he not anticipated this? Iris, under the impression he’s called his mother every day. CeCe is finally looking at him, but out of the side of her head, like a bird at a button. She seems to be uncoiling, the silk of her emerald housecoat gleaming in the sun. They’re both looking at him.

  “Getting away from work’s been difficult.” Against his will, his eyes remain lowered and dashing; he’s committed himself to the alternate study of the tip of his shoe and a table leg. “I’m sorry we didn’t come sooner.”

  “They promoted George,” Iris says. “Did he tell you?”

  “Not really a promotion. More time off. More flexibility to work from home. It’s very trendy now, Mother, to do everything remotely.”

  “And he’s been keeping me updated on how you’re feeling. Is the treatment what you expected?”

  “Has he,” CeCe says. “I’m glad. Did you bring your dog? Shouldn’t you go check on him?”

  “3D’s with Victor. Our friend Victor? He has a key. I think you’ve met him.”

  “Ah. The man who gives massages and walks the animals and prepares your lunches. The hybrid butler.”

  “He doesn’t cook for us,” Iris says. “I cook. I mean, if you can call it cooking. How’s Pat? Coming along?”

  “I imagine so. Haven’t talked to her lately.”

  “We haven’t either, I guess. Have we, George?”

  “You,” CeCe says, turning to him. “Hiding in plain view. I haven’t talked to you lately.”

  “What?” he cries, attempting his most extreme thunderstruck, his mouth agape, his hands in tight fists. Soon enough he finds himself genuinely so, as sometimes a true feeling may be awakened by its false expression.

  “I’m going to have a look outside, I guess.” Iris gestures toward CeCe’s French doors, the sparkling view beyond. Only now has it dawned on her that she’s been told to excuse herself.

  “Yasser’s planted an abundance of late perennials. Have a look at his garden. It’s still quite impressive. Go ahead. We’ll miss you.”

  “Okay,” Iris says. George will not meet her gaze.

  As the door closes, George whispers, “You don’t have to be rude to her because you’re mad at me.”

  He’s right. It’s only—Iris has everything and doesn’t care. Doesn’t care or doesn’t know. Hard to tell which. “You’re right.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. I was unkind. I’m sorry.”

  “You are?”

  “I am.”

  She stretches her arms out to him.

  “I need some money,” he says, looking at the ceiling.

  “And so, you’ve come.” She folds her hands in her lap.

  “No, unrelated! Just now, on the drive up, I was thinking I should share more of my progress with you. I thought, Maybe I’m not forthcoming enough. Maybe that’s something I should apologize for. Maybe she’d—you’d—like to be a part of the exciting things that are happening in my life.”

  “What an odd kind of promotion to receive, that you have more time and need more money.”

  “It wouldn’t be for me! It’s for—listen.”

  Nervously, he removes the huge padded headphones and the iPod from his bag. He fits the headphones heavily and loosely over her ears. Her cranium looks reduced by the headphones, both walnutlike and fragile. He’s afraid to touch her and neglects to tighten the band before stepping away. It slides forward onto her brow. By reflex, she reaches up and grasps at the air to catch the band and push it back. Now that it’s on her head and she’s helped put it there, it seems she’s agreed to listen. She feels ridiculous and will endure.

  “Antinoise. The
se headphones are almost completely sound canceling. Because of the ear cup.”

  “What?” She makes a face like sour lemon, pulling one ear cup back.

  “Don’t take it personally,” he says, gathering confidence, “that I’ve never shared this with you before. It wasn’t ready. Even Iris hasn’t heard it yet.” Though not for lack of trying, he thinks. Since she missed the rehearsal, why has she not asked to come to another? Or to listen to a recording? “Anyway, my team, we’ve been working away, and it’s only this month I’ve let anyone come to rehearsal. It wasn’t time. Now it is.”

  As he says the word time, she looks at the fluttered cover of the Time magazine on the table. The red letters T-I-M-E. George summarizes the plot of The Burning Papers for her. She nods. It sounds like nonsense. He is speaking all in a rush, more ragged than she remembers. He puts the iPod into her hand, shows her how to change the volume, and presses play. She listens. He paces back and forth, looking out at the lake, until abruptly exiting into the hall. He’s gone for the good part of an hour. He returns, just as abruptly, carrying a plastic cup of water. He sets this on the table in front of her. While he’s gone, for a brief spell, she turns the volume down and puts her face in her hands, but this he does not see.

  When it’s done, she takes off the headphones and puts them on the table. She sits looking at them with her hands folded in front of her.

  “You wrote this?”

  “Yes.”

  “The words? And that’s your, the story?”

  What can she say? The music is that of a train hitting a merry-go-round. It sounds like the very incarnation of atrocity. The instrumental is both gastric and inorganic. The discordant principals’ duet is like the nocturnal emission of a cancerous horse tethered in its dolorous slumber to a barbed aluminum fence during an electrical storm. All she can picture as she listens is a windup toy from her childhood, a tin monkey on a unicycle with a painted red coat and bellman’s cap and cymbals that clap together, herky-jerky. The noise is not what surprises her. That the opera will surely be an embarrassment is also not entirely a surprise. What surprises her is that the story’s dream is—of all things!—evil. Lusty for the ranking of and ordering of peoples. For the supremacy of the one over the other to be not by accident of birth but by nature’s design.