In the Palomar Arms

by Hilma Wolitzer

  He approaches his wife and her parents, and even his small daughter, as if they’re strangers he might sit next to without attracting notice. Fat chance. Molly claims him the way he’s seen people greet their luggage as it moves slowly toward them on a carousel—with the glee of recognition and possession. And Gus stands and puts one arm firmly around Kenny’s shoulders. It’s his usual wordless prelude to departure. At the boarding gate, he’ll probably embrace them all and then tearfully advise them to lay off the sweets. He is such a demonstrative man. Joy has said that he never left the house without kissing her and her mother goodbye, even if he was only walking to the corner to buy a newspaper.

  Frances asks Joy if she’s thinking of going back to work soon, and Joy answers vaguely: “Maybe. I don’t know. After Molly’s in school.” Then Frances asks when they’re coming to New York again.

  Kenny looks at her, alerted. Their fondness for one another has often allowed for a kind of shorthand communication. And her professional experience has surely developed her instinct for domestic trouble. Now he tries to assess what she might have perceived or guessed, in spite of his, and Joy’s, little dance of deception. “Who knows?” he says with caution.

  “Don’t you want to see the trees in October, dear?” she asks, sweetly wheedling. Neither Kenny nor Joy answer, and they look away from one another.

  Then Joy takes Molly to the women’s room, and they’re gone for what seems like ages. Kenny turns to Steven, hoping he’ll use some of that nervous energy to occupy and entertain his grandparents. The boy is silent and clings to his father, as though he has some uncanny premonition of the future. “Come to Grandma,” Frances says, holding her arms open, and as soon as Steven feels Kenny’s slight push in her direction, he holds back.

  “Fair-weather friend,” Kenny tells Frances, and they smile. Gus pats Steven’s head. Kenny has a sudden impulse to tell them everything while Joy isn’t there, and is horrified. It’s not like the idle notion he’d had at breakfast the other day, but more of a compulsion, something he might do against all reasonable judgment. His belly starts to cramp. “Be right back,” he says, practically flinging Steven away from him. He sprints toward the men’s room, rushing past Joy and Molly without speaking to them, although Molly calls angrily after him.

  Sitting on the toilet where Steven had played, Kenny trembles and tries to release his clenched gut. “Shit,” he mutters, “oh, shit,” not without noting the irony, but he can’t free himself from the spasm’s grasp. Over the loudspeakers, messages for strangers invade his privacy. “Will Mr. Ralph Arnold please pick up a white service phone?” “Will Ms. Carolyn Green please meet her party at the insurance counter?” Why do they use the word “party”? Who the fuck still buys flight insurance?

  He’s sweating now and worries that he’ll pass out, trousers down, on an airport John. Fucking coward. Why am I so afraid, he wonders, and then admits that it isn’t fear but loss that has gripped him. He is about to lose Frances and Gus as surely as if their plane is destined to crash on takeoff. Dearly departed. They’ll never forgive him for the grief he’s going to cause them.

  As soon as this is all clear in Kenny’s mind, his belly relaxes a little. He wipes his forehead and upper lip with toilet paper and starts to feel even better. He can’t really understand this easing. Nothing has changed, except his acknowledgment of what must happen, his acceptance of responsibility. He wishes, as one wishes at a deathbed watch, that he had been better, more loving, although he knows he’s been good. This wish doesn’t come from a false hope of pardon and grace. There’s no possible plea he can make for himself that will alter the outcome of things. Joy’s parents will be as resolutely unforgiving as they have been passionately loyal. And he doesn’t forgive himself either, not yet.

  Finally he’s able to rise, fairly steady on his feet. He washes his hands and goes back to his family.

  22

  THEY COME IN THE middle of the night, as she’s always known they would, with flashlights, like a search party. Nora lies as still as a bird dog in long grasses, waiting. Playing dead. No, that can’t be right.

  But they go right past her, their lights blinking, to the other side of the room. One of them says, “Put the sheet on her,” and the other one says, “You got the feet? Okay, now lift!”

  Has the poor wretched thing died at last? And now they’re taking her away. They’ll call the daughter and she’ll shriek and carry on. She will have to look for something else to do with her days. At least Nora won’t have to listen to that voice anymore, asking questions which will never get a satisfactory answer.

  Nora’s head hurts—the lights passing briefly over her were somehow painful—and she aches so deeply in her bones that she imagines something willful has entered and wormed its way to the very center of her, into the marrow. The new ghost?

  She wants to be rude and tell them to be quiet and work fast and just let her sleep. But her voice won’t come out of her throat. The words are all there, piled up in a clotted heap, along with a mad jumble of names: Jack, Mother, Catherine, Jesus, Reenie. The passage has become too narrow for them to escape. She’s not frightened, though. It’s not her they’ve come for.

  Who will they bring in next, after this one’s gone? Ah, she doesn’t care, as long as they’re quiet about it. And this time she won’t look when they take the body by, covered from head to foot. They strap them down, too, heaven knows why. She doesn’t need to see that. Bad luck. Bad dreams.

  She does look, anyway, at the last moment. Why, they haven’t even covered the face! And the daughter’s right there, helping them push! “Mother, are you comfortable?” she asks. What’s wrong with that girl? Will she be calling down into the grave, asking, “Mother, are you comfortable? Do you want the Jell-O tonight?” Now they’ve all gone mad, or Nora has.

  But then the corpse struggles in the straps and says, “Wah!” So she isn’t dead after all. Maybe it isn’t the middle of the night, either. When the door opens, Nora can hear the meal carts rolling, and morning banter, before it shuts again. It’s just those dark shades making an artificial night. Her father did that for the measles, hanging blankets at the windows to protect her eyes. She lost track, somehow, something she’d vowed never to do. But when has she last had a calendar, or a clock?

  She wants water suddenly and says so. The word comes out, as if it’s liquid itself, trickling through the narrow space. Someone brings it, and lifts her head so she can drink. “Easy, Mama, slow.” When they try to take the cup away too soon, her hand comes up to grab it back.

  23

  MRS. SHUMWAY IS AT the cauldron, stirring something dense and forbidding, when Daphne comes to work on Monday. Bats’ toes and gnats’ ears. Yet it doesn’t smell that bad. It hardly smells at all.

  There’s good news in the kitchen, and everywhere. Mrs. McBride has passed through the crisis. They were ready to give up and send her away, when she began to get better. Now she’s starting to sit up a little, and take nourishment eagerly by mouth. She’s very weak, of course, but that’s certainly natural, considering her great age. Her survival is a miracle of sorts, one that makes the long-shot bettors feel religious and hopeful. They’ll feed the old lady up, and move her around to get the blood swirling. They have five weeks until the party. She won’t have to dance or anything, just sit there and reign. They’ll dance for her, and around her. She’ll be the Queen of the May in September.

  Daphne smiles at all the easy celebration, but she can’t concentrate on it for long. Kenny’s in-laws flew back to New York today. At least she thinks they have. But Kenny would have let her know if the strike had detained them. And he promised to speak to Joy as soon as possible, as soon as they were alone. That could be tonight. This moment. All day, Daphne’s been obsessed with her mental schedule of Kenny’s hours: now they’re driving away from the airport; now he’s in his office, trying to work; now he’s on the way home, opening the door, stepping inside …

  She ladles food into the trays and
wishes for him that it’s over, that it has gone well. She’s not sure what she means by that, except that the suffering will not be too enormous, or enduring. She wishes his marriage to have an easy death.

  Will good news bring more good news? She hasn’t been superstitious since childhood, when she turned playing cards up on the kitchen table—red for yes, black for no. Or pulled a thread from her skirt so she could drop it and watch it form the first letter of the name of the boy who would love her. She looks down at her uniform and there are no loose threads visible. But there is one on Feliciana’s sleeve, and Daphne plucks it without attracting anyone’s notice. Then she drops it casually to the floor, not following its descent. That’s part of the magic. When she does glance down, she can’t find it at first. Maybe it’s fallen under the assembly table, out of sight. Then Feliciana moves her foot a little and there’s the thread. Daphne sees that it’s curled into a convoluted and mysterious shape, like no recognizable letter of the English alphabet. Certainly not a K. Or a B, for his last name. Not even with the license of imagination.

  Of course, Feliciana has stepped on it, altering its destined form, invalidating its meaning, or lack of it. Oh, stupid adolescent game. As if you can control the world with cards or threads or wishes. Still, she bends quickly to retrieve the thread and put it in her pocket, feeling the heat darken her face as she rises.

  Later, Daphne stands at the elevator bank with the others. They’ve exhausted the subject of Mrs. McBride’s recovery, and even their own capacity for jubilation, and still the elevators haven’t come. Daphne scouts desperately for something neutral to talk about, so she won’t start thinking about Kenny again.

  It occurs to her to take her turn at telling a horror story, and because she can’t invent one, she decides to borrow Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” It was her first reading assignment for the World Literature class, and it has all the components needed to be successful here: love, suspense, and plenty of ghoulish details. Naturally, she can’t remember it verbatim; this will have to be a loose interpretation, revised and condensed for the sake of liveliness. Updated, too. She’s about to begin the way they used to begin oral book reports in high school, with the title and the author’s name. Instead, she simply plunges in and says, “Something strange happened on our street in Seattle once.” She’s surprised by her own ingenuity and by the immediate attention she receives.

  “There was an old woman named Emily Grierson who died.” The silence is very gratifying; it’s always good to begin with a death. “She’d lived with a devoted elderly servant.” Daphne decides not to say the servant is black, as he is in Faulkner’s story. Most of the women in her audience must be sick to death of devoted black servants, in fiction and in life.

  “There was insanity in Emily’s family,” Daphne continues, “and her father drove away any young men who might have married her anyway.” She remembers that in the original story Emily is still single and past thirty when her father dies. That doesn’t seem so remarkable in the new Seattle version, so she says that Emily was over forty and had never gone out with anyone. There are exclamations of sympathy. When she describes Emily’s refusal to acknowledge her father’s death, Evita says, “Loco,” and makes a spiraling motion near her ear. Daphne goes on, encouraged by audience response. She rechristens Homer, Emily’s lover, Hank, and refers to him as a “hard hat.” The word, like his nickname, sounds ruggedly modern and sexual. Then she tells about the arrival of Emily’s busybody cousins, whose purpose is to derail romance. They’re booed and derided for their villainy. Love is the proper hero.

  “One day,” Daphne says, “Emily went to the hardware store and bought some rat poison.”

  “Don’t start with rats!” Ruthann cries.

  “Here it comes,” Feliciana warns.

  “Get rid of those cousins.”

  It’s the sort of tale that doesn’t hurtle toward its climax, and yet everyone is still attentive. No one has even pushed the button for the elevators since Daphne’s begun. She tells it all, with increasing confidence: Homer/Hank’s disappearance; the peculiar odor from Emily’s house; her thirty-year seclusion, during which she becomes fat and ugly, her hair turning iron-gray; the discovery, after her death, of the locked, dusty, rose-colored bridal chamber.

  Then Daphne is close to the end. “The man himself lay in the bed,” she says, and knows that sentence is exactly as it was written. It pleases her greatly to speak it. She remembers that in the book the single line had its own paragraph, giving it added impact. She wishes she could recall the rest of the story as it was written, too, or could read it aloud. It was the best part. There was something about the long sleep that outlasts love, and about being cuckolded. But the actual words elude her. And she’s committed to finishing this irreverent revision.

  “Everyone just stood and stared down at him,” she says, “at his smiling skull. What was left of him looked as if it had been lying in an embrace. Then they noticed the pillow next to his, and the indentation of a head on it. One of them leaned forward and picked something up, trying hard not to breathe the stale air and dust. He held up what he’d found, so the others could see. It was a long strand of iron-gray hair.”

  There’s a significant pause, and then Daphne is praised and congratulated. The story is a wonderful success. The ending, the whole thing, seemed so obvious in her slipshod retelling, but no one had objected. Her listeners had generously let her relate what they already knew or suspected.

  The elevators come and Evita laughs, rolling the first cart in. “They’re like to be starved to death up there,” she says.

  “Lots of gray hairs on those pillows.”

  Daphne is extremely uneasy. There’s a weight of pressure near her heart, and her breath is shallow and quick. What a variety of stealing she’s managed to do in such a short while. A husband, a sweater, a famous story.

  “It’s not really true, you know,” she says as the elevator rises, with Lucille and Evita beside her.

  “That’s okay,” Evita says.

  “It’s actually a work of fiction, a short story I read in a book for school. It’s called ‘A Rose for Emily.’” The heaviness in her chest lifts only slightly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lucille says. The elevator stops and the doors open.

  “Of course it matters,” Daphne answers. “Someone made it up and it wasn’t me. I didn’t even tell it right. The servant was black. Hank’s name was Homer. And it isn’t true. It didn’t actually happen.”

  “Who cares for that kind of true,” Lucille says coldly, and glides away.

  Daphne stands there, puzzled and hurt. Why is she being deprived of her right to confession? And why is Lucille so hostile?

  “We get enough of what happens,” Evita says.

  24

  THE PLANE DOESN’T CRASH on takeoff. It soars beautifully upward, against all possible influence of disbelief and fear. Kenny and Joy and the children stand at a window to watch the ascent. They stay there until there is nothing to see but a fading jet stream against the hanging blue sky. “All gone!” Molly says.

  The flight finally left at noon and now Kenny’s family is hungry for lunch. At least, the children are, and they head for Steven’s favorite fast-food place, a taco stand midway between the airport and Sherman Oaks. Kenny hates eating in the car, or at one of those sticky fly-bombed tables outside. And he doesn’t trust the underage chefs or the cheap spicy ingredients they assemble. But he suggests going to Mister Taco’s anyway, because he wants to please Steven, to make up for being so grouchy at the airport.

  Once Joy said that women can always tell when their husbands are having affairs. This was long before Kenny’s own fall from innocence, and the remark entertained him and made him curious. When he asked her how women knew, Joy said with authority that men give themselves away by erratic changes in their behavior. They’re very mean at times, without provocation, and much too good at others. Guilt is what drives them, of course, she said, first to rage, then to
repentance, and back to rage again, etc., etc. It was so transparent, and boring. “Where did you read that?” he’d asked. Joy was always reading in those days, with a rather catholic appetite. She zipped through every new novel, books by Theodor Reik and Wilhelm Reich, glossy fashion magazines with their articles heralded on the covers: “The You He Never Sees,” “An Exotic Oriental Palette for Spring,” “Why Men Fear Intimacy.”

  “I didn’t read it anywhere,” she said. “I just know.”

  “Oh, yeah? Not by observing me, kiddo,” he’d answered.

  “No,” she admitted. “Not you.”

  By then his curiosity became less general and more stimulated. Which one of their friends was screwing around? “Nobody,” she said. “Do you think I’m a fink?” He nagged at her, cajoling and threatening for a whole day before she would tell him, making him swear first not to tell anyone else. It was Gene Warner, a tax colleague and tennis buddy, with whom Kenny had thought he had a pretty close friendship. He was genuinely surprised, a little thrilled, and envious. The Warners were separated a few months later, and then divorced—the first in their social circle to fall, to fail.

  Kenny looked at Joy, at all women, after that with new respect for their witch-like intuition. Sometimes he thought, why do men fear intimacy?

  Now, watching bits of shredded lettuce escape from his taco and disappear into the car’s upholstery, he wonders if he, too, has been giving himself away all along. He’s hardly had any unprovoked flare-ups, just frequent irritable moments. Anyone could have those, for any number of reasons other than infidelity. The usual tension between Joy and himself was enough to make them both more radical in their ways, and a lot less civil when they were unobserved by others. One night, after a bitter bedtime quarrel, she cut all his ties in half with her cuticle scissors. The next day she went shopping and replaced them, but she never apologized.