In the Palomar Arms

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Like what?”

  Jesus. “Like what you’re thinking, what you want to do.” He’s been careful not to mention the children yet, and hopes that she won’t, either.

  She looks directly into his eyes. “I hate you,” she says.

  “Joy.”

  But she no longer acknowledges the name. She stands and rinses the platter under water that must be too hot for her fingers.

  “I’m truly sorry. For everything,” he whispers.

  The steam rises from the sink, obscuring her face.

  Kenny leaves the kitchen, goes into the dining room and then to the den, trying to decide what to do next. In all his imaginings of this scene, there was always the uproar of combat. He was prepared for that, if he was prepared for anything at all. She should be smashing dishes instead of rinsing them. He should be shouting instead of choking on all the unsaid words.

  Maybe he ought to go upstairs now, take a few things, and go to a motel. Would it be a strategic mistake? A moral one? He could never sleep there anyway, never tolerate the confinement of a single strange room. And he can’t go to Daphne’s either. His mission is not accomplished. He and Joy are not done with it.

  He wanders back into the kitchen, but she’s no longer there. The faucet is dripping. Otherwise, the house has an ominous silence, different from the one they had silently agreed upon. Kenny feels unaccountably nervous. He goes from room to room, looking for her. He won’t call her name, though, certain for some reason that she should not know his whereabouts before he knows hers.

  Their bathroom door is closed and he stands before it, listening. Nothing. “Joy?” He knocks and slowly turns the handle. The door opens without resistance, but she isn’t in there.

  Then he hears footsteps, downstairs, and the drone of the garage door, lifting. He runs, taking a few steps at a time, but the car is pulling out of the garage when he gets there, the headlights dazzling before the electronic door lowers again.

  She doesn’t like to drive at night, claims that she suffers from night blindness and must follow the tail-lights of another car or she loses the road. She’ll be back soon. She’s only avoiding the confrontation, delaying it, the way he’s been doing for days.

  In the shadows of the garage, Kenny sees the outlines of beach chairs, rakes, bags of gravel and charcoal, and he recalls Daphne’s litany of coveted things. He goes back into the house and upstairs, where he checks on the sleeping children.

  Then he goes downstairs once more, to the kitchen, and loads the dishwasher. He scrubs the pots and wipes all the counters with the yellow sponge. Househusband.

  Most of this day has been spent in the company and contemplation of women. In the bowling alley, there were only a few other men playing—teenagers, really. The other lanes were busy with women’s leagues, competing. They wore uniforms, bright satin shirts with the team names bold on their backs, and their own names embroidered over the various curves of their left breasts. Linda, broken precisely at the n by a pointed peak; Sandy, gently rising and falling; Paulette, stretched across a broad, nearly flat plain.

  Kenny bowled terribly; three gutter balls in the first five frames. He looked around him in an agony of self-consciousness. The teams of women on each side appeared to be too busy with their own games to have noticed his failure. They razzed and cheered one another, and were as raucously noisy as a flock of tropical birds. But when it was her turn, each player rose and went to the edge of the lane and paused there, purposeful and sober, before letting go. The pins exploded. Most of the women racked up scores he would have had tattooed on his chest.

  He was reminded of Miss Oberon and her flawless typing; of Joy intent on the work of childbirth; and of Daphne in bed, sweetly yielding, yet authorizing their pleasure.

  It was hard to bowl by himself. Aside from being solitary and tedious, it was also physically exhausting. When he stopped long enough to drink a beer, his shoulder muscles ached and his legs trembled. The thunder of the balls and the repeated crash of falling pins got on his nerves. Yet, once he started again, he kept at it. He played like a maniac: strikes, spares, splits, gutter balls. His chest pounded and his back hurt. I’ll feel this later, he told himself, although he was already feeling it. He kept score as if he were playing against an opponent; they were both lousy. When one of the women on the team to his right strayed too close, he gathered up his score sheet and crumpled it before she could read it.

  Kenny goes into the den and watches a British drama on Channel 28. He can hardly understand what anyone is saying. At ten o’clock he watches the news, most of which is bad. The air-traffic controllers continue their strike. In Warsaw, the Solidarity union threatens one. James Brady suffers a major seizure. There’s a shooting on Wilshire Boulevard. The commentators, a man and a woman, shuffle their papers and make brave, ironic asides about all the bad news. They are like a married couple, muddling through.

  At ten-thirty, the garage door whines open. Kenny jumps from the sofa to shut off the television set, as if he’s been caught in a disgraceful act. He listens hard, and hears her come in and go upstairs. When her footsteps are overhead, soft in their carpeted bedroom, he climbs the steps, too. All of his muscles ache, from the bowling, he supposes, from the tension. He wants to finish. He wants to console her and receive consolation in return.

  She is standing nude near her closet when he gets to the door of the bedroom. It is a shocking, spectacular sight. Her body is very lovely, girlishly slender, as he once preferred women’s bodies to be. He is not aroused, except by sorrow and a loathsome pity. She must have torn the clothing from her to have undressed this quickly. Now, with dreamlike slowness, she lowers the white veil of a nightgown until the light of her skin is doused. She gets into bed and takes a magazine from the table and opens it.

  “Won’t you talk?” he asks, and she shakes her head, looking down, turning the pages.

  It is like visiting a sickroom to which he has come without medicine or gifts or the proper words of encouragement. “In the morning, then,” he says. The pages turn.

  Kenny lies down in the guest room just down the hall. He’s afraid to shut off the light. The air conditioning is constant, maddening. He gets out of bed, adjusts the thermostat, and then opens a window. The air is heavy and natural, and summer insects are singing close by. When he’s back in bed, counting, the burglar alarm begins its high-pitched scream.

  27

  DAPHNE IS DETERMINED TO be very good with Kenny’s children, to dispel the wicked myths about stepmothers. As she goes in and out of the rooms collecting trays, she thinks seriously for the first time that she and Kenny must also have children together, a new family that won’t depose the old one. The drowsing patients, returned to childhood by their captivity, the soft food, and early bedtime, awaken maternal feelings in her she didn’t know she had. All of Kenny’s children will eventually be friends. A picture of a large bountiful table, in some as yet unknown kitchen, comes to mind. There is sunlight, and the overlapping talk and laughter of an animated family. Daphne swears never to use plastic forks or spoons, paper cups, or anything made of Styrofoam. Their meals, even picnics, will ring and chime with the resonance of silver on china and glass.

  “Everything is made of down,” Miss Nettleson says. “You can’t imagine how gentle—the walls, the chairs, my downy arms and legs. It’s very pleasant. Nothing bumps or jars …”

  Daphne helps her to lie down, pulling the covers up to make her comfortable. She disappears under them, becomes a flat, invisible terrain. Last week, Lucille said, “If I ever get like that, I hope they take me out back and shoot me. Like a horse.”

  “Just think,” Daphne tells Miss Nettleson as she tucks her in, “the dream is the reality. This is only a dream.”

  As Kenny is a wonderful father, she can become a perfect mother. After practicing on these elderly children, how can she not be prepared for the real thing?

  Once she’d had a dream herself, just after making love with Kenny, and before coming t
o work. She lost its content as soon as she woke, but some of its essence stayed with her. It had to do with mothering, and was sad. In her pragmatic way, Daphne concluded that Kenny, hungry at her breasts, and then the warm flood of semen inside her were the forces that had triggered an unconscious wish or fear. All day she kept thinking about the life process, its inexorable advance toward aging and death. By evening she’d worked something out, in a bemused fashion. When she saw Mkabi in the lounge, Daphne said, “I had the craziest dream today. Life was completely reversed—you know, people were born old and they died young. They moved downward, from being hopeless, to fulfillment, and then to innocence.” She was a little ashamed of pretending this was the substance of a dream, but she would have been more ashamed to admit to it as a conscious thought. “Weird,” she said, covering herself further.

  “That’s almost the way it is,” Mkabi said.

  “Well, sort of,” Daphne allowed, smelling a wisp of her hair, then her hands. She took out the flask of perfume and moistened her pulsating wrists. “Refreshing,” she said, offering the perfume to Mkabi, who shook her head. Daphne went on. “Except that infants are appealing in their helplessness. Their dirty diapers are okay, somehow. You don’t mind the smell and you know they’ll outgrow it, anyway. You become helpless in the way you feel about them. Otherwise, who would ever survive to grow up? It should be that way when you’re dying. Someone should want to hold you in their arms, to nurse you out the way your mother nursed you in. And just like a baby, the one dying shouldn’t have a drop of memory. I mean no longings, no regrets, not even language.” She became very embarrassed then. Her recitation sounded too theoretical to be the stuff of dreams. “Stupid, right?” she asked, and Mkabi said, “Yeah,” but not unkindly.

  The sisters are sitting on the edge of one bed. Mrs. Feldman is combing Mrs. Bernstein’s hair. Theirs is the recovered nursery, a grotesque realization of Daphne’s dream/idea. She stays and talks with them a little longer tonight, and Mrs. Feldman says, “I detect something. I see stars in your eyes, honey. She’s in love, Pearl!”

  Mrs. Bernstein, limp and drifting under the strokes of the comb, smiles her half-smile. The notion of love still triggers her approval.

  “Getting married?” Mrs. Feldman inquires cozily, and Daphne nods, smitten with pleasure. She can tell her news to everybody now, one by one.

  “I’m glad and I’m sad,” Mrs. Feldman admits. “I always wanted you to meet my nephew, Richard. He’s some handsome fellow. He looks like what’s-his-name, on the news.” She snaps her fingers, soundlessly, and tries to remember.

  “Dan Rather?” Daphne asks. “Tom Brokaw? Frank Reynolds?”

  “It will come to me,” Mrs. Feldman promises. “But what’s the good? You’re taken! Congratulations!”

  “Thank you,” Daphne says.

  Taken. It’s a lovely romantic and sexual word. She carries it like a gift along the hallway. It carries her from room to room as she collects the trays and says good night, rehearsing her new maternalism.

  Only Mr. Axel resists.

  She looks at his scarcely disturbed dinner and makes clucking noises. “But you have to eat,” she says.

  “Not hungry,” he answers, ducking his head, something Kenny’s daughter might do. When Daphne herself was a baby, she had to be coaxed with the promise of Buffalo Bob’s likeness at the bottom of her cereal dish. She also thinks of Peyton Weber under the table in that restaurant, snatching bits of crust from her mother’s hand, and she smiles.

  The meat course and the vegetables are cold and congealed, but the tapioca pudding doesn’t look much worse for the waiting. Its bumpy surface is still intact. She breaks it with the side of a spoon, scooping some up, and holds it to Mr. Axel’s mouth. The mouth shuts in a hard steady line, while his hands quiver and jerk.

  “Just a little,” she urges in a motherly singsong. “Just a tiny taste.”

  “Don’t want,” he says, throwing his voice.

  “Let’s go,” Daphne says, sounding like a drill sergeant to her own ears.

  His mouth opens slightly, and he drools. Going in, the spoon catches the spittle and tries to return it. His teeth close in a sudden vicious chomp. They seize the spoon and it cracks in two with the decisive snap of a mousetrap. Daphne is so startled she lets both pieces drop into his lap, tapioca and all.

  “I guess he don’t want it,” Mr. Brady says.

  Mr. Axel’s eyes are alight with victory. There is a man behind them. Daphne mops delicately at his soiled lap, aware of the man in there, too.

  She is virtually childless by the time she gets to 227. Who can possibly love them the way she meant to?

  Mrs. McBride’s room is a private one now. Unlike Mr. Axel, she chooses to eat, to live. Another aide has assisted her, and she’s been fed, sponged, and put to bed. She sleeps easily, and breathes like a dependable machine.

  She’ll outlast us all, Daphne thinks. She’ll have her party. A reporter from the newspaper will come and ask her how she accounts for her longevity. Daphne has seen other interviews like that. A turkey farmer in Texas, claiming to be 116 years old, said that a diet of fried giblets and cornbread was solely responsible for his survival. The newspaper published one of his recipes. It sounded revolting, and his printed age looked more like a record temperature. Another man, in another paper, was photographed with his enormous family. He coyly alluded to an active sex life at 101. His unsmiling wife was in her eighties.

  Some of the patients at the Palomar Arms make nocturnal visits to one another’s beds, and not always in a state of confusion. Staff members are ordered to scold them severely and accompany them back to their own beds. In stubborn, recurrent cases, the use of bed straps is advised. Feliciana has asked what Rauscher’s so worried about: pregnancy? VD? She draws curtains, closes doors, and turns her back.

  Mrs. McBride sleeps untethered. Is the lusting consciousness gone before the body? Oh, let it.

  Daphne reaches into her pocket and finds the thread from Feliciana’s sleeve. She shuts her eyes and drops it to the floor at the foot of the bed. She drops it and picks it up at least twenty times, until she gets a satisfactory facsimile of the letter K. “Ahhh,” she says, touching the footboard of the bed for balance.

  Mrs. McBride opens her eyes. “Who is it?” she asks. “Is it for me?”

  28

  IT’S ONLY ONE OF THE girls, a flitting white shadow, mumbling something, joggling the bed.

  Nora calls, “Who is it?” and the girl is gone from the room. They’re always going somewhere. Well, let them. She’s wide awake now, and no mistake. There used to be days for waking and nights to sleep, a safe and orderly life. Now there’s only bits of moon and sunlight as random as birds.

  She tries her breath and it whistles clean. Her voice works again, too, but she’s her own listener. It’s not an old woman’s crazy habit. She talked to herself as a child, too, in those rare sweet moments of solitude. And later, after Jack was gone. Hello? Hello?

  That one’s daughter was forever answering. “Were you calling? Do you want the bedpan?” Who ever wanted a bedpan?

  There’s no one in the other bed. It’s bent in half and stripped naked. Today, or yesterday, Nora asked the girl with the spoon like a steam shovel, “Is she dead, then?” And the girl laughed and said, “How can you be eating pudding, dead?” If they won’t pay attention, there’s no use talking to them.

  Anyway, Jack is dead, as dead as cats and kings. She doesn’t think of him enough, that’s the trouble, or she thinks of him falling.

  Once, a boy and girl came from a school to put her voice in a machine. They said, “Please talk into this. Tell us everything you can remember.” The machine hummed at first and the boy said, “Shit,” and hit it with his fist until it was right. Then Nora spoke of the gas lamps in the Boston house, and the church school near the stables, and beer carried home in sloshing wooden pails. They asked, and she told them, about her slow, zigzagging journey west, about all the houses where she was needed
and went, where the cries of nieces’ children dragged her upright from sleep into unknown rooms. She once thought of all those moves as her own Stations of the Cross. “Oh, wow, great,” the boy said, and “Wait, wait!” as he opened and shut the machine a few times. The years slipped and shifted while Nora waited. When she began again, with Jack making a pine table, with the saw’s harsh steady whisper and golden sawdust snowing, the girl stopped the machine and said, “No. Please. Women’s history.”

  They played it back for her later, but that wasn’t her voice in there; it was someone else, in a deep tunnel, or inside a cupboard, talking about Nora’s life. And she never said about Jack.

  If Nora forgets him, who will remember? When people used to say “A fate worse than death,” maybe that’s what they meant. But there isn’t any worse.

  He fell from a building under construction, from the glassless open frame that would be a window. It was that easy. He must have become dizzy, they said, or careless. He was sitting on the ledge, one leg in and one out. It was a brilliant March day. Spring was promised and the sky passed right through the open rooms. Perhaps the sun glinted too much off the head of his hammer and dazed him. His hand still held the hammer as he fell; the tenpenny nail was still poised, slanted on its point, to be hammered in place.

  Someone hammered it. The window glass was put in, and walls made bedrooms and kitchens. People moved into the building with pianos and children and chairs. For months, Nora could not look into any large distant space without a falling body appearing on the threshold of her vision. In summer, she would not pass the building with its open windows, and piano music flying out.

  The terrified men came to tell her, to catch her when she fell, their arms weaving a net under her fainting falling self.