The Collective

by The Collective [lit]

  up and went down, but it didn't go away. She'd been aware of it

  ever since that thing about Floyd started knocking around in her

  head - and then the little girl in the red pinafore.

  But, really, hadn't she felt something before either of those things?

  Hadn't it actually started when they came down the steps of the

  Lear 35 into the hammering heat of the Fort Myers sunshine? Or

  even before? En route from Boston?

  They were coming to an intersection. Overhead was a flashing

  yellow light, and she thought, To the right is a used-car lot and a

  sign for the Sanibel Community Theatre.

  Then she thought, No, it'll be like the crosses that weren't there. It's

  a strong feeling but it's a false feeling.

  Here was the intersection. On the right there was a used-car lot-

  Palm-dale Motors. Carol felt a real jump at that, a stab of

  something sharper than disquiet. She told herself to quit being

  stupid. There had to be car lots all over Florida and if you

  predicted one at every intersection sooner or later the law of

  averages made you a prophet. It was a trick mediums had been

  using for hundreds of years.

  Besides, there's no theatre sign.

  But there was another sign. It was Mary the Mother of God, the

  ghost of all her childhood days, holding out her hands the way she

  did on the medallion Carol's grandmother had given her for her

  tenth birthday. Her grandmother had pressed it into her hand and

  looped the chain around her fingers, saying, "Wear her always as

  you grow, because all the hard days are coming. " She had worn it,

  all right. At Our Lady of Angels grammar and middle school she

  had worn it, then at St. Vincent de Paul high. She wore the medal

  until breasts grew around it like ordinary miracles, and then

  someplace, probably on the class trip to Hampton Beach, she had

  lost it. Coming home on the bus she had tongue-kissed for the first

  time. Butch Soucy had been the boy; and she had been able to taste

  the cotton candy he'd eaten.

  Mary on that long-gone medallion and Mary on this billboard had

  exactly the same look, the one that made you feel guilty of

  thinking impure thoughts even when all you were thinking about

  was a peanut-butter sandwich. Beneath Mary, the sign said

  "Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida Homeless Won't You

  Help Us?"

  Hey there, Mary, what's the story.

  More than one voice this time; many voices, girls' voices, chanting

  ghost voices. There were ordinary miracles; there were also

  ordinary ghosts. You found these things out as you got older.

  "What's wrong with you?" She knew that voice as well as she did

  the eyebrow-and-dimple look. Bill's I'm-only-pretending-to-be-

  pissed tone of voice, the one that meant he really was pissed, at

  least a little.

  "Nothing." She gave him the best smile she could manage.

  "You really don't seem like yourself Maybe you shouldn't have

  slept on the plane.

  'You're probably right," she said, and not just to be agreeable,

  either. After all, how many women got a second honeymoon on

  Captiva Island for their twenty-fifth anniversary? Round trip on a

  chartered Learjet? Ten days at one of those places where your

  money was no good (at least until MasterCard coughed up the bill

  at the end of the month) and if you wanted a massage a big

  Swedish babe would come and pummel you in your six-room

  beach house?

  Things had been different at the start. Bill, whom she'd first met at

  a crosstown high-school dance and then met again at college three

  years later (another ordinarv miracle), had begun their married life

  working as a janitor, because there were no openings in the

  computer industry. It was 1973, and computers were essentially

  going nowhere and they were living in a grotty place in Revere,

  not on the beach but close to it, and all night people kept going up

  the stairs to buy drugs from the two sallow creatures who lived in

  the apartment above them and listened endlessly to dopey records

  from the sixties. Carol used to lie awake waiting for the shouting to

  start, thinking, We won't ever get out of here, we'll grow old and

  die within earshot of Cream and Blue Cheer and the fucking

  Dodgem cars down on the beach.

  Bill, exhausted at the end of his shift, would sleep through the

  noise, lying on his side, sometimes with one hand on her hip. And

  when it wasn't there she often put it there, especially if the

  creatures upstairs were arguing with their customers. Bill was all

  she had. Her parents had practically disowned her when she

  married him. He was a Catholic, but the wrong sort of Catholic.

  Gram had asked why she wanted to go with that boy when anyone

  could tell he was shanty; how could she fall for all his foolish talk,

  why did she want to break her father's heart. And what could she

  say?

  It was a long distance from that place in Revere to a private jet

  soaring at forty-one thousand feet; a long way to this rental car;

  which was a Crown Victoria-what the goodfellas in the gangster

  movies invariably called a Crown Vic heading for ten days in a

  place where the tab would probably be... well, she didn't even want

  to think about it.

  Floyd?... Ohshit.

  "Carol? What is it now?"

  "Nothing," she said. Up ahead by the road was a little pink

  bungalow, the porch flanked by palms - seeing those trees with

  their fringy heads lifted against the blue sky made her think of

  Japanese Zeros coming in low; their underwing machine guns

  firing, such an association clearly the result of a youth misspent in

  front of the TV - and as they passed a black woman would come

  out. She would be drying her hands on a piece of pink towelling

  and would watch them expressionlessly as they passed, rich folks

  in a Crown Vic headed for Captiva, and she'd have no idea that

  Carol Shelton once lay awake in a ninety-dollar-a-month

  apartment, listening to the records and the drug deals upstairs,

  feeling something alive inside her, something that made her think

  of a cigarette that had fallen down behind the drapes at a party,

  small and unseen but smoldering away next to the fabric.

  "Hon?"

  "Nothing, I said." They passed the house. There was no woman.

  An old man - white, not black-sat in a rocking chair, watching

  them pass. There were rimless glasses on his nose and a piece of

  ragged pink towelling, the same shade as the house, across his lap.

  "I'm fine now. Just anxious to get there and change into some

  shorts."

  His hand touched her hip where he had so often touched her during

  those first days - and then crept a little farther inland. She thought

  about stopping him (Roman hands and Russian fingers, they used

  to say) and didn't. They were, after all, on their second

  honeymoon. Also, it would make that expression go away.

  "Maybe," he said, "we could take a pause. You know, after the

  dress comes off and before the shorts go on.

  "I think that's a lovely idea," she sai
d, and put her hand over his,

  pressed both more tightly against her. Ahead was a sign that would

  read "Palm House 3 Mi. on Left" when they got close enough to

  see it.

  The sign actually read "Palm House 2 Mi. on Left." Beyond it was

  another sign, Mother Mary again, with her hands outstretched and

  that little electric shimmy that wasn't quite a halo around her head.

  This version read "Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida

  Sick - Won't You Help Us?"

  Bill said, "The next one ought to say 'Burma Shave."'

  She didn't understand what he meant, but it was clearly a joke and

  so she smiled. The next one would say "Mother of Mercy Charities

  Help the Florida Hungry;" but she couldn't tell him that. Dear Bill.

  Dear in spite of his sometimes stupid expressions and his

  sometimes unclear allusions. He'll most likely leave you, and you

  know something? If you go through with it that's probably the best

  luck you can expect. This according to her father. Dear Bill, who

  had proved that just once, just that one crucial time, her judgment

  had been far better than her father's. She was still married to the

  man her Gram had called "the big boaster." At a price, true, but

  everyone paid a price.

  Her head itched. She scratched at it absently, watching for the next

  Mother of Mercy billboard.

  Horrible as it was to say, things had started turning around when

  she lost the baby. That was just before Bill got a job with Beach

  Computers, out on Route 128; that was when the first winds of

  change in the industry began to blow.

  Lost the baby, had a miscarriage - they all believed that except

  maybe Bill. Certainly her family had believed it: Dad, Mom,

  Gram. "Miscarriage" was the story they told, miscarriage was a

  Catholic's story if ever there was one. Hey, Mary, what's the story,

  they had sometimes sung when they skipped rope, feeling daring,

  feeling sinful, the skirts of their uniforrns flipping up and down

  over their scabby knees. That was at Our Lady of Angels, where

  Sister Annunciata would spank your knuckles with her ruler if she

  caught you gazing out the window during Sentence Time, where

  Sister Dormatilla would tell you that a million years was but the

  first tick of eternity's endless clock (and you could spend eternity

  in Hell, most people did, it was easy). In Hell you would live

  forever with your skin on fire and your bones roasting. Now she

  was in Florida, now she was in a Crown Vic sitting next to her

  husband, whose hand was still in her crotch; the dress would be

  wrinkled but who cared if it got that look off his face, and why

  wouldn't the feeling stop?

  She thought of a mailbox with "Raglan" painted on the side and an

  American-flag decal on the front, and although the name turned

  out to be "Reagan" and the flag a Grateful Dead sticker; the box

  was there. She thought of a small black dog trotting briskly along

  the other side of the road, its head down, sniffling, and the small

  black dog was there. She thought again of the billboard and, yes,

  there it was: "Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida Hungry -

  Won't You Help Us?"

  Bill was pointing. "There-see? I think that's Palm House. No, not

  where the billboard is, the other side. Why do they let people put

  those things up out here, anyway?"

  "I don't know." Her head itched. She scratched, and black dandruff

  began falling past her eyes. She looked at her fingers and was

  horrified to see dark smutches on the tips; it was as if someone had

  just taken her fingerprints.

  "Bill?" She raked her hand through her blond hair and this time the

  flakes were bigger. She saw they were not flakes of skin but flakes

  of paper. There was a face on one, peering out of the char like a

  face peering out of a botched negative.

  "Bill?"

  "What? Wh-" Then a total change in his voice, and that frightened

  her more than the way the car swerved. "Christ, honey, what's in

  your hair?"

  The face appeared to be Mother Teresa's. Or was that just because

  she'd been thinking about Our Lady of Angels? Carol plucked it

  from her dress, meaning to show it to Bill, and it crumbled

  between her fingers before she could. She turned to him and saw

  that his glasses were melted to his cheeks. One of his eyes had

  popped from its socket and then split like a grape pumped full of

  blood.

  And I knew it, she thought. Even before I turned, I knew it. Because

  I had that feeling.

  A bird was crying in the trees. On the billboard, Mary held out her

  hands. Carol tried to scream. Tried to scream.

  "CAROL?"

  It was Bill's voice, coming from a thousand miles away. Then his

  hand - not pressing the folds of her dress into her crotch, but on her

  shoulder.

  "You O.K., babe?"

  She opened her eyes to brilliant sunlight and her ears to the steady

  hum of the Learjet's engines. And something else-pressure against

  her eardrums. She looked from Bill's mildly concerned face to the

  dial below the temperature gauge in the cabin and saw that it had

  wound down to 28,000.

  "Landing?" she said, sounding muzzy to herself "Already?"

  "It's fast, huh?" Sounding pleased, as if he had flown it himself

  instead of only paying for it. "Pilot says we'll be on the ground in

  Fort Myers in twenty minutes. You took a hell of a jump, girl."

  "I had a nightmare."

  He laughed-the plummy ain't-you-the-silly-billy laugh she had

  come really to detest. "No nightmares allowed on your second

  honeymoon, babe. What was it?"

  "I don't remember," she said, and it was the truth. There were only

  fragments: Bill with his glasses melted all over his face, and one of

  the three or four forbidden skip rhymes they had sometimes

  chanted back in fifth and sixth grade. This one had gone Hey there,

  Mary, what's the story... and then something-something-

  something. She couldn't come up with the rest. She could

  remember Jangle-tangle jingle-bingle, I saw your daddy's great

  big dingle, but she couldn't remember the one about Mary-

  Mary helps the Florida sick, she thought, with no idea of what the

  thought meant, and just then there was a beep as the pilot turned

  the seatbelt light on. They had started their final descent. Let the

  wild rumpus start, she thought, and tightened her belt.

  "You really don't remember?" he asked, tightening his own. The

  little jet ran through a cloud filled with bumps, one of the pilots in

  the cockpit made a minor adjustment, and the ride smoothed out

  again. "Because usually, just after you wake up, you can still

  remember. Even the bad ones."

  "I remember Sister Annunciata, from Our Lady of Angels.

  Sentence Time."

  "Now, that's a nightmare.

  Ten minutes later the landing gear came down with a whine and a

  thump. Five minutes after that they landed.

  "They were supposed to bring the car right out to the plane," Bill

  said, already starting up the Type A shit. This she didn't like, but at

/>   least she didn't detest it the way she detested the plummy laugh

  and his repertoire of patronizing looks. "I hope there hasn't been a

  hitch."

  There hasn't been, she thought, and the feeling swept over her full

  force. I'm going to see it out the window on my side in just a

  second or two. It's your total Florida vacation car, a great big white

  goddam Cadillac, or maybe it's a Lincoln - And, yes, here it came,

  proving what? Well, she supposed, it proved that sometimes when

  you had deja vu what you thought was going to happen next really

  did happen next. It wasn't a Caddy or a Lincoln after all, but a

  Crown Victoria - what the gangsters in a Martin Scorsese film

  would no doubt call a Crown Vic.

  "Whoo," she said as he helped her down the steps and off the

  plane. The hot sun made her feel dizzy.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing, really. I've got deja' vu. Left over from my dream, I

  guess. We've been here before, that kind of thing."

  "It's being in a strange place, that's all," he said, and kissed her

  cheek. "Come on, let the wild rumpus start."

  They went to the car. Bill showed his driver's license to the young

  woman who had driven it out. Carol saw him check out the hem of

  her skirt, then sign the paper on her clipboard.

  She's going to drop it, Carol thought. The feeling was now so

  strong it was like being on an amusement-park ride that goes just a

  little too fast; all at once you realize you're edging out of the Land

  of Fun and into the Kingdom of Nausea. She'll drop it, and Bill

  will say "Whoopsy-daisy" and pick it up for her, get an even closer

  look at her legs.

  But the Hertz woman didn't drop her clipboard. A white courtesy

  van had appeared, to take her back to the Butler Aviation terminal.

  She gave Bill a final smile-Carol she had ignored completely-and

  opened the front passenger door. She stepped up, then slipped.

  "Whoopsy-daisy, don't be crazy," Bill said, and took her elbow,

  steadying her. She gave him a smile, he gave her well-turned legs a

  goodbye look, and Carol stood by the growing pile of their luggage

  and thought, Hey there, Mary...

  "Mrs. Shelton?" It was the co-pilot. He had the last bag, the case

  with Bill's laptop inside it, and he looked concerned. "Are you all

  right? You're very pale."

  Bill heard and turned away from the departing white van, his face

  worried. If her strongest feelings about Bill were her only feelings