by Maria Flook
Holly worked changeover Saturdays in almost the same way people attended to their sabbath rituals. The tiny chapel-white clapboard cottages, in a zigzag line to the sea, were like pristine grottoes which Holly kept straight. Every autumn, when she closed up the shacks and Salvatore removed the screens from the windows, storing the hand-painted flower signs, Holly felt vulnerable and melancholy. When the string was boarded up, her duties suspended, she couldn’t stop thinking of the place. She pictured the salt cellars where she had left them in pairs, the neat stacks of cobalt Fiestaware plates, the green iron stains ringing the drains in the tiny porcelain sinks, the striped Hudson Bay blankets folded at the foot of each bed. In the winter months, she felt a little lost and guilty, as if closed off from her house of worship.
Her husband, Jensen, had often stopped in at the units on changeover days, wanting something. She didn’t like to rough up the bedclothes that she had already smoothed. “I’m not doing these sheets twice because of you,” Holly told him. Neptune’s was one place where she had the authority to turn him away.
In February, her unemployment insurance ran out and Social Services located a position for Holly at a local prep school. She was hired as a kitchen assistant at Saint George’s School. When Holly started her new cooking job, she tried to think that she had everything in control; she had her divorce and a decent employment future. She told her co-worker, Robin, “I’m single again. I lived to talk about it.”
Robin told her, “Congratulations. When it happened to me, I started singing in the shower. Are you singing yet?”
Holly couldn’t say if she felt free enough or lost enough. She knew that she would have to feel unabashedly free or perilously lost to encourage a breakthrough. When her marriage deteriorated there had been corresponding environmental signs in the apartment house where she had lived with Jensen. She watched lines of sweet ants scroll across the kitchen counter and onto the pantry doors, a disturbing message in a pulsing script. Silverfish twisted in the porcelain sink like tiny bouncing drops of mercury. Then, on the day she received the official court document, Holly came home to her building after work to find that where there had once been a grassy front lawn, there was no lawn. It was a gaping pit. A sinkhole. Heavy asphalt crusts were turned over in scalloped rows around a circular trench, a breathtaking saucer. The hole seemed to be expanding as she watched.
The sinkhole had torn open the street, gouging a wide trench in the building’s foundation. A bearing wall was tilting. Newport public works crews arranged fluorescent red sawhorses at each corner of the lot. The DOT trucks pulled to the curb and men unloaded a backhoe. Blue lights surged on and off in a pleasing split-second unison. A police officer explained to Holly that it wasn’t an actual geological sinkhole, it was a bubble. A water main had erupted underground and pumped enough water into the sandy loam until the street collapsed, the asphalt erupted in a jagged funnel.
Her apartment house was condemned.
Holly’s landlord came out of the building and handed Holly a padlock still in its plastic blister. “This lock goes on the U-bolt as soon as you get your suitcase,” he told her.
“Please don’t tell me this. How long do I have to be out?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. They say it’s the whole infrastructure. It depends on insurance. When they get moving on a claim, we’ll be okay. Just pray they don’t decide that it’s an act of God. An act of God won’t bring a dime.”
“An act of God?” Holly enjoyed the sound of it. It implied an absolute finality. Perhaps the moment she had torched her love pallet it had been an act of God. Holly telephoned her friend Robin at Saint George’s and made arrangements to sleep on Robin’s foldout sofa as long as she brought her own linens. The officer permitted Holly to go inside her apartment to get some clothes and toiletries. She tugged her Wamsutta loose from the mattress and walked with an armful of bedding down the stairs and across the front courtyard. The sheet snagged on the turf and her toe caught in the elastic hem. The sheets’ private floral pattern splashed open and the city workers turned their faces in the opposite direction. She balled up the linens and shoved them into the passenger seat of her Toyota. She went back inside and took her good dresses on pink satin hangers. Why she bothered with the dresses she didn’t understand. The party dresses looked quite homely in the harsh sunlight, and the city workers rested on their forks and shovels to gawk at them. She went inside again and walked through the apartment, careful to choose her steps on the precarious flooring. Yet the floor didn’t feel any different. She knew that sometimes there were warning signs, bridges might heave and wobble before collapse, otherwise there’s no hint and structural integrity gives way all at once.
She examined her possessions gingerly, as if everything was part of the doomed whole. She decided to leave most everything behind until another time if she wanted to come back for them. An almost physical urgency took over and she snapped the padlock through its U-bolt. She had to remind herself to shove the toy-sized key deep into her pocket. She might have just as easily thrown it over her shoulder.
The night Holly moved into the duplex, her ex-husband was scheduled to be on a plane to Kanpur for a visit to his new fiancée’s homeland. A fragile tissue copy of her final decree, with its embossed seal, fluttered on an end table near a warp in the storm door. She placed a giant seashell ashtray on the court document so it wouldn’t sail around the room like something bewitched. Holly imagined Jensen’s Indian bride, her tiny red pencil mark. All evening she saw Sarojini’s ruby dot in the twilight. It was the commuter air traffic from Warwick Airport, one jetliner after another. Each bright speck throbbed and receded. In its anonymity, she was convinced that one certain jet in particular was the one that lifted her ex-husband off the continent. Then, another aircraft angled past, and she decided that it was the one. She wasn’t wholly relieved to have met the finish line, which was, of course, also the starting line, but she was pleased that the sinkhole had forced her out of her apartment. She stood facing the dark Atlantic, whatever was out there, on her own terms. Of course, the local authorities were keeping track of her. She wasn’t exactly under surveillance, but she was ashamed of her predicament. Shame itself was a cold eye out of nowhere.
Her psychiatric counselor, Dr. Kline, looked a lot like the virginal TV actress Eleanor Donahue, the eldest daughter in the series Father Knows Best. The striking similarity between the actress and Dr. Kline had a paralyzing affect on Holly. Holly never wanted to open up. At Holly’s last visit, Dr. Kline said, “How are you this week?”
“Same old same old,” Holly said.
“Still feeling guilty?” Dr. Kline asked.
“Not exactly.”
“You don’t feel responsible?”
“From this minute on, sure. I’m a responsible citizen.”
“What about the fire?”
“That fire is extinguished.”
“What about the next fire?”
Holly played along. “Another fire? I don’t see that happening.” She told Dr. Kline, “What happened, happened.”
“What did you learn from it?”
“Life goes on,” Holly said. “On the other hand,” Holly continued, “no one gets out of this world alive.”
Dr. Kline said, “That’s a gloomy assessment.”
“Mostly it’s the here and now. Like I’m almost out of cash. That’s just the plain facts. I’m not putting any spin on it,” she said. “I had to put four hundred dollars down. Another one hundred fifty for the propane tank. That pretty much cleaned me out.”
The rooms in the duplex were cold. It was really a summer house with auxiliary heating. She adjusted the space heater and she lit the gas stove and opened the oven door. The propane scent reminded her of Neptune’s Hide-A-Way. She often helped the tenants relight the pilots on their stoves with a foot-long matchstick. The same propane scent permeated the duplex, it was comforting and she breathed it willingly.
The winter after Holly and Jensen were marr
ied, Jensen was hired as an intern with the Beef Growers Institute, a national lobbying group. He was assigned to a meatpacking plant in Sioux City. He was sent there to help employees address public relations issues. The nation was becoming anti-beef and it required a grassroots turnaround. He took the job, and Holly drove out to meet him.
She drove straight through and Jensen was there to greet her. He was standing out in the cold, his breath white as phlox. He looked like a real rancher in a new shearling coat. Holly ran out of the car into his open arms. He wrapped her inside his sheepskin jacket, folding the dense blond wool over her head, and she felt all the warmth she would ever feel in his tight hold. It lasted all night and into that first spring.
If she thought of her husband at all, she might as well think of that showy sheepskin coat, its sweet, tallow smell.
She had made one mistake, but the dominoes kept falling in a straight row of incriminating details gathered from her personal history. Dr. Kline took notes on legal pads with pencil-thin green lines. The green lines had bled on the yellow paper; they weren’t lines so much as blurs. What did her probation officer write between these blurs? What would happen to these documents? Holly wanted to burn them.
Holly arranged her brush and comb on the knotty-pine bureau upon a yellowed doily. She decided she would soak the dirty lace circle in a bowl of Clorox. The idea of bleaching the doily was oddly reassuring. Perhaps she was regaining her domestic instincts. She purchased a package of potpourri, a jumble of citrus rinds and herbs to boil on the stove. She hoped its lemony scent would overwhelm a familiar undefinable trace of clean musk that lingered on certain hand towels and unisex T-shirts that she had shared with Jensen.
She walked through the little duplex and switched on the lamps. The bedroom had recently been painted with “sand paint” to cover up flaws in the plaster. The surfaces were sharp and gritty. As Holly made her bed, she brushed the back of her wrist against the wall and the blood rose in tiny dots. She licked the small red grid from her skin. She made the bed with the same floral sheets and set the pillows straight. At two A.M. she finally went to bed, pulling the blanket high, until its icy satin binding touched her throat.
She was sinking into dreams when the lights blazed again next door; a platinum square fell across her wall. She pinched her eyes shut but the neighboring light washed through. Holly wondered how much longer until the invalid next door succumbed and his caretaker was released from her duties. Certainly the schedule was difficult for the vigilant soubrette. Holly lifted herself on her elbow to watch the illuminated curtain, the nurse’s familiar outline. Earlier that evening, Holly had been impressed by the queer dance, its unflinching charity, which in silhouette had appeared doubly genuine.
Whoever was sick wasn’t to be envied, but she felt a wave of jealousy. A personal nurse was a luxury, wasn’t it? Then Holly recognized that she didn’t wish for comfort but for its opposite, the opportunity to attend to someone, to look after a beloved.
Holly heard the screak of a window sash. A woman, quite older than she had imagined, was leaning far out from the third-floor bedroom, her hand inserted in a tight, white muff. She was shaking the muff loose from her wrist. It was a sock; she stretched its elastic cuff, letting its accordion ripples snap shut. The wind tugged it out of her grasp. She inserted her fist in its mate, then shook it free.
Holly stood up and tugged on her flats. She found her overcoat in the dark kitchen and pulled it around her. She walked outside, across the clamshells. She picked up the socks, which had landed like dog ears on the bare hydrangea. She looked up.
“You want these things?” Holly called up to the woman above.
“Watch out. They’re contaminated,” Rennie said.
Holly dropped the socks. She imagined the viral contagion that the invalid must be dying from. “Shit. You can’t just throw these infected things around.”
“We’re fighting a war up here,” Rennie said. She didn’t elaborate.
Holly said, “You’re fighting a war?”
“One battle at a time.”
“Sorry to hear that.” Holly looked up at the woman, who was out of uniform and wearing her nightdress. The fouled socks had repelled her, but Holly lingered below the window. She cherished the moment of drama. “Is your patient very ill? Is it HIV?”
Rennie stared down at her.
“You have a local doctor? I guess you drive into Providence? Does your patient need a specialist? There’s a HIV network. It’s a hot line. Do you have that 800 number?” Holly asked a string of questions.
Rennie told Willis, “It’s our neighbor. She’s vaccinated with a phonograph needle.”
“Shit. Was I talking too fast? I thought I was showing some concern. Christ.”
“Don’t worry. The patient is fine. Except for the fleas.”
Holly wasn’t following the woman’s explanation. She watched Rennie’s face. Despite her many years, it was the face of a sprite, fully backlit with her silver hair ribboned loosely over her shoulders. Holly shrugged and moved back to her duplex. She waited on the porch until Rennie slammed the window. The morbific socks pulsed in the wind where Holly had dropped them on the garden walk.
Chapter Two
During his recuperation, Willis checked his potency at odd hours, several times a day. He solicited events from his carnal memory, and when that was depleted he left the house. He loitered on the Cliff Walk with a girl from Salve Regina College. The girl was a nursing student, right off of her shift at Château-sur-Mer Retirement Village. She wore a disposable paper cap, a white triangle high as a wedge of angel cake. Willis crushed it in one hand and sailed it into the beach plum bushes. The girl retrieved the hat, creased it flat and plunged it into her coat pocket.
The afternoon was raw. Joggers wore surgeons’ masks against the windchill. Oldsters passed through, wrapped in Synchilla mufflers up to their eyewear. Willis steered the student to a private love nook behind a retaining wall, out of the wind. The cliff went straight down to where the sea sudsed the rocks. She came right along with just her fingertips alert in the palm of his hand. She was hypnotized by Willis’s looks. Willis was half Cuban and his hair was rich as ink without a touch of sorrel in it. His pale skin and dark Latin crown was the kind of thing that made other men feel challenged. Willis unhooked the leather toggles on her jacket. She wasn’t entirely a novice, but her mock complaints increased when he reached under her warm clothing. His right arm was still bandaged in a plaster cast and he rolled its icy surface against her bare skin. He siphoned her breath with harsh, toothy kisses.
The light was going. Loose mare’s tails stretched deep across Rhode Island Sound. Newport has its layers of veneer; historic houses were a polish or a bright corrosion along the famous coastline. Most of the old mansions had been acquired by the Preservation Society and tourists came each season to sightsee it into the ground. Native year-rounders were ordinary, with love and trouble at their own level. Two days before, at Newport Hospital, a baby was stillborn. The brain stem was intact, but it didn’t have the cortex. Willis felt jittery about it. He knew the baby’s mother, Sheila Boyd, a laughing girl whose bright, ebullient nature had proved only to tantalize a mean fate. Of course, it was just luck. Luck was a wild filament, like the jagged arc in a light bulb.
The stillbirth was the town’s table talk for longer than necessary, but Willis understood that if you live on an island you’re under a microscope. Aquidneck Island was a torn cuff of land with three different bridges threading it to the main coastline. Each span grafted the island to every vein of commerce, healthy or not. There were potato farms and nurseries inland, but its jewel was Newport. A New England seaport puts a spell on its population; the indifferent rolls and shivers of the surf were like the town’s collective respirations.
Willis made love to the nurse despite the cold and his waffling symptoms from Rennie’s morphine. He waited while she fastened the barrel clasps on her coat and then he walked her into town. She tried to hold his hand
and pushed her icy fingers into his vent pocket. Willis saw that the love act had made her clingy and he let her explore the flannel lining of his jacket. The boots he wanted were on sale at one of the plush leather boutiques on Bowen’s Wharf and he took her along to get her opinion. He stopped in front of Northern Lights Leather to study the window. It was a pair of golden Luchesse cowboy boots on a Lucite pedestal. “Shit. I’m in love,” he told her.
She stared at the boots.
The toes and insteps were embossed with patterns of gorgeous raised nubbins over the tawny hide; the calves had miraculous eagle-wing sewing. Willis imagined wearing the boots, walking into Narragansett Tavern through the stale puddles of Rolling Rock. One of the tap handles leaked, leaving a constant rivulet of beer across the floor. It was bad luck to step over the stream, Willis had to touch it with his shoe on the way in and on the way out too. Willis liked to put out a cigarette wearing good boots, grinding the stiff, triangular sole against the littered tile. He walked the nursing student inside the leather shop and they sat down in the row of seats.
They waited for the salesperson to finish a transaction. Willis told the nurse, “The question is—just what does that sign really mean?”
“That sign there?” she said. “It says SALE.”
“What does it mean?” Willis said.
She laughed, two impatient coed snorts. “It means they’re going to cost less money.”
“But from what height does the price make its descent?”
“Its what?”
“It’s all relative,” he told her.
She moved across the room to look at a fringed handbag; she fingered the leather strings. “How about Friday night? Doing anything?”
He knew that was coming. He ignored her invitation and told the salesman, “Ten and a half, maybe eleven.”
