by Maria Flook
“Do you always bring girls to meet your folks like this?”
He was surprised by her words and laughed. His laughter was exciting to Holly, it exposed him. Real laughter erupts from a man’s soft interior, and she was pleased to feel its luxurious notes dissolving in the air around her. She tried another quip, but it wasn’t successful; he was on guard after the first time.
Holly said, “Ever been to Neptune’s?”
“That string of summer shacks?”
“My home away from home,” she told him.
Willis took her over there. He told her, “I always liked the place. You can see it from across the cove. These shacks are white, all right, like a row of teeth.”
“It’s nice, isn’t it? Yachtzies can see it offshore. They sail into the Ida Lewis Yacht Club to rent moorings and ask about this place. They can see these shacks all the way out in the sound.” She made Willis park the car and she walked him down the string of shacks, telling him their distinctions and peculiarities. Each cottage was boarded up; Holly had to paint the interior with words. She even tried to describe the shelf paper in the cupboards. The wallpaper. The matching curtains. Everything was cabbage roses. “I start changeovers again in about a month.”
“What exactly happens at these changeovers?” he said.
“I work my ass off. People start coming and going. I tell you, it’s a view of the world. People check in and they check out. You get a picture of someone. After one week of vacation, some fellows look good, they’re satisfied. Other ones look worse for it, like they can’t accept the fact that life is ninety-five percent hard work at a regular job and only one week off. I watch it all. They party it up, get some big lobsters. Did you know everyone puts his lobster down on the linoleum before they shove ’em in the pot? I think that’s a scream. They have a feast, then they sink into gloom. It’s a whole spectrum of feelings.”
“What about these hooks?” Willis said. He pointed to the empty hooks over the front doors of the cottages.
“These hooks are for the flower signs. You know, ‘Lupine,’ ‘Myrtle—’ ” She recited the names of the flowers. The bare hooks over every door gave Willis an uncomfortable feeling. It was the same feeling he got when he saw blank granite monuments displayed on the front lawn of the stonecutter’s shop. Holly told him that the signs were removed and stored until the summer season so the wind couldn’t lift off the lettering. “The wind out here,” she said, “is like a chisel.”
Willis put his arms around her waist and leaned into her on the doorstep of one cottage. “Which one is this?” he said.
“Clematis,” she said. It had an anatomical sound, which she hadn’t yet noticed after all her years there, not until that moment.
He tugged her and rattled the door handle. He moved his hips against her, as if he was climbing through her. He shook the door. He was playacting, but she knew he wanted in.
“Locked,” she said.
“You don’t have privileges?”
“No. But I have my other keys with me.”
“What keys?”
“My old apartment. The place with the sinkhole. You hear about it?”
Willis said, “Everyone in town knows the place. It’s a regular attraction.”
“Want a closer look?” She might have been talking about the sinkhole or something else. He studied her face.
Willis admitted that he was curious.
They rode into town and parked on Spring Street. Spring Street was dead. In the twilight hours, the world resumes its clarity, everything is arrested. Night falls over the town the way a drop of water pins a flea with its minute surface tension. Willis knew that a flea could survive until the water evaporated; but he often didn’t think he would emerge intact from any given night. He looked up. A pink moon was eroding, cherry of morphine. When he had these thoughts, his eyes started to hurt, his sinuses stabbing. He rubbed his knuckles across the bridge of his nose to soothe the pinging. Holly watched his moods shift. His modulations of feeling were disturbing, yet she disliked men who never washed over a certain level.
They walked around the sinkhole, skirting the flat chunks of broken asphalt. Her apartment house was still condemned, but she saw construction had started. The joists had been shimmed and the foundation was partially filled in with gravel and chalky-blue hardener. The front door of the building was left wide open. She ignored the NO TRESPASSING signs and took Willis inside the building, as if nothing had ever happened to suggest that the building might, at any minute, give way to its years. Willis followed her up the stairs. The hall was dark. The electricity was shut off.
Once inside the apartment, she found the drawer with the hurricane candles. Together they tapered the wicks and lit them with kitchen matches. Willis arranged the candles along the kitchen windowsill, letting the wax drip on the ledge before grinding the stems into the hot puddle. She sat down at the dinette set, which was coated with concrete dust from weeks of jackhammering in the street outside. Willis sat across from her and pushed the heel of his hand through the powder, reaching for her. The candlelight stuttered in the draft, one waffling gold zone.
The building’s decay seemed a strange catalyst. It was a phantom dwelling; the sinkhole’s gaping pit attained the dreamy character of a castle’s moat. They didn’t have to remember the exterior world, their lives already in progress; their irrefutable pasts seemed, suddenly, open-ended.
They moved to the sofa. He was careful not to rest his plastered arm against her bare skin, until at last she asked to feel its chilly swipe. He tugged it gently over her hips and guided it along her mound of Venus. She pinched her legs closed upon it. She released her hold and they laughed. She shivered with temperature shifts; pleasure surges ricocheted through her erogenous landmarks in one cluster response. Her sharp inhalations couldn’t keep up. Willis liked hearing her shaky respirations, which vacillated with his touch, as if he manipulated a magic throttle.
Willis rolled onto her. His skin was flushed where the candles threw their light. The hair at his temple smelled like hard-milled lavender soap, like old-fashioned boxed soaps sold in department stores.
He was holding back. “Wait a minute. Are you all right?”
She told him yes.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I’m fine,” she told him.
“Are you sure? Some girls are just like Chia Pets. Next day, they’ve sprouted.”
She wondered what he was talking about. “Bean sprouts?”
“Just think a minute. Think of Sheila’s baby.”
Holly couldn’t imagine it.
Then he started again, his reserve was crumbling. In his mind, he said Holly’s name. Her name was an illumination, her name flared like smudge pots along a remote runway. Again he held up. Now it was his romantic notions which dizzied him with their complexity, or it was morphine which almost stole his erection. Holly seemed to recognize that he had moved ahead of sex, and she told him to concentrate on one thing. One thing.
He fucked her and let his mind rest.
In a moment, Willis jumped up. The window was blazing. Candle wax had puddled and ignited the jacquard curtains; even the window sash was catching, its old linseed paint snapping. The flames rose up both sides and across the top valance.
He went to the sink and turned open the tap. The water was off. Holly took her sweater and hit the flames with its little cuff, but it only fanned the blaze. In the dark, the golden frame was hypnotizing, and Holly stopped her efforts to stand beside Willis and watch. The fire threw a sheet of light across their bodies and they looked back and forth at one another with only a slight veil of modesty.
At last, Willis picked up a kitchen mat and rubbed it over the window frame, clockwise, as if he were dusting the furniture. The thick rug robbed the flames of oxygen and the window grew dark. The scorched wood released its immediate scent.
“Shit, that took off fast,” Willis said. “This old paint—”
“You weren’t there yet,�
� she said. She pulled his hand to her bare waist, but he had lifted his jeans from the floor and was tugging them over his legs.
“Come on,” she said.
Willis said, “Not here.”
She tugged his sooty fingers.
“Jesus, girl.” He peeled her hand off his wrist. “I’m sure someone saw that fire in the window. It was the fucking Fourth of July. They’re dialing 911.”
He drove her back to the duplex. He parked the car in his usual spot against the side of Rennie’s house and he walked Holly over to her porch. Willis stopped dead in his tracks. He was eyeing something.
Some nights, a family of skunks congregated at the porch steps and Holly had to pick her way carefully. She looked for the skunks. She didn’t see anything.
“What is it?” she said.
Willis rubbed the heel of his hand against the white clapboards. Then Holly saw the writing. Someone had spray-painted the side of her house. The metallic paint swirled in two-foot-high script.
Two silver words: “Size Queen.”
The eerie pronouncement was repeated five times across the width of the house. Each letter S was meticulous, like a dollar sign. The sizeable Q had a slight flourish, its silver tail curled once around like a piglet’s.
She pushed past Willis and went inside her house. He came after her and waited for her to scrub the palm of her hand over her face at the kitchen tap. The smell of burning wax clung to her. “Who would do that?” she asked. “Would Fritz do that? Is Fritz jealous?”
“Fritz would never do that.”
“Are you sure?”
“He wouldn’t do it. Fritz is an extension of me—”
“God, that’s weird. That’s what I mean. That’s sick,” she said.
“You’re not listening. Fritz doesn’t destroy property.”
“And I do? I destroy property, right? Fuck you.”
“Not what I’m saying.”
“Well—”
“Your old man? Mr. Softee.”
“I told you, it’s Carvel. Not Mr. Softee. And Jensen’s in India. He’s on the other side of the world,” she said.
“How do you know? How do you know what side of the world he’s on now? You can’t be sure. Where is that fuck-head? At this very minute?”
The idea disturbed Holly and she let Willis walk her into the bedroom and tip her onto the bed. He unfastened her layers of clothing. He promised that he would paint the clapboards. “At daybreak.”
“Before people can see it,” she said.
“Rennie’s got a gallon of white-white in the shack. I’ll roll it on thick as you want. I’ll roll it until you tell me to stop—”
She was going along with him. He was making her laugh. He was saying the words out loud. The two silver words. He whispered the words against her ear.
“It’s true,” she said. “It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.”
Chapter Eleven
Rennie asked Holly to go with her to visit Château-sur-Mer. Holly had the afternoon free until four o’clock when she had to report to work. She had not seen Willis for a full week. After Willis had painted the side of her house, he disappeared, as if he, too, was shamed by the vandal’s assumption. Holly wanted to show him that in the full sunlight the silver lettering bled through the layer of new paint. Holly agreed to accompany Rennie to the retirement community where they would meet Munro and have lunch. Lunch was a sales campaign and Rennie said that she didn’t trust that all the meals would be as good.
Rennie told Holly, “Munro thinks I haven’t paid attention to him. If I go there to look it over, I can make an educated decision against it. It looks better on paper if you log in the research and catalogue your protests. I will have made a legitimate survey of the place.”
“They might make you sign something.”
“I have to play their game.”
“But once you’re a player—”
“I’m a rat running through a maze, but I’m not coming out where they want me to come out.”
Holly said, “Right, we’ll go into the forest but we’ll drop bread crumbs.”
Holly saw she wasn’t helping. Rennie was a nervous wreck. She walked across to Holly’s place two times as she was dressing. “Should I wear my good clothes? Good clothes will prove I can still take care of myself, but I don’t want to get gussied up. I don’t want to be another satin doll at the doll museum. On the other hand, if I look drab, Munro will say that I’m losing interest in life, like someone who never gets out of her housedress.”
Holly went next door and helped Rennie choose a nice wool jersey dress. She poked through Rennie’s jewelry tray and found a necklace and brooch to soften the neckline. Rennie, still in her slip, sat on the edge of her bed. She let herself fall back on the mattress, her hands at her sides. “I can’t stand charades,” she said.
Holly said, “Just be yourself.”
Rennie said, “You know that saying ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, that used to be true for me. I took my knocks. I developed a thick skin, but too much is too much,” Rennie said.
Holly couldn’t keep a serene distance; she fell back on the bed beside the older woman. Together they stared at the ceiling. Holly followed the crown molding as it turned the corner. Her fingers slid over the quilt and she squeezed Rennie’s hand. Holly thought that Rennie’s decision to visit the retirement center might indicate a little change of heart. Rennie didn’t have the stamina she had appeared to have that first night when she burned up the floor plans. There were occasional days when Holly didn’t see Rennie around the house at all, she must have been in her bed. Rennie seemed aware of the fact that she looked sick and tried to erase the notion with a fancy swear about the weather or a lighthearted spray of ridicule against Munro.
Rennie said, “I guess they’re ready to ladle it out over there, we better be first in line. First served, first to finish, first excused.”
“It’s good to be on time where you’re getting a tooth pulled. No sense postponing it,” Holly told her.
Rennie finished dressing. Holly saw a little book on Rennie’s night table. It was an old autograph book with a suede cover. Holly flipped it open and read some handwriting in a scratchy fountain pen. “Open the Gate! Open the Gate! Here comes Rennie, the Grad-u-ate.” The fountain-pen ink was faded to a pale violet. She turned another page. “Do not throw rock at mouse and break precious vase.”
Holly kept reading with fascination. She found a singsong stanza excerpted from a poem:
Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.
So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle’s feet—
Rennie saw what Holly was reading and she snatched the little book out of her hand. “Do you mind? Don’t you think I’ve got a secret or two?”
“Sure,” Holly said. “Sorry.” Holly recognized what Rennie was doing with that little book. She was just trying to hold on to everything. Just hold on to the threads.
On the drive over to Château-sur-Mer, Holly mentioned to Rennie that she had not seen Willis’s car. Was it in the shop?
Rennie said, “Since when are you interested in cars?”
Holly said, “Shit.”
“Willis has been doing a full shift at WASTEC. He’s spending nights out on the Tercel with Carl Smith. Then, there’s Debbie. Debbie takes up a lot of his time.” Rennie wrinkled her nose; she kept her eyebrows arched, her cheeks puffed out, waiting for Holly to suffer a fit of pique. “Well?”
“Well, what?” Holly said. She wasn’t going to take the bait.
“As if he needs three mothers,” Rennie said.
“Which three mothers?”
“Me, Wydette, and, if the shoe fits—”
“Ready for lunch?” Holly changed the subject.
“If it’s lobster Newburg, watch out. The cream sauce in these places is like library paste. It coats your throat for a week. Lobster should be served whole with all its whiskers.”
“It won’t be Newburg, will it?” Holly said, relieved the conversation had turned.
The driveway into Château-sur-Mer was neatly landscaped, the sidewalks edged meticulously in the precise way private mental hospitals keep their emerald lawns perfected, but there was always someone crying in a corner, someone sitting alone on a glider wringing her hands.
They met Munro at the sales office at Château-sur-Mer. He stood in a large foyer at the entrance to the main wing of the old mansion. The door was framed by full-length stained glass panels and the light streamed in, washing fruity colors over Munro’s pinstripe suit. Munro was very solicitous of Holly, taking her coat off, supporting her sleeve as she withdrew her arm. He let her elbow ride over the tips of his fingers as he tugged her sleeve. He apologized to Holly for the recent behavior of his stepbrother. “He makes himself a pest, but don’t worry. He’s harmless.”
Rennie said, “When that cast comes off—”
“He’ll never have full use of that arm,” Munro said. He turned to Holly. “I broke my collarbone when I was a kid. Fell off the monkey bars. I still have a knot right here.” He tapped his finger against his lapel. Holly noticed his pinkie finger. A thick gold band set with a flat diamond the circumference of a thumbtack. She saw his expensive clothes; his suit wasn’t off the rack. He looked ready to operate in some cutthroat executive exchange.
Inside the lavish administration building, there were several large urns of long-stemmed roses. The double-headed roses were oversized and dewy. Holly never saw so many roses. It was like the dressing room of a diva on opening night. Munro plucked two roses from the arrangement and offered one to his mother; he turned and gave the other rose to Holly, first passing the bud beneath her nostrils. He commanded her to inhale its fragrance. Holly sniffed the rose obediently before she could stop herself. Munro was patronizing her, plain and simple, but she couldn’t ward it off. He was one step ahead of her, enjoying it.
