“Z’all great,” she said.
How it was possible that he could not come up with such a simple, generic line? A waitress was not interested in philosophical truth-saying. She was checking in, being polite, protecting her tip. It seemed to him that all he needed to do was memorize a few rote sayings, latch on to a handful of clichés, and he’d be sane.
“Have a nice day,” he practiced as he steered, not zipping along as he would when he had taken no meds. Sane driving, though slower than any other car on the road. “Take care,” he rehearsed. “Keep your head up.”
The Firebird ducked under the freeway’s dark awning and just beyond, the unlit museum crouched by the side of the road. The car in the lot was older even than his own, and he felt a sudden kinship with this mislaid woman. A shadow on the porch rose from the swing and descended the steps, gaining color and human dimensions as she approached, shedding her shady existence, utter transformation. How magical life was when you really saw it. She had blond or maybe light brown hair, a willowy build, a woman older than Karly or Maura, but no older than his mother. He got out of his car to greet her.
“Are you Mick?”
Obviously, he was different from what she expected. He wondered how it showed, his illness. He had studied himself in the mirror, compared himself to men passing in the street. He could not see the difference but others could. He said none of this, merely nodded, a heaviness with him just that quickly, ready to flatten him.
“I’m so grateful to you,” she said, and in a second the heaviness lifted. “This is beyond the call.” She smiled, which changed the shape of her face. A striking smile but it made her unattractive—which made him understand that she was pretty when she wasn’t smiling. She was wearing a light-blue dress belted low on her waist. Her arms and legs were bare. Beyond the call? Beyond the phone call?
“Hello,” he said.
She extended her hand, and Mick shook it, a gentle handshake, a careful handshake, telling her his name, which she already knew. She was definitely not brown-haired but blond, so blond that he felt uncomfortable, and with that deforming smile. Jimmy? This was Mr. James Candler’s sister. Jimmy?
“You work with him,” she said, “don’t you?”
“I work with him,” Mick said.
“I thought so,” she said. “I’m—this is so embarrassing, but I’m easily turned around. I left the gathering to . . . just to get away, but I wanted to see the Holy Waters place.”
Easily turned around: he knew what she meant, but some part of him resisted knowing. Mr. James Candler was trying to get him to be what he called mindful, which meant being aware that his mind was going to offer up junk, and he had the power to ignore it.
“It’s not open at night,” he said, glancing at the museum, which was taller now, darker now, and more solid.
“I didn’t think it would be, but I’m not much for bars, and I needed a getaway. I’ve been driving in circles forever.” She laughed gently. “I have no idea how to get back to the bar, or the name of the bar. Oh, can you rescue me?”
Mick wanted to straighten out her error, tell her that he was a client of Mr. James Candler, not a colleague. He worked with her brother, but they were always working on Mick. At the same time, he liked her mistake. A fabulous mistake, and the picture snapped back into place. It was just a parking lot, a woman he didn’t know, a simple task to perform. Just like that, the world was clear again, the magic gone.
“I didn’t grow up here,” he told her, “but I know the way around pretty well. I drive a lot. If you can’t remember the name of the place,” he didn’t want to say the word bar, for some reason, “can you tell me what that part of town is like?”
“There are so many chapters in my stupidity that I might have a complete and completely preposterous book. It was on a highway, and there were a number of old motels.”
Mick raised his hand to cut her off, but it made him think about school, raising his hand to answer a question. What question? He couldn’t remember any questions from school, but here within him was the urgency to respond. Mr. Clay Hao was in a band with his brother. Mick knew they were playing in town tonight. Why else would Mr. James Candler be in Onyx Springs on a Saturday night? He said, “Is it the Phantom Limb?”
She smiled, that disfiguring expression of pleasure, and nodded. “How could I have forgotten that?”
I’ve forgotten who I used to be, he thought to say. He told her how to find the Phantom Limb. He gave excellent directions. He had a logical mind. His problems did not involve logic, exactly. Not street-direction logic.
“Do you want to follow me there?” he asked.
“You’re going?”
She seemed excited by the possibility. Was it possible to go to a bar where the counselors would be? He imagined this as a topic for the crowd at the sheltered workshop, but he didn’t seriously consider going and at some level he understood that her eager response was merely relief. It had been that way in the restaurant, too. Even as he was imagining the tasting apparatus of a halibut, some part of his brain knew he was on the wrong track. All he had to do . . . he let the thought go. He had been a little loopy, he realized, but now he was better. This woman, her kind way of talking, was making him better.
“I’m not going to the party,” he told her, “but if you’re worried about finding it, I could lead you.”
“You’re very kind, and I am a moron with directions.”
Mick flinched. Moron was one of the words they were prohibited from using at the shelter. “I don’t mind.”
After a second, he added, “Z’all great.”
“I’d feel better if you’d let me buy you a drink, at least.”
“I have another . . .” He had to search. “. . . engagement.”
“I may be moving here,” she said. “To this part of the world, anyway. I’m just visiting right now, but I’m at loose ends and I like the ocean—not that Jimmy has taken us to the beach yet. You coastal types take the beach for granted.”
“When I was a boy, I would say take it for granite.”
“You wouldn’t want a beach you could take for granite.”
She again tendered the complicated smile. It revealed her in such an odd way, as if it showed the person beneath the face. What was underneath wasn’t pretty in the simple way her unsmiling face was pretty. Her smile made her ugly in order to reveal her deeper beauty. This made sense to him, although it was the kind of thinking that made his counselors worry. Did logic have to apply to everything?
“Please don’t tell Jimmy I had to beg directions off you. He already thinks I’m a dimwit.”
“I know plenty of dimwits,” Mick said. “Many of them are my friends.”
She laughed at that and said, “Now you know another.”
Before they drove off, she called, “Don’t drive too fast.”
That would not be a problem.
The boy drove so slowly, he must think she was an utter nincompoop. But it was generous of him to guide her across town, and Violet found herself once again on the old highway that led to the bar. She had not driven much when she lived in London. She would ride the tube or take buses and taxis, and when she and Arthur had taken out their car, he had done the driving. She never adjusted to being on the left side of the road, and now, back in her home country and with the car on the right side, she still felt tentative behind the wheel.
The two-lane blacktop that had once been the main thoroughfare for Onyx Springs was lined with failed motels from the 1950s. Jimmy had told her that the city council, back in the day, had worked to preserve the neon signs advertising the motels, even as the buildings themselves were demolished or transformed into low-rent mini-malls, seedy apartment houses, a salvage yard and parts store. Only a few survived as motels. Jimmy provided all this information on the drive in, an apology of sorts to his fiancée, Violet thought, for their destination. The Wayfarer’s Inn si
gn showed a neon car from the fifties parked beneath a neon palm, but the building housed a drinking establishment and band venue, the Phantom Limb.
Violet liked the history of the old highway. It was so supremely American, the road culture of motels, the preservation of the signs instead of the buildings. Ludicrous, but she liked it. She understood that she had been homesick. Arthur’s illness and death had overshadowed her own desires, and she was happy now to acknowledge her feelings.
The young man pulled into a gravel lot, and she followed. He didn’t stop to let her thank him, but waved as he drove off. She wondered how he knew her brother. He seemed too young to work at the Center. Or perhaps he merely looked young. Maybe she had grown so old that young men looked like boys, but she suspected that he was one of Jimmy’s patients. What would have happened had she dialed someone who was seriously disturbed?
She had to pass through a lingering group of people at the door. They eyed her with curiosity and suspicion. The Center had reserved the place for the night, and one had to be on the guest list to enter. She could not guess why people were surrounding the entrance as if to catch a glimpse of a celebrity. None of the doctors or counselors at the Center was famous. Violet had researched Onyx Rehab when Jimmy took the job three years earlier. Arthur had helped her. He had been fine then, as far as she had known. Just three years ago.
An immense, pudgy security guard in matching blue pants and cap, and a white shirt so thin that it was virtually see-though, stood at the door. He had a fat silver badge pinned over one nipple.
“I’m Jimmy Candler’s sister.” She took her passport from her purse. “I just left to get some air.”
“I remember you,” the guard said, declining to look at her identification. “I’d have to be a gooney bird to forget you. You’re Candler’s sister.”
She had just said as much, but she smiled anyway. “That’s right.”
“My wife works with your brother,” he said. “I’m glad he’s finally getting married.” He winked at her. “This job is only temporary. Somewhat demeaning, given the work I’m accustomed to, but what the heck, anything to help out. You know?”
“It’s nice of you,” she said.
“I’m not pretending I can’t use the feed besides.” He abruptly turned to stop a young woman from entering the bar. “Hold it there, missy. This is an invitation-only thingy.” The woman mumbled something and turned away.
Violet leaned in close to him. “Who are these people you won’t let in?”
He put his lips against her ear. “The crazies,” he said, softly. “The long-goners. The three-bolts-and-only-two-nuts, the the-cab-looks-fine-but-where-are-the-wheels. In other words, the loonies. What they call their clients, the ones that live out in the open. My whole job is to keep ’em out.”
Inside, the scene suggested why. What patients could trust therapists who drank so much and danced so badly? Violet rubbed at her ear, which was moist from the guard’s breath. The front lobby had a quiet bar, while the band played in what had once been the motel’s restaurant. The windows were blackened, but otherwise the place still had the rundown charm of the Wayfarer’s Inn.
She made her way to the lobby bar, passing two young men waggling their heads and beer bottles to the music, eyeing the hypnotic buttocks of a dancing woman. She was surprised to find Lolly in the lobby. She would have thought Lolly the type to dance until she dropped. She was a bit tousled and damp from dancing, but she did not look close to dropping. Several young men gathered about her, but not Violet’s brother. When Jimmy had come to London to visit, Violet introduced him to Lolly because she was an employee. It was not her intention to throw them together. She tried to talk to her brother about the danger of falling for someone while abroad. He and Lolly were two Americans in London, which might make it seem like they had a lot in common.
Jimmy misunderstood her intent. “I’m sorry about Arthur,” he said, “but his illness had nothing to do with where you met him.”
That flummoxed her. Her husband of nine years died of a rare disease of the muscles, known in the U.S. for a baseball player who had suffered from it. Arthur’s muscles one by one burned out until in the end he was wholly immobile. It was true that she had met him in London, but she couldn’t otherwise follow the circuitry of her brother’s logic.
Lolly called her over. Arthur had liked Lolly. She reminded herself of this fact often. Arthur had liked Lolly and so there had to be something worthwhile about the woman. A half dozen men surrounded her. Lolly was pretty, but it was the way she flaunted herself that attracted the men. She was all candle flame, and the moths inevitably lined up to be charred. It had been a joke between Arthur and Violet, how obvious and predictable Lolly’s provocations were, and how a certain type of man was made powerless by them. By that time, Arthur could not speak or actually laugh, but his eyes would flare with wicked delight. Nonetheless, he had liked Lolly. In one of the painfully slow messages he had managed to type on his computer—a filament was attached to his eyebrow, which served as a mouse—he typed:
You re tooo hardon her.
That was possibly true, she admitted, but that didn’t mean she wanted Lolly as a sister-in-law. Violet could not believe that her brother was one of the moths—the head moth, prepared to be stuck in her hot wax forever.
“Where’d you disappear to?” Lolly asked.
“I drove around Onyx Springs.” Instead of revealing that she’d been lost, she told Lolly what the guard had said, that the bunch outside the door were all patients.
When one of the young men stuck his head between them for an introduction, Lolly said to him, “Don’t you wish they let the patients come to this? It seems so bloody callous to lock them out.”
Violet winced at bloody. Lolly affected a number of British phrases. She had lived in London merely a year, and the expressions included most of the clichéd lines that Americans imagined Brits spoke. The men stared earnestly at Violet, waiting for her view. She offered them a smile. She had met them earlier but could not have named a one. She said, “I can understand wanting to be free of responsibility for a night.”
“There you go,” one said. He shook a cigarette from a crumpled pack and offered it to her. “It’s a private party,” he said. “Smoking’s cool.”
Perhaps she was through with parties. She would live alone for the remainder of her life to avoid small talk. She’d have to get a cat. She would return to the Holy Waters and find that poor kitty. She and the damaged feline in some snug cottage.
“It’s just so dull, don’t you think?” Lolly said, adding, “No offense, gentlemen.”
“It would be dull,” another said, “if you two hadn’t come.”
Lolly showed him a wide, rectangular smile. She was twenty-six, a few years out of college. Jimmy was thirty-three, and he’d been more mature than Lolly when he was in high school. Or perhaps that was merely a sister’s biased assessment. Violet was only just getting comfortable with the idea that she’d soon be forty. She was a widow and middle age had stopped like a cab at the corner to wait for her, but she was still attractive to men—when she wasn’t standing beside someone like Lolly.
There was another reason she had doubts about Lolly, one that sounded self-important, and she never voiced it. She believed Lolly’s desire for Jimmy had to do with Violet herself, with joining Violet’s family. Violet had hired her, and Lolly had been so grateful for the job. She wanted to hang out with Violet and help with Arthur, and at first, she and Arthur enjoyed her company. There was no denying that Lolly was helpful. Violet leaned on her at times. But there was always an expense.
Once, when the two women were in a specialty grocery, delighted to find several cases of the high-calorie nutritional drink meant to keep Arthur from withering away to nothing, Lolly sought out a clerk to help with the toting, and the young man, an Ichabod type, all elbows and Adam’s apple, said to Violet, “Your sister’s grand. She have a bloke?
”
“You told that boy we’re sisters?” Violet asked after the gawky creature finished loading their car.
“Aren’t we, though?” Lolly responded. She had dated the clerk for a couple of weeks—that gangly, ungainly stork. And now these men that crowded about her—given the chance, would any of them resist Lolly’s charms? Was Violet absurd to think her brother ought to know better?
Lolly was telling the boys about her own history as a counselor—the absurd massage idiocy—a recollection that Violet could likely have repeated word for word, and so she knew when Lolly was winding down—yet the final sentences surprised her.
“Do we get to meet some of them?” Lolly asked. “The patients?”
Of course she’d want to meet them, Violet thought. She’d want to display her own therapeutic skills, and god help them if they failed to applaud her talents.
The young men looked earnestly to a somewhat older man whom Violet had met earlier and she did remember his name: John Egri, the departing director. He fit in well with the twenty-something crowd, despite his age, chubby-cheeked and cheerful. All of the men were handsome, or at least well groomed and inoffensive in appearance. She found them difficult to tell apart. For the moment, men did not particularly interest her, not romantically, not sexually, and only rarely intellectually. It was as if the whole gender had lost their verve during the years she was married, and they didn’t seem to be making much effort to get it back. Maybe this was why she could not connect with Jimmy. Maybe it was her fault.
“If you’d like to have a tour of the facilities,” John Egri began, speaking so softly everyone had to lean toward him.
“Not another bloody tour,” Lolly said rather dramatically. “Before I joined Violet at the agency, I worked on a tour bus in London. I had to fake an accent. No one on vacation from Idaho wants to hear about Westminster Abbey from a Jersey girl.”
Tumbledown Page 26
