“Hi,” Elise finally said, rising to her feet.
“Hi,” I said.
“I’ve missed you.”
I repeated what she said, but added a too.
“Hello Dr. Alexander, fancy meeting you in the middle of your Get Naked for Atheism across America book tour.” I finally turned to her. “Make any new converts lately?”
“Two percent of the world’s population and growing.”
“Some of those nudists, I imagine.”
“You know it.” She smiled.
“Yes, that’s lovely. Please tell Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to keep their tighty whities on.”
Ellie blushed. “I’ll do no such thing.”
“While you dream about the possibilities, do you think I could have a moment alone with my wife?”
“Whatever you have to say to Elise,” Ellie held her nose up high, “you can say to me.”
Not several weeks before Ellie had squeezed my arm in Barnes & Noble and said anything that Elise cared about, so did she. I wondered if she was a relationship gauge and if this meant Elise had drifted even further away.
“Ellie, It’s ok. I’ll be fine. You can give us a moment.”
Ellie didn’t seem to take the hint. We both stared at her for a good ten seconds until she opened her mouth and said Oh, and moved away. Only she didn’t return to the house as I’d hoped. She walked down the steps and leaned against my car hoping to pick up on the juicy details.
Elise wrapped both arms around my neck. “Words can’t even begin to explain how sorry I am for everything that I’ve put you through. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Aside from being Charlie’s best man, I was afraid I might not be welcome.”
“Don’t be silly.” She pulled back, speaking with an air of sterility this time. “No matter what happens you’ll always be welcome here.” Somehow I was having a very difficult time believing her. “And by the way, the Sisters know nothing about the two of us. Nobody in my family knows aside from Josephine. No need to complicate things.”
“So you’re saying I’ll be treated as I always am, as the damned boy who stole their little girl away from them.” I smiled when I said it.
“Better than the damned ex-husband.” She tried to make a joke of it, but it came across as harsh and threatening.
“I don’t want to be the damned ex-husband, Elise. I want to be the damned boy who stole their little girl away from them.”
“That’s what I want too,” Elise said.
Aristotle returned with the ball, dropped it at her feet, and danced on his paws in anticipation of another adventurous chase through the shoe garden. Elise threw it for him. She flexed her conversational tone back to the realm of excitement as we watched the hound dog sprint for it, ears flapping behind him like broken sails.
“Can you believe it? My twin sister is getting married this weekend!”
“I know. It’s very exciting.” I answered her.
“You don’t sound very excited.”
“I just drove six hours in the car with them. Forgive me if I’m not overly enthused.”
“I’m sorry.” Elise wrapped her arms around me. “That must have been very painful.” She hushed her voice to a whisper. “Just think how I felt, driving up here with Ellie while she droned on about her relationship issues.”
“Now I feel like the fool.”
“Yes,” she smiled. “But you’re my fool.”
Elise kissed her fool. With a kiss like that, I’d be anything she wanted.
5
You know that scene in the 1963 movie Charade (staring Carey Grant and Audrey Hepburn) where James Coburn enters the open-air stamp market? Everywhere he turns, STAMPS! STAMPS! STAMPS! STAMPS!
Entering the Sisters home is sort of like that, only the fortune isn’t in stamps. It’s in dolls. Hundreds and hundreds of collectible dolls, thousands even, every single one of them staring you down no matter where you look or how fast you turn. DOLLS! DOLLS! DOLLS! DOLLS!
DOLLS! DOLLS! DOLLS! DOLLS!
By the time I caught up with Michael and Susan, they were standing paralyzed upstairs in their assigned guest room, apparently as petrified of the collectibles as I was of Sparky the therapeutic Schnauzer. The dolls were clumped across the bed and stacked so high that we couldn’t even see the walls. But I’d come prepared.
“It helps if you hold the covers over your eyes,” I said.
“Aren’t you ever afraid that they’ll come alive during the night?” Susan said.
“Only when the Mayan calendar ends.”
“I’m not sure if this is a museum or the abyss that the demons begged to avoid when Jesus sent them into a heard of swine,” Michael said.
“Yeah, I’m not sleeping tonight.” Susan froze. “Um, is it me, or did that doll just move?” She tightened her grip on Michael’s arm.
We all stared at the doll.
“You’re imagining things,” Michael said.
“Have no fear.” I reached into my pocket and revealed a bottle of sleeping pills. “I brought drugs. Elise and I never visit the Sisters without them.”
“You’re a God send,” Susan sighed with relief.
“A God send? Probably not.” I slugged the bottle back into my pocket, retrieved a tambourine that I’d found downstairs, and tossed it on the bed. “But I am your Tambourine Man.” I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to keep the sixties alive.
“I’m not singing the song,” Michael said.
“Fine, have it your way.” I pushed the pills back into my pocket, picked up my bag and headed for my room. “Call me if you need anything in the dead of night.”
Aristotle was busy moving up and down the hall dodging in and out of rooms and sniffing the wild assortments of collectibles. He didn’t stop to salute his superior officer as he passed. That’s a hound for you.
“There is it again!” I heard Susan’s voice. “Michael, it moved!”
“I didn’t see anything!”
“Michael, it moved three inches to the right!”
“Are you sure?”
“Sing him the stupid song.”
“OK, fine. I’ll sing the Tambourine Man song.”
I waited for him to sing the song, and arrived on cue with the drugs.
6
Actually, there was something even far more dark and brooding in the Sisters home than their legions of dolls and collectibles. Josephine and I knew about it firsthand. We’d heard him (or it) walking the halls at night. There was one area in particular that neither of us liked going near. It was the joint walk-in closet that separated the Sisters rooms, where they kept their red hats, feathery scarves, mothballs and muumuus. We were pretty sure of it, that’s where he lived.
I guess Josephine and I had the gift because Elise wouldn’t know a ghost if it were twerking her from behind. But we knew he was there. His oppression was apparent. I’d seen him once before when Elise and I were first married. I had exited the bathroom somewhere around eleven at night and he was standing there at the end of the hall holding a candlestick. The flame was green, just like the rest of him, and it was only in the hallway that either of us saw him. We called him the Green Man.
Josephine came up the stairs from behind.
“Do you sense anything?” She said.
Charlie followed, trudging one step at a time, with enough straps and baggage hung from his shoulders to keep Thurston Howell the Third satisfied on a three-hour tour with Gilligan and the Skipper.
I took a good long look down the low-lit hall with its gauntlet of doors. Fear had nothing to do with it. If and when he wanted to make himself known, he’d do so with waves of oppression and anger. Fear was secondary.
“No, not yet.”
“Good.” She said. “Me neither.”
7
I set my bag in Elise and Josephine’s childhood room, sunk into the bottom bunk, reclined Schulz and Peanuts at my side, opened up my black notebook and started work on another poem or tw
o about my current circumstances. Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was crackling on vinyl (I’d pulled it from the Sisters record collection) when someone knocked on the door. Sprawled out comfortably at my side, Aristotle lifted his head.
“Who is it?” I said.
Elise hesitantly peeked inside. “Is it OK if I come in?”
Aristotle jumped off the bed to greet her.
“Of course.” I patted the mattress. “I thought you’d never ask.”
She closed the door and sat down at my side. When Aristotle realized there was no more room on the mattress, he stared at us disgustedly, sometimes puffing his cheeks.
“I’m looking forward to spending time with your this weekend. I’ve really missed you.”
“I thought maybe you brought Ellie along to avoid me.”
“No, don’t be silly.” And then she thought about it. Perhaps in her subconscious my observation was true. Ellie really was brought along as a deflective shield if the circumstances called for it. “Quite the contrary, I think you’re funny, charming, look dashingly handsome and…. sexy.”
Elise was always a master at not answering my questions, but I kind of liked where this flattery was going. “I think we still need to talk about your relationship with that college kid and what happened a couple of weeks ago.”
Elise swallowed a cancerous lump of agony down her throat.
“Tom and I had a big fight before I came up here. It’s not that he was ever invited or anything, because I respect your space, and us. It’s just…I don’t know…I’m not sure if I can go back to him. He’s so egotistical, narcissistic, and controlling all the time.”
Tom again? It was news to me. Apparently she was still a part of his political agenda, despite the fact that she’d led me to believe otherwise on the morning of July Fourth. Their relationship was painful to hear, but I liked her descriptions of him.
“Go on,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk about Tom right now.”
“Me neither. Getting back to that college kid.”
“I want to talk about us.” She brushed fingers over my hair and kissed my forehead. “I missed you. I missed us.” She kissed me again on the cheek, running a hand alongside my arm. “Like I said, Aunt Patty and Nancy don’t know anything about what’s happened. It would be a red flag if I were to sleep in the other room. I thought we could share this bed tonight.” She moved in again for a kiss on my mouth, simultaneously unbuttoning my pants.
“What are you doing?” I stopped her.
“I was hoping we could spend some time together.” Hurt swelled in her eyes. “I miss you.”
“It’s the middle of the day, and besides, they’d hear us.”
“Who cares if they hear us? I’m a big girl, and right now I want to be with a big boy…. You.”
“I’d be thrilled if we fell asleep together in the same bed tonight, but it feels like you’re pretending that nothing’s happened between us.”
She pulled away, and for a second I wondered if she’d scoot off the bed and out of the room altogether. “Well, it feels like you’re rejecting me.”
“It’s not rejection, Elise. Words can’t express how much I’ve loved you, how much I love you now, and how much your relationship with Butt-Face hurts.”
“Don’t say Butt-Face. That’s not nice.”
“Tom.”
“I don’t want to hear his name right now.”
“Fine, the Representative from the State of California. The way you ran off with the politician hurt. I don’t lust for you. I long for you. As a therapist in training, you know there’s a huge cavernous difference in that, and I need to know, whomever I sleep with, that she’s gonna be here in the morning.”
“I’ll be here in the morning,” she said.
“And the next morning, and the week after, and the month that follows?”
She thought on it. “Is there another girl in your life, Joshua?”
“No. You’re the only girl for me, Elise.”
“I don’t know if I could breathe or go on living if I knew you were with another girl. But I guess it’s only fair, with what I put you through and all.”
“Elise, there’s no other girl.”
She kissed me. “I’ll be here tomorrow morning.”
“And the next day thereafter? And what about Tom or the next pool boy to come along?”
“You’re not being respectful. I don’t want to talk about it.” She scrunched up her face simply thinking about the incident (I wondered if there had been others), as if pushing away a pesky groundhog burrowing through her skin, and set her head on my chest.
“Elise, I love you, and you’re avoiding the question.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk at all. I just want to be with you, like we used to. I want another start, Joshua. Would you be ok with that, if we started fresh, right here and now, tonight?”
“Yes. I’d like that. But I think its best that we not confuse things right now with sex.”
Oh, she frowned.
“And if we’re starting out fresh but not sleeping together…”
“You were serious about that?”
“I was hoping maybe I could lay here for a while and hold you, like we used to.”
“That would be nice. You know, there have been studies on this sort of thing, the differences between lust and love. People who lust typically separate themselves faster from the bedroom after sex than those who love.”
“And this is love,” I said.
“Yes.” She smiled. “It is.”
8
Lying in the bottom bunk with Elise, my arm warmly tucked around her ribs (with a hint of fatty breasts pressing up against them), we studied the intricacies of our accommodations. It’s as though the Sisters had snapped a Polaroid of Elise and Josephine’s bedroom when they were little children and attempted to recreate every aspect of it. Sure, there were mounds of new child-like collections lining the walls, but much of the twins’ childhood items remained. Barbie was married to the hairbrush on the dresser. My Little Pony was free ranging across the floor. Cabbage Patch Dolls and jewel-bellied Trolls with purple hair kept a lookout from the bookshelf. Care Bears, Teddy Ruxpin, and Kid Sister filled both bunk beds where twin sisters had once slept. Paper letters, JOSEPHINE (colored in crayon), was strung over the closet door, with her artistic competitor, ELISE, sagging inches above the dresser mirror.
“How long have we been coming up here now?” I said.
Several raindrops pattered across the window. A storm was beginning its promised invasion of the bay area.
“As long as we’ve been married. Longer actually. Almost seven years.” Elise squeezed my hand and bent her mouth down to kiss it.
“Is it just me, or has the hoarding…I mean, collecting, gotten worse?”
“It’s ok, you can call it hoarding. Though you’re partly correct. I might have trouble prescribing them as compulsive hoarders so much as pathological collectors. Their house may not be swamped with greasy cardboard boxes, milk cartons and garbage bags, but this is hoarding, however you flip the coin. Before my father died this house was practically empty except for its typical antique furnishings.”
“And that’s when the hoarding began, and their excessive weight problem, once their brother died.”
“Sort of. I think it really took off after Andrea pulled Josephine and I away to Southern California and forbade the Sisters from seeing us. We were everything to them…. and still are.”
“You two have been through a lot.”
“We have.” She gazed at the mound of Beanie Babies lining the wall, probably hundreds of them, and then the Disney collectibles, including a Mickey Mouse doll from the late twenties or early thirties, which hadn’t been there when she was a child. “This used to be my room once, long ago.”
“If the Sisters had their way, it still would.”
“This ceased being my room after….”
She couldn’t finish her se
ntence. The raindrops fell in heavy succession now, almost to the point that we couldn’t distinguish one splatter from another, and a distant roll of thunder pronounced its intended arrival from somewhere over the Pacific.
“After Andrea’s boyfriend molested you,” I said.
Her eyes dampened. She closed them, and quite suddenly I saw the elfin girl in the bottom bunk some fifteen years earlier, pulling the covers to the brim of her nose while two sets of toes separated the light at the foot of the door. When she opened her eyes again, I read a yes reply in them.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Should we find another room to stay in?”
“No.” She wiped her eyes, sniffling. “I guess we’re both reeling from some past trauma, you and I.”
Only I never returned to my personal Ground Zero, and she had. This time I lifted her hand to kiss it.
“When I worked up the courage to tell Andrea about the incidents she just brushed them off as she always did, denying everything, like a figment of my imagination, and waited an entire four months to do the boyfriend trade-in. She’s quite the historical revisionist. I’ve never told the Sisters. They already hate Andrea passionately, and haven’t spoken in years. But they’d murder her if they knew.”
“It goes against the hippie guidebook to murder.”
Elise laughed. “That didn’t stop Charles Manson.”
“No.” I said. “I guess it didn’t.”
9
A dozen bottles of Pabst Blue-Ribbon beer and soggy slab of bread in one arm, paper bag furnished to the brim with health food nestled in the other, its sopping bottom ready to split at its seams. But Charlie and Michael were in the same fragile predicament. Both of their arms were packed with sodden paper bags and fully hooded, only two peepholes for their eyes, mouth and nose while rainwater cascaded off the Sisters roof and spilled into their jackets. It was no use knocking anymore. Even our underwear was soaked.
Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1) Page 34