“Whenever you need to bring them by. I can give them dinner, if you want.” We ran behind the swing and wrestled in the hammock. Tris had his arm around me and Elmer came by, Tris called out and rolled over, his weight tipped the hammock hanging between the two ends of the pole, he tipped it and fell out. She stares down at me with her eyes dazzled, glazed over by her wanting. It’s okay, I want to say to her, it’s okay for you to want a man. I wanted someone too. I wanted him, but he tipped and fell out. He fell and chipped his tooth, blood spilling across the grass. He fell and I wanted him even more, he fell and he slips the plastic card into the slot, the green light blinks above it, the door yields with a satisfying click, and he is in. The maids have turned the air conditioning down too low, as usual—all these air conditioned spaces he inhabits, airports, rental car buses, hotels, restaurants, convention centers, are chilled to a temperature that’s uncomfortable without a sweater, a sports coat, or a long-sleeved shirt, as if the wonder of air conditioning is not self evident without cooling the room to sixty-five degrees. He tosses the overnight bag on the bed and tests it, dropping his weight onto the side edge and bouncing up and down a couple of times—not too bad, firm. Plenty of pillows and several different sizes. He will use some for sleeping on his back, other larger ones for sleeping on his side, propping his head up at just the right angle to avoid getting a stiff neck.
In his years of travel for work he has become a connoisseur of hotel rooms, and though he is not a snob about it, he understands there are certain things that will make the brief segment of his life he is wasting in this rented space more tolerable. He always requests a king instead of two queens, because it means the large faux mahogany or cherry cabinet that holds the television will more likely be situated directly in front of the bed for optimal viewing—again, he avoids the stiff neck because he won’t have to turn his head at an awkward angle to see the screen. He always requests non-smoking. There is an iron and ironing board. Wireless internet has become a must as well, though he notes that minibars have become much less frequent denizens of these tight, temporary compartments where he spends a good portion of his life. Too much pilferage? The only reason he can imagine for them to eliminate the profit center that provides the $6.00 cans of beer and $4.00 packages of cancandy he used to enjoy. The obligatory small couch or chair fronted by a coffee table. The work desk and lamp, all furnishings in a comforting traditional style. The print of ducks on the wing or a bland, non-threatening landscape hanging on the otherwise blank walls.
He avoids the trendy, modern boutique hotels because they usually get something wrong in their efforts to be funky and bizarre. He drags the heavy curtains aside and opens the shades, letting the late afternoon sunlight filter in through the dust. A view of a parking lot and a city he will not even bother to explore. To him it is just another airport, another meeting. It could be Denver or Des Moines or Detroit just the same. Many years ago, in the first decade he traveled, he used to try to walk the cities he visited, to avoid being completely sedentary and to get to know the place. Now the thought of going beyond the constricted tube of airport/hotel/conference center/office space is repugnant to him. The more he sleeps and watches television, the sooner the trip will be over.
He pulls a wrinkled dress shirt out of the overnight bag and hangs it in the closet tucked behind the wall that partitions the vanity from the rest of the room and, as he sees himself doing these things, he catches himself thinking about himself in the third person again, as if he is a kind of benign, observant, godlike being or one of those tiny security cameras mounted in a corner of the room tracking the actions of this person who has entered and disturbed the muffled silence of the place—not a person so much as a sequence of states and events that lead smoothly from one to another to another until the ultimate and final event has occurred. In a swift instant his awareness has skipped outside itself and he has lost all sense of being a single, unique person—Mr. Holloway was the name they addressed him by at the front desk—and instead he sees himself as merely an aperture for experiencing the sensations of this world for a brief time, a tiny hole that has opened in the fabric of time and space to capture bits of light and vibration, converting electromagnetic waves into images and sounds. Why me? Why this person, here, in this room: Tristan Holloway? He feels himself rising to a great height, outside himself, the world melting away beneath him. He has left behind whatever it was that comprised his self, and the sensation is one of dizzying freedom—everything that went into making this person, Tristan Holloway, is momentarily no longer there. In its place, a vast emptiness, the aperture expanding to encompass everything outside that narrow tube that was him.
The odd sensation is gone in a second.
Tristan Holloway finds himself standing in front of the closet again, staring at his blue dress shirt hanging on the hanger where he hung it a moment ago. He takes a deep breath and feels the hole he fell up through tightening around himself again. The aperture closes to a tight little point.
He walks to the bed and picks up another dress shirt, hangs it in the closet. Then, instead of finishing unpacking, he slips off his shoes and lies down on the bed where Tris and I used to lie down when they made us take naps in the afternoon. We were all up here, Louise and Elmer, me and Tris, and they made us take naps, but we never slept, running around hiding and making noise, talking until one of them came up to quiet us. I could let the girls sleep here in this bed or maybe in Karl’s room, the single room in back, if they have to stay all night. She wants them to stay all night, and everything’s ready, they can stay all night and all the next day if she wants. I have taken care of children before, and Tris and I were children once together. He saw me, then I touched him. Now the bell is ringing, it’s her ringing twice, she must be in a hurry.
“Hang on a sec!” The stairs are still narrow and steep. At the landing you can go either way, towards the front or the back, but on Elmer’s side you can only go one way through the living room and she’s ringing again. “Hold on!” She’s not patient, young and wanting her man. The children are standing behind her, their faces hiding and cut into slats by the venetian blinds, jiggle the lock and the door opens with a catch. She steps through the doorway and into the dank living room, not what she would consider impoverished but slightly musty somehow, the furniture must be fifty years old most of it, antiques in all likelihood. Maybe some of it is worth something, if the old lady ever had the inclination to sell. A flattened recliner floats in the middle of the room aimed at the television, flanked by a teetering oval end table draped by a lace doily stained with yellow arcs, empty cans of diet soda, and a half-eaten bag of corn chips. Holly envisions the hours the old lady must spend slouched in the tan nappy chair soaking up afternoon soap operas, her body sinking into the plush overstuffed fabric, slowly becoming one with it—as soft and pliable as it is. But Amelia it seems has dressed up for this occasion. Her hair is of course looking much better since this afternoon, trimmed and a better fit for her head, a long head with cheeks that have become jowly over the years, loose flesh hanging and drooping a bit as you would expect, the cheeks spotted with bright patches of rouge Amelia has applied. Her eyebrows have been tended to carefully, plucked and primed to a fine cambering line over each glimmering eye. She has on what Holly would consider to be nothing less than a pant suit constructed from acres of pastel blue synthetic fabric, a relic from the seventies or early eighties—what a woman from that prehistoric age would wear for a day at the office, clearly dragged out of the closet as a means of putting on her best for Holly and the girls.
Holly extends her hand tentatively, and for the second time this day Amelia takes it. They don’t shake in the direct one-to-one grasp of two businessmen. Instead, it is more a brief holding of hands, the way women do. The grip from Amelia is taut, more full of feeling for her, but the bones are still there, still swimming it seems beneath the thin mottled skin she felt before, blue veins surging in gnarled meandering channels across the top of the hand. Hol
ly lets go first, but she tries to convey through her touch a multiplicity of meanings: how much this help means to her, how grateful she is and also how hard it is to leave her girls here.
“Come inside girls,” Amelia says, reaching to the bureau that crouches along the wall by the door. “I have a treat for each of you.”
Startled and enticed by the prospect of what the old lady hides in her hands, Jenny and Zoe move towards her with furtive shy steps, their heads downturned but peering at the two arms hiding something behind her broad backside.
“Pick one,” she says, challenging. “Go ahead.” Jenny, being the oldest, after a tick of hesitation, steps forward and points to Amelia’s left arm. It comes out from behind her and the hand opens to reveal a pale blue ball the size of a large marble, speckled with pinpricks and swirls of white, a miniature model of an earth-like planet. Jenny stares at it, not quite knowing what to do.
“Now you. You must be Zoe. The youngest.”
She nods her head almost imperceptibly and points to the other arm, as if she still has a choice in the matter. The right hand appears and releases another swirling blue marble, nearly identical to the first. Both girls are surprised by getting the same thing—they thought the act of choosing a hand meant there would be two different gifts. They look towards their mother as if to inquire whether this is all quite right. Holly smiles to reassure them.
“They’re jawbreakers, special candy,” Amelia says. “You don’t eat them—they’re too hard to chew. But if you suck on them for a long time, they change colors and taste different too.”
Holly peeks beyond the exaggerated shoulders of Amelia’s suit jacket towards the dining room.
“Is there a phone … I can use?”
Jenny has popped the blue ball into her mouth, her cheek bulging from the effort to contain and control it. She bites down once, testing, and her teeth crack against the unyielding rock in her mouth.
“Don’t bite,” Amelia says, heading for the dining room. “They’ll break your teeth.” She points at a beige desk phone complete with a cord and a rotary dial, almost as old as the furniture. Holly picks up the handset and begins to dial, plugging her finger in the notch for the first number and pulling it around to the dull tusk of metal that stops her. The dial tone hums and then is interrupted by a series of clicks that signifies the number going through.
It takes a while to dial this way, but it still works. Rick comes to the phone after one of the cooks tracks him down. Busy kitchen noise, people talking, pots and pans clattering in the background. His voice is strained.
“Yes,” Holly says. “I think it’ll be okay.” She turns her back and faces away from Amelia, who has drifted towards the living room and is talking to the girls. “A nice old lady.” Holly listens out of her other ear to catch what Amelia and the girls are saying. “The neighborhood? Not so great. There are Mexicans next door.” But she tells him what he wants to hear. “No—it’s okay. Really. I’ll be there soon,” knowing full well that he doesn’t get off until midnight, if then.
Holly looks around the dining room, her mind’s eye scanning it as she listens to Rick complain about work, neither one of these inputs fully registering. A table and four chairs. Old as the furniture in the front room. Rick saying the bastard was supposed to come in so I don’t have to close. A hulking breakfront that looks handmade—a real antique maybe—with a display of silver-framed photographs on the lower shelves. And on top of the breakfront a fine porcelain vase, more of a pitcher really, now that she looks, a vessel meant for carrying liquids, the only lovely thing she’s seen in this house, the modulation of its curves evoking nothing more than the dip of a woman’s waist as the line goes dead—he’s gone to school, a bright young man they all said, you’ll be a famous architect Tris, designing grand buildings like the Lyceum Theater. The girls are playing with the animal cards, the game I gave them, Flinch or Pit. The oldest lays a card down and the other puts down three, they don’t even know how to play. We could’ve had girls like this, two lovely girls, I would have given you children like when we played house together. I was always the mother and you were the father and Elmer was the child and Louise would never play, off doing something else, too grown up for us. She was always better, and we always thought she would tell me your phone number so I can have it, just in case.” In case, Holly thinks. In case something happens to the girls. Amelia writes the number with a blue pencil that says GRAIN DEALERS MUTUAL ASSURANCE along one side of it, in tiny white block letters. And just as Holly is gathering the nerve to take her leave, one last look at the girls before saying goodbye, she’s startled by a black moth that flutters into her frame of vision and brushes against her face. She jerks her head back, flinching, as her hand comes up involuntarily trying to sweep it away. “Jesus!” she says, swiping at it again, and the moth dances away, fluttering towards the ceiling, dancing around the crenellated light fixture that holds the two bare bulbs in place.
“Must have come in with you and the girls,” Amelia says. “Here, before you go. Let me show you my garden.”
Holly tries to gather herself after her brush with the black moth, which flutters and dips its way around the light. Her heart is still racing from being startled.
“Oh,” she says, not knowing what to say. She doesn’t really want to see any garden. Rick is waiting for her, her need for him bearing down on them, pressing out across the miles. “Sure. I bet it’s a wonderful garden.”
“It is,” Amelia says, holding out her hand for the girls to follow. “It certainly is.”
The lots in this workingman’s slum are long and narrow like the houses they contain. The sidewalks from the back doors at each side of the double angle towards each other, forming a Y, the resulting single sidewalk heading towards the garage and alley at the far end of the yard. A towering oak tree shades the Mexicans’ portion of the yard, its shadow cutting across from Amelia’s side where a round bed of flowers nestles underneath the thick trunk. The girls take off towards the bird bath, and before Holly can stop them start splashing their hands in the water held by the shallow plaster dish.
“It’s okay,” Amelia says. “I change it every day.”
There’s a bird feeder on a metal pole nearby and a long narrow flower bed flanking the fence on the Mexicans’ side, forming a river of color to separate Amelia’s domain from the ragged and trash-strewn lot of the house next door. The August evening is beginning to settle in, the insistent dry chirring of the cicadas swells to a crescendo, gathering itself then quickly dying away, the leaves of the trees swaying in the first cool breeze that signals a hint of autumn coming. Holly watches as a starling lands on the lip of the birdbath, peers at its reflection in the water for a moment, then, with a casual flip of its wings, darts away.
“The neighbors are good people, the Salgados. They let me keep my beds after Elmer passed away.” She must mean the Mexicans in the other half of the double. Amelia is walking towards the long phalanx of flowers along the far side of the yard, pointing to one of the splotches of color there. “My asters,” she says. “Just starting to come in. Early this year. Black-eyed Susans and phlox. Cone flowers and snap dragons. Lord, how I love my snap dragons.”
The girls have run to a bench-like swing that hangs from an inverted U-shaped iron pole towards the rear of the yard. Together they’re sitting in the swing and laughing, their legs pumping in rhythm at the back of the arc, kicking against the air to make the bench go higher with each tinkling chink of the loose end of the chain as it swings them up into the sky. Holly’s mind freezes them in a slow-motion vision captured at the top of arc, a holographic moment captured and bound up into the giant ball of emotion that rests within her, the girls’ laughter and the pink and white and purple of the flowers swirled together into the knowledge that they will be safe here. Amelia will keep them safe.
“I don’t know anything about gardening,” Holly confesses. “Never had time for it.” She gazes at the garden once more, her eyes trying to associa
te the names of the various flowers Amelia has just listed with the dazzling shapes and hues she sees before her. “Which ones are the snap dragons?” she says, knowing full well which ones. She must know in her head even though her mind won’t tell her, she’s just talking to fill the air with words. Her mind is somewhere else, but her head already must know that the ones with the delicate curved lips reaching out over the bright tongues inside are the snaps. They were always our favorites, and Elmer’s favorites too. He gave them a special place near the back porch so he could see them from the kitchen window, so they were the first thing you saw when you stepped towards the garden. Still the first thing, because I kept it all the same for you, Tris. It’s all still here just as you would remember. You’d never know a day had passed since we rode in the swingset, we kicked our legs high, just the way these girls are doing. We went higher, higher, just like these girls, and we would swing his legs off the bed after an hour and a half of watching the television sports recap and two consecutive reruns of a sitcom. He hadn’t intended to lie in bed so long, but he wanted to check the pennant races and then a good episode came on when he was flipping through the channels. On the desk at the far end of the room, his cell phone plays a tune that he downloaded only yesterday, a synthesized classical melody that sounds familiar to him but whose name he cannot remember, or, most likely, he never even knew. He checks the number before answering and sees that it is one of his customers, probably trying to reach him to ask about a problem they’re having with the product he sold them. The digital readout on the phone says it’s past 6:30—past 8:30 on the east coast—after hours as far as he’s concerned, so he presses the IGNORE button and lets it roll to voice mail.
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