“A little late, my ass,” Jillian snaps. “They were supposed to be here an hour ago.”
“They don’t really put a whole lot of emphasis on punctuality,” Sunshine explains. “They’re very dependable, but they’re not clock-watchers. They don’t believe in regulating their lives by schedules and timetables.”
“Oh, yeah, they’re real dependable, except that they’re always late. That makes a lot of sense.”
They sit side-by-side on the wooden platform that had served as a stage for the awards ceremony that followed the conclusion of the Hartford Kid-Athlon just over an hour ago. Jillian had stood on the stage and draped ribbons around the necks of beaming eight- to fifteen-year-olds; now, she dangles her legs over the side, leans her arms on the lower of two wooden rails, and rests her chin on her hands. Sunshine sits next to her, cross-legged, her hands on her knees, palms up, thumbs and forefingers forming small circles like inverted A-OK signs.
The park is now largely deserted. The restraining fences have been rolled up; the signs and banners have been removed from trees and stakes; the loudspeakers have been disassembled, the cables coiled up, the sound equipment packed up and carted off. Even the litter has been efficiently collected by an army of eager volunteers who swarmed over the grounds like so many ants, restoring the park to its pristine condition.
“Is that them?” Jillian points to a battered car that has just wheezed its way into the parking lot. She’s not sure if she wants the answer to be positive or negative. Even from a distance, the car looks like it hasn’t been washed since the day it rolled off the assembly line. It gives the appearance of having been in a thousand wrecks, and nobody’s bothered to patch up any of them. And it’s burning oil, with thick, black smoke pouring out of the tailpipe.
“That’s not them, is it?” Jillian asks again, hopefully. “That’s gotta be for one of the workmen, right?”
“I don’t know,” Sunshine says, but something about her tone suggests to Jillian that Sunshine wouldn’t be surprised if it were them. “I don’t know what kind of car they’ll be driving.”
“You don’t know what kind of car your own parents drive?”
“The commune doesn’t believe in private property, Jill. There’s always just a bunch of cars lying around. Anytime anybody needs to drive someplace, they just take one of the cars.”
At first, the car seems to be rolling toward a few workmen who are tearing down a temporary shelter that had been hurriedly constructed as protection from a predicted rainstorm that had not materialized. But then it veers off, pulls up next to the stage where Jillian and Sunshine wait, and comes to a stop with a screech of brakes.
As Jillian follows Sunshine down the steps to the parking lot, she can’t help but notice that the woman driving the car appears to be enormous. Her shoulders are draped with some kind of formless garment that looks more like a tent than a shirt. She has an impossibly round face, its features buried in puffs and jowls of mashed-potato-soft flesh. Her wavy light-brown hair is parted in the middle, hanging in greasy patches over her ears, with a few stringy forelocks plastered to her forehead. She fills the window so completely that Jillian can’t tell if there’s someone else in the car, although she thinks that she sees a flutter of movement that indicates that the woman might have company in the front seat.
“You look pale,” is the first thing the woman says to Sunshine. “You don’t have any color in your cheeks. What have you been eating?”
“Corinne,” Sunshine says, as if she has not heard anything that requires a response, “I’d like you to meet my friend, Jill Kendal. Jill, this is my mother, Corinne O’Malley.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Jillian says, sticking out her hand instinctively. She’s thinking: Corinne O’Malley? The former Corinne McVeigh? The Olympic swimming champion? Is it possible? Can this really be the girl that Daddy encountered at that food stand? Or did I just imagine that? I think I fell asleep in the middle of Daddy’s story, but maybe I actually fell asleep at the beginning of the story and dreamt the whole thing.
Or maybe I’m having a nightmare right now.
“Hi,” Corinne says without interest, flicking a quick glance at Jillian and ignoring her hand. “And you look so gaunt,” she adds disapprovingly, continuing her appraisal of her daughter. “Have you been getting enough to eat? You’re turning into a scarecrow. You need some meat on your bones.”
“And that’s my Dad, Roger O’Malley,” Sunshine says, waving vaguely at the far side of the car. “Roger, Jill Kendal.”
The passenger-side door creaks open and Roger O’Malley climbs out. “Hey,” he grunts as he emerges from the car. Leaving the door ajar, he ambles heavily around the front of the car toward Jillian. “How ya doin’?”
He extends his arm before he’s halfway around the car, but when he walks up to Jillian, she’s too stunned to take his hand immediately. She’s just lowered her own hand, which had been sticking out foolishly since being ignored by Corinne, and she can’t quite make it rise again to meet Roger’s, as if perhaps it requires some recovery time before it can operate again.
Though perhaps not as large as Corinne, Roger is super-sized just the same. A roll of flabby flesh hangs over his beltless jeans. One shoulder of his ragged T-shirt is so tattered that it’s almost nonexistent. Printed across the front of the shirt in faded letters, a slogan announces:
YOU’VE OBVIOUSLY MISTAKEN ME
FOR SOMEONE WHO GIVES A SHIT
An upturned handlebar mustache accents a face that’s covered with several days’ growth of stubble. His hair is pulled back and tied behind him in a short ponytail. And although they’re so dirty that it’s not immediately obvious, his feet are bare.
Is this the Roger O’Malley? Jillian wonders, as she finally unfreezes enough to take his meaty hand, which turns out to be warm and clammy. Even after he lethargically shakes her hand a few times, he does not immediately release it, as if to compensate for her delay in taking his.
What’s going on here? Jillian wonders, her head spinning. Am I missing something? Can these be the same people who used to be world-class athletes?
What happened to these people?
And then she’s being herded into the car, still half dazed. “Let’s you and me get in the back,” she hears Roger say. “Sunshine and Corinne have a lot to talk about.”
Oh, Lord, Jillian thinks, as she climbs into the back seat of what she dimly recognizes as an ancient Chevrolet and slides over so that Roger can squeeze in beside her on the torn seat.
Oh my God, she thinks, as the car roars to life, belching and wheezing its way out of the parking lot under the careless control of Corinne’s heavy foot.
Oh, Jesus, she thinks, as they round a curve without slowing down and Roger “inadvertently” slides over next to her, offering copious apologies as the full force of his stench wafts its way into her nostrils.
Holy shit, she thinks, as she gingerly removes Roger’s hand from her knee where it has “accidentally” landed.
This, she thinks gloomily, is going to be one long fucking ride.
4.1.2: Route 87
“And what do you do, dearie?” Corinne asks, somewhere between Columbia and Liberty Hill.
“Excuse me?” Jillian says, as she plucks Roger O’Malley’s hand off her leg. Again.
She’s been staring out the window, absorbing the picturesque scenery – rolling hills, small farms, story-book villages with neatly trimmed squares and quaintly steepled churches – and trying her best to ignore Roger, who seems to be intent on placing his hand on her knee every five minutes. Engrossed in a rambling, hour-long critique of her daughter, Corinne has, to Jillian’s relief, ignored her completely. Until now.
“I said,” Corinne repeats impatiently, “what do you do? Go to school? Work in a funeral parlor? Grow flowers? Deal drugs? What?”
“Jill’s a triathlete, Corinne,” Sunshine answers for her. “She’s the best in the world. She’s going to be in the Olympics with me.”
“Well, that’s just dandy,” Corinne scoffs. “Are you the one who got Sunshine into this ‘Olympics’ bullshit?” she asks accusingly.
“Nobody got me into it, Corinne,” Sunshine says pleasantly, but Jillian thinks that she hears an edge starting to creep into her voice. Hardly surprising, Jillian thinks, the way the fat old bag’s been picking at her.
“Well, you sure as hell didn’t get into all by yourself, young lady,” Corinne shoots back. “I know Roger and I sure didn’t teach you to be competitive.”
“But you two were in the Olympics, weren’t you?” Jillian blurts out. She feels foolish as soon as she says it. These two fat slobs in the Olympics? It staggers the imagination. She must have the story wrong.
“Yeah, but that was before we knew better,” Roger confirms. “Isn’t that right Cory? We tried to raise Sunshine to understand that she didn’t have to feel like she was better than anybody else just to feel good about herself, but…” – he shrugs – “…there’s no telling when a kid’s going to turn out to be a black sheep, I guess.”
Jillian is about to jump to Sunshine’s defense, but Roger’s grin makes her realize that he meant it as some kind of weak joke. “But, Sunshine’s such a good athlete,” she protests, anyway. “I mean, I just assumed that she picked that up from you two.”
Corinne sighs heavily. “I guess it was our fault,” she concedes, guiltily. “We used to do a lot of swimming and biking together when Sunshine was little. That was when we thought that it was important to be in good physical condition,” she adds quickly. “That was before we realized that it was much more important to be in good spiritual condition, and that outward appearance is insignificant.”
“I’m not being competitive, Corinne,” Sunshine says defensively, picking up an earlier thread in the conversation. “But Nathan says…”
“Nathan,” Roger snorts. “I should have known.” He throws up his arms in disgust, and one of his hands happens to land on Jillian’s leg. She picks it off disdainfully and throws it back at him with a little more force than she used the last time. “What you see in that two-bit hustler I’ll never know,” Roger adds, with a sly wink at Jillian.
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about Nathan like that,” Sunshine says, wounded. “You just don’t know him. If you’d give him half a chance…”
“Honey,” Corinne sighs, “don’t let Roger get your goat. He’s just trying to get a rise out of you.”
“I am not,” Roger insists. “I’ve always been up-front about the way I feel about that dime-store guru. He doesn’t know any more about enlightenment than I know about building moon rockets.”
Or taking baths, Jillian thinks. “This is probably going to sound silly,” she says, “but for some reason I thought that you folks lived with Sunshine out at Nathan’s… ‘ashram,’ do you call it?”
“No way,” Roger says, with a dry laugh.
“We live on a communal farm called Nature’s Bounty,” Corinne explains. “It’s in a little town called Pierce’s Bridge, a little northwest of Boston. Sunshine lived there with us until… just about a year ago, I guess.”
Nature’s Bounty, Jillian thinks. Why does that sound familiar?
“Nathan came there one night to give a lecture,” Sunshine says, her eyes sparkling as she remembers. “He was so… so different from anyone that I had ever known. He had such a powerful aura. There was such a sense of peace about him, and compassion, and understanding. I felt like he could see right through me, as if I was completely transparent, like he could read my mind, like he was…”
“Like he was hot for your buns,” Roger says, scornfully. “It was just hormones, Sunshine. Don’t make it sound like a religious experience.”
“That’s not true, and you know it,” Sunshine says, annoyed. But she blushes. “Nathan is the most spiritually advanced person in the world. He only elects to remain in his physical incarnation so he can enlighten others. We’re just lucky that he doesn’t choose to discorporate and return his karmic essence to the godhead.”
“Hell of a break for us,” Roger agrees, sarcastically.
“But you’re driving us out to Nathan’s… ashram, aren’t you?” Nature’s Bounty, Jillian thinks again. I’ve heard that somewhere before.
“As a matter of fact, we’re almost there,” Corinne confirms. “Don’t let Roger put you off,” she adds. “He’s just teasing Sunshine. Nathan’s not such a bad guy. A bit on the overzealous side, maybe, but…”
“Nature’s Bounty sounds so familiar to me,” Jillian interrupts. “Where would I have heard of it? Sunshine, did you ever tell me about it?”
“I might have,” Sunshine replies, appearing to welcome the diversion. “I don’t remember…” She snaps her fingers. “Of course! Your dad, G.W., he was telling us about the time… Don’t you remember? He was telling us about the time that we met when we were both little kids?”
Jillian shakes her head. “Not really. Well, sort of. I mean, I remember him telling us about it, but I slept through most of it. Maybe I heard the name while I was half-asleep…”
“Corinne,” Sunshine says, “this is so exciting! Did you know that Jill and I met when we were both real little? And you met her too! Both of you! And her parents, too! Isn’t that amazing? It’s like our destinies are intertwined, like it’s part of some cosmic plan, like we’re all…”
“Hey, slow down,” Corinne says. “Wait for the rest of us to catch up, okay? What are you talking about?”
“It’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Sunshine insists. “A long time ago – like, I don’t know, fifteen years, maybe? – well, anyway, a long time ago, Jill and her parents were driving around and they had some car trouble and they pulled up to the food stand!”
“What food stand?” Corinne asks, puzzled.
“Our food stand. The Nature’s Bounty food stand.”
“The one over on Chapel Valley Road?”
“That’s the only one there is, Corinne.”
“They drove all the way to Connecticut just to buy some apples?” Roger asks. “What’s the matter, don’t they know how to grow them in Texas?”
“You know what I mean, Roger,” Sunshine says, patiently. “They just happened to be driving by, and they had some car trouble, and they stopped at the stand and they bought some fruit. Some pears, as a matter of fact, I think G.W. said. And he really liked them.”
“Well,” Corinne said, “they must have been pretty special for him to remember them after all these years.”
“Please take your hand off my leg, Mr. O’Malley,” Jillian says. I don’t want to make a scene, she thinks, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to put up with this asshole any longer.
“Call me Roger.” He grins lasciviously and pats her knee affectionately before he complies with Jillian’s demand.
Oh Jesus, Jillian thinks. Now I remember. This is the guy that slept with his own daughter. I guess it’s hardly surprising that he’s hitting up on one of his daughter’s friends. But if he thinks I’m going to put up with his shit any longer…
“You don’t remember anything about a car from Texas pulling in and buying some fruit?” Sunshine asks. “A young couple with a little girl?”
“Honey,” Corinne snorts, “you have got to be kidding. Do you have any idea how many people have stopped by that food stand in, what, twenty years?”
“They were driving a… I think G.W. said that they were driving a big old Cadillac.” Sunshine screws up her face as she tries to remember the details. “There was something about the car… what did he say, Jill? Something on the hood…”
“We had a pair of horns on the hood, if that’s the
car I’m thinking of,” Jillian says. She looks down at the floorboards as she wracks her brain. “I’m not sure if it’s the same car, but when I was little, we had a big black Cadillac with these enormous horns on the hood. I don’t mean beep-beep horns, I mean longhorns, you know, like from a bull? I don’t know what happened to that car, but…”
“Wait a minute,” Corinne says. “Wait a minute. You mean, like a pair of cow horns sitting up on the front of the car, like some kind of hood ornament?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean,” Jillian says, surprised. “You mean, you actually remember it?”
“A tall guy, kinda stocky, sandy-blonde hair? Hat, boots, all that cowboy stuff? Wife about average height, teased blonde hair? A little bit of a bitch?”
Jillian grins. I don’t know if I like somebody talking about Mother that way, she thinks. But I can’t argue with the description. “That sounds like them, all right.”
“And you were a pretty snotty little kid, as I remember. Maybe a couple of years older than Sunshine, right?”
“Oh, Corinne, that’s incredible,” Sunshine enthuses. “What a memory. I can’t believe that you actually remember them after all these years.”
“Remember them?” Corinne laughs. “Hell, I gave that cowboy a blowjob under the counter. I guess I ought to remember them.” And she bursts out laughing, a lewd, raucous laugh, a belly laugh from the depths of her considerable belly.
Jillian freezes. Is this Corinne’s idea of humor? she wonders. Is that supposed to be funny? Calling Mother a bitch and me a snotty kid is one thing, but saying something like that about my father? How do they expect me to react? Like it’s some kind of big joke? Even if it’s true – which I suppose it could be – what kind of woman would say a thing like that about a man to his own daughter?
“Corinne,” Sunshine says, in a half-scolding tone, but with a little laugh, as if she were reprimanding a child who had been amusingly disobedient.
Roger, however, seems to find Corinne’s remembrance to be uproariously funny. Holding his gut, he doubles over in hysterical laughter as far as the cramped seat will allow.
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