The Lifeguard

by Mary Morris

  Zachary went over to calm her down. Then he found Tracy at a friend’s and took her back to her mother’s to discuss her truant behavior. Tracy had a new hole in the top of her ear and a pink feather dangling from it. When he came home, he ate a DoveBar and watched a late-night horror movie on cable. Bennett came into the bedroom, where Meg sat alone. “What’s up with the oral sturgeon?” This was how he referred to his oral surgeon father who liked to fish. Actually Zachary was renowned for the invention of a movable plastic replacement for the human jaw, and he traveled all over the world, presenting his invention. “He’s concerned about your sister, that’s all,” Meg said.

  “I was gonna talk to him about the thing in my room, you know, Tronka, but maybe this isn’t a good time.”

  “Maybe not.”

  She went downstairs and saw Zachary taking out a box of bills he’d been putting off paying since they’d begun seeing one another. “Zachary,” she called from upstairs, “don’t you want to come to bed?”

  “I think I’ll read,” he said. “Don’t wait up for me.”

  It was morning when his body eased its way into bed and Meg reached for his hand. But he was too far away to find. She sat up and found him hovering close to pillow 1. “What is this? You come to bed at five in the morning and don’t even kiss me good night.”

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” he said.

  “Next time wake me.”

  In the morning as Meg had her coffee, she noticed that the sun in the mural had slipped behind a cloud. The sunflowers had turned away from the sun. She was about to mention it when Zachary bent down and kissed her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “About last night. I’ve had so much on my mind lately. The kids and all.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I understand. It’s all right.” When she looked back at the wall, the sun had returned as if it had never gone away.

  Meg got some cartons from the store and began to pack away Lucinda’s things. First she went to the closet near pillow 4 and took out Lucinda’s dresses and skirts, her shirts and sweaters. Meg put them into neat piles on the bed. Then she took out the shoes and from another closet the coats and underwear.

  She took out the kaftans and dashikis, the leftover floral prints. The peasant skirts, the suede shoes, the lace-up boots, the cowgirl jackets. She laughed as she folded them on the bed. How could anyone have dressed this way, she asked herself. But instead of packing, she began to put the clothes on. She put on a purple halter top and an embroidered Mexican shirt with puffy sleeves. A bulky alpine sweater, boots, a jacket. She dressed herself in layer after layer.

  Lucinda was an ornithologist, an expert in the language of birds. Zachary had told her this. Birds, he said, spoke in dialects, and they had intonations that were as distinct as those of people from the north and the south. Whisper, nuance, secret murmurings. Lucinda knew them all. An educated bird could be told from an illiterate, a wise from a stupid, a cosmopolitan from a hick, a savage from a lamb. Her specialty was owls. Those creatures of the night, princes of darkness. Lucinda had journeyed, before the kids were born, to the wilds of Peru, the backwoods of Wisconsin, just to glimpse a snowy white.

  Meg put on the clothes and stood before the mirror. She was thrilled when the peasant skirts fastened around her waist, when the pants zipped, the blouses buttoned. She was amazed at their eerie fit. She told herself, “I’ll keep these clothes. I’ll wear them.” But she packed them. It took hours. The packing, the labeling—shoes, floral-print blouses, Guatemalan sashes—but when she was done, Meg congratulated herself. There, it’s over, she said. She’s gone.

  ———

  A few weeks later, Zachary had to go to Nairobi for a two-day conference to present his jaw. Meg didn’t mind having time to herself. She liked to sit up in the middle of the bed reading as if she were queen of a small republic. Or she’d review the checklist of decorating changes she’d made, of the new ones she wanted to incorporate into her scheme. She looked over the list often because sometimes she had no idea what changes she’d made. At times she thought that nothing was different at all.

  One evening Bennett walked into her room. A razor blade hung from around his neck, his hair had blue streaks running along the sides. “My parents aren’t my parents,” he said.

  She sat up, closing the book. “Of course they’re your parents, Bennett.”

  “I read a story once,” he told her, “about these parents who were replaced by robots of parents. Sometimes I think that’s what happened to my parents. Like extraterrestrials live in their bodies. Like they’re not there at all.”

  “Have you tried telling them?” she said, suddenly concerned.

  “The thing in my room, Tronka, I think that’s my real parents. These people are from another place.”

  “Have you tried being open with them?” Meg felt oddly happy that Bennett had chosen her to confide in.

  “Oh, they wouldn’t listen to me at all. They’d just say, You’re nuts, kid, see a shrink. There’s no sense telling them a thing.”

  Later, as she drifted to sleep, the phone rang. A voice crackled at her from thousands of miles away. “I can’t talk,” he said. “I’m in a terrible rush.”

  Meg stared at the receiver in the darkened room. “You call from halfway around the world to say you can’t talk?”

  “I just want to make sure everything’s all right.”

  “Everything’s fine,” she said. Then added softly, “We miss you, darling.”

  “Miss you too, honey,” he replied. “Gotta run.”

  Meg went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. As the water boiled she glanced at the wall. The Aztec temples shimmered, the pyramids stood high. But in a corner a woman wept on an unmade bed. A man about to leave stood faceless in a doorway.

  When Zachary returned from Nairobi, Meg followed him around the house. “Please,” she said, “let me paint the wall. If I could just paint it, I think I could live here as if this were my house.”

  Zachary sighed, bored with all of it now. “It would break Mona’s heart,” he said.

  “I don’t even know Mona,” she cried. “I don’t care about Mona.”

  “It would break her heart,” Zachary said.

  So break my heart then, she thought, but instead she said, “You were unfaithful to Lucinda, weren’t you? You saw other women and she knew.”

  Zachary looked at her stunned. “Who told you that?” he asked. “How do you know?”

  ———

  Lizzie came by to check on the construction and saw that it was going well, but Meg was dejected. “It’s not working,” she said. “It still feels the same. I mean, there’s more light. The furniture’s unnailed. But it’s still her house. It’s their house.”

  Lizzie listened, a kind look on her face. “Let me just ask you one more thing. I can work around anything.… I really can …” They were walking back downstairs and she hesitated, leaning closer to Meg as if she were about to whisper a very big secret. “But have you considered moving?”

  That night they lay in bed, reading, the soft amber lights Meg had installed warming their faces. She looked at him. He had such gentle eyes, such long, strong hands. She loved his hands. Loved the way they turned the pages of books, they chopped vegetables. Loved the way they glided over her body when he felt like making love, which she was beginning to notice wasn’t that often. At least not when they were in the house. When they went away for weekends to country inns or on business trips, he hardly took his hands off her. Or when the kids weren’t around, they made love on the new carpeting or in the TV room on the new sofa. But in this bed, though it had happened slowly, almost imperceptibly, they made love less and less.

  “I think we should move,” she said to Zachary that night in bed. “The decorator thinks so as well.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll do fine here,” Zachary said. “A little more paint, a few more things. You’ll see.”

  “But, look, could we just think about it?”

  “I don’t wa
nt the kids to have to make a big change at this point in their lives. You know, they’ve been through so much.”

  “We wouldn’t have to move far.”

  He leaned over and kissed her, put his mouth to her ear. “Let’s change the subject,” he said.

  “Then let me paint it,” she pleaded. “Let me paint the wall.”

  The next night they went to a Chinese restaurant and ran into Mona. She was a large, flamboyant person who wore a Tibetan amulet around her neck. “Zachary,” she said. “It’s been so long …”

  “This is Meg,” Zachary said. “I’ve wanted you two to meet.”

  “Oh, you’re the one who did the wall.”

  Mona waved her pudgy hand. “Oh, that thing?” She stared at Zachary, scolding him with her finger. “Is that still up? That’s from an old cycle. Zachary, you should get rid of it. Get a fresh start.”

  First Meg photographed the wall as a record for Mona.

  Then one weekend, when Zachary had gone fishing, she bought the white acrylic paint. With a sweep of the brush, the Aztec empire came down. Next she took out the lightning bolt and half the angel’s wing. She wiped out the Indian nations, several animals on the endangered species list, a significant chunk of tropical rain forest, and assorted rare birds. She let it dry and then applied the second coat. But later that evening she saw that the paint barely covered the wall and the images continued to shine through. Meg phoned Lizzie. “Try yellow paint,” she said.

  “I don’t want a yellow kitchen,” Meg said.

  “You can paint white over it,” Lizzie advised.

  Meg had a plan for the kitchen wall. She and Zachary would go out to the country and buy baskets, dried flowers, old prints of flowers and birds. They’d make a country kitchen for themselves. On Sunday morning she bought yellow paint and tried two coats but the wall still shone through.

  She called Lizzie again. “What about black?” Lizzie said. “Black is very chic. Can you live in a black kitchen?”

  “Black?”

  “Well, if yellow doesn’t cover it. After all, Bloomingdale’s is black. It’s stylish.”

  “It’s a kitchen.”

  Meg was contemplating going out to buy black paint when the doorbell rang. A woman stood there in a soft pink angora sweater and brown slacks. Her hair was pulled back in a bun. She looked like the kind of person who would be handing out The Watchtower or collecting for the retired firemen’s fund. “I’ve come for my things,” Lucinda said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Then she walked into the rooms that had once been her home. She looked at the light coming in, the new sofas and chairs, the tables against the wall. “You’ve made some changes, I see,” Lucinda said.

  “Yes.” Meg spoke cautiously.

  “You’ve unnailed everything.”

  “Yes.” Meg was pleased she’d noticed. “Why did you nail it all down?”

  “To keep it from moving,” Lucinda said.

  Meg cast a nervous glance around the room. “It was moving?”

  “No,” Lucinda said, “but everything else was.”

  They went down to the basement, where Meg had put her things. Lucinda appreciated the fact that Meg had folded her clothes, stored them carefully away. “It was nice of you to do this,” Lucinda said. Meg was surprised at how kind she seemed. They carried the boxes outside and Meg helped put them in the car. The last time Lucinda walked through the house, she went into the kitchen. She glanced at the wall. Then she gave Meg an odd look and Meg couldn’t tell if it was anger or praise. When they put the last box into the car, Lucinda said, “Thank you.” Then added as an afterthought, “And good luck.” Meg went back into the house. From the living room window she watched Lucinda sit in her car, head resting on the wheel, staring at the house. It was a long time before she drove away.

  Then Meg went back to the kitchen. With one more coat of yellow paint, the wall was done.

  When Zachary came home, he kissed her on the cheek, then carried the fish he’d caught into the kitchen, where he stood staring at the yellow wall, a blank look on his face. “It’s your favorite color,” Meg said.

  “What have you done?” he asked, his body trembling. “What have you done?” Then he said nothing. All through dinner he was silent. That night it was a long time before he came to bed. When he finally did, he turned his back to her, his head on pillow 1. “Zachary,” she said, “we can scrape the paint off if it matters that much to you.”

  “I needed it, Meg,” was all he would say. “I needed that wall.”

  Beside him Meg tried to sleep, wondering when the gentle curves of their arms had changed to the harsh bend of spines. This night even their backs didn’t touch. Still, Meg felt herself press against something hard. But when she turned there was nothing there. She lay awake, listening to the rumblings. Craters exploding, animals trying to claw their way out. The earth split; paint chipped. Downstairs the wall pulsed like a heart.

  Bennie’s Leaning Tower of Pizza—the original one in the Westfield Mall, and not the five chains Bennie’s now got all over Orange County—is where I work five nights a week and Saturday afternoon. I’ve worked here for a long time and what began as a part-time kind of thing is starting to turn into my life. Of course, I’ve got other plans. When I get out of high school, which should be in another few years at the rate I’m going, I want to open a small retail store. Maybe video rentals off the Coast Highway.

  For now I toss. My girlfriend, Sue, does the toppings. We’ve been going out since our surfboards collided on Huntington Beach two summers ago and I got her her job here. I toss and she chops. We didn’t plan it this way, but it just kind of happened. Sue is good with the clean, swift strokes. She raises a knife in her suntanned hand and brings it down hard. Her wide hips and her long dishwater-blond hair sway like she’s dancing. She can get rid of a mushroom or a green pepper the way a magician gets rid of a white rabbit. I’m better with dough. I know how to pound to make it pliable, how to get it spinning on the tips of my fingers until it’s going like a top. And then I toss, higher and higher. I am not good at everything I do, but I’m proud of the few things I do well, and tossing pizza is one of them.

  We make all kinds of pizzas here and some that even seem kind of strange, like pizzas with broccoli or melted goat cheese. And then we’ve got your average sausage and cheese, mushroom and anchovy. Some of them have names like the Sophia Loren with its big dark circles of pepperoni and the Al Capone with lots of anchovy, and the Joe DiMaggio, which is all veggie. Bennie gave them their names, don’t ask me why.

  I know most of the people who come here. Mr. Schultz comes in on Tuesday nights. He was my math teacher for umpteen years until he gave up on me. Mr. Schultz always orders a small Joe DiMaggio and always tells me how this is his wife’s night to play cards with the girls. He seems sad when he tells me this and my mom says it’s because everyone in town knows that there’s no card game on Tuesday nights and his wife’s having an affair with the soccer coach.

  The O’Sullivans come in every Wednesday when we’ve got giants for the price of mediums and they always order the same thing, the Slice of Life. They’ve got three boys—Buddy, Oscar, and Scott. Oscar can’t move his arms or legs. That is, they kind of just flop around and his head bobs in a funny way too. I can’t quite describe it, but it’s like Oscar’s made of Play-Doh. I always bring the pizza to them myself because I like the way Oscar’s mouth shapes itself into words that his mother translates for me as thank you. I give Oscar a free Coke when he says thank you because I know what a difficult thing it is for a kid like him to say.

  I don’t really know what’s in the Slice of Life, but I know that it’s got everything, plus something else. It’s the something else I can’t describe. Bennie says with a snicker it’s a family secret, an ingredient handed down by the ancestors from the old country. I always ask if it’s some kind of hash, but Bennie just laughs. He says it’s a combination of things.

  My mom comes in sometimes and she alway
s wants a small plain cheese, which I tell her is the dumbest thing, but she says a haircut that looks like the tributaries of the Amazon with little rivers and canals running through it is also pretty dumb, so to each his own. I don’t argue with that. Mom comes in more now since Dad stopped coming. He used to come a lot, but it dwindled to less and less, like those letters I used to get from a pen pal overseas.

  My dad’s got this funny way of doing things. He always has to know where we are, but we can’t know where he is. He says he’s not a gunrunner or involved with the CIA. He’s just a very private person and needs his space. Before they split, my mom didn’t complain much about this in front of us. But now, especially when his payments are late, she says he’s involved with the mob and they’re going to cement and deep-six him one of these days.

  One night Sue and I are in the back and I’ve got her pressed against the butcher block. She’s a big woman, strong as a horse, and I’m drawn to her the way I was to Amazons as a boy. I’m running my flour-coated hands up and down her arms until I can see the tattoo of a unicorn on her shoulder. When I first fell in love with Sue, it was for her tough walk and her unicorn tattoo. She starts moaning. “Let’s close up and get out of here,” she says just as my dad walks in. I pull away from Sue fast as if someone’s come to rob the store and she says, “Hey, what’s wrong?” He was never one to show up at good times and this is another instance. Where are you when I got expelled? I want to shout. When I fell off my motorcycle last year? Instead I say, “What’ll it be?” I keep my hands under the counter so he can’t see them trembling. It takes a moment for me to notice that he’s got a girl with him, a small blond number who looks like his stenographer, if he ever needed a stenographer. They both have tans and some of her skin is peeling off her face. My dad’s got his Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned and a few gold chains around his neck. “A medium cheese with half sausage, half mushroom, right, Marlene?”