In the Palomar Arms

by Hilma Wolitzer

  And her mother, what would she make of it all, after the initial shock and disapproval? Daphne is sure that her parents, who married as young sweethearts, have always been faithful to one another, even in their fantasies. In terms of sexual experience, she is probably far older than they are. Her mother would be bewildered, at best; at worst, heartsick that values and life styles have really changed, and aren’t merely the make-believe substance of the soap operas she loves.

  Perhaps Daphne will have to speak to Margaret, the baby sister to whom she’d once carefully explained, in the dark of their shared bedroom, how a man plants his seed inside the woman he loves. Margaret had burst into contemptuous laughter, as if she had just heard the most, ridiculous story. What a little prig I was, Daphne thinks now, remembering that she had managed her entire explanation without one reference to lust, or a direct naming of genitalia. She had been in high school herself then, still intact, but barely, and not for want of curiosity or heat. Her parents’ stern morality kept her from complete abandon, but she knew plenty, anyway, especially about tongues and hands, and enough about nether parts.

  The telephone rings and Daphne watches as Margaret sprints for it, and is tugged by envy. During those last two nights in Ventura, she’d let her phone ring unanswered while she sipped tea, while she lay drowsing in the bathtub, or disturbingly awake in bed. She knew that she was getting even by her silence, that she was punishing him as she had been punished by his absence. But she was also uncertain of what to say if she did speak to him.

  This phone call is for Daphne, and when she mouths “Who?” and Margaret shrugs, Daphne’s heart knocks like a faulty radiator. Only Kenny knows that she’s here, in Seattle.

  “Hello?” Her voice quavers and she’s aware of her family’s quiet attentiveness. But it’s only her old friend Rosemary Hadley calling. She’d met Mrs. Moss at the supermarket the other day and heard that Daphne was going to be in town. Why hadn’t she called? What is she doing tonight?

  The flow resumes through the valves of Daphne’s heart; her voice steadies, and she agrees to visit Rosemary later, after the dishes are done.

  It’s only a five- or ten-minute walk to Van Horton Street, where Rosemary lives with her husband, David, and their baby girl, Lindsay. Daphne’s father insists that she take the car. It’s not safe for a woman to walk alone anywhere at night. She remembers how he used to refuse to let her use the car just after she’d gotten her license, and was wild about driving. He would say that walking was a damn sight healthier, that insurance rates were insane because of adolescent maniacs—just read any National Safety Council Survey—that Drivers’ Ed ought to be banished from the school curriculum. The sex classes, too, he’d add irrelevantly.

  When she’s alone in the brown Plymouth wagon, the one they’ve had for nine years now, she’s even more overwhelmed by nostalgia than she was in the house. She used to borrow the keys to this car while her father slept, and then sit in it, inside the garage, with her high-school boyfriend, Jesse Krantz. They didn’t ever drive anywhere, she would argue against her conscience, against thoughts of her father’s forbidding. They just stayed in the oily darkness to kiss and kiss and paw each other. Their moans were absorbed by the tan upholstery, and mixed with the music from the radio, which they played with the ignition key turned halfway. Jesse worked at a gas station on weekends, and assured her that this wouldn’t run down the battery, and that they were also being spared the risk of carbon-monoxide poisoning. He’d insisted on music, the hard-driving acid rock he hoped would make her lose her mind, and consequently her virginity. Often, she almost did. She wonders where Jesse is right now. The last she’d heard, he was living in St. Louis and doing something with computers.

  Rosemary and David’s house is a miniature Tara. It’s lit like a movie set, or a funeral home. There’s no doctor’s shingle outside. As Daphne parks the station wagon, she remembers that David’s practice is downtown, in an office complex called the Dermatology Center. Margaret had mentioned that he does only cosmetic work, helping people to slough off their old skin, like snakes.

  David isn’t there when Rosemary lets Daphne inside. She makes the appropriate noises of appreciation at the lushness of the house’s interior. It was being built, to an architect’s specifications, during Daphne’s last visit, and Rosemary, who had once been unpredictable, and fun, stood largely pregnant in the raw frame, and went on and on about color schemes and fabrics and period furniture.

  Everything is really sumptuous, richer than either of their parents’ homes, far better than the digs of Daphne’s few other married friends. She thinks of her own place with its foldout bed and phony fireplace, and of the impermanence of all furnished rooms. There is a solid sense of the future here, where Oriental rugs bloom lavishly on the polished teak floors. There is even the important bulk of a grand piano. Does anyone play?

  The two women tiptoe, arm in arm, up an elaborate staircase to the nursery, where Lindsay; at three months, is almost hard to find in the skirted, canopied crib. Stuffed animals are propped around her, looking as benign as the lion in that painting of the sleeping gypsy. There is a baby smell of sweet skin and lotions that Daphne inhales as if it were some restorative essence. “She’s gorgeous,” she whispers, pinching Rosemary’s arm, although the dim Cinderella night-light hardly illuminates the tiny breathing form.

  They tiptoe out again and go downstairs, into a small paneled room where a fire is burning in a stone hearth. A black woman in a white uniform is setting out a tray of tea. She smiles and backs out as the other two women enter. There have been no introductions, but Rosemary sighs and says, “Janelle has been with us since the baby came. She makes my life possible.”

  For the first time, Daphne wonders if Kenny and Joy have household help, too—someone to mix their underwear in the laundry, to strip the secrets of their bed along with the linen. She is a comfortable distance from the hearth, but she feels her face grow hot.

  Rosemary pours some tea and, after sipping hers, puts the cup down and stares appraisingly at Daphne. “Tell me about you,” she says, but her rings glint distractingly in the firelight, and Daphne feels this is only a courteous overture on Rosemary’s part. She really wants to talk about herself, to gather more compliments for her amazing house, husband, child, and servant. Why else would she have the air conditioner and the fireplace going at the same time? At twenty-four, Rosemary is very pretty in the well-tended way of privileged young matrons. She looks older than Daphne, or as if she’s trying to look older. In high school, so alike were they in their dress, hairstyle, and mannerisms, that they were often referred to as “the twins.” They’d planned to be stewardesses for the same airline someday, and then, after seeing a movie about Margaret Mead in Samoa, to be co-anthropologists instead.

  Perhaps it’s Daphne who wants to continue talking about Rosemary. When she first saw her old friend tonight and recalled the way they had once urgently exchanged news, she’d had an impulse to blurt it all out, about Kenny and her consuming passion, about his marriage and his stalling. But that moment passed in the ceremony of greetings, and now she ducks her head and says, “Well, I’m still going to school. Can you believe it?” She laughs, eliciting only a weak smile from Rosemary, who’d done four straight years at Washington State and has a B.A. in art history. Now she’s on maternity leave from the art museum, where she assists one of the curators. Daphne drinks some tea, hoping to recapture her earlier poise. It’s a smoky, herbal brew that reminds her of witches and spells. “Do you remember,” she asks Rosemary, “that creepy girl in eleventh grade who told fortunes?”

  “Yes,” Rosemary says immediately. “Helen Foswicki. She came from Pennsylvania, and they moved away in the middle of the night, and nobody knows where they went.”

  “My God, you have a great memory, Rosie. I couldn’t even think of her name, just that she had that greasy pack of cards she was always laying out in the cafeteria. The ace of spades meant instant death.”

  “She said I
was going to be rich,” Rosemary says. “What did she tell you?”

  “Gosh, who can remember? It wasn’t that significant, I guess, or maybe I didn’t have that much confidence in clairvoyance. You know me; I’m such a hardheaded pragmatist.”

  “She said I would marry a doctor and have a daughter.”

  “Did she really? Well, the daughter part wasn’t much of a risk. There’s always a fifty-fifty chance of being right when you predict the sex of a baby. And all of our mothers were dying for us to snag rich doctors, anyway …” Daphne realizes with a start what she’s said, and puts her hand over her mouth. “That came out all wrong, Rosie,” she says.

  “No, no, it’s all right,” Rosemary insists. “Do you remember how unattractive Helen was, her bad skin and those awful clothes? Yet we tolerated her, let her hang around us, because she told us only what we wanted to hear. It was the secret of her survival in high school.”

  “But she turned up the ace of spades for somebody once—for Janet Mazur. Who wants to hear a prediction of her own death?”

  “Janet would. She probably loved it. It made her important in a way that wasn’t possible otherwise. She did have a kind of morbidity, anyway. All that overeating and then throwing up.”

  “Anorexia.”

  “No, bulimia, but we didn’t know the word for it then. The point is, I wanted to be rich, and … voilà!”

  “So,” Daphne says. The bitterness in Rosemary’s voice is obvious, and Daphne suspects a revelation about the sadness of granted wishes she doesn’t want to hear. And why can’t she remember what Helen had predicted for her? Was she so purposeless, even in high school? A few weeks ago, Monica Mann had called her a “California girl,” and Daphne had easily perceived the mockery in that phrase. “Why did you call me that?” she’d said. “I’m not a native, I’m not a surfer, I’m not even a blonde.”

  “Oh,” Monica said. “I only mean that you sort of drift. You’re one of those girls who end up in California, no matter where you start out, as if it’s your destiny. And then you never live a serious life. You don’t matriculate.”

  “I am now!” Daphne interjected. “I’ll have my associate’s degree by the end—”

  “Oh, I’m not talking about that,” Monica said impatiently. “I’m talking about your life. You just do a little bit of everything. A little work for the studios, take a few courses—gemology, psychology, astrology. You get half-assed associate’s degrees. You see this guy and that guy. You’re always in a relationship.”

  “Do you know you’re crazy, Monica,” Daphne had answered, wondering if she’d ever mentioned being a gofer at Paramount when she’d first arrived in L.A. She looked around the lounge for support from the others, from Mkabi, who was shuffling her mixed-drink flash cards, from Jerry, who stared into space and pretended he wasn’t listening. “My God, what’s wrong with being in a relationship?” Daphne demanded. “I mean, it would seem to be a sign of maturity, of mental health!” She was almost shouting and her heart hammered.

  Monica smiled and she, too, addressed the others. “Do you hear this? Can you believe it’s a sign of maturity to work in this death dive and see a married man for quickie matinees?”

  Daphne wanted to say that it was none of Monica’s business who she saw, and that fat, disgusting, quarrelsome people’s opinions didn’t interest her. She thought it out in those very words, but her position was still defensive. She had permitted her life to be other people’s business by talking freely about it, and name-calling was the most infantile form of argument. Instead, she said, “You work here, too. I don’t see you having a serious life, whatever that is.”

  “I guess I’m just a California girl myself,” Monica said with infuriating mock innocence, and Jerry laughed and laughed.

  “Why haven’t you asked me where David is?” Rosemary says. Her tone is challenging, as if Daphne has failed some test and is about to fail another.

  “I don’t know,” Daphne says. “I suppose I thought he was working late or something. I don’t know.” It is a little strange that she hasn’t asked about David, although his conspicuous artifacts make his absence less significant. There are his medical books on the shelves, his pipes and humidor on a table, and his child asleep upstairs in her crib. But nobody would work nights at a place called the Dermatology Center. They probably wouldn’t have to. And she has sensed something in this house, without bringing it to the surface of consciousness. Rosemary is so much less playful than Daphne remembers, and it isn’t only the sobering process of marriage and motherhood. She’s miserable, possibly as miserable as Daphne is. The idea is exciting, like a renewal of their lost camaraderie. Maybe they can go past the materialism of Rosemary’s life to its true fabric, and from there right to what’s happening in Daphne’s life. It will be like the old days in a ruffled teenage bedroom, with the spilling of sacred and profane secrets, and the assurance of an absolute ally. The villains then were parents, teachers, boys who only wanted one thing, conniving girls who gave it freely.

  “He has a mistress,” Rosemary says.

  Mistress! It’s such a melodramatic word—something out of a gothic novel—that for a moment Daphne thinks Rosemary is joking.

  “He used to pretend that he was working late, and for a while I pretended to believe him. I mean, everybody has an emergency dermabrasion or two, right?”

  Daphne hates the threat of hysteria in Rosemary’s voice. She thinks of David at a party last winter, holding up a shadeless lamp in the bedroom as a woman raised her sweater to show him a mole on her back. “Is he going to …” Daphne can’t finish the question.

  Rosemary does it for her. “Leave me? I doubt it. Even David knows there’s an expiration date on that kind of heat. It will cool off, become as routine as married sex. But in the meantime, he won’t stop.”

  “Why don’t you leave him, then?”

  “God, Daph, you’re still the same old simplistic kid, aren’t you? A plus B always equals C.”

  “Well, thanks a lot.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to jump at you. Just guess who I’m really furious with.”

  “Then I’ll repeat myself. Why don’t you—”

  “Because I don’t want to divvy up the Oriental rugs and let him screw his sweetie on his half. Because I don’t want everyone to know. I’m ashamed, as if I’m the one acting like an asshole. Because I don’t want Lindsay to have the trauma of a broken home.”

  As if on cue, the baby starts screaming. There are muffled footsteps overhead, and Rosemary goes to the foot of the stairs. “Janelle?” she calls softly. “Will you bring her down, please?”

  The baby sits on Rosemary’s lap like a witness for the prosecution. Who wouldn’t fall for her story? She is gorgeous, with the general loveliness of babies. No dermatologist can give anyone that perfect complexion. Everyone in the world would want to protect her from the foolish crimes of adult behavior. The foreman of the jury rises. Take those adulterers away in chains!

  Rosemary continues as if the baby hasn’t interrupted their conversation, almost as if she isn’t really there. “Because marriage is difficult and boring, and getting a divorce has to be difficult and boring, too. Because I’d like to kill them in the act rather than do something civil and lawful. I’d like to do something symbolic, like skin her.”

  Mistress, Daphne is thinking, the skin on her own neck itching and tingling. That’s what I am. Except the connotations are as ridiculous as the word. Kenny hasn’t set her up in a lavish apartment. He doesn’t buy her expensive gifts. Not that she wants that kind of treatment from him. Aside from sexual fantasies, she mostly dreams about the two of them sitting in the same room, in a kind of timelessness, reading books, and looking up once in a while to read something aloud, and for the pleasure of finding the other still there. But she suspects that everyone would think, Joy would certainly think, that it’s a temporary, loveless match based on Daphne’s greed and Kenny’s natural faithlessness. Rosemary would think the worst of her
, too, even if Daphne tried to explain that one can also have a simplistic view of the other woman.

  There is a silver thread of drool hanging from Lindsay’s lower lip, and Daphne watches, mesmerized, waiting for it to break and fall. “Maybe you don’t know the whole story,” she suggests.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Rosemary’s voice is unforgiving. The baby whimpers, starts a second thread of drool.

  “I don’t really know what I mean,” Daphne says. “I’m just talking to say something.”

  “Do you see?” Rosemary says. “Even you’re embarrassed by the situation.” She and the baby seem to be fused together on the sofa. Daphne can imagine David at their side, all of them securely joined, despite his infidelity, in that undeniable unit, the family. Like a small but shining constellation of stars.

  “Yes,” Daphne says. Mea culpa. Take me away. But wait. Please wait! Just one more moment of happiness!

  10

  THE PORCH LIGHT IS on when she gets home. She parks the car carefully, as if her father were watching from behind the living-room drapes, the way he once did.

  “Is that you?” Her mother’s voice drifts down the stairs.

  “Yes,” Daphne calls up, and starts to climb. The door to heir parents’ bedroom is closed. There is no slit of light at the bottom. She remembers wondering about the logistics of their lovemaking. Did they wait for their grown children to go out or fall asleep? Did they ever?

  Margaret is sitting up in bed, wearing headphones, swaying voluptuously to the music Daphne can barely hear. They exchange little wrist-flapping waves, and Daphne goes out to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. Her mother comes in behind her, appears in the mirror.