In the Palomar Arms

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “You scared me,” Daphne says, and knows that she doesn’t just mean that she’s been startled, but that her mother’s reflected face is scary. She looks older than she did during dinner. That ratty bathrobe, soft and achingly familiar, doesn’t enhance her looks or promote an illusion of youth. She is barefoot, and in the fluorescent bathroom light, her feet appear yellow and callused. Daphne’s parents are not even fifty yet, but they have stepped out of the magic circle of immortality. Her mother’s eyes are faded, squinty. From behind their bedroom door, her father’s snoring is like a repeated question, rather than the growling command Daphne remembers. She thinks of Mr. Axel and of his daughter leaving him at the Palomar Arms and then collapsing in the parking lot. Everything in this room—washcloths in their orderly little pile, back-to-back toothbrushes, the deep plastic smell of the shower curtain—is too much to bear. Daphne buries her face in a towel and waits for composure.

  “A man called,” her mother says.

  “What?”

  “A telephone call from some man. He wouldn’t leave his name.”

  “Oh,” Daphne says.

  “I guess I’ll turn in,” her mother says, but she sounds as if she hopes to be persuaded against it.

  “Are you okay?” Daphne asks. “You look a little tired.”

  “I am,” her mother confesses. “You girls can laugh at your father, but since last year, since that first eruption …”

  “Come on, Ma,” Daphne says, but her mother sits on the wicker hamper and crosses her ankles. “The laundry won’t ever get clean,” she says wearily. “I use bleach, blueing.”

  “It’s not likely,” Daphne says. “You know that.”

  “My cakes don’t rise the way they used to.”

  “How did he sound?” Daphne asks.

  “Who? Oh, the man on the phone? Disappointed, I think. In a hurry. I hate when people don’t leave their name, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Daphne says. “It drives me crazy.” She yawns and her mother stands up. They kiss good night in the hallway between the bedrooms, and separate.

  The room Daphne has always shared with Margaret is a mess, even worse than the one she abandoned in Ventura. Clothing, magazines, and records are flung everywhere. It looks like the aftermath of a robbery, or an orgy. The twin beds, painted white when Daphne was fifteen, are flaking and seem too small.

  “I feel like Goldilocks,” Daphne says.

  “What!” Margaret yells. She’s still wearing the headphones, and Daphne motions for her to remove them.

  “Did you have a good time?” Margaret asks.

  “Ummm,” Daphne says.

  “Fun City, huh? I could never stand Rosemary. She always smiled at herself in the mirror. And she used to use my comb.”

  “Hey, she was my best friend in high school.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t choose her now, believe me. Or the pimple-squeezer, either.”

  “You’re disgusting,” Daphne says, but starts to laugh as she says it.

  Margaret laughs, too. “This is just like old times, kiddo,” she says. “Except now I’m the older sister.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “That guy called after you left. Mom wanted to give him the Hadleys’ number, but Daddy looked as if he’d shoot her, so she didn’t. He’s important, isn’t he?”

  “Ummm,” Daphne says again, and feels even worse than she did in the bathroom. “How’s your love life?”

  “Who, me? Not bad.” Margaret looks smug, reminiscent. “There are these two boys, Doug and Randy. I can’t make up my mind between them.”

  “You’re going out with both of them?”

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

  There is a long pause during which Daphne understands what Margaret wants her to know. “Listen,” she says, “do you …”

  “Daphne, everybody does.”

  Daphne thinks of the stern-faced nun who was visiting Mrs. McBride the other day.

  “Except maybe Lady Di,” Margaret says. “I guess they can’t have these old lords sitting around Parliament in fifty years, bragging about how they once put it to the Queen.”

  “But Doug and Randy, do you mean both of them?”

  Margaret giggles. “Not at the same time, dumbass,” she says.

  What’s happening here, Daphne wonders. She sticks her arm out into the space between the beds. “What does this smell like to you?” she asks.

  Margaret sniffs, obligingly. “Norell?” she guesses. “Charlie?”

  “No, no, not a fragrance. Just what does it smell like?”

  “Like an arm, like normal sweat. I don’t know. What is it supposed to smell like?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. Turn off the light, okay?”

  It isn’t quite dark in the room and Daphne realizes that she’s left the porch light on. She’s too tired to go down again. And she couldn’t face her mother’s probable reappearance, the anxious voice trilling, “Everything all right?”

  “Do you use protection?” Daphne asks.

  “Yeah. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you an aunt before your time.”

  “I was thinking about you. Hey, do you remember when I explained procreation to you?”

  “Do I? I nearly died, it was so funny.”

  “Mags?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know exactly what you want to do with your life?”

  “Sure, exactly what I’m doing right now—living it.”

  “But don’t you want to have a purpose? Or a plan?”

  “Do you mean like future goals and things like that?” I guess so.

  “No. That’s all bullshit, anyway. People plan their lives as if they’re never going to die. Do you remember what Charlotte said to Wilbur?”

  “What? Oh, God, don’t tell me.”

  “She said, ‘After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little, we die.’”

  “Do you think a lot about dying?”

  “Not a lot. But sometimes right after making it, especially with Doug. Sometimes I feel as if I am dying.”

  “The little death.”

  “How about you? Do you think about dying?” Margaret asks.

  Once, Daphne had confessed in the lounge at work that she thought about it to what might be an obsessive degree.

  Mkabi said that she was sure the physical part was not always terrible. Plenty of people died very suddenly, or in their sleep. “A short circuit,” she said, “and the lights go out.”

  “I just can’t stand that my consciousness will leave the earth forever,” Daphne explained.

  “I just can’t stand that my beautiful body will leave,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah, what if there’s a consciousness after death?” Monica asked. “A restless, horny consciousness without flesh to satisfy if?”

  “I try to keep busy,” Daphne tells Margaret. She is close to tears and doesn’t exactly know why. Thoughts of death, just before sleep, are inevitable and terrible; but now it’s sex that disturbs her. Sex is on a rampage, she thinks, like some uncontrollable epidemic. David and his sweetie, Margaret and her two teenage lovers, Kenny and herself. Perhaps even her parents, consoling one another this minute, right across the hall, about the fallout of volcanic ash. She punches down her pillow, kicks against the tightly pulled sheets, and tries to reduce her oversized body to fit the narrow confinement of the bed.

  “Good night, Daffy Duck,” Margaret whispers.

  “Quack, quack,” Daphne answers, growing smaller and smaller, falling away into sleep, knowing with dread and certainty what she must do.

  11

  JOSEPH AXEL WAKES UP in the Palomar Arms, aware of an erection and the knowledge that he would like to die. It’s not just this place, although the move from Sandra’s house has surely reinforced his wish. If he’d had any sense, he would have taken something from the store long ago, and hidden it away for this time. He has always been a realist, especially about the practical matters of life and d
eath. You don’t dispense medicine for forty-three years without learning that you can’t save everybody, and that finally you can’t save anybody.

  Adele had invested him with powers he’d never possessed. To her he had been as mighty and mysterious as the alchemists must have seemed to mortal and frightened kings. She had seen him do a few tricks over the years, watching from her side of the counter, the merchandise side. He’d protested at first when she started calling him “Doc,” the way the customers did, but the combination of coquetry and genuine awe won him over. And (he can admit this now) he swaggered a little when the simplest emergency measures saved the day, the life. Ipecac for the croupy child, the new antibiotics that cured bacterial pneumonia. The very illness that had taken Adele’s young father, a man born in the wrong century. So what if Joe hadn’t invented the stuff? At least he was able to break the cipher of the doctor’s handwriting and, wearing his white coat, grind the powders, hum an incantation, and come up with the winning formula.

  Adele sold the bathing caps and the shampoo, the earplugs, and the Modess. She gift-wrapped perfume and baby toys and Russell Stover candy. She was very hardworking, and her lively personality encouraged business. Who didn’t love Adele? But he was the deity in that store, the one to roll back eyelids and find the irritating fleck of dust. The hero of the mortar and pestle.

  To the end, to the very end of her own life, she believed that he would save her, too. And he was glad she had not outlived him. He hates to be here now, not himself, not in his rightful body, but here nevertheless. He has a cold and sane longing to be dead. But if he had deserted Adele by dying first, and she had landed in this place, she would have been terrified, confused, and tortured. She would have looked for substitute saviors, probably anyone in white—even the man who moves the dust around the floor now and sings a song about laying his baby down.

  Joe feels the tension of his erection and hopes the bedclothes hide it. He has no baby to lay down, no desire to lay anyone down. His tumescence is an ironic side effect of the medication, a priapism that comes without true lust, without purpose. He can only hope it’s gone before the woman comes in to sponge him. Must he pray to Priapus for his release?

  In her last days, Adele, who had been religious, never seemed to pray. She looked past the helpless doctors, her eyes terribly alive above the oxygen mask, pleading with Joe, depending only on him. And when the doctors left the room, he removed the mask long enough to slip the tablets in—sugar only—but she made the face of a child tasting something bitter, the bitter taste of medicine that would work, that would stem the rising tide of water in her lungs. She trusted him right to the last minute. He thought of hurrying her along, the way Schur had hurried Freud when living became impossible. Joe had so many opportunities—extra digitalis, a few quinidines, even an injection of adrenaline. She would have smiled at him as the needle slipped in, but he couldn’t be her murderer and her redeemer at once. The morality of it was too confusing; the act was beyond him. I’m only a druggist, he’d think. I’m only human. And finally she was gone.

  And the erection he would like to hammer down with his fist, if he could make a proper fist, is dying on its own, too. He looks toward the door whenever a shadow crosses it, hoping, now that he’ll be presentable, for Sandra, or for the pretty young woman who brought supper the other night and was so distressed by her own pity. A different woman, who chattered musically to him in Spanish, brought the food last night. While he tried to eat, he distracted himself by thinking about the store, on Meserole Street in Brooklyn. Between the window displays of suntan oil and patent cold remedies, he’d kept a pyramid of old apothecary jars, their inscriptions in gold leaf: Spirits of Aethyl Nitrate, Tincture of Ferric Chloride, Aluminum Hydroxide. Sunlight was gold on gold, and the blue and amber glass shone like jewels.

  After Adele died, and he retired and came to live with Sandra and Bud, she paused one evening in the middle of stirring something at the stove, and said, “Dad, I wish you’d kept a few of those jars when you sold the store. They were so beautiful, and they’re really valuable now.” There was more grief in her posture and the heaviness of her tone than a couple of old jars could ever arouse, no matter how handsome they were. He guessed that she was lonely for her mother, and for the past.

  He believed that his own loneliness was more constant and more profound. He missed everything about his old life, in spite of the comforts of that new home. The dear presence of his grandchildren was the only strong consolation. Deborah, the oldest, and the only girl, was as dark and radiant as a biblical queen. She would come up behind him and cover his eyes. “Guess who, Poppy?”

  Daniel was gentle and ambitious. He read his homework aloud after supper, and invited Joe into his room to watch Star Trek and Get Smart.

  Joe favored the youngest, Kevin, who was cursed with a kind of intensity that made him unpopular and unhappy. Only his grandfather could get close enough for touching.

  All three of them liked to hear Joe talk about the store, but they weren’t interested in its practical or nostalgic aspects. They wanted him to tell about the holdups during the last years, especially the time the junkie shot up right there in the telephone booth while his friend kept a trembling gun against Joe’s head. Again and again, they wanted him to say how he sensed when he was about to be robbed, by the way a man walked into the store, absently fingered counter displays, and then looked directly into Joe’s eyes, delivering a reckless message.

  The grandchildren were half grown when he came to California to stay, and soon they moved away, one by one, to school and marriage. There was a great-grandchild, then another. The first symptoms of the Parkinson’s had already begun. He knew what they were and chose not to acknowledge them. His cockeyed gait. “Daddy, don’t run, you’re lurching,” Sandra said. And he’d answered. “Right. What’s my hurry? Where am I going?” His steps became carefully small and he often felt he was only moving in place. In the room he’d inherited from Daniel, a room that still had rock-star posters and a stolen red Stop sign on its walls, he observed his hands in the pill-rolling motion that was once deliberate but was now involuntary—thumb against forefinger, with nothing between them—an early, absolute sign of Parkinson’s.

  The disease is progressive; he knows that. Is everyone born in the wrong century? He knows what the medication can and cannot do. Sandra would pick it up at a twenty-four-hour discount place that sold everything from cocktail snacks to bikinis. The world is coming to an end, he’d thought, the first time he walked into one of those all-night stores with its numbered and lettered aisles, the young, indifferent checkers jerking around to the incessant Muzak. But the world was only changing—nothing serious.

  He locked his bedroom door and looked up his disease in Daniel’s encyclopedia, desperate for promising news he might have missed. The language of the short article was both direct and lyrical. It said that the victim moves forward with small mincing steps as if he were trying to “catch up to his center of gravity.” The mind remains clear, it said, but eventually the patient is confined to bed. How careless he’d been, or what a coward, not to have prepared for this possibility. Jacobs, a gentle pinochle player, whose pharmacy was a few blocks away, on Marcy, downed half his inventory as soon as he learned that he had cancer. Before he lost the courage to command his fate, and the ability to swallow.

  After breakfast, two aides arrive to take Joe and his roommate, Brady, off to the recreation room for a talent show. Brady, in fact, will be part of the show, and tries to get Joe to do something, too. His shaking head shakes more violently to indicate that he can’t. “No talent,” he tells Brady, who says, “Awww,” in mock disgust.

  The recreation room is filled when they get there, and other wheelchairs are maneuvered to make room for theirs. This is obviously a popular event, a rare instance of democracy between inmates and staff. A nurse, wearing a black paper mustache, serves as the announcer. She says a few words of welcome before introducing “our own Jeanette MacDonald, Mr
s. Rose Barstow!”

  There is a thunderclap of applause, and then a pretty, elderly woman in a lavender dress sings “Buttercup” from H.M.S. Pinafore. Her voice is quavering, but sweet, like a voice on an old phonograph record, and she knows all the words without faltering. She is accompanied on the piano by a cadaverous-looking male patient, who uses the pedals with unexpected force and energy.

  Next to Joe, another man in a wheelchair cries, “Oh, God, oh, God,” and Joe looks at him in alarm, thinking the fellow is having a stroke, or at least a vision. But everyone else ignores him, including Rose Barstow, who keeps singing without a break until the end of her song.

  The nurse emcee is up again, clapping vigorously and saying, “Let’s hear it for Rose!”

  Then a maintenance man, a black fellow who could be a descendant of one of the Nicholas Brothers, does a wild and impressive tap dance; and he’s followed by a woman in a green bathrobe, like Joe’s, who stands with her walker and solemnly recites “In Flanders Fields.” Joe notices another woman across the room, who looks older than Methuselah, and is fast asleep, or pretends to be. She must be the birthday girl, the one approaching her first century.

  There are a few other performers, including a man wearing a T-shirt with a woman’s face on it, who does some gymnastics. In this place, where walking unassisted is an accomplishment of note, his contortions seem extraordinary.

  Brady is on last, and he turns out to be a comedian of sorts. Anyway, he wheels himself to the front of the room, where he tells a few jokes, most of them borrowed from television comics, and told in borrowed voices. He sings bits of various songs, altering some of them so they relate to his own double amputation. A line from “All of Me” becomes “Take my legs, I want to lose them!” No one in the room appears to be offended or embarrassed, as surely most people would have been in an ordinary performance elsewhere. And when Brady finishes with the beautiful Beatles song “Yesterday” and comes to the—line “Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be,” there is raucous laughter and cheering. This is the brave side of things, Joe understands, the toughing out of tragedy. The idea is to be darker than the darkness, and then you can hope to endure it. When the man next to him starts saying, “Oh, God, oh, God,” again, Joe knows that it’s only his routine, his response to the demons that have come and taken away autonomy and freedom. His litany is tolerated by the others the way Brady’s tasteless jokes are, and the boring recitation of “In Flanders Fields.”