Mrs. D was especially glad to see Aud, and greeted me kindly when we stepped in. I’d been on the phone with her a few times, explaining Audrey’s situation, and I was expecting a quiet reception. Instead the house was full—with uncles, aunts, faculty members, and a group of what I must have misheard to be botanical statisticians—and next thing I knew the Jameson’s was brought out and a tumbler clapped into my hand. I was going on about three hours’ sleep, and what with all the unexpected people and the music blaring—Professor D was a great Louis Armstrong fan, particularly of the Hot Five era—after talking variously with Mrs. D, Ciaran, Maud, and Edwina, I quickly became dull and overwhelmed. Worse than this, I have the weak liquor stomach of (just to quote Henry James here) a mere vague Italian, and so next thing I knew I was in the guest bathroom yakking up the hors d’oeuvres.
I looked up from the toilet bowl to see an unearthly pale and beautiful little girl standing next to me, regarding me with interest. She had the tiny, precise features of the Devane family and was dressed in a pillowcase and Christmas garlands. This would be Eugénie, I realized, Edwina’s interestingly acquired five-year-old daughter. To hear Audrey tell Edwina’s version of the story, Eugénie had come mail-order from France, like some excellent baking dish.
“Ugh, so sorry,” I said to her. I wiped my mouth on some toilet paper and sat back on my haunches. “What are you, dressed so nice like that?” I asked her.
“I’m a fancy ghost,” she said gravely.
“That’s pretty cool,” I told her.
“I need to show you my animals,” she said.
I was barely able to flush and clean up before she had grabbed my hand and was dragging me down the basement steps. At the foot of the stairs I stopped. Spread out all around us was a miniature wonderland of plastic and stuffed animals and dinosaurs and shoebox buildings and silk flowers and trees. Eugénie pulled me down and began telling me about each of them in exhaustive, genius-surreal descriptive detail: This is Mr. Potts, he’s a dromedary, not a camel, which is called the Bacitracin camel, which is an antibiotic, and that’s two humps, and you can tell because he has one hump—hello, Mr. Potts!—he’s Arabianic…We met Mrs. Boodles and Friendly and Uncle Wag and Zilly and many dozens of others this way—it seemed as if no one in the history of the world had ever listened to Eugénie at all and she’d saved this up for the first hearing person who happened to show an interest—and at some point I must have gone clean asleep, because the next thing I knew I was on a pull-out sofabed with Audrey (how had I got there?) and Mrs. D, already with lit cigarette in hand, was waking us up for Christmas mass.
Everyone but the missus was in a grumpy-assed mood as we drank our glasses of water—too late for coffee if we wanted the Eucharist!—crunched across the lawn through the snow, piled into the 1967 Chrysler Newport Town & Country, and drove down the long, skinny highway to church. Something had gone down at the party the night before, and Edwina, Audrey, Maud, and Ciaran were bickering in a hiss-hiss secret sibling way. The windows were rolled tight and everyone but Eugénie and me was puffing away—pipes for the men, cigs for the ladies—and the car was filling up with smoke like some Guinness Book of World Records endurance stunt. I was close to death.
Eugénie and I were rolling around in the back. The bickering subsided, and in a moment Audrey turned to us, a little smile on her face. As if just remembering something, she said, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“What’s that?” I said, mad nauseous and in no mood for silliness. Eugénie was tucked up by my side, most of her head in the pocket of my parka to avoid the cigarette smoke.
“Someone’s meeting us at St. E’s,” she said.
“Mr. Potts?” I said.
“Mr. Potts!” Eugénie screamed with joy from inside my parka.
“You’ll see,” Audrey said, smiling.
We pulled into the parking lot of St. E’s, and as soon as Professor D cut the engine, all the Devanes sprung from the car as if popped from a pneumatic tube. I slowly rolled out and got to my feet. Eugénie ran ahead to a stunningly dressed woman leaning against a big white old-model Mercedes in front of the church. The woman was like a vision, all in white: white fur coat and white patent boots and glamorous white turban. I sighed, cursed with the inevitable.
The woman, of course, was Kendra.
*
Needless to say, it was a little unnerving to see her in this context.
Audrey introduced Kendra to her family, who all gathered around her smiling and shaking hands, as if meeting a dignitary, but who obviously had all been let in on the surprise. I hung back, jealous, and stared at her with a look of great sarcasm affixed to my face, disgusted that she could have so seamlessly invited herself into someone else’s Christmas. As we filed into the church Kendra fell in next to me and we had our own hiss-hiss back-and-forth argument:
Me: Why are you here?
Kendra: Why are you so mean?
Me: Why are you so phony?
Kendra: That’s not very Christian.
Me: Screw you, Tinker Bell.
I plopped to my knees in the pew and laced my hands in front of my face, pretending to pray and fighting down the urge to slug Kendra. The organist was laying it on thick, and the church, an ugly ’70s thing styled on a Quonset hut, shook with the strains of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Through the lattice of my fingers I watched the people filing into the pews ahead of us, all so cow-country conservative. Almost everyone who passed in front of us did a full turn and stared at Kendra, some with their big cow mouths fully open. This pissed me off and made me feel protective of her. I stole a look her way and watched her as she prayed, eyes closed, a weary angel look on her face. What if she really was serious, I thought, and here I was mocking her intentions?
We stood for the procession, and as soon as the choir leader raised her hands, Kendra began belting out the hymn. However, Edwina was also a belter and the two of them kept upping the ante, Edwina pitching higher and higher until everyone around us was standing on their tippy-toes and singing into the ionosphere. By now I had fully closed my froggy mouth and leaned forward and turned my head to catch Audrey’s eye. She looked back at me, and for the first time in months I fancied I knew what she was thinking—nothing complicated, just something like I want to run out of here, over the hills, and into the land of the cigarette trees.
During the mass Kendra followed the book very closely and was perfect in her responses. It was as if, driven by a real spiritual thirst, she’d made a study of the mass, all the exterior things, as a way into the spirit. What if she’s sincere? I thought again, hearing the loving caress she made of every word as the rest of us mumbled our responses. Whenever the moment came for an amen, the whole congregation said it the flat, standard Catholic way: Ay-men. Kendra’s voice alone sounded it the “fine” Protestant way: Ah-men!
With a flutter of eyelids.
This is just another snow job, I thought.
*
Back at The Walking Irish Tragedy homestead for dinner I sat at the farthest end of the table from Kendra and watched with a deep, spongy cynicism as she entertained the Devane family and extended clan with her glittering, “outrageous” stories of Life in New York City. I’d been looking forward to a nice home-cooked meal and being kind of like the guest of honor, but clearly someone more worthy was here now. I increasingly retreated until I had demoted myself to the kids’ table, with Eugénie and some wriggling cousins imported from Massachusetts, where I sat mostly smoking instead of eating. And it was all I could do not to stub out my Camel Filter in the pumpkin pie.
I wondered about that elusive thing called charm.
At some point I realized that Audrey kept getting up from the table and disappearing, and at about the third time I rose and followed her. I walked soundlessly behind her as she went into the living room and over to the Christmas tree and touched a homemade clothespin-person ornament in a little cutaway coat meant to represent Éamon de Valera. She did this three times.
Then she went to the front window and surveyed the yard, moving her head slowly in a 180-degree sweep; when a car finally passed by, she was free to move. She went into the library, took down a copy of The Great Cat Massacre, removed a bookmark in it, replaced the book, took down a copy of Ciano’s Diaries, and put the bookmark in that instead. Then she stood at the library window and surveyed the side yard for some minutes before going into the kitchen, taking the lid off a Kromex brushed-aluminum flour container, one in a series of flour-sugar-coffee-tea, and peering deeply into it. Once certain about the flour, she returned to the dinner table. And in another seven or so minutes, she rose and did the whole circuit again, this time moving the bookmark from Ciano’s Diaries to a paperback copy of Admiral Byrd’s Alone.
“Hey there,” I said to Audrey at the Kromex station, “what do you say we go for a walk?”
We’d dropped our coats in the mudroom, so it was easy to steal away without anyone seeing us. Outside was wood smoke and frozen snow and quiet, resting prewar stone bungalows, tall fir trees and sleeping hedges. Not a soul was out. We both immediately lit a smoke, looking at each other as we put flame to cigarette, Audrey with her dour, delicate Van Eyck angel face. And then we began walking down the middle of the street, stark and unfamiliar as we were in our boots and long dark church clothes. That unexpected childhood good mood seemed to overtake Audrey again, and she began kicking up her heels as she walked. I started to walk like her, kicking up my heels and throwing my head back to look at the cloudless blue sky, and then she hooked her arm through mine and we were spinning each other around in the street. We went spinning and spinning, and it was fun and great and heedless. It was as if we had escaped from everything, we knew we had this moment of stolen time and it was ours and couldn’t be rescinded. There were almost no words from her, and this would increasingly be the case, but in these times Audrey was my best friend in the world.
We’d been out walking for not half an hour when we heard the screech of a car taking the corner too quickly behind us. I turned to see the big white Mercedes, with Kendra at the wheel.
She pulled up beside us and abruptly hit the brakes, then threw open the passenger door at us with an angry jerk.
“Why’d you leave me like that?” she yelled.
“You seemed just fine,” I said.
“Fuck you, Chess, I’m talking to Audrey.”
“Fuck you, Kendra, I’m talking to Audrey.”
“Fuck you, snot brain!” she shouted.
I stared at her until I felt my face getting all loony-looking and then I kept walking. Clearly she had mistaken me for her little sister. Behind me there was silence, until I heard Audrey, momentarily undecided, start walking again. She caught up to me, and then so did Kendra, cruising in her big white car, the passenger door still open. I stopped and turned to her.
She just sat there staring at me, her face shadowed, her mouth screwed up into a failed rosebud.
“Come on, girls,” she said at last. “I’m lonely.”
*
The winter night had come on early out in the strange wilds of south-central PA, and we cruised the hills and flats and thin blank highways. Towns had names like Mount Zion, Palmyra, Shiloh, Deodate. Give to God, God-given? Out in the in-between spaces there was no light but the moon, sometimes bright, sometimes obscured behind scudding winter clouds. Kendra produced an enormous spliff, and though I didn’t like pot so much we all passed it around and smoked it and a kind of textbook mellow came over us all. Any anger left me completely. We were surrounded by night paintings: Pinkham Ryder, Blakelock. The land was silver, strange, and shimmering, and the feeling was that here we were, the three of us all together as one, protected in the dark and security of the enormous old car.
It was outside a town in Berks or maybe Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Dutch country, that we pulled over and gobbled up magic mushrooms.
I’d had these before and was sure they had no effect on me at all. As far as I was concerned, they just tasted like dirt and chewed up to the tooth like my childhood memory of chicken hearts. Things were good and fine. Then I was aware that the time in the car and the time outside the car had lost their sync. I was communicating this to Kendra while Audrey was splayed out happily in the back, her head lolling against the back of the seat. By now we were really cruising, but the inside of the car was very slow, and Kendra had jammed in an unlabeled eight-track tape, which was the only available music option and which turned out to be a Perry Como Christmas album. I can’t explain it, but Perry Como was seeming deeply sinister to me just then. We were cresting a hill on the long, skinny road when all of a sudden there was a kind of bump-bump and we flew up a little and I knew we had hit something—run it over.
“Holy fucking shit,” Kendra said.
She swerved wildly to the right and we jumped out of the car and attempted to race through the occluding, puddinglike air. And there it was, an opossum in the middle of the road.
“Is he dead?” Audrey asked.
Kendra turned and gave her a look. The opossum was in two fully separate pieces.
We all stood staring at him.
“The poor little guy,” Audrey said at last. She started struggling out of her coat.
“Oh no, no, no, Aud, please don’t do that, Aud,” I said as she attempted to throw her good winter coat over the little guy.
“I doubt he’s cold,” Kendra told her.
A debate ensued. Should we bury him? After all, we had ended his life. Isn’t burying the dead a corporal work of mercy? We turned all this over for some time.
In the end we simply cleared him off the road, which Audrey was all too happy to do, except that when she approached him with her beatific face and thin white hands we thought she might pick him up and hug him. So it was up to me to gingerly nudge and roll the opossum parts to the side of the road, where I more or less assembled him so he was somewhat intact-looking. There we prayed over him a little bit and I wiped the guts off my shoes, and then, suddenly propelled forward by a force stronger than me, I puked all over the little guy.
“Mr. Potts!” I said, between hurls. “I’m so sorry!”
But the puking did not end there, and I leaned on the cow fence and kept my head down until I puked out all of Christmas Day: turkey, ham, green beans, dinner rolls, pumpkin pie, fruitcake.
I had the knowledge that we were way fucked up, but we all got back into the car and we kept cruising. I felt like hell. We passed a big sign and Kendra began chanting: “Roadside America, Roadside America!”
“Roadside America, Roadside America!” Audrey picked it up.
“Roadside America, Roadside America!” they were both chanting.
“Fucking A, Roadside America!” Kendra yelled out.
I was dimly aware of this thing, Roadside America, some kind of big diorama or something, but specific knowledge of anything at all seemed very distant from me at that moment. Kendra took a quick turn that threw Aud and me against one side of the car, and for an awful moment I thought I was about to decorate the inside of the windshield with new Christmas upchuck.
We rolled across the parking lot, and then Kendra cut the engine abruptly. She and Audrey leapt from the car. I sat with my head down for some moments before I could make my body move.
I found them over at the other end of the parking lot, staring up at a huge Amish couple perched on a kind of dais. They must have been fiberglass or papier-mâché, and both of them were smiling madly. The male half of the couple had one ineptly articulated hand raised in greeting and a pitchfork clutched in the other. The woman was bent forward as if she were praying, and maybe because of this her smile took on a sad, grave aspect. She must have been holding something at some point, because her hands were close together, describing something circular in shape, perhaps a lost Amish baby. They were like some denial-ridden mother and father in couples grief counseling.
Behind us stood a long, rangy building with a kind of frontier-style stepped facade with ROADSIDE AMERICA MI
NIATURE VILLAGE across the top. In a moment Kendra had gone back across the parking lot and was up at the building, yanking on the door.
“It’s closed,” she called out.
“It’s three in the morning,” I yelled back.
She backed away from the locked door and stood staring at the facade. The affront to her seemed immense. Why should Roadside America be closed at three in the morning? What is this bullshit conspiracy? I had trailed her over to the front of the building, Audrey following, and now Audrey appeared to have keyed in to Kendra’s disappointment and began quietly sobbing. Kendra turned to us, white and commanding against the dark night.
“Let’s break in,” she said.
Even in my pretty well completely incoherent state, I thought this was a bad idea. I actually stood there thinking, Why is it that I’m always the one who doesn’t want to do something dumb? Why can’t I just get with the dumb flow, hotwire that dumb car, steal that dumb item of small electronics, skip out on that dumb restaurant tab and go prancing gaily down the avenue?
But the Amish couple had caught Kendra’s interest again. She began walking back across the parking lot toward them. Meanwhile Audrey had strayed in the opposite direction and I saw her plop down on the cold ground in front of an outdoor soda machine. I watched as she slowly extracted her cigarettes from her coat pocket, took one out, and meticulously ripped off its filter and threw it to the side. She found her matches, and it took her something like nine licks of the match on the striking panel to get a flame. As I watched her I began to well up with sadness.
Time's a Thief Page 10