Sometimes, at night, she sought comfort at the foot of Sam’s bed; his little-boy breath, sighs in the night. She liked to walk Jingles, their old collie, early and then turn in for the night. But tonight she had promised him a night out, Papa Gino’s, or one of those godawful indoor playgrounds. Phony worlds created to look wonderful from a distance. No sooner were they in the car with the heater going full blast, and battling bumper-to-bumper traffic as people made their way home for the blizzard weekend, than Sam began begging for Wonderland. The latest site of numerous birthday parties, it was a huge tin structure, converted from one of the wholesale clubs that had gone out of business, and there were enough fluorescent tubes inside and out to light an airport.
So much for people staying in for the night. The Wonderland parking lot was filled to capacity, and Charlotte had to drive to satellite parking across the street behind Computer City. She flipped on her car alarm and turned to pull Sam’s hat into place and remind him that he was to hold her hand and walk quickly. She explained that it was icy and it was cold and they couldn’t stay at Wonderland that long anyway.
They crossed the street and threaded their way through the icy lot, while she committed to memory where the car was parked—third row down, between a red pickup and a blue station wagon. She should write it down; she was forgetting so many details now. She was about to open her purse for pen and paper, but Sam was rushing her, wanting to get there. This was the kind of fun that Jeff (and whatever woman he asked to accompany him) gave Sam every other weekend. It was the kind of fun she would enjoy much more once it was over, when they were safely tucked back in—doors all locked, dog at the foot of the bed—and she could tell herself she’d given Sam a wonderful night out.
The outside of the building was painted with characters from Alice in Wonderland, advertising what was offered inside: the Mad Hatter’s teaparty ride and the Queen’s croquet court, the mirrored funhouse, and so on. The place had not been open long, and the building was still ringed by Porta-Johns and piles of rubbish. Sam couldn’t wait to drop through the rabbit hole, a huge twisting slide through darkness. She thought she’d probably walk down. She was a technician who prepared people for their MRIs. She was the one who gave them Valium and talked soothingly. She had gone in once herself so that she’d know what she was talking about. It had felt like a coffin and she found herself consumed by irrational fears of no air and no light. Ever since, she had been careful to warn people seriously. She didn’t just offer the drugs; she recommended them. It will scare you to death, she always wanted to say, you will panic for air, but she fought the urge. She couldn’t afford to get transferred from her spot—there are very few nursing positions that don’t involve much blood. She had passed out cold three times during nursing school; most recently it had happened when she clipped Jingles’s toenail too close and sprayed blood all over the kitchen floor.
Sam was small for his age and his features looked fragile, more so because of the contrast of his thick, dark lashes against his pale face. He had her skin and Jeff’s straight dark hair, Jeff’s pale gray eyes. Whenever he pondered something—the reasons why they no longer live with his dad; Tiger, their cat, as she lay having kittens; or even this fun-filled park—his expression turned so serious that it made her want to cry.
Now she followed the concrete trail. Painted white-rabbit footprints led up to the door of the building. Despite her begging Sam not to run ahead of her, he was already up there, leaning against the turnstile where a family of five stood waiting to pay. The three children looked just like their mother, pale blond hair, plump white skin. Was the older, darker man the father?
Charlotte bought two passes, and they moved through the turnstile. Directly ahead was the rabbit hole. There was a ramp for those unable to slide, and she toyed with the idea of using it, but Sam was waiting for her. Would Jeff slide? Of course he would. She followed Sam into the long line, which was nearing the hole, slow step by slow step. Jeff would be coming to pick Sam up the next day. He was taking him for a week, spring vacation, another irony that the weathermen kept pointing out. It was the first time Sam would be away for more than two nights, and though she relished a little bit of quiet time, which she had not had in weeks, she couldn’t imagine sleeping night after night in an empty house.
Before she could speak, Sam leaped through the hole and was gone, his happy scream spiraling after him in the tunnel. Charlotte felt the eyes of antsy children frustrated by slowness. “Come on,” Sam was calling, and she surprised herself by stepping in, letting the tube take her body. The drop was much steeper than she’d anticipated. She heard herself screaming all the way to the bottom, a thick cushion of foam. She was out of breath, her neck tense. A man monitoring the landing yanked her forward just as another kid plowed down.
Sam was already in line for the Red Rose Ride, a piece of machinery with long spidery arms and carts that turned and spun at the end of each arm. It was the tallest ride in the building and they had raised the ceiling to accommodate it. When she was little she had loved this kind of ride, had thrilled to see rinky-dink carnivals stop in her hometown and within a few hours create a blinking, spinning, breathtaking world. On their honeymoon she and Jeff had ridden a roller-coaster that raced upside down through a dark tunnel; they had laughed at the sign warning those with heart problems to stay away. Now she caught herself studying the nuts and bolts that held one piece to another, the safety bar latches, and the rough-looking characters pulling the levers. Charlotte tilted her head and watched the arms weave and turn and the rosebuds spin. She heard the screams of the rosebud riders; she saw their arms waving and their hair flying. She looked up to see that the monstrous ceiling portrayed a summer sky, pale blue with puffy white clouds and streaks of sunshine.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked Sam. He was nodding, his hand clutching the fabric of her shirt. He no longer grabbed her, just things attached to her, but her sister claimed this would have happened anyway, even if Jeff were home, even if there had never been the lengthy separation, the cold distant discussions. “He’s just growing up,” her sister said.
They slid into their designated rosebud and an attendant latched the safety bar. Charlotte could not keep herself from repeatedly checking it, lifting and pulling. She had to check and double-check, the same way she did the doors and windows of their house late at night. She watched the young boy who had locked them in. Was he really competent to pull that lever? Had there been any accidents here in Wonderland in its three months of existence? Had anyone’s cart gone sailing through that fake sky?
With the blizzard coming, Charlotte thought Wonderland might be part of what Jeff had planned for the vacation week. For once she’d beaten him to the draw. She would have the pleasure of watching Sam have fun and she would leave the nausea and irritability following too much junk food and too little sleep for Jeff to deal with for once.
It will scare you to death, she wanted to tell him, but didn’t he already know that? Wasn’t fear why he had left to begin with—fear of getting older, fear of having a wife who was getting older, fear of staying aboard the same old train when others were hopping onto newer and faster engines? Charlotte closed her eyes and allowed her head to spin and spin with the words, with a vision of Jeff hearing all of this come from her, his look of surprise at her forcefulness. She brushed away her tangled hair, and saw Sam still clutching the safety bar. “Whew,” she said and waited, not sure if he were about to laugh or cry. Joy or pain? High or low? She feared extremes and always had. If things were too good she waited for the bottom to drop out; if things were bad, she was overwhelmed by the energy required to climb back up. She thought living right in the middle was okay, but that was where they disagreed. It’s dead, he said, meaning their marriage, even though she pretended not to hear and went to pull down and throw away a crusty brown philodendron on the bookcase. Just accept it.
Without thinking, she reached and pulled Sam up close to her, which jerked him to attention. H
e was aware of the older kids waiting in line as he pushed her away. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “Let’s go again!”
They played a round of what was really miniature golf but was billed as croquet, and Sam won a free pass to play again. It seemed everyone won such a pass, or at least every kid did, so all that was needed was another ticket for the adult to play along. If only the children would suddenly unite and play together by themselves. Just behind them were a young boy with only one arm and a man whom she assumed was his father. The boy did amazingly well with just his right arm, and as he adjusted the club with his chin and then swung, Charlotte saw the stump of his other arm, which ended just below the elbow to leave him a slight el. A large dimple of skin had been pulled and tucked in like a navel. When Sam pushed her forward to the next hole—just beyond a line of aluminum cards bent in funny positions—she realized that the father had seen her staring. She looked away, ashamed, her face flushed. “Good one,” the man yelled. The boy had not, in fact, gotten the ball in. He had merely touched it with the club, tapped it a few inches. She glanced at the man and found him gazing at her. His large brown eyes solemn, he gave her a slight nod, and then a smile, as if to reassure her that they were used to the stares, as if to tell her she hadn’t done anything wrong. She nodded back and followed Sam to the eighteenth hole, where a large wooden cutout of the Cheshire Cat was set to flash lights and ring bells for holes-in-one.
Kindness was not something Charlotte had allowed herself to feel since the separation. She had severed all ties with their mutual friends, even those who wanted to remain close to her. She was afraid to trust anybody. If the person you sleep with every night can turn on you, why not an aquaintance? Why not a neighbor? When Barbara Reynolds called to check on her (she and Jeff had been in their wedding, and they’d been in their’s), Charlotte had more or less told her that she didn’t want to see them.
“But we’re talking about years, Charlotte,” Barbara said, her voice sounding high and unnatural, to Charlotte who cradled the receiver so that her hands could move freely through the medicine chest, discarding old razor blades and shaving cream. She poured out a bottle of aftershave Sam had given to Jeff for Father’s Day; she knew even as she poured it out that she would spend the afternoon going back into the bathroom to catch what remained of the familiar scent.
“Well, I can’t help that.” Charlotte had said. She heard the shock and hurt in Barbara’s voice, but it was as if she were reading a prewritten script. It was what she had to do to survive. Those who were really her friends would, she believed, welcome her back when it was all over and when she felt secure enough to return. It was a kind of test—prove you are loyal. “I’m starting all over and I mean from scratch.”
“Good. That’s a boy.” The man was patting his son on the back. His muscles rippled under the tight sleeves of his Grateful Dead T-shirt. The one-armed boy was begging to go on another ride, and the man stopped and turned to the side, pulled a thin canvas wallet from his back pocket and fingered the bills. She turned her head quickly, but again he caught her watching. His shoelaces were tied in big fat bows identical to the boy’s and they wore their hair similarly, cut close and combed straight back.
She followed Sam to the snack bar, where they ordered hot dogs and drinks. They sat at a picnic table under enormous signs that said “Eat Me” and “Drink Me.” Nearby was a petting zoo, a series of too-small open-lidded cages: a pathetic flamingo, two white rabbits, some mice, a couple of goats, and a frightened baby tiger. While Sam ran from cage to cage, she sat on a bench and studied the crowd: the excited children and their parents worn out from another work week and dreading the snow-shoveling they’d have to do the next day. The pale, plump family was squeezed around one table sharing two huge pizzas. Charlotte watched as all five roared in laughter at something the youngest had said. The youngest looked exactly like the father when he laughed. When the manager of Wonderland (a large man with a bad toupee) stopped by to see if the family needed anything, the father responded quickly with a wave of his hand that they didn’t need anything else. “We’re just fine,” he said, and Charlotte felt a great twist of envy over the pronoun we, over his speaking on behalf of the others—on behalf of his family.
She caught herself hoping for a blizzard that would keep Jeff’s girlfriends away and leave him stranded all alone with Sam. She thought of Sam tossing and twisting throughout the night, missing his own bed. Of his middle-of-the-night cries of “But I can’t sleep!” But when Sam came running up to get her attention, to make sure she watched while he actually touched the tiger, she asked herself what she was doing, wishing misery on him, when all she really wanted was for Jeff to say that he was sorry, it was a mistake; he had taken her for granted, would she please take him back.
She turned to see a man in a Wonderland suit (she guessed they were all meant to look like the Mad Hatter) standing by Sam as he stroked the poor little tiger. She felt a rush of fear and then there was the man with the one-armed boy, waiting their turn. Again the father nodded to her as if to assuage her fears before letting his own son offer up his one good arm to the creature.
The boy also had a scar along his neck, visible now that his sweat-slicked hair was pushed back and off to one side. She had tried to imagine the birth of the child, the pronouncement of his deformity to the parents. She had wondered if such a thing made a marriage stronger, pulled two people closer, begged that they hold each other in the night when they woke to discover that what they hoped was a nightmare was real. But maybe it wasn’t a birth defect. Now, it looked more like the result of an accident. A car crash? Icy roads? Was the mother lost on some back road along with the boy’s arm? Or had he gotten too close to some horrible machine? She realized that she had been holding her breath, that she had failed even to notice the pale family of five go back to order two more pizzas.
“Did you see me?” Sam asked as he raced up, his shoe untied and dragging the ground. “Wait till I tell Dad.”
Their last ride of the night was through the house of mirrors. They squeezed into a tiny cart on a track. The cart was deep, the sides so high passengers could see only what was directly in front. What Charlotte could see was that the man and the one-armed boy were in the next cart up. She heard them talking; the boy said he was tired, that he wanted to go home. Then there was a whir of machinery and their carts split and turned, racing toward this mirror and then that. Everywhere she looked she saw her face beside Sam’s, long and thin, round and fat, their eyes huge, like insect eyes. She strained to watch other people pass, normal faces, and managed to catch sight of a teenage couple she had seen kissing at one of the tables earlier; she glimpsed little children, sunk down in the huge seats, the safety bars seeming apt to decapitate them as they twisted and turned, eyes held wide in alarm and fear. Sam grabbed her now. He reached his hand over and held tightly to her arm, and she grabbed him back closing her eyes to the dizzying mirrored spin. He gripped her the same way that she had always gripped Jeff. Every year they had returned to the Spooky Car Wash to celebrate the night they met, and every year she would shriek and lean away from the windows where ghoulish faces appeared along with suds and brushes. The year Sam was three they had to honk the horn and beg the goblins to back off; he was wailing in the back seat and even when they drove to Friendly’s for ice cream and sat with him huddled up in the front seat between them eating his ice-cream cone, he continued to sniff and cry and refused to look at them. The next year they got a babysitter and left Sam at home, and the year after that he loved it so much they went through twice. She should have known when Jeff was too busy to go last year that everything was not as good as it seemed.
She was dizzy by the time the carts began to slow and filed back onto the track. It was still dark, but she heard the one-armed boy again. Let me go, he said, and then the machinery screeched and whined. Please, Mister. Mister? Wasn’t he the father? Wasn’t he the person in charge? She thought she heard Shut up; she thought she heard I’ll break your goddamn n
eck, but the PA system was announcing the license number of a car with its lights on and that it was one hour until closing. And there was old disco music blasting from the video arcade. She blinked against the bright fluorescent lights, the swarms of people in line for this ride, that game. A group of older children was dancing to that song, “YMCA.” She looked at Sam to see if he had heard what she heard, but he was laughing and begging to go again; everyone was laughing, talking, sighing with relief. She glanced up just in time to see the man and the boy exit the ride and head through the crowd. They walked fast, the man pulling the boy along. What had she witnessed? A threat? A warning? Her mind raced, conjuring every horror show she’d ever seen, every hideous news story. These evil people appeared normal on the surface, but then enough time passed for neighbors’ voices, and relatives’, to worm out of the woodwork, to remember that the person was antisocial, had a volatile temper, had tortured animals as a kid, had no conscience, no respect for others. Were people guilty when they turned their heads and ignored all the signs? Was she?
They stumbled out of their cart and down the ramp, but by then the man and the boy had disappeared in the crowd. Though Sam begged for another ride, she dragged him by the hand up to the food counter and quietly tried to explain to the woman serving the sodas that she had heard a man threatening a child. “I threaten mine all day long,” the woman said and sighed. “If you don’t do this, I’ll never let you out of this house again.” Her lips turned downward as she reached to fill another cup.
The young security guard at the exit smiled at Charlotte while she stood near him, trying to decide if she should say anything to him. And what was he supposed to do? What was she supposed to do? Why would the guard be any more trustworthy than anybody else in the world? She shivered. In her mind, many minutes had already passed—enough time to pull a boy into a car, to tie him up, to slit his throat, to toss him out like a sack of garbage on the turnpike.
Final Vinyl Days Page 10