by Delia Ephron
Tim, driving them home, suggests they stop at the Pick ’n Save. “It’s open twenty-four-seven.” He assures them that since he’s the assistant manager they can get whatever they need, it won’t cost them. “It’s the least I can do,” he tells Tracee.
When they arrive he pulls Tami, the cashier, aside, and tells her to put all their stuff on his tab.
“What tab?” says Tami.
“Start a tab.”
Tami ignores him and continues reading In Touch.
“Is Buzzard around?” Buzzard is their nickname for the owner, although the owner doesn’t know it.
“In the booth,” she says.
“Not happening,” says Buzzard when Tim asks.
“You didn’t even raise me when you promoted me. Not one dollar more. And I’m still doing all the stacking and pricing I did before, plus keeping things smooth. I’m the best at keeping things smooth, you know that. The least you can do is let me put their stuff on a tab.”
Buzzard cleans his nails with a penknife.
“I’ll work it off two extra hours a week.”
“Fair deal,” says Buzzard.
“Whatever you need, it’s on me,” Tim shouts to the women, who have dispersed down various aisles.
Lana calls, “One soap and one toothpaste for all three of us. And three toothbrushes. I’ll get them.”
Tracee tries on sunglasses. The pair she fancies has red frames and black lenses. When she puts them on she feels like a gangster’s girlfriend. She slips them into her purse as Tim skids to a stop at her aisle. “Whatever you want, it’s on me.”
She looks at his friendly face brimming with kindness and generosity. She wants to put the glasses back. She wants them to jump out of her purse and onto the display. But it’s as if they’re gone, and she feels helpless to do anything about it. All she says is, “Thank you, that’s really nice, but Lana will get everything I need.”
Rita wanders up one aisle after another. She picks up a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, puts it back, and picks it up again. She meanders through the makeup, then gets interested in something called “butterfly washcloths,” pastel-colored netting sewn together into a floppy ball. She runs one up her arm, and decides she’d like that too. At that point she gets a plastic basket to carry things. She goes to the section with stockings and tights—she’s going to need more panty hose—but then on the opposite shelf notices a three-pack of women’s underwear on sale for six dollars. After examining the pictures carefully on the cardboard box, she selects the relatively sedate bikini cut. Moving on, she reads all the labels on hand creams and then finds herself in the shampoos and conditioners, trying to make sense of the choices, not even sure whether her hair is dry, normal, or oily. These distinctions have always escaped her. She’s never tried a conditioner and has used the same shampoo her whole life: Prell. When she spies a shampoo-and-conditioner combination with the name Fresh & Breezy, she unscrews the top and inhales deeply. A lovely aroma, not too sweet, piney. It also reminds her of dandelions.
She hopes it is just the thing for what she has in mind.
16
Rita has always been able to wake at the exact time she wants without the help of an alarm clock. At five a.m. she sits up in the chair, confused for a second to find herself in these surroundings, then relieved. It was awkward but not terrible to sleep this way, half sitting, half lying, with her legs on the double bed, which Tracee and Lana share.
She raises her legs off the spread and lowers her feet to the floor, waiting a second to see if Lana or Tracee stirs, and when they don’t, she gets up and tiptoes to the closet. The rug under her bare feet feels like an old dry sponge. She nudges the closet door open, lifts Tim’s pants off a hook, checks his pockets, and turns up what she wants: his keys.
She tiptoes into the bathroom, where Tim is curled up in the shower, a folded hand towel for a pillow and a skimpy bath towel for a blanket. Last night he gave them T-shirts to sleep in, and before bed they all rinsed their clothes and hung them to dry—over the shower rod and towel racks, across the sink, and over the toilet seat (which is down).
Rita takes her blouse, skirt, bra, and panty hose, and tiptoes back out. She starts to dress but then, it’s dark out, why not, she thinks, and quiet as a mouse she leaves, wearing Tim’s tee and carrying her clothes, shoes, and the box of new underwear. She’s hoping for a trash can on the way to Tim’s car. When she doesn’t find one, she sticks the panty hose in Tim’s glove compartment, planning to toss them later. She dresses in the car, and soon after, enjoying the freedom of bare legs and bikini underwear, she arrives at The Lion, locates the right key on the chain, and unlocks the padlock.
Once inside, she heads straight for the ladies’ room. She washes her hair with her new shampoo and conditioner. There is no hot water, but after the first shock of cold she finds the experience refreshing. Her hair reaches nearly to the middle of her back. She hasn’t had it cut in years.
When she has finished, she arranges her wet hair around her shoulders as if it’s a full skirt.
Rita leaves the ladies’ room and walks to Marcel’s cage. Marcel is asleep, lying on his side, his front paws crossed over each other. The paws look soft, like the paws of a stuffed animal. She notices that sprays of little brown freckles form a mustache below his nose.
She sits on the floor right smack against the bars with her back to the cage. She smooths her hair.
And sits.
And sits.
She senses the lion’s presence behind her. His head looms up behind hers and she hears him sniffing. The sniffs are short and then longer and more satisfied. She knows that he is sniffing her hair and that he likes it.
She stays there for a half hour at least, barely moving a muscle, simply listening to Marcel’s friendly—yes, she is sure that they are friendly—sniffs.
Then she tells Marcel good-bye, locks up the place, and, under a cloudless sky showing the first light of day, drives back to the motel.
When she enters, turning the knob so there is barely a click, everyone is still asleep. She slips the keys back in Tim’s pocket.
That night, when Rita buses tables, the lion follows her, moving from one side of the cage to the other.
17
The next day Rita asks Tim if he’ll drop her at the library. He’s giving a driving lesson to a sixteen-year-old named Debi, and the ride over is a herky-jerky experience. Every time Debi makes a turn, she accelerates, changes her mind, and hits the brakes. When they get to the library, in spite of Tim’s careful guidance, Debi drives right up on the curb.
The librarian is helpful, setting Rita up at a computer where she can use the Internet. Who is this woman plain enough to be a maiden aunt in a period novel? the librarian wonders. What is she doing at the Fairville Public Library?
She sneaks a look over Rita’s shoulder to see what Rita is Googling. On the screen is a picture of a lion jumping back and forth through a hoop. Below which it says, “Never try anything when the lion is hungry.”
As the librarian goes to answer the phone, Rita scrolls down and reads more.
The Lion
Clayton built The Lion twenty years ago, when the North Carolina furniture business was booming and tobacco farming was profitable. The design was his wife’s idea. “A hodgepodge,” Helen called it. “Keep it cheap—buy whatever they’ve got at the scrap yard, mix it all together. The crazy construction will get attention,” she said. She was right.
He remembers the night they came up with the idea. All their friends had children, and Helen didn’t see herself as the mothering type, but they wanted something together, a project. They went out for steaks—it was their second-year anniversary. They sat in the corner booth at the Outback Steakhouse. Everyone they knew drank beer, but Helen always ordered, “White wine, whatever you’ve got.” She smoked through the meal, letting the cigarette burn in the ashtray, taking a satisfying drag now and then. “We’re night people,” she said, and that’s what led to the whole notion
of opening a bar, a big one with a jukebox and dancing.
Afterward, even though it was a cold night in December, they’d taken a ride in the Chevy with the top down. Helen took off her scarf and let the wind rip through her carefully curled bouffant. She always set her hair in hot rollers the size of frozen orange juice cans. They tooled up and down back roads hunting for For Sale signs, and were exhilarated when they saw a couple of flat acres available on Winstead Road. The property was convenient, right off the highway.
Helen was angular. Her hip bones poked out. She had thin arms with sharp elbows, narrow hard shoulders, and pointy breasts. You could get stabbed hugging that woman, which should have been a tip-off. She wore flowered dresses in slinky nylon that weren’t exactly sexy but clung. Her skirts flared and stopped above the knee. She had good legs. And she was sociable. She kept the customers happy, moving from table to table. “Clayton’s Place”—that’s what The Lion was called then—was popular. One night an old beau of Helen’s roared up on a motorcycle. He’d stopped in Fairville and had asked if anyone knew where she was. Everyone knew exactly where she was every single night. A couple of days later she told Clayton she realized it had been him all along.
“She’s gone,” was all he’d say when people asked. Folks were forced to speculate. They figured it out because a few had seen her eyes light up when that man walked in, and had noticed that she didn’t table-hop that night.
Clayton never let on, even to himself, that he was bothered. So what if Helen took off and told him it was someone else all along. So what if that made all their years together something of a delusion.
Then Rocky died.
Rocky was a black mutt, mostly Lab, sleek-furred and graceful. Rocky went everywhere with Clayton. He loved the Chevy Bel Air. He sat up proudly in the front seat after Helen left (before that, in the back), and was handsome enough to do the car justice. He died of cancer—a quick death—and while Clayton couldn’t allow himself to grieve for a wife who took off with another man, he went to pieces over the death of his dog. Of course, it wasn’t only Rocky he was mourning. It was the double whammy, all that loss. He tanked. He stopped taking care of his house, lived basically in the living room, sleeping on the couch. Sweats were the easiest thing to put on. He got sarcastic too. Couldn’t help it.
Clayton’s falling off a cliff emotionally coincided with tobacco farming and furniture manufacturing hitting hard times. Some farmers switched to soybeans but didn’t make as much. Everyone had less to spend, and going to Clayton’s was depressing because Clayton was depressed. Many of the customers were depressed already. Only a few regulars came by out of loyalty, to cheer him up or because they couldn’t give up the habit.
And that’s the way it was until two years ago, when his aunt died. His mother’s sister. She was his last living relative and she named him in her will as beneficiary. Clayton had to go to Florida to sell her small condo.
He drove down. It felt good driving around Miami. His 1957 Chevy blended in with the surroundings, all those spruced-up fifties buildings, many of them in orange or trimmed in orange, like his car’s leather seats and dashboard. The ocean breezes pepped him up too. He spent a week getting his aunt’s stuff sorted and found a Realtor to handle the condo sale. In the evenings he sat outdoors under a beach umbrella at a local bar eating fish tacos and drinking mojitos. No question he was buzzed when he picked up a newspaper that someone had left behind on the next table, read the classifieds, and, under “Animals for Sale,” saw an ad for “big cat.” He somehow knew what was going down. Someone was unloading a lion.
He called the number. The woman who answered had an accent he couldn’t place. That she sounded foreign made him more circumspect. Instead of saying, “What’s the deal? Are you selling a lion?” he said, “I’m interested in what you’re selling.”
She was polite. “We’ll be happy to meet you, sir, at nine this evening in Jefferson Park.”
He walked through a fancy wrought-iron gate into a tropical garden, an oasis of large, leafy plants and palm trees, their giant fronds in silhouette against the night sky. The couple was waiting.
He could barely see them. The garden was all darkness and shadows, and they were shadowy figures—olive skinned, dressed in black, with black eyes and shiny ebony hair, hers long and straight, his long too, wavy and tucked behind his ears. Clayton assumed they were Gypsies, a conclusion based on his fantasy of a Gypsy rather than any direct knowledge, and the fact that she wore large gold hoop earrings and a bracelet that jangled. She had a low, sultry voice, which made the experience even more novel and enticing, and Clayton more inclined to go with the flow.
No names were exchanged.
They led him to the street, where a horse trailer was parked.
“The circus is done with him,” the woman said as Clayton looked into the trailer through a small square wire grate.
The lion was facing him. The remarkable yellow eyes, rimmed in a brushstroke of black, were flat. They gave nothing away. His head hung low. He’ll die if I don’t take him, Clayton thought. Maybe he was thinking of himself. This was his last chance too. At the same time, it didn’t seem that the animal wanted to be rescued. It turned its head away, uninterested.
Clayton believed the story—that the lion was from the circus. It made sense. He knew the circus summered or wintered in Florida, whichever season it wasn’t touring.
“Why aren’t you giving him to a zoo or one of those safari places?”
“No one wants him.” The woman knew how to close a deal. She was certain this explanation would hit home, that Clayton would identify.
“You’d think someone would.”
“He’s old. Believe me, sir, it’s not easy to find a home for a wild animal.”
The man said nothing, only kept his hands in his pockets and nodded whenever the woman spoke.
“We tried to give a parrot to a zoo once, a beautiful bird, and it was not possible. She took up much less space than Marcel.”
“Marcel? That’s his name?”
She wiggled her fingers, showing off silver nails. “Marcel, yes.”
They followed Clayton to an ATM. He withdrew six hundred dollars to add to the four hundred he already had. Was he saving himself or the lion? Was it folly? A balmy night, two Gypsies, a garden as lush as a jungle, the intoxicating scent of gardenia and jasmine. A man could do something crazy, like fall in love or buy a lion.
They helped him attach the trailer to his Chevy, and as they drove off, the woman called out the window, “When one door closes, another opens.”
“A goddamn cliché,” Clayton said to himself. Yet it resonated.
He renamed his bar The Lion. He used the money from the condo sale to make it lionproof. He built the cage, added drainage and several accordion doors along the back to open the place wide. The cat needed fresh air. But after an initial flurry of interest, business lapsed to what it had been before, only now instead of one depressed soul in the bar (Clayton), there were two (Clayton and Marcel).
When Clayton discovered Tracee, as pretty as a spring day, snooping in his refrigerator, and then Lana, tough and sexy, strolled in, he remembered the door-closes-opens thing. He’d never been able to shake a belief in it, still harbored a tiny hope. The lion, now these women. Gypsies were fortune-tellers, weren’t they? Then the very first night, Lana tried to stage an intervention in the ladies’ room, browbeating poor Candy. When he was home later microwaving some mac and cheese, he laughed about it—how loony tunes was it of him to imagine they were some sort of salvation? Still, they weren’t dull. He sat on the couch in his ratty blue terry-cloth bathrobe listening to a Braves away game on the radio. His TV was shot. A few weeks before, when the sound was static, he’d taken it apart. The wires were still strewn about.
The game was in extra innings, tied 6–6, when it occurred to him: Lana is like Rocky.
Rocky could get obsessed. He would scratch the same spot, trying to dig a hole in the wood floor, which was impossi
ble. But if Clayton threw a ball, Rocky forgot all about the floor and chased the ball. Perhaps like Rocky, Lana needed redirecting.
The next night he pointed to the back of the bar—all the bottles and glasses—and said, “Do something with this. Make it nice.”
She started organizing and reorganizing the liquor bottles by height and color. Sure enough, it turned into an obsession. Lana returned to the task whenever she wasn’t waitressing. Clayton, pleased with himself, foolishly thought it was that easy to keep her out of trouble.
18
Tracee flutters around Lana and Rita as they approach the motel office. “Cash,” she says. “Just pay cash.”
“Of course cash,” says Lana. “We don’t have anything else.”
“And don’t sign.”
“What?”
“Anything.”
“I’ll handle it, Tee. Don’t I always handle it?”
They have been paid for their first two weeks’ work.
“A grand total of two hundred thirty.” Clayton pulled it from the register with a flourish and counted it out. Enough to get a room of their own, and worth it, they decided. They all feel guilty about Tim’s sleeping in the shower, especially because he is cheerful and obliging and acts as if they are doing him a favor, allowing him to curl up every night on the damp, cramped concrete floor. He shares his clothes with Tracee too. She wears his shirts as minidresses. And he drives them everywhere.
Rita, who has been making daily secret early-morning visits to Marcel, knows that Tim doesn’t lock his door and she can continue to sneak his keys and borrow his car.
“Maybe I don’t want to go in. I don’t want to be noticed,” says Tracee.
“Fine,” says Lana. She does not point out that Tracee works in a bar every night. Rita has gotten used to Tracee’s intermittent paranoia. One morning when Marcel was sniffing her hair and Rita was sitting cross-legged with her back to him as usual, she said, “We’re all hiding from something.” She just put it out there.