Emporium

by Adam Johnson

  Then Mrs. Cassini leans over, her hand like it’s going for your belt loops, and you go limp, drop a hand from the wheel and give her room. “That’s better, Benny,” she says, and soon her strong chest is in your face—you’re in the fast lane!—as she fumbles around on the far side of your captain’s chair. She comes up with the microphone handset, the loopy cord bouncing in your face. When she’s composed herself a little, you give the BlueLiner a quick burst of gas and watch the tip of that catheter circle into a tight orbit below her hem. Cassini smiles sideways at you.

  You two’ve done this routine before.

  Blue Danube kicks into gear, and across the women’s faces in the mirror comes a certain serenity, like they’re all picturing the slow-tumbling spaceships from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie you thought was pretty sexual—all that docking and pod work—and which your dad said was a coded history of existentialism.

  She lifts her flask high. “For my husband,” she says into the mike, addressing the bus like a lounge singer. “Scholar. Diplomat. NASA scientist of the year.” Here she whoops loud, and the women are swaying to the music just enough to make the bus woozy between lanes.

  “He has a permit to buy weapons-grade plutonium, reserved parking at JPL. He wrote his name in the wet cement of Cape Canaveral’s launch pad, but it’s Thursday night, and he can’t come within five hundred feet of his wife for four more hours.”

  The bus explodes, the women are in the aisles, some with their arms in the air, dancing and pirouetting homages to both the famous Cassini satellite and the weekly, six-hour Cassini restraining order.

  Mrs. Cassini tosses the mike into your lap and from her glowing abandon, you’re trying to guess the destination this week: Shocking the tourists at the Idanha Hotel? Maybe scar-strutting with the black ties at the Capitol Club or lobbying complimentary cocktails from the Westin convention staff.

  Cassini moves closer, her lips just brushing your ear, and you want to close your eyes. “To the Cove, young captain,” she mouths and you know there’s both a difficult U-turn and some slumming ahead. But your shoulders start to loll to the music and soon you have the old BlueLiner waltzing through the backroads of Boise, a little too fast perhaps, though none of your passengers are very worried about crashing because they’ve all had cancer, and the motion of their bodies tonight seems to confirm both Space Odyssey theories.

  At the Cove, you wheel the bus around in a crush of white gypsum and bottle caps, coming to rest under the yellow buzz of bug lights and a single beer sign humming blue enough that cars look stripped of their paint. The Cove through the windscreen is a square slump-block hut set off by its brighter parking lot, dark-bordering pine, and backdrop of lake that’s snowmelt still.

  The women descend beside you, heels sinking in gravel, and make for the only door there is. They move past, winking, patting your shoulders, letting the sheen of their nylons run staticky along your forearm as you hold the door lever. There are some new faces in the Cancer Survivor’s Club this week, but you don’t have the energy to meet their eyes. You look to familiar faces instead, the veterans. It’s pathetic, for sure, but they ladle love on you and you take it, these Thursday-night women who flirt with you, rub your shoulders, teach you to foxtrot. Judge Helen—the one who granted the restraining order—is the last to leave, and she already has her weekly Winston in her lips. She is a bigger woman with short, spiked hair who is not afraid to wear black spandex, and you like her for that.

  They all cross the blue-yellow parking lot with a motion only cancer survivors can muster, a sexy, patient gait that comes with the knowledge bosses can’t fire dying women, that cops won’t cart them off, that bartenders don’t tell bald women they’ve had too much. Through a door padded with red vinyl and brass studs, they disappear, and you are alone again.

  Out stumble two men who turn back to stare at the red door in disbelief. One is wearing fishing gaiters. They look at each other, at the bus, strain a glance at the sky as if the weather might have something to do with the women they’ve seen and then backtrack, heads shaking, for an old Subaru by the Dumpster.

  You shut the door, check your watch, and pull out a Miller’s Analogies workbook. The college entrance test is Saturday, and you’re more than a year behind on everything. You put your feet up on the console and flip through the pages, a stream of letters and numbers that don’t even register.

  “I’ll scream rape,” comes from the back of the bus, singed with mock-play and the smell of tobacco.

  “You know the rules, Mrs. Cassini. No smoking on the BlueLiner.” You say this over your shoulder, feigning interest in antonyms in an effort not to encourage her. But you can feel her nearing, hear her slapping the overhead straps on the way, leaving them to swing in the dark behind her.

  “I could have Helen throw away the key,” she says and pauses, smoking. “I’m willing to bargain on your punishment, though.”

  “Cat-o’-nine-tails? Thousand licks, Mrs. Cassini?” Your voice is flat, disinterested.

  “Benny, your tongue. You’re lacking a refining, feminine influence.”

  “And you’re the best I’ve got?”

  She’s standing beside you now, taking one step down toward the door so that she is lower, but farther, so she has to lean. “Oh, Ben. If you only knew how much control it takes to be a role model for you.” She runs a hand through your hair in a circular motion that leaves her holding your earlobe. It’s a thing your mother used to do. “Seriously, though, how’s things? Stan okay?”

  “You know Dad, he’s sawing wood. I got a test coming up.”

  “Good, good. You study hard and I’ll throw you a party.” She taps the cigarette ash into her hand. “In the meantime, are you gonna help me get off?”

  “Mrs. Cassini?”

  She nods her head at the lever, and you swivel the doors open for her. “Relax, Benny. Go with things, okay? Live for me.” She turns to leave, but on the last step stops and lifts her skirt for a full bare-ass flash before jumping down and trotting off toward the red vinyl of home, and you’re left shivering with a knob in your hand. You know these women well. You know a side of them nobody sees, and Mrs. Cassini’s been playing the flirting “auntie” for a long time. Back then, though, you were seventeen and your mom was on this bus. Now you’re nineteen, a lot of things have changed, and it’s fifty-fifty at best whether you’ll even show for that test.

  You swing the doors shut and set the lock, more to keep yourself on the bus than anything, but the static is still in your arm, smoke hangs in the air. Your dad has a small State Farm branch—which is why Mom was insured to the teeth and you’re covered to drive a fifty-six-foot bus—but one time he took you with him to underwrite a warehouse, a windowless cinder building that stored marine batteries. Everything was primer gray except for the stacks of yellow cells with their red and green posts, but there was a pulse to that place that twitched like copper windings and made your mouth taste of zinc. You remember thinking this must be what it’s like inside a hydroelectric dam, with stands of vibrating water behind the walls. This is what you feel now from the Cove, this draw.

  You pick up your books and set them down.

  Your mom once said cancer was the best thing on earth, that as long as it didn’t kill you, you were going to live. When she and Cassini and the others started the club, they sat outside in your mom’s cactus garden, drinking tea and sharing. It wasn’t long before they started searching for stronger medicine and held rituals in the trees out back, events in the twilight where they buried their hopes and burned their fears in the group holes they’d dug. Except for a few veterans, the turnover rate in the club is pretty high, and you understand why green tea and empathy eventually yielded to Donna Karan dresses and a tang of vermouth.

  The I-High school counselor, Mrs. Crowley, said writing an essay about struggling with your mom’s death could open the doors of a lot of good colleges. You didn’t jump at that idea. She said look at the big picture: it could help you get int
o medical school someday, where you could make a difference, where you could find a cure for what took your mother.

  You told Mrs. Crowley she had something there, that working with radon and lab rats had always been a dream, but your real plans include asbestos. For some reason, you confessed to stealing your father’s drill bits, to once lying about the reading on your mother’s thermometer so you could go see Forrest Gump at the drive-in, admitted to sometimes eating her chemotherapy pills when she wasn’t around. Mrs. Crowley said remember to turn in the combination for your locker and bring a photo of yourself to the SAT.

  What you couldn’t explain to Mrs. Crowley was that the real danger is in handling it too well. Managing loss is your father’s business. He’s pretty good at it. He got mom the best medical plan, the best doctors, the best palliative counselor. Dad knew the stages of grief and there were no surprises. Mom even died on schedule. Those doctors were amazing; they called it within a weekend.

  Dad joined a support group and took up woodworking. He bought you a brass trumpet and a punching bag. Now he comes home from work, checks the Weather Channel—he’s crazy about the weather—puts on a shop apron, and goes into the garage to build the look-alikes of colonial furniture that fill your house.

  Sometimes he gets nostalgic on Sundays or has a few too many beers over dinner and tells you things about Mom when she was young. You’ve heard most of them many times, but once in a while he says something new, and you feel close to him for that. Your mom had a pony named Applejack when she was girl. In college, her favorite movie was The Andromeda Strain. That, pregnant with you, she was in Albertson’s supermarket when her water broke, and she calmly took a jar of pickles from the shelf, dropped it over the fluid on the floor, and moved on.

  But even these moments of disclosure from your father seem expected in a way, and his power tools never seem to rattle him the way you’d think they might, the way the BlueLiner’s big diesel can vibrate something loose in you that makes you forget where it is you are driving, makes you check and check the overhead mirror for her in row six. You think if Dad could have seen her on this bus one time, bright-eyed and destination bound, all those pieces from his replica projects wouldn’t fit together so well.

  You hear the thump of the red door and look out the windscreen to see a kid your age cross the lot with a white bucket of beer caps. He cuts around to the back dock, where he starts dumping them in the lake. It’s dark and a long way off, but you think you know him from the baseball team, from before you quit. He leans against the rail and he pours slowly, watching the caps go down like all those green innings in a near-championship stadium. His name might be Tony. Finished, he spits on what is probably his own reflection and goes inside. When the door closes, though, there is a woman standing beneath the blue beer sign.

  She crosses the lot, circling wide to avoid the floodlight. With calm, measured steps she walks around the far side of the bus, where she grabs a sapling with both hands and stares at her feet.

  She’s in trouble, about to be sick, but there’s something about her shoulders, the way her ribs flare and trim toward her waist. She’s younger, new to the club, and caught your eye in the mirror on the way over. You could tell she was drawn to the mood on the bus, the abandon, the acceptance of being out without her wig. For everyone on the BlueLiner, the worst has already happened, and this is how they can laugh and talk to one another across newly emptied seats. This is what your mother wanted: for everything to race on without her.

  Now, she retches, the thin branches shaking above her. When her shoes and ankles get wet, you know you should look away, but there is something necessary in the sight. It makes you wish your mother could have shown this side, the alone-and-sick, slipping-outside part of the deal, because all her strength, like your father’s adaptability, did nothing to brace you for after.

  Her heels shift in the gravel again, heading for the bus, where she shakes the locked doors. You find her seat, her purse, and at the cab, strip the towel off your captain’s chair before levering open the door. With the bright lights behind, she is more than alluring. She is here and real.

  She takes her bag from your hand. “Jesus,” she says. “This stuff I’m taking.”

  “I’m Ben,” you tell her. Inside you’re feeling that pulse, and don’t know what to say because somehow you’re already beyond small talk. And even just talking means you’re making an investment of some kind. It’s like standing before a brass trumpet or boxer’s bag: they promise to show you a lot more of yourself than a red face or sore hands, and you’re unsure if you want to touch them for that.

  You climb down to the last step and sit, so she’s taller. “Here,” you say, holding the towel in the air before her, and there’s this thing between you so clear that she grabs the door molding for balance and places a foot in your hand. You begin with her calf, stroking down to the heel.

  “Do you feel better?”

  “Sue. I’m sorry, Sue.”

  “Do you feel better, Sue?”

  “No, not really.”

  She has a Hickman port in her chest, a sort of gray button connected to a white tube that disappears into the skin below the collarbone. You know your cancers pretty well, and the Hickman’s a bad sign. It’s made so they can inject really strong drugs like vinblastine, chemicals that will burn out the veins unless they’re pumped straight into the superior vena cava, straight into the heart. You can feel the slim bones of her foot through the towel. Vinblastine is made from the purple blossoms of the periwinkle plant. You want to push that button.

  “I mean you’re nice for this, but this medicine . . .”

  “Ben.”

  “This medicine, Ben.” She shakes her head.

  You take her other foot when she offers, wanting to make her legs dry and clean. You want to tell her you understand, that you’ve tasted Cytoxan, that it made your fingernails loose and teeth hurt. The feeling like your molars have been pulled returns: platinum spark plugs have been screwed into your jaw, and for a moment, it’s like when they’d crackle to life in the middle of the night, making you see blue on the inside of your eyelids. “It’s okay,” you tell Sue.

  “What’s okay?”

  “Everything. It feels pretty bad now, I know, but it’ll all work out.”

  She pulls her foot back.

  Your voice is thinner even than Mrs. Crowley’s, but still you say, “Things’ll be fine.”

  “I’m pretty fucked, thank you. I’m screwed.”

  She says this and hops once, slipping a shoe strap over her heel before walking away.

  From your wallet you pull your entrance ticket to the SAT. The picture you glued to it doesn’t look anything like you. You cut it out of your sophomore yearbook, a dull-faced goofy kid who has no idea what’s coming, who doesn’t suspect that no one in his family will take a photo for the next three years.

  You follow the route Sue took through the cars, into the Cove.

  Inside, things are about what you’d thought. Several women have corralled two wrecker drivers into a group jitterbug that has them spinning off balance from woman to woman, their eyes unsure where to land—avoiding chests and hairlines—while their hands clutch at waists as if for emergency brakes. Oblivious to the fast rhythm, Mrs. Boyden dances with a small, older gentleman in a brown jumpsuit. They move like strangers on liberty, her fingers hooked in his collar, his hands gathering the fabric of her emerald dress like parachute cord, a move that smoothes where his head lay sideways on her sternum, listening, as if to the source of the softer music they seem to move to. There is no sign of Sue.

  Nothing seems to involve you. You sit at the bar wanting ice water while the bartender watches the Tonight Show on a soundless set. The music and laughing seem to sweep past, and it is as still on this stool as afternoons when you pull one of your father’s pine Louis XIV chairs into your mother’s cactus garden and contemplate in the half-light where she might’ve dug her holes. Lately, though, this is a riskier propositio
n because after only a year, you’re no longer so sure of what she hoped for and feared. If you wrote it, this is what your college essay would be about: Feeling for divots in a dark lawn with your toes. Renting movies like The Fighting Seabees with your father. Living in a house filled with cactus all winter, sleeping in a room made small by jade-green ribs and spines while the smell of hot saw blades from the garage blows in through the heat vent.

  Sue takes the stool next to you, and she also is ignored by the bartender. You ignore her too. In front of you is a wall-length mirror littered with business cards, snapshots in cheap plastic frames, and several yards of dollar bills signed with red marker. There is a crisp five-dollar bill that says Work-Battle-Battle-Win in beautiful script; it was the motto of your I-High baseball team, a stupid ritual you chanted before every game.

  At the end of the bar, like sisters, Judge Helen smokes and chats with a woman who has rad-therapy lines tattooed on her neck. If you catch her from the other side, where they took the lung, Judge Helen’s smoking can be spooky. But from here, her ribs expand as she drags and exhales, her laugh comes with a rise in her chest.

  If you were sick, you and Sue would be laughing like this. You’re pretty sure you might even have her in the back of the bus right now. But if you were sick, there’d be a hell of an essay in it, and you’d probably be at Harvard. As your mind hovers over cancer and college and Sue on hot vinyl, your eyes wander the mirror, and there, framed by shoulder-length black hair, are the brown eyes of your mother.

  This snapshot—taken by who, the bartender?—depicts your mother about to limbo under a pool cue held by her best friend, Mrs. Cassini, and another woman who’s no longer in the club. The colors are washed out, the eyes red, and Mom’s just starting to descend, her eyes reckoning the height of that bar. There is confetti in her hair and for now her breasts are whole, so you know this must be her thirty-eighth birthday, and that despite the sheer dresses, the snow outside the Cove is deep. Her friends have set the bar at a ridiculous height, a point from which no one could be expected to rise, and you’re wondering where you were when this picture was taken. Everyone smiles. She is about to fall, yet there is a thrill in this, too. They all lean forward, breath held, and for this moment, it looks like she is going to make it.