The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  “Lemme see it?” Alice Marie reached for the gun and Evie pulled her hand away.

  “Careful, it’s loaded.”

  Alice Marie gave a huff of disbelief. “Joe Cullen’s wife is walking around with a loaded gun? Evie Lynne, you’re out of your mind. You don’t even know how to shoot that thing.” She spoke in the haughty, elder-sister tone that had infuriated Evie ever since they were little. But now, with the gun resting lightly in the palm of her hand, she felt no irritation.

  Alice Marie, sensing this, increased her disapproval. She leaned back in her chair and regarded her younger sister with cool eyes.

  “You know what that gun is?” she said after a moment.

  “A revolver.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Alice Marie pointed and flexed her toes, wire-walker warm-up style.

  “What do you mean, then?”

  “Hush your voice, the baby’s napping. I mean, that gun? It’s a Freudian symbol.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been reading about dream interpretation, and psychologically speaking, you are carrying around a classic Freudian symbol. What you really want isn’t a gun, it’s a—a male organ.”

  Evie started to laugh, then caught herself—laughing hurt her broken ribs.

  Alice Marie nodded sagely. “That gun means you really want—you know, a penis, and since you can’t have one, you bought a gun instead.”

  “Jesus, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of. What magazine are you getting this out of?”

  “I’m reading a book,” Alice Marie said haughtily, “The Thinking Person’s Guide to the Mind.”

  “Alice Marie, if you think I want some old dick hanging down between my legs you’re dumber than I thought you were. What I want—” Evelyn stopped, because suddenly the conversation wasn’t funny anymore and her voice was shaking. “What I want is for Joe to keep his hands off me when he comes home in the middle of the night drunk out of his mind and wanting to screw, and not too drunk to smack me if I don’t want to. I’m sick of it, can you understand that?”

  “I understand that fine. What none of us understand is why you still put up with him at all.”

  “What’s that mean—what are people saying?”

  “Nothing you haven’t heard. That you should divorce him. That if he wasn’t your husband, he’d have been kicked out of the show long ago.”

  “Well, he is my husband.” Evelyn got up and went over to Alice Marie’s tiny refrigerator. She poured herself a glass of milk, stirred in a few squirts of chocolate syrup and drank it down in one long swallow. She dropped her spoon in the tin washtub where it clattered loudly on a frying pan. From the back of the trailer the baby began to howl.

  “Now look what you did.” Alice Marie got up heavily, giving Evelyn the older sister scowl, and pulled aside the curtain hung across the rear of the Winnebago. “Hush, baby. C’mere, honey.” She heaved the toddler, Rusty, into her lap and stroked his hair.

  “I could divorce him,” Evelyn said.

  “That just occur to you, dumbbell?”

  “No, but you can’t just divorce somebody just like that.”

  “Throwing him out of the trailer would be a good start.”

  “It’s his trailer. I dunno, Alice Marie. Maybe he just needs to cool off.”

  Alice Marie jutted her chin at the little gun. “You gonna cool him off real good with that, if you’re not careful.”

  Evelyn dropped the gun into her shoulder bag. “I have to go now.”

  “Wait.” Alice Marie transferred Rusty to her shoulder and with a grunt, stood up from the daybed. Evelyn looked at her sister. Worry lines puckered Alice Marie’s forehead. When their eyes met, Alice Marie turned away and addressed her son: “You need a clean diaper, don’t you, baby?”

  “Well?” Evelyn asked.

  Alice Marie shifted the baby. “You wanna stay here tonight?”

  “Here in your trailer?”

  “Yeah. You can sleep in the overhead here, and Rusty can move to the fold-away.”

  She looks tired, Evelyn thought with a touch of surprise. Alice Marie’s perfect golden hair was pulled into a hasty ponytail at the nape of her neck and looked dirty. Her mouth, making halfhearted kissing noises at Rusty, was tired. Evelyn lowered her empty chocolate milk glass gently into the washtub. “You sure about that?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “Lemme think about it.” She opened the screen door.

  “Just come over after the show,” said Alice Marie.

  Evelyn went down the steps and across the lot to her own trailer. As she walked, her shoulder bag knocked gently against her hip, its heaviest item padded by the more benign contents: a bottle of Freckle-Fade Foundation, a movie magazine, a change purse, a lipstick, a package of Adams clove chewing gum. For the first time in months she felt happy. Was it because Alice Marie was being so nice? Or was it that, as easy as picking up a gun, she no longer felt afraid of her husband?

  “How about this,” Ingrid said, reaching around for an apple from the grocery bag in the back seat. “‘The air conditioner in the Oldsmobile hadn’t worked since Truman was president, and it was hotter than V-J day in Nagasaki.’”

  “This car is falling apart,” Evelyn said. “Now it won’t go into drive.” She moved the lever in and out of park and tried again, cursing under her breath. The computerized sign outside the bank said it was 98 degrees out, the car was an oven and the transmission wouldn’t engage. This was not Dream Life anymore; this was Jones and Wallace all the way. She turned the car off, turned it on and tried again and the Olds jerked forward. After they’d lugged the groceries into the kitchen, Evelyn wet a dish towel and mopped her face.

  “Hey,” said Ingrid, watching her, “why don’t we bike over to Walden Pond and go swimming?”

  “How about I don’t have a bike?” Evelyn said.

  “I can ride you on my handlebars.”

  “Not for ten miles you can’t.”

  “It’s not that far.”

  “Not in this heat,” she said. “Anyway, I burn easily.” Evelyn pictured herself walking naked into the water, clothed in ink from breast bone to knees. Small children screeching and pointing, mothers calling out to the lifeguard, Do something.

  “You can’t swim, can you?” Ingrid asked.

  “Okay, no. I can’t.” Which was true, but more importantly, it meant the end of questions about why she wouldn’t put on a bathing suit.

  “I could teach you.”

  Evelyn wrung out the dish towel and hung it around her neck. “How about we go to a movie instead? It’ll be air-conditioned, and we could even take an air-conditioned cab there.” A fortune it would cost, but what the hell. Ray was gone at work so much lately he must be making tons of overtime.

  Evelyn got the newspaper off the kitchen table where Ray had left it and opened to the movie section.

  “Terms of Endearment is playing at noon,” she said.

  “Is that the one about the girl whose mother dies of cancer?”

  “You probably don’t want to see that,” Evelyn said quickly. “You choose something.”

  Ingrid looked over Evelyn’s shoulder at the newspaper, breathed warm red hair and freckled fields. Who cared what they saw anyway, when whatever was on the screen meant she would get to sit next to Evelyn in the dark?

  “How about this one?” she asked.

  Evelyn leaned over Ingrid’s shoulder to read the ad. “‘War Games?’ Oh yeah—teenage kid accidentally starts nuclear war. I should have guessed that’s what you’d pick.” Ingrid held her breath for a moment. The movie looked like it might be scary, so if Evelyn agreed to see it, perhaps she would grab for Ingrid’s arm in the dark, like Jessica Rosen did when they watched Poltergeist.

  Evelyn did grab her arm. Ingrid felt Evelyn’s nails dig in and plant secret transmitters that beamed their signal all through her body, waves of adrenaline that bent themselves into a crazy kind of pleasure inside her. She got so distracted that for
a moment she almost forgot they were watching a movie; she was witnessing the near annihilation of the entire planet, Mister, with a beautiful dame on my arm.

  In the cab going home, Ingrid, craving another wave of whatever that crazy rush was—some chemical, Mister, that the Soviets fed to their spies to addict them and keep them from defecting —said: “You know what we should really do? You and me? We should go to Paragon Park.”

  “What’s that?” Evelyn asked.

  “You know, the amusement park. They have a great roller coaster we could ride. My dorm went last year on the last day of school. They went this year too, but I couldn’t go since I was suspended.”

  Evelyn was silent. Amusement park meant cotton candy, Skee-ball, bumper cars and old carnies. The guys who worked the rides and arcade games were the same guys who signed on as roustabouts with Jones and Wallace, each with their own bad story they didn’t tell. Jailhouse tattoos and cigarette burns and busted teeth. They were what Joe Cullen would have wound up being had he stayed alive long enough for Evelyn to divorce him.

  “It’s cool,” Ingrid was saying. “There’s a beach there, and miniature golf, and this crazy wooden roller coaster that looks like it’s about to fall down. We were playing mini golf last year and when a roller coaster car went by above us, all these paint chips came raining down on our heads.”

  Why not, Evelyn thought. Just for an afternoon, go back to something like her old life and try to enjoy it? Now that was a fresh idea: just enjoy it, for once. If Ingrid was there, maybe she could see it through Ingrid’s eyes—the eyes of a town kid. No bad parts. Just the lights going around.

  “Okay,” Evelyn said, “let’s do it.”

  Ingrid grinned again. “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s Wednesday. I have to go to lunch with Marseille Yeager.”

  “I thought you didn’t like her.”

  Evelyn glanced at Ingrid. “Did I say that?”

  “Well, you don’t, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you going to lunch with her?”

  “She’s been hounding me about it for over a month, ever since I skipped going to that concert. I finally just had to say yes.”

  “You realize, don’t you—” Ingrid drummed her fingers on the cracked leather seats of the taxi—“that the movie wasn’t all that far-fetched? A computer could go haywire, or the guy in charge of launching cruise missiles at Russia could just hit the wrong buttons. Half an hour later a nuclear war’s going on, and if that happens, do you really want to be having lunch with some lady you don’t like? Because really, we could all die any minute.”

  Evelyn pictured Joe, going ass over beer can down the aluminum stairs.

  “I don’t really want to be having lunch with Marseille even if it isn’t my last day on earth,” she said. “But the Yeagers are Ray’s best friends and I already said yes. But we could go to the amusement park this weekend.”

  “Or Friday,” Ingrid said. “How about Friday?”

  Friday would be just the two of them, no Ray. It would be more fun that way, Evelyn thought; Ray wouldn’t want to do any of the things that were the whole point of going—eat junk food, scream on the rides, waste money at Skee ball.

  “All right,” Evelyn said. “I’d love to.” Ingrid turned her face away and looked out the cab window but not before Evelyn saw the smile hiking up the side of Ingrid’s face.

  Ingrid was right, Evelyn thought. She did not want to be sitting here, across from Marseille Yeager in the booth of Szechwan Garden, an upscale place that served dishes you could get for a quarter of the price in Chinatown. They hadn’t even finished their appetizer yet and already Marseille had quizzed her on how she was feeling (“We were worried when you didn’t come to Symphony Hall”), how Ray was managing given all the stress in the office ( “Alex is a wreck from all the changes being made”), and whether she didn’t think chopsticks were superior to forks (“Tapered bamboo is just so much more civilized than this Occidental custom of putting metal prongs in your mouth, don’t you think?”).

  When the waiter arrived with their main dishes, he set the food down, refilled their tea, bowed in a way Evelyn suspected was pure flash, and started back toward the kitchen. Evelyn cleared her throat.

  “Excuse me?”

  The waiter turned.

  “I’d like a fork, please. If you have them.”

  Marseille blinked. The ghost of Joe Cullen let out a delighted snort. The waiter nodded, poker-faced, and continued toward the kitchen. And Evelyn thought of Ingrid, of the pleasure of telling Ingrid about this later, and had to cover her face with her napkin to hide the grin that was threatening to break into laughter.

  16.

  Ray continued to stay late at Dunlap and Scott, making sure to arrive home after dinner. He was trying to avoid seeing Ingrid, but he did not want to think of that as the reason, so he pushed his motivation behind another one that had to do with designing a stairwell for a bank’s corporate headquarters. When he was home, he did his best to stay away from her: to say no to walking up to the ridge with binoculars because Saturn was going to be visible, no to helping her solve Detective Arthur Slade’s problems with his crooked clients, no to her offer to play the Scrabble game she’d found in the closet of the fainting room.

  This evening he arrived home at quarter to nine, kissed his wife hello, mixed a drink, grabbed some leftovers from the fridge and said he was sorry but he had to go upstairs and keep working. Then he sat in his study with the door closed and the sound of crickets loud through the broken window. Chapter three of Victorian Architecture: A Treatise lay written out in longhand on the desk in front of him. He picked up his pen and doodled boxes in the margins.

  I am doing the right thing, he reminded himself. It’s my actions that count. I am sitting at my desk with my architecture book in front of me. No one knows I am staring at the matchbook she left on the corner of my desk, thinking of her hands leaving it there, no one knows I am mooning over some teenage girl.

  But she is not some teenage girl. She is Ingrid.

  In four weeks Newell Academy would reopen for the fall, and Ingrid would pack her iguana and her baby doll with the gas mask on its face, pack her stuffed owl and her ripped black clothes and go back to her dorm. Four weeks and everything would be fine. She’d be five miles away, one town over. Perhaps she’d come for tea now and then, of course she would, just make sure Evelyn was here, but then how could he talk to Ingrid, just talk to her, let her talk, be alone with her, oh this was terrible, what was wrong with him?

  Behind him, the door of the study opened.

  Ray turned and breathed a sigh of disappointed relief when he saw it was Evelyn.

  “We have to take the car to the shop,” Evelyn said. “I keep forgetting to tell you. It doesn’t want to shift between drive and reverse.”

  “Was the engine light on?”

  “I don’t think so, but it’s the transmission, not the engine.”

  “The transmission is part of the engine. It’d be the engine light.” And when Evelyn blushed and looked away, he added, “It’s all right, darling. I don’t expect you to know about car repair.”

  “You don’t expect me to know anything,” she said, and went out.

  He was messing up, he knew it. There was no reason to patronize his wife, no reason to try to pick a fight with her to assuage his guilty feelings. He would apologize to her later, after he finished going over these drawings.

  A minute later, the door opened again. Ray turned, thinking it was Evelyn coming back, but it was Ingrid who stood in the doorway, holding a mug in one hand and a sheaf of typed pages in the other.

  “I brought you some tea,” she said.

  Tea, Ray thought, the drink of British Royalty and Japanese Zen masters alike. Tea, a perfectly safe thought to be having. A perfectly safe drink to drink.

  “Whatcha doing?” Ingrid twisted her head around and read aloud off the legal pad he’d written on. “‘…Evidenced by its pro
minent chimneys, counterpointing the availability of wood in the American builder’s armamentarium.’” She looked up at him. “‘Armamentarium?’ You’re kidding, right?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong with it? Oh, boy.” Ingrid shook her head pityingly. “I can’t help you there. So how about taking a break and helping me instead?”

  “Help you do what?” Ray felt irritated, which was a relief; irritation was not attraction.

  “Work on our story. You know, Arthur Slade.”

  “It’s your story, really,” he said, but his annoyance ebbed at her use of “our.”

  “Well, I can’t do it without you,” said Ingrid. “You haven’t been around for days, and I’m stuck.”

  “You don’t look stuck.”

  I’m busy, go away, he should be saying. How to say it politely yet firmly, how to make her leave?

  “Try the tea,” Ingrid said. “Milk but no sugar. I watched you.”

  I’m busy, go away. But she’d watched him.

  He took a sip, made himself say, “Thank you,” and nothing else.

  “I need to know what to write next,” Ingrid said. “I did the scene where Arthur Slade goes back to go visit Emily Roseine, just to be sure she isn’t setting him up, and he sees her kissing another guy, remember?”

  “I don’t think you showed me that scene.”

  “Well, anyway, now is the scene where he confronts her about it. Here, read.”

  She thrust several pages toward him. Now, push the pages back, say, Ingrid, I’m very busy. Say, Ingrid, why not go ask Evelyn what she thinks?

  But he didn’t want Evelyn to be the one to help her. He wanted to do it; he was the one who had published a detective story, after all. The cup of tea was a bribe, he knew, but no less pleasant for being one.

  All right: he would drink his tea while he read what she’d written, which would take five minutes, tops, and then he’d send her off with a new idea and get back to his own work. He took the pages from her.