Rosie hears Kat spraying cleaner on the ice machine. When Julie Anne moves away, she can still smell her perfume. Julie Anne rests her hand on the shoulder of the larger argyle socks man and her voice rises and falls in a singsong. The men appear bored by her attention.
Rosie and Kat finish their side work in silence, and later, when they walk out together, Kat pulls on the dark blue jacket with the hood. “Where’s your car?” Kat asks, her jacket making a nylon brush sound with the movement of her arms.
“Wouldn’t start,” she says, and her palms itch. She wants Kat to drive her home, not so much for the convenience, but so she can sit in Kat’s car and ask her questions.
“Come on,” Kat says, head down.
Hanging from Kat’s rearview window are prayer beads with a crucifix, Jesus Christ’s palms facing up on the cross, fingers cupped. “My daughter found it in a bush,” Kat says, fingers brushing Jesus’ feet. “Right outside my bank. Maybe someone got mad and threw it.”
“Julie Anne’s a bitch,” Rosie says, wanting to remind her of their newfound allegiance.
“She hired you because you’re pretty,” Kat says, “and she can’t get a man.” Kat has set Jesus in motion; he swings slightly. She leans over and the nylon from her jacket swishes on her red tights. “Started smoking again,” she says, fumbling with a pack of Marlboros from her purse, “after two years.” The car lighter ejects. “My daughter knows, she can tell.”
When she lights her cigarette, her face draws in on itself, and she watches Rosie, as if testing her reaction. She approves—smoke exhaling. She drags on her cigarette. Exhales. Drags. Exhales. She cracks the window and flicks it with her middle finger. Gray specks of ash float and drop. “Hey,” she says, “it was really nice the way you covered for me. No one’s been nice to me like that in a long time.”
“Let’s quit,” Rosie says, and they both laugh.
“Yeah,” Kat says, “but I’m too old to be a prostitute.”
A comfortable silence gathers between them. The sky is dusky, day ending. Out the window, Rosie watches a squirrel scurrying up the trunk of a palm tree. The squirrel pauses, stares back.
“Why’d you say that,” she asks, looking back at Kat, “about the dream?”
“It’s true,” Kat says. “I did dream it.” She stares at Rosie long and hard, the cigarette burning close to her fingertips.
“What does it mean?”
“It means, it means,” Kat says—“God, I don’t know. It means a man used me because I let him; I still wear his jacket. That you probably let men use you, even if you dress it up different; that maybe I should’ve followed my gyno’s advice when he told me to keep my skirt down.” She stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray. “The whole point,” she says, “is to find some dignity.”
“Your gynecologist told you to keep your skirt down?”
Kat turns the key and warms the engine. “I was thirteen,” she says. “That was right after he stuck his hand inside me.”
“My grandma says I need to be smart about men and booze, that I take it too far, but I don’t know how to be smart. My family hates me.”
“They probably don’t know you,” Kat says.
“When I imagine being with a man,” Rosie says, a piercing in her chest, “maybe having a boyfriend or something, I can’t ever imagine us doing normal things: going to a movie, eating dinner, or even just talking.”
Kat considers. “If that’s what you want,” she says, shifting into gear, “you’ll have it.”
The next day, the door opens and Julie Anne and her party arrive. Mr. Vanderkemp walks with a cane, dragging his left foot at an odd angle. Rosie sees one side of his face, his mouth tweaked in a frown, and his eyelid droopy, giving his eyeball a sliver to see through. There are five people in the party, Julie Anne directing, and they arrange themselves at a table. Julie Anne is at the end of the table, directly under the deer head. Rosie senses her orders, body tense and alert. She remembers to smile: “You’re a Holloway’s girl now and you need a Holloway’s smile.”
Mr. Vanderkemp sits at the other end of the table. On one side of his face is a bulbous, red mass, like a birthmark but worse. She doesn’t know which side of his face is more grotesque. His face sags on the other side, the cheek slack and a pale purplish color like granite. His breathing is deep and slick with saliva. He wants to talk, but Julie Anne orders for him. He smiles and appears genuinely happy, at least more than Julie Anne and the others.
When Rosie sets his plate of steaming spaghetti down, he motions for her to come closer so that he can tell her something. The others at the table are watching, and there’s an edge of danger, as if they’re also waiting for something bad to happen. His breath is warm and gurgled and she worries that he’ll smell like a fart, but she can’t smell anything except spaghetti.
She expects the worst: that he’ll say he wants to put his dick in her mouth or lick her cunt, remembering how Jennifer called him a perv. He puts his hand on hers and it’s dry and light. She puts her ear closer to his mouth and he says, “I love you,” very serious. “I love you. I love you.”
She raises her body and looks at him. His eyes are filmy, the left flecked with a cataract. She knows the others are watching and she faces them. Julie Anne—water glass lifted—stares, her eyes shimmery and bereft of commands.
Rosie avoids Mr. Vanderkemp’s side of the table the rest of the meal, but whenever she looks at him, his expression is earnest and his eyes are on her, the napkin tucked under his chin speckled with spaghetti sauce. After their meals have been cleared, she sets down a flourless chocolate gâteau, garnished with three strawberries and a green striped candle, flame dancing. Her arm brushes his back, and she sees white and gray hairs curling on his neck and a yellow-streaked sweat stain at his collar. She wants to sing “Happy Birthday” but singing is prohibited.
He stares at the cake and candle, a hand gripping the table, and the woman sitting closest to him leans over and blows the flame out. Rosie is aware of Julie Anne’s hard stare and she knows that she’ll get in trouble later, but she can’t think of what she’s done wrong. Above Julie Anne’s head, a spider web is caught in the deer’s mouth, laced across its red tongue. Another web is wrapped in the eyelashes rimming one of the deer’s eyeballs.
When the party is done with coffee and dessert, they leave without paying, no tip. Mr. Vanderkemp leans on his cane, the side of his face raised and deformed, the color of raspberries. Julie Anne opens the wood door, says something to a woman, and the woman nods, taking him by the arm and guiding him. The door shuts, but Julie Anne hasn’t left. There’s heat on Rosie’s face and neck as Julie Anne’s gaze finds her.
Tap tap tap—Julie Anne’s heels hit the floor. Jennifer moves closer, standing with her back to Rosie, as if cleaning the bar. Julie Anne notices, leans in, holding Rosie by the elbow, making sure no one can hear. Her breath is warm, smelling of coffee and garlic. “What’d he say?” Outside the window, she watches two people getting into the back seat of a Mercedes, Mr. Vanderkemp collapsed in the passenger seat, the woman holding his cane at the curb.
“Nothing.” She shifts her gaze to Bacchus, forlorn and belligerent; she imagines Julie Anne as a child.
“You’re lying.”
No answer. Her elbow is released.
“Why aren’t you clearing the table?” Julie Anne says, loud enough for Jennifer, and for Kat—shoulders slumped, uncorking a bottle of wine at table two—to hear. “Always clear the tables immediately. How many times do I have to tell you?”
Jennifer repositions her body so that Rosie can get a silver tray from under the bar. When she turns around with her tray, Julie Anne is still watching, and she’s confronted directly by her unhappiness. Behind Julie Anne is the table, and she sees that the plates have been cleared by the busboy already, only a few glasses left. Julie Anne’s heels tap against the floor, out the wood door. When she gets into the driver’s seat, none of the passengers acknowledge her, as if wary of upsetting
her further. Mr. Vanderkemp’s head is down, and the Mercedes moves out of sight.
As Rosie clears glasses onto her silver tray, Jennifer comes toward the table with another tray at her side to help; but she knows what Jennifer really wants is information.
“What the fuck happened?” Jennifer says, an excited ring in her voice. She sidles closer so that their arms touch conspiratorially. Her eyes glitter as she stacks glasses.
“Nothing,” she says.
“Come on,” Jennifer says, anger darkening her expression. “I’m not stupid. Julie Anne looked so weird.”
Jennifer is persistent, but she doesn’t tell her.
“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing, nothing.”
A dull but loud voice comes from behind the bookshelf: “For fuck’s sake. Leave her alone.” The flat confidence reinforces Rosie’s resolve, makes her smile.
“What’s your problem,” Jennifer says, bumping against the table so that the glasses rattle on her tray. She speaks to the bookcase. “It’s none of your business, so why don’t you go back to your hot dog cart and shut the fuck up.”
The voice says nothing. Rosie imagines Kat leaning against the ice machine, savoring the leftover flourless chocolate gâteau behind the bookshelf. Rosie slows her breathing, holds it in and then lets it out through her nose. Mr. Vanderkemp’s words spin inside her, cracked with dignity, an imperfect offering. And she can feel herself fingering possibilities, not in spite of who she is and what she has lost, but because of it. She will tell no one what he said, except for Kat. She doesn’t want anyone to make fun of him.
Castaways
MICHAEL RULE, TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS old and officially separated from his wife for four days, woke Friday morning at nine-thirty to the buzzing of a digital alarm. The clock was on the floor, and for a frightening second, he didn’t know what the shrill hee hee hee sound was, only that the noise emanated from the faded olive green carpet of an unfurnished and unfamiliar apartment.
As Michael leaned over and turned off the alarm, an awareness moved through him like warm jelly pulsing through his veins: today he needed to pick up his five-year-old son, feign control and manliness while explaining the separation and impending divorce, and answer Anthony’s questions, of which he knew there were typically a multitude. He imagined Anthony’s face—trusting, earnest, worshipful—and he felt helpless.
Michael went over the facts: four days ago his wife, Penny, had confirmed that she was in love with Donald—wealthy, established, his father-in-law’s contemporary and business equal—and she wanted a divorce. (Ever since: rage, jealousy, bitterness, a reassessment of his masculinity and worth, and the bone-crushing dead weight of sorrow.) Thus far father-in-law, William Deader, hadn’t fired him from Deader Industrial LLC.
The apartment was a former office overlooking Newport Car Wash, at the periphery of the Newport Beach shopping mecca Fashion Island. Deader Industrial LLC owned the property; Deader Industrial LLC owned Newport Car Wash. The apartment was a concession, Michael believed, for Penny’s infidelity. But how long would Mr. and Mrs. Deader’s pity last, now that he hadn’t shown up to work and was ignoring Mr. Deader’s—Bill’s, Dad’s—phone calls?
The last four days Michael had been going to bed (two mattresses stacked on the floor) at three, four in the morning, sleeping fitfully, and waking in the hazy sunlight near noon. He lay there for hours, listening to the sounds of the car wash below, aware that he had to persevere through another day, but unwilling to begin: held back by a keen disbelief and a profound hurt at the power of circumstances to develop against his will.
Once he got out of bed, he sat with his back against the wall and studied the activity below, how the customers assembled, their backsides to him, on a cement bench and waited for the men to flag them with towels. Customers slipped cash (mostly dollar bills) into the men’s hands, and the men nodded, but rarely spoke, except to one another.
Michael had discovered that the men had a system to alert one another of the periodic visitations of their manager, a white man with a mustache. Upon spotting the manager descending three cement steps, the employee at the head of the car wash snapped his towel, and the men successively snapped their towels down the line, until the last person got the signal.
Naked, walking to the bathroom, hands cupping his groin as he passed the window, he caught a glimpse of the tan-uniformed men toweling the shiny blacks, blues, and reds of Porsches and Mercedes. He was beginning to recognize the men, noting who was more animated, who came to work hung over, and he imagined their whispered conversations.
Everything was new in the apartment, cheaply assembled, transformed from an office, and a fine dust coated the sink and toilet from their harried, half-assed construction. He imagined the office’s hasty conversion had been for his convenient elimination from Penny’s life. Lifting the toilet seat to pee, he concluded that after a nearly six-year determined hiatus from alcohol, instigated by Penny’s pregnancy with Anthony and their mutual decision to “live healthy,” he might very likely get very drunk very soon.
The hot spray from the shower hit him directly in the face with an irregular hissing noise, thumping little pellets against his eyelids, nose, and lips, as if the showerhead had never been used and was trying to sort out its purpose. It was his first shower in four days. Unlike the removable and multiple-choice showerhead in his bathroom at his home in Newport Shores—Penny’s home—he discovered the apartment showerhead had one spray option: Unrelenting Beady Squirt.
Never before had life hurled him in such loathsome directions, reminding him of how it was to struggle under the foamy tow of a wave, his body pushed and pulled. As a boy and teenager, he believed he wasn’t manly because he didn’t care about the things his own father revered—business, football, politics—and what sweet revenge when he succeeded beyond his father’s middle class aspirations anyhow. Penny fell in love with him because he was different. A novelty, she said. They met at UCLA, both philosophy majors, English minors, and married soon after graduation. Affluence and a generous position at Deader Industrial were added benefits to marrying Penny, and he learned to ignore any qualms about working for a large corporation. Over the years, he’d grown accustomed to the advantageous lifestyle.
Penny’s main reason for falling out of love, Michael believed, was that his success was connected to her family, that he’d claimed their affluence as his own, as if he’d disappointed and betrayed her, even though they’d decided together that he should work for Deader Industrial. And in his mind, she was irretrievably connected to her family’s prosperity, therefore connecting him—it was complicated. On further analysis, he conceded that besides working for Deader Industrial and living in the three-story home in Newport Shores—a wedding gift care of Mr. and Mrs. Deader—he’d conveniently overlooked any prior ambition to write novels and teach. What had happened to him?
Michael put on his socks, pants, and shirt. His clothes fit loosely, he fastened his belt to the last hole, but his pants sagged. Since about a year ago, when he’d first suspected Penny of infidelity, he’d begun losing weight, mostly muscle tone. In the corner of the small kitchen stood an Arrowhead water dispenser, beside it three blue plastic containers of water, leftovers, no doubt, from the apartment’s time as an office. No one had noticed him since he rarely left the apartment, and he wondered if the other offices had been warned that he lived among them, since they worked for Deader, too. The container made a gulp as he poured a cup. He drank, his hair damp from an unenthusiastic towel dry, rivulets along his ears collecting at his earlobes, and then crumpled the paper cup in his fist.
When the phone rang, he knew it was his younger sister even before he answered. The phone was on the floor, and he sat with his back against the wall, letting it ring, his palm against the receiver, feeling its vibrations. Lisa, divorced, mother of two sons, and remarried at twenty-five, called daily. Normally they only talked on holidays and birthdays, and although he was grateful to her for being worried, he was reluctant
to talk.
“Hello, Lisa,” he said, answering by speakerphone.
“I thought I’d have to wake you,” she said, her voice echoing. At seventeen Lisa had moved to San Francisco where she continued to live. She chose men that bullied her, reminding Michael in the worst ways of their father. Although a respected church member and community leader, their father’s form of discipline had been a backhanded slap when least expected. “Take me off speaker,” she said.
He held the receiver and switched over.
Her voice became cheery. “Good for you—you’re already up.”
He didn’t answer.
“Today you see Anthony.” It was a statement. He nodded, and then realized she couldn’t see.
“Have you talked to Mom?”
“Not yet,” he said. Submissive and unadventurous before widowhood, their mother was on an extended vacation in Central America; timely, since if she were around, he imagined long, heartfelt discussions loaded with her disappointment and self-blame.
“Listen to this,” she said. He heard the rustling of a newspaper. “Sagittarius. June sixth. Life changes inevitable. Time to return to true nature, true self.” She paused, as if waiting for him to say something.
“Here comes the best part,” she said. She cleared her throat. “Take opportunity in next few days”—she paused again, as if preparing him—“to make decision regarding loved one. Trust instincts!”
He said nothing.
“Did you sleep?”
“Yes; no.”
“Can you take something?”
“I’m planning on it,” he said, thinking again about getting drunk.
“Have you called your lawyer?” she said. When he didn’t answer, she continued, “You need to protect your rights with Anthony. Deader Industrial is big, big, big.”
He heard her light a cigarette, take a drag. His greatest fear was that Penny would take Anthony from him, as she’d threatened in their worst argument, a tightness in his chest every time the subject was brought up; he’d been careful and pragmatic with Penny ever since, unwilling to jeopardize his chances. In the background, clothes rumbled in a dryer. He knew Lisa called from her laundry room, where she had the most privacy.
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