by Carol Anshaw
Plus, not all of Harold’s pee made it into the bottle; his aim was wobbly and a squirt often dribbled onto the floor or seat, or worse, onto Nora, which was one of the reasons she had drawn her line.
It was midafternoon in the middle of February deep into Georgia, the state where they had finally left the winter behind. The car was a rolling oven. They had all the windows open; air rushed in with a deafening roar but no cooling properties. This was the second day of their trip south from New York to Dania, Florida. Their mother had pulled them out of school for her three-week gig singing and dancing with Ray Bolger in a high-season dinner theater production of Anything Goes.
“Bolger’s a genius. His feet are little geniuses in shoes. He came out of retirement to do this show. It’s a real break for me,” she had told them as she packed their small suitcases. “Something that could lead to something bigger.”
She let Nora and Harold in on all her career plans and worries. She was thirty-eight, getting old for musicals, plus she now had the two of them to think about, and with their father on the road so much of the time, he couldn’t be as much of a help as he might be. Opportunity wasn’t knocking as often as it used to, and when it did, she sometimes couldn’t even get to the door. She was determined not to let this particular knock go unanswered.
Nora wished she wasn’t stuck in the back with Harold. She longed to be up front next to her mother, who drove in a speedy, freewheeling way. In the passenger seat, Nora could pretend she herself was doing the driving.
Lynette paid little attention to them and their back-seat squabbling. She kept the radio turned up; one speaker was on its way out and quavered under the strain of Dionne Warwick singing “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” from the dashboard. Lynette picked stations that didn’t play rock and roll, which she eyed with suspicion. She was in a trance, locked into this song, plugged into the current that Dionne was sending through the airwaves. Lynette was syncopated with the road—wheel in one hand, cigarette in the other, a covered cup of coffee jiggling on the dash, both the mottled tan filter and the coffee lid greased coral with her lip-print. She had the radio and the road and her mission, to get them to Dania and the Sand Bar Motor Hotel and Dinner Theater by tomorrow afternoon.
“Palm tree!” Harold shouted. “We’re there!” But it was a suppressed shout. He understood that everyone was enormously tired of him at the moment. He had been announcing their arrival since they hit Maryland.
“No,” Lynette said, holding a map over the top of the back seat. “See. We still have almost the whole length of Florida to go.”
“Oh,” he said, then grew deeply silent, his narrow chest rising and falling under the skimpy plastic lei he had been wearing since their stop yesterday at the Aloha Juice Stand, a Hawaiian outpost in North Carolina.
“We’ll stop soon,” she promised. “Start looking for a motel. Start looking for VACANCY. A little vacancy is what we need.”
Art—Lynette’s husband, Nora and Harold’s father—was in Las Vegas, managing Vicki Ashford, “The Purring Kitten,” a singer with long blond hair that fell over one eye and a husky voice (“Stop by Some Night, Late” was her current big hit, number twenty-seven on the Billboard charts). Vicki was like a kitten onstage, but behind her back Art referred to her as “The Shrieking Jackal.” Art had managed Vicki for two years, and her career was beginning to skyrocket, but the more famous she got, the more demands she came up with, and the more she drank. And the more she drank, the more she demanded. Demands for her dressing room (champagne on ice, Hershey’s Kisses in a crystal bowl) and wardrobe and special lighting and photo approval and musical arrangements, and of course, always for more money. Keeping Vicki happy was hard, highly acidic work; Art stashed a bottle of chalky white liquid antacid in the pocket of his suit coat, and often had a white mustache from swigging it through a long day of Vicki.
That night, at the motel where they’d found some vacancy, on the beige phone on the nightstand between the beds, Lynette talked with Art about Vicki. They tried to save money on long distance by making lists of what they needed to say and most of Art’s list was about Vicki. Lynette listened, then calmed him down in a low voice. Before Vicki, Art had had a client list consisting of Lynette; the Balkan Tumblers; a ventriloquist act, Dan and Herkimer; and Joey Zee, a comedian who told jokes so filthy he could be booked only into bachelor parties or late-night shows.
“There’s no going back to those days,” she told him.
On her next call, this one to California, to Fern Lawler, her friend from their Rockette days, she made the same point. “Vicki is this family’s meal ticket. Art is going to have to keep her happy, no matter how many ulcers it gives him.”
“Can we go out to the pool?” Nora pantomimed to her mother, pointing to the door, then to herself and Harold in their bathing suits even though it was already purple outside, the sky saturated with dusk. Laugh-In was on the TV on the dresser, but with the sound off. Nora watched while she waited for her mother to answer. Jo Anne Worley was screaming. Even with the sound off, Nora knew she was saying, “Is that another chicken joke?!”
Lynette nodded as she tilted a green bottle of Canada Dry over a glass of ice cubes and continued talking to Fern Lawler.
The pool—billed as OLYMPIC SIZE—seemed too big and glamorous for the Ho-Hum Motor Lodge with its sign featuring a yawning man in a nightgown and tasseled cap. There were a few other kids in the illuminated water—tired holdovers from an afternoon shift, who were getting in their last splashes. Their squeals and shouts echoed through the motel’s courtyard. Nora put down the towels she had brought from the bathroom and strapped Harold into his orange life jacket. He always wanted to swim, then got nervous once actually immersed in water, his head tilted back as he treaded furiously. This didn’t seem like any fun at all, but he always wanted to go in again.
“Stay where you can touch bottom,” she told him, then kept an eye on him while she lined up for the diving board. When her turn came, she cannonballed into the water, resurfaced, lined up again. She loved cannonballing.
There was another girl making the same circuit. Pretty in a sunburned, chlorine-blond way, smaller than Nora, about her age probably, but it was hard to tell. She had breasts, or at least had a bathing suit with cups inside that made it seem as though she had breasts. Nora was twelve and fried-egg flat, although this didn’t bother her. Still, girls with breasts seemed in another league and so she was made shy by this one. She turned out not to be at all conceited, though. Her name was Cheryl and she opened up the conversation.
“You do a really good cannonball.”
“I’m training for the Olympics in diving, that’s why I don’t have to be in school. I’m only fooling around tonight. That’s why we’re staying at this place. The Olympics people only let me stay at places with Olympic-size pools. It’s kind of a regulation.”
“Oh,” Cheryl said, and left it at that. She was either an extremely trusting sort of person, or didn’t care if Nora was lying. The wind went out of Nora’s sails, which had been billowing with lies the whole trip. She abandoned the stories she was about to tell about her childhood spent traveling alone across Europe by train, the thyroid operation during which she almost died.
“My father’s an astronaut,” she said, but there was no steam in it.
“Do you have a radio with you?” Cheryl said.
Nora shook her head.
“It’s okay. I do,” Cheryl said, and hoisted herself out of the pool to get it.
Nora paddled over to Harold, who was standing in water deep enough to push his life jacket up around his ears. Under water, Nora could see his swim trunks ballooning around his hips.
“We’re going to have a dance party,” she told him. “I’ll let you come.”
Cheryl brought out a sea-green plastic portable that came to life with a huge chaotic burst of static. With a safecracker’s fingers rolling the dial, she tuned in to a new Aretha Franklin song, “Chain of Fools.”
The other kids had disappeared by now, had drifted off to showers and pajamas. It was still warm out; the air and water were a perfect match in temperature. The girls pulled T-shirts on over their suits. Harold kept his life vest on. The three of them danced, mostly shuffling side to side, sometimes taking each other’s hand and doing a shambling jitterbug. The girls occasionally gave Harold a yank and a twirl, or grabbed him and bent him backward into a giggly dip.
Lynette wandered out and sat on the foot of a webbed chaise and watched them for a while.
“I’m going to put you two in the show when we get there,” she said. This was a frequent, but idle threat. With their looks they should be on the stage or in front of the cameras. She said this all the time. Nora wasn’t interested.
She and Harold shared the same combination of Lynette’s thick black hair and Art’s wide-set pale green eyes. Something about them startled people. Neighbor ladies clucked over them. Teachers gave them the benefit of the doubt, rounding their scores off to the higher grade. More recently, Nora noticed boys watching her in a way that indicated they didn’t want her to know they were watching. This gave her the creeps. The whole attention thing made her feel as if she were being followed around by a little spotlight.
The light actually shone down on her whole family; they hadn’t successfully blended into any of their neighborhoods, especially not their latest one in White Plains. There, against the background of pampered lawns and pastel living rooms, her mother’s bright clothes looked like costumes rather than outfits. She spoke too loudly, had too many racy backstage anecdotes. It was as though she were an immigrant from a backward culture, trailing her strange, vaguely embarrassing customs behind her into coffee klatches and PTA meetings.
Nora’s father was no better. He wasn’t like any of the other fathers on their block; his job had nothing to do with industry or the stock market. And Nora could tell he had no interest in belonging to their club. She could tell from the quick, stiff conversations he had with these neighbors that he was bewildered by their interest in sports, their vengeance on crabgrass.
“Time to get out of those wet suits,” Lynette said, stubbing her cigarette in a sand-filled urn by the side of the pool. The water shimmered with subsurface lighting.
Cheryl looked at Nora quickly. Something passed with a flicker between them. As Nora met the glance, then looked down quickly at the cement of the pool deck, she knew they were setting up a small conspiracy, an alliance invisible to anyone else. They were entering a private space beyond the sunlit spot children were supposed to occupy.
“Help me put my radio back in my room,” Cheryl said, as though the radio were cumbersome as a steamer trunk, as though her room were up a tricky, twisting staircase. Nora told her mother she’d be back in a little while. Harold frowned, broody with rejection, but went off with his mother because he was too small and young to assert any power in this situation.
Cheryl had her own room next to her parents’, but there was no door connecting them. The parents were out to dinner anyway. Cheryl made a point of mentioning this. She didn’t turn on a light; there was only the muddy orange neon drift from outside. The air was dense with the smells of carpet shampoo and bleached sheets and Comet.
Cheryl set her radio on the dresser and turned it on. The Stone Poneys were singing “Different Drum.” It was a song that could be danced to either way—slow or fast, and Cheryl decided on slow, putting her hands shyly on Nora’s shoulders, as though waiting to see if Nora would shrug them off. When she didn’t, Cheryl put together the dance they were going to do, rocking Nora a little side to side, moving her around with small pushing steps. The soles of Nora’s feet were iced by the cold terrazzo floor. Although their faces weren’t quite touching, she could feel Cheryl’s breath passing over the line of her jaw.
At this point, events—which seemed to have been speeding along—suddenly froze. Nothing further, she knew, would happen unless she made it happen. Cheryl had brought them this far and now it was Nora’s turn.
She pulled back a little and, with her eyes closed (she couldn’t look), she covered Cheryl’s mouth with her own. From there, everything was a brief tumble of imagined colors and temperatures. Their lips were blue, the insides of their mouths red. The room held steady at orange, and something inside Nora clicked. A photograph was already starting to develop inside her.
Orientation
MRS. RATHKO HAS ORDERED her standard festive platter from the Jewel: crushed, colored foil topped with bologna rollups; triangles of an oily, brilliantly orange cheddar; canned olives; toothpicks with cellophane tassels. She has thumped onto the table two boxes of wine—Country Red and Summer White. Cans of store-brand pop sit in ice in the fake crystal bowl she drags out for these occasions. At Christmas, she dusts off empty gift-wrapped boxes to set under the artificial tree. For Thanksgiving, she folds out an accordion-pleated crepe paper turkey. Mrs. Rathko knows how to cut celebration down to size, portion-control it.
In spite of the heat wave—which is into its third day over a hundred degrees—there are maybe fifty students at this reception in the ballroom of the Student Union, about a quarter of those enrolled for the fall semester at Access. Even this year, with her nicotine-hungry nerves and apathy toward her job, Nora is still a little fluttery and hopeful about launching the new school year. Although Access has its share of goof-off courses, it also provides a little academic trampoline. Marginal students can build their confidence and grade points here, then move into the degree program. And now there’s a strong English as a Second Language Department, serving a population recently arrived here, impelled by unfortunate circumstances. These foreign students seldom show up at any of the school’s social events. Nora extrapolates from their serious manner, imagines them working long hours in hard jobs, places thick with steam or fumes and too few windows. They have no time for any sort of frivolity or social break. Maybe for a wedding, a birth, a religious festival, but not for a school reception.
These sorts of gatherings mostly attract the other segment of the student population—those looking to the program for distraction or redirection. They are unhappy in their jobs or marriages, or are unpartnered and don’t understand why. People in a rut or at a crossroads, or hoping a crossroad will turn up along the way of their rut. Most of the students who have come tonight look as though they fit one or another of these profiles. They look dulled, worn out, as though they’ve come here to revive themselves, are waiting for plasma or megavitamin shots rather than merely for culture or hot dates.
One of them, though, is not dull. According to the block letters on her paper nametag, she is PAM. She’s very tan. There’s a slight list to her stance, a confident, relaxed quality in her expression. She is, Nora suspects, someone conversant in the language of seduction. She has the look of someone who has run a long gauntlet of women but come out unscathed, instead has left the gauntlet battered and bruised. She’s postbutch—narrow black pants, black sneakers, a black rayon camp shirt. Where the collar opens at her throat, a silver chain is visible, a semiserious chain that rides the line between jewelry and statement. There’s a small hickey under the chain. Actually, it’s a neck that’s hard to imagine without a hickey.
She has a crewcut.
Nora tries to picture this woman in a job. Deep-tissue massage therapy. Dog training maybe.
To the ordinary eye, she wouldn’t appear to be doing anything provocative at the moment, only standing in the middle of this reception, holding a plastic glass of Country Red, nametag stuck to her shirt. It’s only to Nora that she is alarming, the alarm an echo from the past. It was precisely women like this who brought Nora out. Neo-vamps adept at using mischief and mayhem to draw not-so-very-straight women like Nora out of worn grooves of marriage and fidelity. There was a time when she desperately needed these women, needed their sullen smoldering, needed the chaos they provided, needed them to call and then not call, to drive her crazy and use up all her available nerve endings on their superficial and tra
nsient interest in her. Assembled, they provided a swaying rope bridge out of some jungle movie, unraveling beneath her as she went, creating so much drama and suspense around her transit that arrival on the other side, the initial point of the journey, turned out to be rather anticlimactic.
Eventually she ran through these women, and arrived at Jeanne. At first Jeanne was attractive simply for who she was not. Not a morning dope smoker, or an all-night cokehead. Not someone who flipped out in the middle of making love, and left. Or someone who, if Nora talked to another woman at a party, was suddenly standing there, like a Sicilian husband, holding Nora’s coat.
When Nora approached her, Jeanne stood still, waiting both to hold Nora and to steady her. And all these years since, she has maintained this unswerving posture. What she offered, continues to offer, is a connection in which love is given the opportunity to flourish. She is never capricious with Nora’s heart.
They each came into the relationship looking for something big and permanent. They were in their midthirties then, old enough to be dragging around tattered histories of grim dating, awkward near misses, hopeless affairs, less-than-successful longterm connections. In Paris, Jeanne had lived with a woman for a few years, an orthopedic surgeon she met by way of a fall on slippery steps. Nora, of course, had her marriage behind her, a terrible mistake, with Nora bearing the entire weight of its failure. Both she and Jeanne came in with complicated reasons for wanting to make good this time.