by Nadia Bozak
Mum says they have to carry everything inside. “Shell, what if we got broken into?”
They pile everything — cassette tapes, umbrellas, Shell’s bag, rubbers, cooler, Thermos, food boxes, maps — behind the door and then Mum locks the car. The motel room, the first Shell’s ever been in, smells like Waffle House hash browns, and the buzz-cut carpet is bright pumpkin. Everything else — bedspreads, wallpaper, towels — is the colour of mushroom soup, so all the cigarette burns show up.
With her boots and jean jacket still on, Shell perches on the edge of one of the two twin beds and turns on the TV.
Mum closes her eyes and bites into an Almond Joy. Shell takes a Grand Slam. They also stocked up on Whatchamacallits and Milky Ways. They’ve got way more kinds of candy here than in Canada.
“Ugh,” Mum groans, rolling off her bed. “All I want to do is put on my pyjamas, brush my teeth, and close my eyes.”
“Yeah,” Shell says. The weather guy on the local news says it’s going to be eighty degrees tomorrow. “Mum, what’s that in Celsius?”
Mum’s not listening. “Shell,” she says, “where’d you put my suitcase?”
“There. By the door.”
A McDonald’s commercial comes on. Shell knows from Mum and Dad’s record collection that the real version of the Mac Tonight song is from Brecht. “Mum, it’s Mack the Knife!”
But Mum’s eyes are narrow with worry. “Shell, I don’t see my suitcase. Go out and look.”
The air in the parking lot is as damp and cool as wet laundry, and the sky is faded black like it’s been washed a million times, and there are no stars. Somewhere, traffic rushes. The pollen of some late night bloomer sweetens the air. The familiar cold of Somerset feels far. No, it is far, and after just a day of driving. With a match held to her cigarette, Shell vows to both quit smoking and go on a diet right after New Year’s. Maybe then Maček will finally ask her to go on a date. Then they can fall in love and take off for California, or maybe New Mexico, where they’ll park a trailer in the middle of nowhere and raise a pack of dogs. Mum can move somewhere close. Pheonix, maybe.
Having been in the Czech army, Maček knows how to climb fences and pick locks, remove beer caps without a bottle opener. Because of that and his vampire smile, Shell’s started showing up for first period: if she passes by the autobody parking lot just as the first bell goes, Maček will be there, finishing his cigarette. Then she’ll walk by again at lunch. He’ll be leaning against whatever car he’s working on, Big Gulp in one hand, cigarette in the other; the safety goggles pushing back his shaggy blond hair show off both a widow’s peak and the V of his cheekbones. Three times now, Maček’s waved at Shell. Each time after, Shell carries around a bright orange glow — a candle burning inside her — for days. But if Maček truly likes her, and Carla says every day when Shell asks her that he does, he would do more than lift his hand when she goes past. And when she does walk by, her neck burns and she pulls down her plaid shirt to make sure he can’t see her bum.
The light comes on when Shell opens the back of the Datsun: coffee cups, Kleenex box, dirty plastic plate, cracker crumbs — oh, and the garbage bag with stuff for the Goodwill. But no brand new wheelie suitcase.
“Shit,” Shell whispers.
“Well?” Mum sits facing the door, hands in her lap. “Find it?”
Shell scratches her head. “It’s weird. You sure it’s not in here?” She scans the station wagon’s contents now carefully stacked by the door. “That a-hole border guard, he take it?”
“God. How the hell did I forget my suitcase?” Mum takes off her glasses, without which she’s suddenly shrivelled and hollow like one of those harvest dolls with the dried-apple faces. “You said you got it from my room.”
“I did?” Shell just remembers her arms being full with her own stuff and the way her groggy headache thumped in her temples.
“You remember it being in there, Shell? I mean, it’s not sitting in the bloody driveway?”
Shell unzips her bag. She shakes out her biggest T-shirt, soft faded cotton announcing Black Market Clash. “You could wear this, Mum. Like for pyjamas.”
“Or maybe it was that border guard,” Mum says, opening the motel door. The parking lot and the Waffle House sign are right there, smack-dab outside their bedroom.
Through the curtains, Shell watches Mum search the station wagon, beginning at the back and working frontwards. The car’s interior light suspends her movements within the surrounding dark and holds them, gold-lit squares of activity, like nights in Algonquin with Dad when the lantern turned their tent into a translucent red pearl, just hanging there in the black swath of fresh air, yellow moon, and brightest stars.
Mum dumps the Goodwill bag on her bed. Their old cutlery set — bundled with elastics — tumbles out, as does a washed-out tablecloth of indigo batik, a set of stained plastic cups, a pair of oversized T-shirts, one fluorescent pink, the other fluorescent green. Some of Dad’s old books end up on Mum’s mushroom bedspread too; Shell picks up Noam Chomsky’s Towards a New Cold War as well as a bundle of spoons.
“What? You’re giving away our silverware?”
The flat handles are embossed with a rose pattern, Made in Korea stamped on the back. Shell loads the bundled forks, knives, spoons into her bag.
“Can’t give all my stuff away.”
“Not stuff, Shell. Crappy old junk we don’t use anymore.”
The avocado-coloured Tupperware cups are grubby with Shell’s childhood fingers and the bottoms buckled with melts and burns. These, along with a pungent smell of plastic and old milk, go in Shell’s bag too.
Mum sighs. “I just have to go to sleep.”
She comes out of the bathroom in the fluorescent pink shirt, a grey motel towel for a skirt. After a cup of milk and a stick of Shell’s Trident to clean her teeth, Mum curls up under the covers. She turns her bright pink back to Shell, who reads Noam Chomsky by the light of the TV. When Mum starts to snore, Shell gets out her Player’s Lights and Jameson and, silently opening the motel door, crouches by the Datsun. Sipping, smoking — the night passes, shaved away by the steady buzz of traffic.
There’s breakfast in the lobby until ten.
Like Shell, Mum wears the same clothes as yesterday — black jeans and lilac turtleneck — and combs her hair with her fingers.
The triangle-shaped Christmas tree in the lobby has fake presents underneath.
“Merry Christmas,” smiles the wrinkled silver-blond lady at the reception counter, barely glancing away from the TV hanging from the ceiling.
“Isn’t she way too old to be working?” Shell asks.
“It’s the sun, Shell. I bet she’s younger than me.”
Along with thin coffee, Shell has two Styrofoam bowls of Raisin Bran; Mum fills up on hot goopy stuff called grits. They share a green banana, and Mum sneaks apples and oranges into her purse.
Mum pumps gas at the Texaco across the road while Shell finds the restroom at the back. She smokes half a Player’s Light, squatting above the toilet, denuded of its seat.
A mum and kids are waiting outside the restroom door. With lowered gaze, Shell hands the mum the long stick with the key.
“Eww!” a little-boy voice cries as she walks quickly away. “Cigarettes!”
The I-8 is thick with holiday traffic and the radio is all about Christmas, so Shell keeps the tape player going. So long as it’s nothing too crazy, Mum says, which means no Talking Heads. Instead, Joan Baez sees them through the bottom end of Georgia, and crossing into Florida it’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”
Shell looks up at the flatlands flashing by then goes back to her Essential William Blake. The air coming through the ventilators gets thick, then full-on humid. Only RVs and cars hauling boats are slower than their brown Datsun. Pickups with stickers for the Florida Gators, beefy motorcycles, low-riding Corvettes whizz past Mum and Sh
ell, all high on sunshine and soda and something else. Cocaine? Shell’s seen Miami Vice.
“Jesus Christ.” With a wailing horn, a rusty Town Car cuts in front of Mum.
“Keep up your speed, Mum. Limit’s up to seventy now.”
“Next time you’ll be driving too, Shell,” Mum says, wringing the steering wheel between her hands, afraid to move her head. “It’s a skill every woman needs to learn.”
In her side mirror, Shell’s gold sunglasses shine like Joe Strummer’s on the cover of that rare Clash single Shell traded for with a skater at school. In exchange, he got a bottle of Drakkar Noir cologne Shell had shoplifted from The Bay.
The Kmart on the outskirts of Jacksonville is so big it has groceries. Ham and cheese and bread, mustard and relish fill Mum’s basket, as well as toothpaste and a brush, a set of pocket combs, a bottle of Keri lotion, and sunscreen. Large one-hundred-percent-cotton underwear comes in a three-pack: pink, mint, robin’s egg blue.
“God,” Mum keeps saying. “It’s so stupid to buy this stuff when it’s just sitting in my suitcase at home.”
Shell offers to buy the underwear for Mum for Christmas. Then she remembers she has no money, so she goes to smoke by the Datsun.
Despite the clear sun, the air is brisk and the wind comes hard. Somewhere off, it smells of rain. Shell pulls up the collar of her jean jacket.
“I thought it was supposed to be hot here,” she says when Mum comes back.
They load the bags into the car. Mum takes off her coat then puts it back on. At the far end of the parking lot there’s a stretch of grass where Mum spreads out the tablecloth from the Goodwill bag. She digs into the cooler. Instead of Mum’s plastic cutlery, Shell finds the bundles salvaged from the Goodwill bag. With the old rose-handled knives and spoons, Mum makes sandwiches. Shell uses Chomsky for a plate; Mum gets William Blake.
“You buy any clothes in there?”
Mum shakes her head; she’ll just wash what she has on. She opens the map. “Some hours to go yet.” Plus, they have to stop somewhere and get a turkey.
“It’s Christmas tomorrow, Shell. Remember?”
Tinselled doors and palm trees hung with Christmas lights line the streets of suburban Fort Myers, but there’s no snow and the tiny bungalows seem to be painted for Easter instead: pink, mint, baby blue, sort of like Mum’s new underwear. At Publix, Mum asks about the Conch Lane address.
“Yeah, it’s a little far,” says the cashier who rings in their lamb — they’re fresh out of turkeys. “Kind of a bedroom community, you might call it. Just take a left at the lights and go straight down to the end.”
They take Conch Lane — inland for an entire hour — as far as it goes. Then Mum turns into an asphalt drive; at the end is a white split-level divided into units.
“Where’s the beach?” Shell thought Mum said it was close.
“‘Steps from the water,’” Mum says, slamming her car door and comparing the number on the building to the one written on the slip of paper tucked in her wallet: one thousand and fifty. “That’s what she told me.”
“Well, she lied.”
The key is in the main-floor mailbox. Mum and Shell drag their luggage and Publix bags up a narrow spiral staircase to the second floor and into an apartment full of white wicker furniture and tropical plants made out of papier mâché. There are two doubles in the bedroom and the living room has about ten lamps and everything is accented with seashells, all kinds of them, encrusting picture frames and coasters and lampshades and the stately mirror hung above the couch. A set of sliding doors gives way to a balcony no bigger than a shower stall, the view from which is of a narrow irrigation creek with a concrete walking path snaking alongside.
“There’s the water we’re steps from,” Mum says.
Shell turns on the TV. “At least she didn’t lie about the cable,” she says, clicking to Murder, She Wrote.
Mum steps onto the balcony, sliding the door closed behind her. She unfolds a patio chair and sits, hugging her winter coat around her. Mum holds her back straight and stiff. Her neck is thin and delicate compared with the size of her head, enlarged by a mass of coarse steel-wool hair, extra puffy with the humidity and needing a trim. Unlike Shell, Mum never cries or yells or drinks whiskey to get to sleep. Even when Dad said he was leaving, all Mum did was go for a long walk by herself, returning with the employment section of the Somerset Free Press. “We just have to go on,” she had said. Well, Mum’s mum had been a real-life pioneer, homesteading in a sod house on the Prairies where it’s minus forty in the winter. She’d come through the Great Depression. “You don’t know from hardship,” Mum will always say when Shell refuses to mow the lawn.
It’s dark when Shell knocks on the patio glass. “What’s for dinner?” she shouts. Mum finally turns around, her eyes pink with tired.
Mum changes into the fluorescent green T-shirt and leaves her turtleneck to soak in the bathtub. Rain spatters against the windows, so they eat their spaghetti and toast in front of the TV instead of on the balcony like Mum said they ought to. The bottle of California wine is for tomorrow, Mum says, but they can have a slice of Publix apple pie, which they heat in the microwave just as the rain turns into a downpour: runoff gushes from the eaves, wind rips and whips, loose palm fronds batter the doors to the patio, which Mum is sure in Florida is called a linah.
“Should we leave milk and cookies for Santa?” Shell asks when Mum says good night.
Mum frowns at Shell, who, stretched out on the flowered couch, boots on the cushions, barely looks up from The Handmaid’s Tale and, beyond that, a Family Ties Christmas episode muted on the TV.
“Well,” Mum says, closing the bedroom door, “at least be glad you’re dry and warm.”
Bright sun slices through the bedroom blinds.
“Looks like Santa came after all,” Mum says when Shell comes out in her nightgown. Mum is reading Shell’s Simone de Beauvoir, dripping coffee down the front of the green shirt. There is porridge on the stove and coffee in the pot. A bag of Hershey’s Kisses and a tube of Kmart brand key lime pie lip balm rest next to the place Mum set for Shell at the round table with the glass top.
“Thanks.” Shell pushes the chocolate and lip balm away.
“It’s nice here.” Mum went for a walk along the irrigation creek. She saw a pelican and signs warning of alligators. The storm cracked a palm in half and Shell should see the hibiscus and lemon trees just there out back.
“Cool.” Shell opens her novel, spooning porridge.
Mum’s turtleneck is hanging on the balcony. It’s dry by the time Shell gets on her jeans and washes her face with coconut-scented hand soap. Mum makes the sandwiches and — “Shell, you’ll navigate” — writes out their route to Sanibel Island. But they’ll have to be home in time to cook the lamb. Say about four.
The air is clear and fresh, but despite the wreaths and plastic Nativity scenes up and down Conch Lane, it could be any day of any year and just about anywhere in the Christian world. It’s just stillness — even the breeze is sparse — no people in sight. Few drives even have cars.
“We the only suckers here?” Shell asks.
“Just you wait,” Mum says, starting the Datsun. “Dollars to doughnuts they’re already at the beach.”
Traffic is thick all the way across town and west up the coast. The Datsun — the only rusty brown car in Florida, Shell is sure — gets swept up in the shiny, top-down island flow. The causeway connecting Sanibel to the mainland is three separate bridges, one for each mile, and seems to go on forever. Crystal ocean stretches out on either side, as far as Shell can see.
Somerset is gone. Back there, way behind.
Mum breathes that “it’s all so beautiful” and keeps swerving to look at the wide blue water. White triangles of boat sail every which way, and birds — also white — sweep across the azure sky. Then, at the end of the last brid
ge, they follow the main road to Sanibel’s first available beach parking lot.
“Ten dollars an hour, ma’am.”
Mum’s eyes harden on the attendant. “What?” The Datsun idles as she does the conversion to Canadian in her head.
Behind, horns toot; someone’s stereo’s got Johnny Mathis singing about chestnuts.
Shell slouches, her head sinking well below window level. “Heck, Mum, it’s Christmas.”
There’s only a few spots left at the back of the lot. Families, couples, cars of teens — from the Carolinas, Georgia, Quebec, and Ontario — gather up umbrellas and picnic baskets, water wings and surfboards. More than a few wear Santa hats with their bathing suits. Mum and Shell grab the cooler and join the queue flip-flopping down to the water. And whether it is dimpled or taut, pimpled or sleek, black or tanned or white as baby teeth, there’s as much naked skin on Sanibel as there is beach. Mum and Shell shuffle along, sweating in their denim and long sleeves and heavy lace-up shoes.
“God, I wish I had my sandals,” Mum mutters.
“Ah, it’s not that hot,” says Shell through her teeth.
While the lilac of Mum’s turtleneck sort of fits into the colour scheme of the beach, Shell’s faded black T-shirt, jean jacket, and thick plaid button-down absorb the bright white sun, which is starting to beat. At least Shell’s collar is open, unlike the tight folded cuff encircling Mum’s neck.
“It must be over seventy,” Mum says, her voice tight. That means the low twenties in Celsius. “We’ll have to get on some sunscreen.”
The salt air smells of fries — the earthy hand-cut kind with skins still on — and the ocean surf peels, steady and strong. Children squeal right along with the seagulls. The beach sand is pink as cotton candy…or, no, not sand. The Sanibel shore is made of millions and billions of tiny seashells, all crushed up and ground up and powdered. Those shells still intact glow the same pastel colours as all the bungalows in Fort Myers. Mum calls the limber white birds scurrying along the water’s edge sandpipers; for every ten of those, there’s a yellow-beaked heron.