“I tell you, Hester, if I had a gun, I would have shot him. They were the only ones on the dance floor, and the whole place got real quiet. They were doing the cha-cha. I never saw Cliff do the cha-cha! They were staring into each other’s eyes and had these silly smiles on their faces. Cliff spins Lola toward him. The song was over, and right in front of me, he kisses her.”
Tears glistened in Barb’s eyes. “That was it for me. Cliff came back to the table, sat down, and looked at me, but before he could open his mouth, I picked up the bottle of his Johnny Walker and poured what was left in it over his head. Then I threw the empty bottle at Lola. It missed and shattered against the wall behind her into a thousand pieces.
“Hester, we’d been married forty-two years, and it was over in one night. I threw him out, and he moves in with her on Queen Palm Drive. I’ve never spoken to either one of them since, and I never will. They could be right behind me in the blood pressure line, and I act like they aren’t there. I’ve gotten pretty good at pretending they’re both dead.”
Hester didn’t know what to say. It was a terrible story, and the cheap wine was making her head spin. She felt sorry for Barb, but she also felt trapped in the circle of torches and the miasma of the woman’s sadness.
“And you know what, Hester, the worst part is I’m totally alone now. None of the men around here even look at me. If they’re widowed or divorced, they want someone younger, a lot younger. Even the men who are ten years older than me and on their way out want someone young. That horrific bowling banquet may well have been the last time in my life I was out to dinner with a man. And now Cliff goes around acting like a teenager in love, and I’m drying up like a forgotten old prune.”
Hester, trying to make Barb feel better, blurted out, “Barb, you look great for your age, and everybody loves you. I just met you, and I think you’re a wonderful, vibrant woman. How can you think about yourself like that?”
But the truth was Barb did look like a dried up prune, and her situation was depressing. Hester was tired. She didn’t want to be alone with Barb any longer. She didn’t want to hear about how lonely she was, or about how Cliff walked away from that bowling banquet with much more than a gag trophy. He’d bowled his way into a whole new life for himself. And Barb, well, Barb was left behind; and because she was a woman, an older woman, the same kind of second chance would never come her way, and that was just the painful truth.
Barb spoke up before Hester could excuse herself, “You think I still look okay? You know, Hester, I wanted to ask Stanley Upshure over for a drink, but the last time I talked to him, he told me he thought the old billionaire who married Anna Nicole Smith was the luckiest old bastard in the world. He called Anna Nicole the hot blonde with the double D’s. It’s disgusting to listen to a seventy-year-old man talk about a young woman’s body like that, but you know what? Maybe I’m too sensitive. Nobody’s perfect, right?”
Hester felt like saying, damn, Barb, you can do better than Stanley Upshure, but she didn’t. The least she could do was leave her with a little hope. It did no good to let on to the world that you’re bitter or your feelings are hurt or your confidence is sagging right along with your aging body. Barb’s nice-sized boobs probably used to look sexy. So what if they looked like hanging papaya now. So what if her arms were flabby, and her wide calves were covered with sunspots and purple veins. She’d put on pink lip gloss and penciled in her eyebrows. Even with her mascara smeared from her tears, Hester could see that at one time she had been attractive, and desirable.
“Barb,” she said, “you may not be Anna Nicole Smith, none of us are, but I like you, a lot, if that makes any difference.” It was easy for Hester to see she made Barb feel better. The woman leaned toward Hester and stared into Hester’s eyes. The zinfandel-fueled look of admiration made Hester uncomfortable, so she added jokingly, “Not that I’m a lesbian or anything,” and then felt stupid for doing so.
Walking home on the deserted lanes of the little trailer park and thinking about Barb Hendleman brought Hester to tears. Then she remembered Rachel Rizzo who had roomed next to Hester at Glassboro. After curfew when everyone else was asleep, they’d sit in the dorm hallway smoking and talking. When Hester was going through her crisis with Arty, Rachel kept telling her not to give up on Arty.
“Hester, the smart woman stays. The smart woman stays.” Rachel missed the whole point, which was that Hester had no choice. Arty was the one who dumped Hester.
But Rachel was right, though, if you looked at Barb’s situation. Barb had every reason to dump a cheater like Cliff, but now Barb was the one who was alone. If she handled things differently, held back and let the dust settle, maybe she could have reined Cliff in. Maybe if she put all those years of being together on the scale before she blew her cork, she wouldn’t be stuck now being the unwanted one.
Al kept calling Hester from the rehab center and Hester kept ignoring him. It wasn’t until the last week of his rehabilitation, she finally gave in and picked up the phone. She’d decided to act like nothing was awry and tell him exactly what she’d told everyone else—Nina had gone back to school in New Jersey.
Hester knew it was a tremendous lie, but, the fact of the matter was, it was a necessary one. Hester wasn’t ready to end things with Al; and besides, as the little voice inside her head kept saying, you don’t really know how Nina died. She couldn’t blame Al if she didn’t know what actually happened, could she?
However, Hester could see where the police might jump to the conclusion that Al was guilty, and how horrible would it be if Al was found guilty of a murder he didn’t commit? What if he was sent to jail for the rest of his life? What if he lost his pension? Their pension? Her early retirement had resulted in a pittance of a pension for Hester. It would never be enough for her to live on. If Al’s was gone, she’d be broke.
And other men? What hope did she have of finding a man at her age? If she did happen to find one, he’d probably have a ton of baggage, new baggage. Better to deal with the devil you know, than the one you don’t. Someone had said that to her a long time ago…probably Rachel.
Life with Al, when she reflected on it, had its upside.
Hester tossed the herbs she’d chopped into a wet mush into the salad. She took the eggplant out of the oven and put it aside to set. She shook olives out onto a small glass plate shaped like a fish and shaved thick curls of sharp provolone over them. She dressed the greens and herbs with oil and vinegar, poured herself a glass of pinot noir, took a sip, and looked out the window again at Al. He was staring at the Bo tree, his beer in his hand.
All for Love by John Dryden. Hester closed her eyes and thought of the comparative thesis she done in grad school. Dryden’s seventeenth century reworking of Antony and Cleopatra versus Shakespeare’s sixteenth century play. One part of a line came back to her. She’d quoted it near the end of her paper, thinking at the time how pathetic Cleopatra sounded, trying to blame someone else for her own mistakes; and, yet, it was undeniable, the Egyptian queen been taken in and fooled by Antony.
“I would reason more calmly with you. Did you not overrule and force my plain, direct and open love into these crooked paths…” Hester sipped her wine again and thought, Al, you son of a bitch, you are forcing my open love into a crooked path.
Hester knew Al would never bring the subject of Nina up again. If Hester didn’t bring it up, they would never talk about it. Al had a sixth sense about when it was best to remain in the dark. And he liked to keep others in the dark when it worked to his advantage. He’d been well suited for the job of vice principal of a school like Sourland High because he was good at sweeping things under the carpet, and leaving them there. But Hester knew that beneath his non-confrontational exterior, there was a manipulative genius at work, constantly striving to control everyone and everything around him.
On that balmy December night, Hester couldn’t begin to realize exactly how voracious her husband’s appetite for dominance really was, how ruthless he could be wh
en it came to his survival.
Looking at him through the window, she wondered if he wasn’t only pretending that everything was fine, that Nina was fine, that she, Hester, was fine, that the whole world was spinning correctly on its axis. What was going on in that handsome, scheming head of his? She’d be damned if she could figure him out.
She picked up the insalata misto, and singing along with “Funiculi Funicula,” joined him in the rosy twilight on the patio.
Al smiled at her. “How’s that dinner coming along?”
“Perfecto mundo!” Hester’s Italian accent was laughable, and she gave the appearance of being happy. She was becoming almost as good as Al at keeping people in the dark.
Seventeen
Two years after their wedding, Hester was outside her classroom on the first day of school waiting for the bell to ring when she saw Janine Apgar come out of her room backwards. She appeared to be talking to someone who was still inside.
Even though time had passed, Hester hadn’t been able to forget the crude comments Janine had made at Hester’s wedding reception, so Hester was still on the lookout for opportunities to make things unpleasant for Janine.
Janine had her hands on her ample hips, and in her tight straight skirt the cheeks of her rump looked like bowling balls. She’d recently started dying her brown hair orange. “Not orange, Hester, auburn,” she adamantly corrected Hester who’d called it orange. Janine had it parted in the middle today, and curls hung on either side of her face like links of sausage. At least with the orange hair, Hester concluded, Janine’s red-orange lipstick didn’t look as garish, and that was about the nicest thing Hester could think of concerning Janine’s current appearance.
Janine seemed to be flirting with whomever Hester couldn’t see. Her orange head bobbled on her thick neck. She shrugged her shoulders, her breasts jiggled.
Who is she talking to? The suspense was killing Hester.
Hester was beginning to think the bell was never going to ring, the malfunction on purpose. It was freshmen orientation and freshmen teachers were never happy about orientation day. Everyone else on staff worked quietly in their rooms while they had to orient the freshmen. Hester begged Al, who was in charge of scheduling, not to assign her any, and he hadn’t; but he did assign five whole sections to Janine. Hester was triumphant. Al knew Janine wasn’t a favorite of hers.
But how had Al convinced Janine to take all those freshmen sections without Janine going ballistic? Janine personally told Hester how much she “hated the whiny little bastards” and how “all the books the freshmen read are nothing but drivel.”
The bell rang, Hester could go back into her room now and dig out her plans for Gides, The Immoralist. She couldn’t believe it was still in the world lit curriculum. An older man, who is ill, travels to Africa and hires young boys to wait on him while he tries to find some meaning in life. He’s too distracted by the intense Saharan heat, and the distracting beauty of the boys, to be able to draw any conclusions about anything. What a depressing story.
Work could wait, though. Hester wanted to see who came out of Janine’s classroom. According to good old Frances Middleton, who kept Hester up on the gossip, Janine hadn’t had a boyfriend in a long time. Maybe she’d found someone on staff to hook up with over the summer.
Hester watched as Janine disappeared into her room. Nothing happened. Hester almost turned away to get started on the Gide unit, when who comes out of the room but Al. He had his clipboard in his left hand, but his right arm was stretched out, and his hand was still inside the room, holding on to something. Then Hester saw it, Janine’s hand in his, her bright yellow bangle catching Hester’s eye like a caution sign.
Janine reappeared in the doorway, and Hester watched as her husband pulled Janine toward him and whispered something in her ear. The sound of the woman’s laughter drifted down the hall to Hester, and pierced her through the heart.
Eighteen
The whirring of chain saws woke Hester, and her first thought was, where am I?
She leaned up on one elbow. She was on the couch in the living room.
Al was on the La-Z-boy.
They’d had a calm, uneventful dinner together last evening. Even watched an episode of The Sopranos. But Hester drank too much wine, passed out on the couch, and now she was feeling pretty fuzzy. The noise outside wasn’t helping, though it wasn’t waking Al up. People were shouting and hammering things. Hester listened to the sounds of glass shattering, metal scraping against metal. The Pleasant Palmers were trying to fix what Mother Nature had destroyed.
Though she hadn’t been there long, it seemed she’d heard the history of Pleasant Palms a hundred times.
It began with the Great Depression and the misfortunes of a family named the Banfords. They were broke and freezing to death in Michigan, so they packed up and headed toward Florida. They ended up in Destination, which was not a true town, just a store and gas station next to a dairy farm on the only road leading south out of Palm Beach. The Banfords pulled off the road and asked the farmer if they could pitch their tent in the pasture in return for working on the farm. They ended up staying the whole winter. In the spring when they returned to Michigan, they were happy and full of hope.
Back up north times got better for the Bamfords, years passed, and their children grew-up and moved away. In the 1950’s, they decided to retire and bought a sleek new travel trailer and drove to Destination, Florida. They wanted to thank the man who’d helped them out when they needed it. The farmer, happy to see them, invited them to park their trailer in the pasture by the beach and stay on for the winter.
It wasn’t long before other tin-can tourists joined them. The farmer herded his cows across the road to another field and charged the Northerners a small fee. The pasture filled with Chateaus, Vagabonds, and Tropicaires. The strangers became friends, and the farmer made more money than he ever had.
The next year the travelers asked if they could leave their trailers in the pasture during the summer while they drove their cars back up north. Then maybe the farmer could build them a modest clubhouse or a small restaurant or a bathhouse? The farmer got worried. What did he know about clubhouses and restaurants? He still had another twenty acres to farm, and he was getting old and tired.
Eventually, the friends got together and asked to buy the pasture. “Name your price,” they told the farmer, and he did. And that’s how Pleasant Palms Trailer Park came to be.
In 1990, Al and Hester Murphy flew down to Palm Beach on spring break for a conference on technology in the classroom. Al was eager to jump on the computer bandwagon, and he was good at scheduling school business in vacation spots so they could travel “on the district’s dime,” as he liked to put it.
As soon as they checked into the Breakers, barely ruffled by their business class flight, Hester reflected, and not for the first time, on the advantages of being married to Al, even though she’d insisted on paying for her own airline ticket. She didn’t really like Al fudging the travel voucher.
When the meetings were over and Hester’s skin was just getting that caramel glow, Al decided they should stay on. He wanted to rent a convertible, explore a bit, and get a tan too. Hester had no objections, not that it would’ve changed his mind if she did. She called for a substitute and faxed some plans to her supervisor before they checked out of the Breakers and headed south on A1A.
“Al, it is so sexy to play hooky at our age.”
Al was driving down A1A, and Hester had her hand on his thigh. She looked over at his profile, and even though his eyes were hidden behind his tinted aviators, Hester could tell by the set of his mouth he was pleased with himself. He looked at her and smiled. She knew she looked good in her tight, white capris and low cut silk top. Her hair, mousy from the long winter in New Jersey, was sun streaked now. Her skin tanned. Al reached over and tweaked her closest nipple through her top. It made her jump, but she liked it when Al touched her like this. It made her feel connected to him. It made her feel
young and sexy and in love, and not like they’d been married forever and he’d done a ton of philandering and they’d never been able to reproduce. At a moment like this, all of Hester’s fears and hurts and regrets evaporated. At a moment like this, even a longed for child might’ve been in the way.
They drove past mansions and stretches of beach. On the radio Jimmy Buffet sang about Margaritaville. They eased around a curve. Emerald lawns led to meticulously trimmed hedges and Belgium block driveways to gilded gates. Yachts as big as houses, with names like High Note and Octopussy, drifted majestically down the Intracoastal.
Then suddenly, they were driving through the middle of a trailer park. Five narrow lanes of pale-blue travel trailers stretched east and west from A1A.
“Did you see that?” Al hollered over the music.
“It was a trailer park!” Hester shouted back.
“No kidding.”
“Turn around, Al. Please! Let’s take a look.”
“Cut me a break, will you, Hester? I was thinking the same thing.” He made a sharp U-turn, parked in front the Pleasant Palms Trailer Park Office, and hopped out. Al had an athletic body, a perfect body, except for that one bad ankle of his.
“Your Royal Highness, welcome to your new kingdom,” he said as he opened Hester’s door. The way he looked her in the eyes made her blush.
It took Al only a few minutes to set his mind on buying the 1978 Chateau trailer on Fish Tail Lane. But the way Al told it later, it was Hester’s decision. Al said it was up to her. He stood by the sliding door repeating what a great place it was, but it didn’t matter unless his beautiful wife was happy too. He did make her feel like a queen sometimes.
On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1) Page 10