The band started, and the black line of students snaked its way around the perimeter of the field and into the rows of seats. The crowd stood until the graduates were in their places and Minister Norway began with an invocation. Hester stepped out onto the grass and stood on tiptoes, looking for Nina. She saw Al on the stage seated next to Superintendent Law. The faculty, in an unusual seating arrangement Al dreamt up several years ago, faced the graduates and parents.
It had been sunny all day, but now clouds were moving in and it was growing dark. Hester saw Al look up. Principal Glatton, the new principal, was at the microphone giving his speech and seemed unaware of the changing weather. The wind picked up, a flash of lightening bolted through the sky. Thunder rumbled. More lightning. Then the rain came down in sheets and everyone ran for the building.
Hester stood behind the heavy door and held it while the crowd jostled their way through. As more and more people jammed themselves into the narrow hall, Hester was trapped behind the door. It was pressing into her with such force she feared being crushed to death. She shoved against the door with every bit of her strength and succeeded in slamming it closed, unwittingly, right in somebody’s face. She tried to open it up again, but she was being swept along by others who were trying to make their way down the hall.
The mass of panicked humanity flowed into the gymnasium, where finally they were able to spread out. Everyone, except Hester and the custodians, who already had mops in hands, was soaked. The people moved the boxes and sat on the tables and flung their drenched jackets about, making themselves at home to wait out the storm.
In a matter of minutes, the room was filled to capacity. Hester was stuck in the midst of a jumble of damp arms and sharp elbows. Noise bounced off the rafters in an incoherent racket. The air felt like it had been sucked out of the room. Hester was trying to maneuver through the crowd in search of a familiar face, someone who might help her impose some order on this chaos, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Hester spun around.
“My God, Theo! You frightened me.”
“Calm down, Hester. It’s only me.” He was standing so close to her they were almost touching.
“Can you believe this mess?” Hester tried to step back, but Theo put his arm around her.
“It’s nothing like the mess your husband’s gotten himself into.”
“What?” Hester tried to pull away. “Come on, Theo, give Al a break. Just because you don’t—”
He put his lips next to her ear. “It doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with me liking him or not. I’m only telling you this because I care about you. I’ve always cared about you.”
“Theo, for God’s sake, you’re married.”
“So what?”
“What exactly are you trying to tell me, Theo? That Al screwed up tonight by not watching the Weather Channel or by not being able to predict a fluke meteorological event? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“Don’t be so naïve, Hester.”
“Maybe I’m naïve, but you, Theo Ottinger, are crazy.” Hester hated the fact that Theo had been after her for years. She’d tried hard to discourage him, but he just didn’t seem to get the message.
“Hester, I am going to tell you something that you can never tell anyone I told you. I don’t want to lose my job over this. If it ever gets out that I’m the big mouth, and Al lies his way out of it, well then, I’m the one who’s going to be screwed. I know you don’t want to admit it, but these administrators stick together, and they’re sneaks, fucking sneaks about it.”
Theo’s breath was hot in Hester’s ear. She’d never heard him talk like this. She leaned back and looked him in the eyes. What she saw there, the seriousness, the concern, the—she couldn’t deny it—passion, made her feel like she’d fallen overboard in rough seas. Did she want to hear what he was going to say? Did she want him to throw her a life preserver or to let her drown?
“No, Theo, no, I don’t want to know anything about Al. Just leave us the hell alone, please.” Hester was shaking her head from side to side.
Theo grabbed her chin and turned her face so he could whisper in her ear again, “Hester, it’s better to know. I don’t want to hurt you, but you have to know so no one else will get hurt.”
“Shut up, Theo, just shut up.” She knocked his hand away from her face and put both hands over her ears. She tried to get away from him, but they were surrounded by people. Hester twisted her head around, looking for a way out. She saw Al coming toward them. But before he got there, Theo pulled her close again and she felt his erection.
Thirty-Eight
Hester didn’t go back to the trailer after the meeting but headed to the beach and followed a turtle track from a mound beneath the palms to the water. The path was wide; the flippers had cut deep wedges in the sand. Hester was sorry she hadn’t made more of an effort to stand watch one night for one of the behemoth leatherbacks in the act of depositing her eggs.
Not many shells tumbled in the surf, but a long, thin, eel-like fish washed up in front of Hester. Its needle nose was long and hard as a beak, and the thick pale body narrowed to a point like an uncircumcised penis.
“Hey, Hester, great news, huh?” Nancy George came up behind Hester. Darlene Erman was with her.
“Well, I was just thinking about that.”
“What’s to think about?” Darlene flipped the dead fish over with her foot. “A million bucks, one million dollars each!”
“Well, yes, a million dollars is a lot of money, but Al and I don’t want to leave Pleasant…” There she was, doing it again. Always saying what Al thought like she thought it too. Hester corrected herself, “No, Al doesn’t want to leave Pleasant Palms, and I’m not sure what I want.”
“It’s a done deal now, Hester, so chin up,” said Nancy. “What kind of fish is that anyway, Darlene? Looks like a slick dick, doesn’t it?” She bent over and put her chubby hands on her fat knees to examine the underside of the creature.
“What are the two of you going to do?” Hester asked to be polite.
“I guess it’s safe to tell her now, Darlene.” Nancy straightened up slowly.
“I would say so.” The wrinkles beneath Darlene’s eyes deepened as she squinted in the sunlight. “Listen, Hester, Nancy and I have been, well, in love for fifteen years. It’s been a strain on us to hide our relationship all of that time. We’ve never told anyone here about our real lives, about who we really are, because we were afraid we’d be thrown out of Pleasant Palms.”
“Darlene and I have had to pretend for too long,” said Nancy. “Damn it, I’m seventy-two years old, I spent a lifetime doing what was expected of me. I got married, had children, took care of my sick husband until the day he died, knowing deep inside the life I was living was not the right life for me. It wasn’t who I really was. I never did a thing wrong; yet, I felt like a criminal for wanting more.”
“And my life, until I met Nancy was a living hell.” Darlene took Nancy’s hand. “I had two bad marriages, and thank goodness, no children. I made too many other mistakes to mention—back in the sixties, if you can imagine it, I worked for a psychologist as a sexual surrogate for men with impotency problems. Me? Imagine that. And I wasn’t even into men, even then I knew I was different. Years later, when I’m turning fifty, with a lousy job at a dental clinic, with no love life, I meet Nancy at, of all places, her son’s wedding. He was marrying a young hygienist who worked in our clinic. When we met, Nancy took my hand and held onto it just a second longer than usual. I felt something in her touch right from the beginning.”
Hester stood silently for a minute looking at the pair, the tide rising, the feet of the women disappearing in the sand. She couldn’t say she was stunned by their confession, that she hadn’t suspected they were more than friends. Odd, Hester thought, how the sale of the park seems to be flushing everyone out of one closet or another.
“I am truly happy for the both of you.” Hester meant it. They were a good match.
Na
ncy extricated her feet from the sand and moved a step closer to Hester. Her teeth were yellowed, and her breath smelled of peanuts, but her eyes drew Hester into their cobalt depths. “When we each get our million, we’re moving to Camp Sister Spirit, a womyn’s—that’s w-o-m-y-n’s—land in a town called Ovett, Mississippi. Have you heard of it?”
“No, never,” said Hester.
“You probably wouldn’t be interested, but the camp is a community of womyn. No men allowed. Get it. No m-e-n. That’s why they spell womyn with a ‘y’ instead of an ‘e.’ Think of it, no testosterone for miles. The theory is men tend toward confrontation and…”
“Domination,” Darlene finished her sentence.
“I was going to say control,” Nancy said.
“Well, same thing.”
“Not really, Darlene, but that’s beside the point. When a man’s around, no one listens to a woman, so we’re going somewhere where they aren’t.”
“You bet, honey.” Darlene hugged Nancy. Her back was toward Hester, and when the wind parted her short hair, Hester saw scabs in the folds of her neck fat. The scabs reminded Hester of Marge Lampo, a comedienne Al and she saw at a comedy club in New Jersey.
Lampo was a big woman like Nancy, but with a loud mouth and a thick Jersey accent. She was an over-the-top composite of all things female and Garden State, a caricature of the real women who were known for being fast and up-front. Her monologue was irreverent to say the least. She said things like, bad men like fat chicks because their backsides are big enough for them to hide behind when the cops come, or Italian men talk like they’re in the mob when all they’re connected to is a fork. Hester laughed in spite of herself. Al, on the other hand, was insulted.
The show ended with Lampo saying Courtney Love kissed Marge on the lips one time. Lampo said something to the effect that Courtney was pretty stupid about a lot of things, but she sure knew a hot chick when she saw one, even if she, Lampo, did have scabs in the folds of her double chins.
Hester didn’t think that part was funny.
“Hey,” Nancy said to Hester over Darlene’s shoulder, “talking about testosterone, your husband got pretty loud at the meeting. Is he over it?”
“Good question,” Hester mumbled and looked out over the ocean.
The women said good-bye and walked north on the beach. Hester walked south to the jetty and sat down on a smooth boulder. It was close to eighty degrees, and Hester fretted for a minute about not having applied sunscreen, but a more ominous worry arose in her mind. She pictured angry Al storming out of the meeting. She pictured sullen Al sitting in his La-Z-Boy clicking his remote. She pictured naked Al coming towards her, wanting her to make him happy. She didn’t think she could, ever again.
Thirty-Nine
After the fiasco in the gym Hester was lying in bed in the dark thinking about how odd Theo Ottinger’s behavior had been, when Al rolled over to face her and said, “You awake, Hester? My ankle’s throbbing. I can’t sleep.”
She was awake, but didn’t answer. Al had been complaining about his stupid ankle for years. She was tired of listening to him whine about it because a bad ankle was a small price to pay not to go to Vietnam. She used to keep reminding him of that. “Al,” she’d say, “you know that ankle kept you out of the service and out of Vietnam. Did you forget that if it weren’t for that ankle, you would’ve been the first to go? Did you forget that your birthday was September 14, the first birth date picked in that awful lottery?”
Al could’ve ended up in a jungle somewhere, addicted to heroin, forced to kill people, sick with some disease, maimed, deranged, or, worse yet, dead. Hester would remind him of all of this. She would tell him about the veteran’s hospital in Philadelphia where she volunteered to help with the amputees. They were young guys, handsome young guys, with no arms or legs, with half a face, with a hole in their skull, with their penises blown off.
“It was a blessing, Al, a goddamn blessing you shattered your ankle in that high school football game. It was a true gift from God, and you should be thankful,” Hester would add with a sigh.
But tonight Hester was tired, and she didn’t want to coddle Al or talk about the war.
When she didn’t answer him, he moved closer to her and slipped his cool hand under her pajama top, and began kneading her breast, “I saw that twerp Theo all over you tonight. What was he in your ear about?”
Hester didn’t answer, but thought, what was he in my ear about? Was Theo trying to stir up trouble or was there something Al needed to tell her?
“Hester, Hester, you fucking love goddess, even the young married men are after you.” He rubbed her breast harder. “Mad at me for interrupting, huh? Well, too bad for little Theodore. You’re my wife, and he can keep his pencil dick to himself.” Al rolled on his back and lifted Hester on top of him in one smooth move. His hands cupped her buttocks. “You are still so round and firm. It’s all of that exercise you get running away from the younger men. How’s this for a stud?” He pulled her nightgown up and forced himself into her. Hester propped herself up on her arms to keep her face from touching his. She really wasn’t in the mood, but Al certainly was, even after all of the chaos in the gym.
Al had gotten that situation under control by getting on the loud speaker and canceling the entire graduation ceremony until the next day. People were angry about his decision, but Al stuck to it, and finally everyone left. Al and she straightened out the caps and gowns and locked up the building. When they got outside, Nina was standing in the rain alone. They took her with them for pizza. It broke Hester’s heart that not one person from her family had been there and probably wouldn’t be tomorrow night either. After dinner, Al reached across the table and took both of the girl’s small hands in his and told her how important she was to Hester and to him. It made Nina blush, but it filled Hester’s heart with joy to see Al acting like a real father. Tomorrow, Hester would order roses for Nina and say they were from Al.
Even though Al had handled the mess in the gym so competently and had been so sweet with Nina, Hester couldn’t stop worrying about what Theo said, “…it’s better to know…you have to know so no one else will get hurt.” What did she “have to know”? Who else “will get hurt”? She should’ve let Theo tell her.
Al was breathing heavily, his penis thick as a hunk of salami.
“Baby, baby, make me come.”
All he needed was for Hester to thrust slightly, and it would be over. But Hester wanted to stop everything and confront him. She wanted to say, “Hey, Al, what was Theo in my ear about? What do I need to know, and who’s going to get hurt if I don’t?” But before she could get off him, his body went rigid, he hollered something about God, and came. As soon as he let go of her, Hester got up and went into the bathroom.
By the time she cleaned herself up and got back in bed, Al was snoring. No hug, no honey, that was great, no nothing. It was the first time they’d done it without one kiss.
Hester was wide awake. She moved as far from Al’s body as she could get and lay watching the shadows on the ceiling and listening to the rain. Had Al hurt someone? Another staff member? He’d certainly hurt her more than a few times.
Yes, she knew what it felt like to be hurt, to be young and devastated. She knew what it was to fight your own private war, to stand in a dormitory hallway and bleed like a wounded sow.
Forty
Two days later Debbie from the Pleasant Palms office knocked on the door of their trailer. Al was in his La-Z-Boy with the TV blaring—Judge Joe Brown rapping his gavel on the desk, shaking it in the air.
Hester stopped making the coffee and went to the door. She knew Al wouldn’t. Debbie handed a paper to Hester. “It’s important; make sure you read the whole thing.”
Hester thanked her and handed it to Al, who immediately hit the Mute button and started reading. Hester went back to the kitchen and plugged in the percolator.
“Hester, hand me my cheaters.” Al was never one to skip the fine print. Hester toss
ed him his glasses. He put them on and read silently for few more minutes before he exploded. “What the hell? Are they kidding? Listen to this, and I quote, ‘Ribsom & Newton are due ten percent, or thirty million, of the three hundred million sale price. The buyers have put down ten million and the board of directors has voted to give the Ribsom & Newton nine-point-seven million of this down payment to assure a smooth closing. Each of the three hundred unit owners in the park will receive an equal share of the remaining three hundred thousand dollars from the down payment, or a sum of one thousand dollars each…’”
His voice grew louder. “‘As each unit owner must share in the cost of legal representation, the final figure to be equally distributed is two hundred and seventy million, but there may be other costs that may lower the final figure. The sale is contingent on a thirty-day closing, which means all units must be vacated in thirty days from today.’ Can you believe this?” Al got up, went into the kitchen, and tossed the paper on the counter.
“Already we’re down to nine hundred thousand, and no one has said one word about capital gains. That could be another forty percent. And what are the mysterious ‘other costs’? Hester, do you understand what this means?”
Hester was scrubbing the sink with Clorox for the third time. She didn’t want to talk to Al, but she couldn’t help looking up at him and saying, “No, Al, remember I’m too dumb to understand what anything means?”
“Oh, God, Hester, get over it, would you? I didn’t mean that, and you know it. And you know these idiots sold us out. All we’re getting before we have to be out of our trailer, is a thousand dollars. Not enough to pay a mover, let alone put money down on a new place. How are we supposed to buy something else if we don’t get a decent amount down?”
Al was fired up and pacing the small space in front of the sliding glass doors like a caged tiger. The angrier he got, the more pronounced his limp. Hester used to see him like this at school outside his office when one principal or another—he had lived through so many—had pissed him off.
On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1) Page 19