Far-Flung (17 page)

“Does it hurt?”

“I don’t feel it,” said Miss Alice Paul. She looked at her foot, which was extended straight out in front of her, like a sword. She had forgotten about her feet. They were so far away from the rest of her. She had lost interest in them. Every other Thursday, she was lined up with the other residents, barefoot, in the corridor, and a podiatrist, who sat on a little rolling platform, scooted down the row, his head bowed over their gnarled, naked feet, trimming their toenails. Like Jesus washing the apostles’ feet.

“It took me a while to find you,” Dominick said. “This is a big place.”

“Well, I used to be over there.” Miss Alice Paul started to wave toward The Lodge, but then she realized she had no idea where it was. “But they moved me because of my foot. It was nicer over there.”

“Maybe you’ll get moved back,” Dominick said.

“Maybe,” said Miss Alice Paul. “I doubt it.”

“Oh,” said Dominick. He sounded disappointed.

“How are you?” asked Miss Alice Paul. “You said you were cutting grass?”

“Yes,” said Dominick. “I have a job cutting grass. All over the county.”

“That sounds … interesting,” Miss Alice Paul said.

“Not really,” said Dominick. “But it’s nice to be outdoors.”

“How’s school?” asked Miss Alice Paul.

“It’s over. I graduated. I start college in the fall.”

“Where are you going?”

“Indiana University. Bloomington.”

“I used to live in Bloomington,” said Miss Alice Paul.

“I know,” said Dominick. “With Aunt Gran.”

Rose. If only Rose hadn’t died.

“What will you study?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What do you want to do?” She almost added, when you grow up, but she stopped herself.

Dominick shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“How’s your sister?”

“Good. At least I think. She moved to California.”

“To be a movie star?”

“No,” said Dominick.

“What does she want to do?”

“She’s not sure,” said Dominick.

What unmotivated children, Miss Alice Paul thought. They’ll get nowhere.

“And your mother?” she asked, thinking, I’ll ask about the mother, but I won’t ask about the grandmother. I’ll be damned if I ask after her.

“She’s O.K.” He stood up. “I should get back to work,” he said. “I just wanted to stop by.”

“It was very kind of you,” said Miss Alice Paul. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything to eat.”

“That’s O.K.,” said Dominick. “I just had lunch.”

“Well, it was so nice of you to come.”

Dominick smiled. “It was nice to see you,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about you.” He paused in the door. “Maybe I’ll come again, before I leave for school.”

“Please do,” said Miss Alice Paul. “If you find the time.”

“Is there anything you need? I could maybe bring you something.”

“Oh, no,” said Miss Alice Paul. She gestured around her little room. “I have everything I need right here. I’m quite … fine. But thank you.”

“So long,” said Dominick. “Take care.”

“Good-bye,” said Miss Alice Paul. He went out into the hall, apparently the wrong way, because he reappeared, walking in the opposite direction. He smiled at her, waved, was gone.

After a moment she tried to move her chair over to the window so she could watch him come out the front. But the girl had put the brake on, and she couldn’t release it. She pulled with all her might but it wouldn’t budge. Damn it, she thought. Damn it to hell.

I
WAS IN THE LIVING ROOM,
twirling around, when the phone rang. I went into the kitchen and answered it. Everything kept spinning.

“Hello,” I said.

“Is Kittery there?” Ellen, my mother, asked. Kittery was my older sister.

“No,” I said. “She’s over Duane’s.”

“I suppose she took her car?”

“She did,” I said.

“Is Topsy back yet?” On Friday nights, Topsy, my grandmother, ran the fish-fry at the Methodist Church.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Oh God,” Ellen said. “Dominick.”

“What? Where are you?”

“I’m at the pharmacy. I’m standing here at the pharmacy, talking on the pay phone. Virginia Doyle is inside trying on sunglasses. I think she’s spying on me.”

“So,” I said.

“So, I can’t do it,” Ellen said. “I just can’t do it.”

“What?”

“I can’t walk home. I can’t walk home alone.”

Last Friday night, on her way home from work—Ellen’s a bank teller, and the bank’s open till eight Friday nights—she claims she was attacked. She says there was a man in the woods along Cobble Road, calling her filthy names, throwing sticks and moss and bottle caps at her. She arrived home hysterical and limping. One of her heels had broken.

“Do you want me to come down?” I asked.

“Would you? Just this once. Next week it will be O.K.”

“It will take me a while to walk down.”

“That’s O.K.,” Ellen said. “I’ll wait right here.”

I’ve always been more comfortable with Topsy, my grandmother; Ellen didn’t live with us until I was twelve, six years ago. She had a nervous breakdown when her husband died, when I was a baby. We all lived in New York City then. Ellen was a fashion model called Nina Night. This is all I know about my father: His name was Alexander Deen, he was rich, he was twenty-four when he married my mother and twenty-eight when he dived off the side of a boat into the Atlantic Ocean and never resurfaced. He had been drinking; it was a hot, sunny day in August. After he died my mother tried to kill herself. Kittery and I were sent back to Indiana to live with Topsy. Now Ellen went to the Mental Health Center once a week and took pills to stay “stable.”

It took me about half an hour to walk downtown. Ellen was standing in the greeting card aisle of the pharmacy, looking at the cards.

“They have some real sweet cards, now,” she said. “Look at this.” She handed me a card: a photograph of a bowl of fruit. Inside was written “Thinking of You.”

“Isn’t that a nice card?” she asked. “Wouldn’t it be nice to get that card from someone?”

“It’s stupid,” I said. “What’s the fruit got to do with anything? It looks plastic.”

Ellen looked at the picture more closely. “I don’t think that’s the point,” she said. “Maybe I’ll send this to John Calvin.” John Calvin Starr was the man Ellen had been dating, on and off, ever since she moved back to Norwell.

“I’m sure John Calvin will like it, especially if you send it to him,” I said.

She bought the card and we started home. Ellen walked real slowly, as if every step were taking her into alien turf. We walked up Growper Street, past the dark high school. Ellen opened her bag and took out a half-eaten bagel wrapped in a napkin.

“Did you have dinner?” she asked. “Want a bite?”

“Sure,” I said. She held the bagel out, and I bit into it. It was hard and tasteless. “It’s stale,” I said.

“Why didn’t you go cook with Topsy?” she asked.

“I didn’t feel like it.”

“I appreciate your walking me home. You must think it’s silly.”

“No,” I said. “I understand.”

We walked along in a comfortable, accustomed silence. Ellen started tearing the bagel into little pieces and dropping the crumbs in the gutter. When we turned onto Cobble Road, which had no houses and fewer street lights, I could feel her tense up. The bagel was gone, sowed behind us, and she began shredding the napkin.

“Did you prove O.K.?” I asked. Every night Ellen had to prove out at the bank—make sure the cash in her drawer was the right amount.

“Smack on the nose,” she said, but she didn’t sound happy about it. We were walking down the middle of the road, where the white line would have been had there been a white line. Our shadows kept waxing and waning as we moved from one streetlight toward another, and I was concentrating on that pattern, trying to find the moment when the direction of our shadows changed, but there were a few dark steps in between the lights where they just disappeared.

Ellen stopped walking and pointed into the woods at some dark trunks of trees beyond a low, disintegrating stone wall. “This is where it happened,” she said.

“You thought someone was in there?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. She stood in a pool of light, her shadow puddled beneath her, staring into the woods.

“There’s no one in there,” I said. I walked up the embankment and stood on the stone wall, picked up a small rock and threw it into the woods. It hardly made a sound, like it landed on a pillow. “See,” I said. I turned around.

Ellen was still standing beneath the light, but she was swaying back and forth, as if she were being hypnotized.

“There’s no one in there,” I repeated.

“I know there’s no one in there,” Ellen said. “Of course there’s no one in there. He’s long gone by now.”

Topsy always took a shower when she got back from the church dinner—“To wash the fish stink off.” I was lying on the living room floor watching a movie on TV. Ellen had gone to bed.

Topsy came into the living room, pinning her long wet hair on top of her head. It looked black, but when it dried you could see it was really gray. She stood behind me, watching the TV for a minute. Then she jiggled my shoulder with her foot.

“Come on,” she said.

“Where are we going?”

“On a mission. You and me. Come on.”

“I’m watching this.”

“I’ve never seen anything so stupid in my life,” Topsy said. “Come on.”

She wouldn’t tell me where we were going. We got into the car and drove downtown, then out toward the sand pit. We stopped in front of Duane’s mobile home. Duane was Kittery’s boyfriend. He was a chemistry teacher and wrestling coach at Norwell High School. He was also thirty, and black.

Kittery had been seeing Duane since she was a junior in high school, three years ago. They had kept their romance pretty much a secret until Kittery graduated. Now they drive around town together, and Kittery spends as many nights at Duane’s as she does at home. Topsy periodically has a “talk” with Kittery. She’s always trying to get Kittery out of Norwell and back “on the right track.” Kittery did go down to the University at Bloomington, but she only stayed for a semester. Now she sells Lottie Dale cosmetics, at least when she’s in the mood.

Topsy and I got out of the car, walked up the metal steps, and knocked on the door. Duane opened it. He was wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts and white socks. Behind him Kittery lay on the couch, watching TV: the same movie I had been watching. Duane didn’t say anything. He held the door open, turned around, and looked at Kittery.

“What are you guys doing here?” Kittery asked. She sat up, but continued watching the TV. Topsy ducked under Duane’s arm. Duane stepped aside, and said, “Hi, Nick.”

“Hi,” I said. I followed my grandmother into the suddenly crowded mobile home. Topsy turned the TV off and stood in front of it, waiting for everybody to focus his attention on her. We all pretty much did.

“Would you like to go put some trousers on, Duane?” Topsy asked.

Duane looked down at his bare, muscular legs. “That’s O.K.,” he said.

“Well,” Topsy sighed. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.” There was a silence while we all considered this statement: Was she referring to Duane’s naked legs?

“Don’t know what?” prompted Kittery. She lay back down on the couch, her head in Duane’s lap.

I was watching Topsy. I knew she had hoped to find Duane and Kittery involved in some illicit activity: gambling, hashish smoking, oral sex, anything but watching the same dumb movie that had been playing in her very own living room ten minutes ago. But the sight of Kittery’s head in Duane’s lap seemed to refuel her energies. She took a good long look at them and said, “Kittery, darling, just because you’re young and smart and beautiful doesn’t mean you can behave any way you want. Now you know me and your brother are worried sick about you. Aren’t we, Dominick?”

I shook my head in an ambiguous sort of way. Kittery was trying not to laugh.

Topsy noted this, but continued. She was not easily thwarted. “Well, at least
I
am. Worried sick. What about you, Duane?”

“I don’t think I am. Am I, Kittery?”

“Duane’s not worried about me, Topsy,” Kittery confirmed.

“Just look at you,” Topsy said. “If you could only see yourself.”

Kittery stood up. She was wearing sweatpants and a flannel shirt. They both belonged to Duane. If she wasn’t so beautiful she would have looked awful. She took a deep breath and smiled. “I’m being a bad hostess, aren’t I? Could I get you something to drink? Dominick?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Why don’t you come help me?” Kittery said. “We’ll let Topsy and Duane talk.”

Kittery and I went into the kitchen. Everything was miniature-sized. Kittery opened the back door. “Let’s split,” she said. “I’m not hanging around for this.”

“What about Duane?”

“Duane’s a big boy,” Kittery said. “Duane can take care of himself.”

Kittery was the only girl in the history of Norwell High School to be elected homecoming queen three years in a row, but she doesn’t want to be a model. She thinks that’s what messed Ellen up; she’s convinced all those flashbulbs fry your brain cells. Kittery is so beautiful that Mr. Templer, of Templer Ford, gives her a free car every year. All she has to do is drive it in the Memorial Day Parade, wearing her prom gown, long white gloves, sunglasses, and a sash that says “There’s a Ford in Your Future.”

Kittery and I drove into town with the top down and radio turned up loud. We pulled into Ransom’s. “Want to get a drink?” Kittery asked. She got free drinks at Ransom’s.

“Sure,” I said.

We went inside and sat at the bar. The movie we had both been watching was on the TV above it.

“I’m starving,” I said. “I didn’t have dinner.”

“I thought you were going with Topsy.”

“I didn’t. I walked Ellen home.”

“How’d she do?”

“She kind of freaked out for a while, but we made it.”

“Jesus,” Kittery said. She ordered a beer and I ordered a Coke and some french fried zucchini—a specialty of Ransom’s. John Calvin appeared, holding a pool stick. John Calvin practically lived in Ransom’s.

“Howdy,” he said. He took one of my zucchinis.