Hot Springs (2 page)

Sometimes her mother went out at night and didn’t come back until very late.

Sometimes she wore black lipstick.

She liked to sing along, very loud, to Elvis Costello records, and also sinister-sounding blues ones.

One day, Bernice found that the crotches had been snipped out of all her underpants. That night at dinner, her mother started giggling and had to be excused.

Sometimes Bernice could hear her sobbing in her studio, when she was supposedly working on her paintings. (Her father did his painting outside the house, in a rented space downtown.) Bernice imagined what Casey Littlejohn would say about that.
Wimp
, maybe?
Froot Loop
, more likely. Bernice had made the mistake of telling Casey about the underwear incident, and now she lived in constant fear that Casey would someday stop being her friend and let it get around to the whole school, at which point Bernice’s life, as she knew it, would essentially be over.

And then, less than three months after the naked walk, her mother solved everything by moving out. This came as a complete surprise to Bernice, although she had sensed that something was up.
Often she heard her parents fighting down in the dining room after she went to bed, their voices drifting up the stairwell, the individual words losing definition and becoming more like the distant sounds of animals, or perhaps the moaning of unhappy ghosts.

Her father came to pick her up from school. On the way home, he suggested they stop at Safeway and get Berger cookies, her favorite. It was a Monday, and the day before, in a magical transformation, as if they’d been holding their breath and were now exhaling, all the cherry and pear trees in Baltimore had blossomed at once. Sunlight glanced off the pink and white flowers, and Bernice felt excitement at this clear promise that summer was coming. She liked summer. She loved the sun.

They bought the cookies. He seemed preoccupied, distant. When they got back to the house, he nosed the car too far into the garage and broke a hole into the wooden cupboard that stood against the back wall.

Inside, he got her milk from the refrigerator, then sat with her at the kitchen table. “Your mother,” he said, “has gone to live with another man.”

“What other man?” Bernice asked.

“Just someone. I don’t know, to tell you the truth. A musician, I think. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that she doesn’t live here anymore. You are not to think about her, all right? It’s just you and me, now. We’ll get along fine. If she calls, I’d like you to give me the phone. What she’s done is inexcusable, and she knows that.” He hadn’t looked at her the entire time he’d been talking, but now he did. “All right?” he asked. He might have been working out a deal on how much television she’d be allowed, or on what kind of grades she’d need to get an increase in her allowance.

Bernice knew that this was not necessarily her real mother doing this, whatever it was. It was her Froot Loop mother. The underwear
snipper. The person who had sneaked in and was wearing her real mother’s body like a Halloween outfit.

“I want to talk to her,” she said.

“Well, you can’t. She’s not here.” He stood up. “You may need counseling or something like that. If you do, I hope you’ll let me know. It’s expensive, and I’m not sure whether my insurance will cover it or not, but that’s all right. I want you to know that—you can go to counseling if you want to. We’ll make that work.”

The next weekend, her mother came to pick her up in her green VW bug for Sunday brunch. Her father, after a brief telephone discussion with her mother, had agreed to this. She wore a low-cut brown dress and makeup. Bernice wore jeans and a pink shirt. When she got in the car, she gave her mom a drawing she’d done at school. It was of a screen door with a girl behind it, which was a scene from the movie they’d been to.

“Oh,” said her mother, when she saw it. “This is really nice.”

“Thanks. It’s for you.”

She took it and reached around, placing it carefully amid the detritus on the backseat—candy wrappers and empty soda bottles and library books and plastic grocery bags.

They drove to IHOP, where a tall, skinny man was waiting to meet them. His name was Craney Crow. “Just like the song,” he said, smiling.

“What song?” Bernice asked.

Her mother laughed. “That’s what I said!” They were in a booth in the back of the restaurant, and almost all the people at all the other tables were black. Many of them were dressed up very nicely, and Bernice couldn’t help staring, even though she knew it was rude. One woman wore a purple hat with white flowers on it that was so big it looked like a very wide wedding cake.

Craney Crow had nice eyes, but he also had snaggle teeth, olive skin, and a little soul-patch beard. He said “cool” too much. That
was what he’d said when her mother had introduced them out in the reception area, where he’d been waiting for them.
Cool
. Craney Crow was a cool cat. He had long, tangled dark hair that Bernice wanted to run a comb through. “It’s this song,” he said. “People know it.”

“What people?” asked Bernice.

He stared right at her. She wondered if he were going to use whatever magical powers he had to seduce her into liking him, the same way he had her mother. “People.”

“Not any people I know,” said Bernice.

“Shake-a-my, shake-a-my, shake-a-my, shake-a-my, shake-a-my Craney Crow.”

“It sounds like a dumb song.”

“What songs do you like?”

She sang him a line about standing too close.

“Jesus, she likes the Police. What did you do to her, Eve?” He turned to her mother, picked up his spoon to use as a microphone. “Da doo doo doo, da daa daa daa,” he sang.

“I like that one, too,” said Bernice.

Their pancakes arrived, along with Bernice’s Belgian waffle, and they set about eating. Bernice’s mother had asked for a pitcher of hot water with hers, and she poured it over the top of the stack.

“She wants to make ’em bigger,” said Craney Crow. “You put hot water on ’em, they inflate.”

The pancakes did seem to grow an extra third or so in size. Her mother offered the pitcher. “You want to try it?”

Bernice shook her head, then watched as Craney Crow did the same thing to his. “It’s a Devereaux family recipe,” he said, grinning.

“I thought your name was Crow.”

“That’s my first name. It’s actually spelled with an ‘e’ on the end, not that it matters. Family thing. Craney is my nickname, and
Devereaux is my last name. But most people just call me CC.”

She wondered if she were somehow now included in this man’s family. She didn’t like the idea at all. She imagined a bunch of birds hopping around a kitchen squawking at each other.

“CC is a musician,” said her mother. “It’s better for me not to be with another artist. You can understand that, right? It’s like two trees next to each other in the forest, fighting for a view of the sun. The one that gets the sun is going to flourish, but the other—it’s going to wither away.”

The pancake thing was grossing her out, and she didn’t like the word
flourish
. She hated that her mother was changing, or trying to act like she was changing, into some totally new person. Bernice poked into the crevices of her waffle with the side of her fork, trying to create pathways for the syrup to enter.

“So, is everything OK?” asked her mother.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, aware that this moment, right now, was probably the point of the whole outing. “Everything’s fine.”

“Because, if there’s anything you want to ask me, you can. I’ll try to answer.”

She looked up at CC and noticed that he was eyeing her in what she supposed he thought was a friendly way, but he sort of gave her the creeps. “I’m fine,” she said.

The waiter brought more coffee and CC told a story about his drummer getting sick on oysters, and then it was later and she was back in the rattling VW watching the brick row houses stream past while her mother hummed loudly the way she always did—today she kept going, “What’s the matter with the mill? It done broke down!”—and then they were back in front of the big house she now shared with just her father and her rabbit, and she was watching her own sneakers as she stepped out onto the curb.

“Can I get some sugar?” asked her mother, and Bernice turned and kissed her quickly on the cheek, then headed up the stairs onto the front porch. She waited until she was inside to start crying, and when she did, it didn’t make her feel better at all. There had been something she was supposed to do, and she hadn’t known what it was, and it wasn’t fair, but she still felt her failure in every bone and nerve. In her room, she climbed into bed with all her clothes on, shut her eyes tightly, and tried to think of the happiest thing she could, which at that moment was the beach at Ocean City, where they had gone as a family for a few days the previous summer. Piece by piece, she assembled it for herself: the cries of seagulls, sand underneath her towel indented to conform to her body, the sun hot against her skin, the nearby rush and retreat of the waves, the distant smell of hot dogs.

J
ust north of Truth or Consequences, Landis heard the unmistakable bang of metal punching through metal deep inside the engine. Lights came on all over the dash, and then they were coasting along dead. He pumped at the brake pedal, which had lost its power assist, and aimed toward the shoulder.

“What did you do?” Bernice said, once they’d come to a full stop.

“I didn’t do anything. We threw a rod, I think. I told you there was a rattle.”

“So, this is my fault?”

“I didn’t say that.” He sighed. “It’s no one’s fault.”

Emily, who had been asleep, rubbed her eyes and sneezed.

“Oh, baby,” said Bernice. “You want a tissue?”

Emily nodded. She had dark brown curls and blue eyes, a high forehead, and sharply defined eyebrows, and wore a detached
expression that suggested she was constantly in a state of remembering something that had happened elsewhere and at another time. She had on blue and white Oshkosh overalls and a light green undershirt, an outfit Bernice had selected for her early that morning at the Hardings’ after poking around to see where the child’s clothes were kept.

Bernice leaned back and wiped Emily’s nose clean, then balled the tissue and tossed it to the floor. “You’re thinking ‘I told you so,’ aren’t you?”

“Not at all.”

“I know you are. Can it be fixed?”

He turned the key. There was a clicking from the solenoid, but that was all. “With a new engine.” Landis stared out at the huge rock formation that slept off to the side of the highway, rising up layered and dark out of the flat desert landscape. “That’s Elephant Butte,” he said. “It’s on the map.”

“I know all about it,” she said. “Now, don’t you think we’d better see about getting a hotel room?”

The temperature was nearly one hundred degrees out, and with the AC off, the car was quickly becoming an oven. He turned to Bernice, in her jeans and white tank top, her bright-lemon dyed hair standing up off her head as if some comic-book artist had drawn it that way. He loved her. But she scared him a little, too.

He worried that a state trooper would come along, but it was a cowboy who stopped and asked if they were OK. Twenty minutes later, they were getting a tow into town. They stayed in the car, the three of them, tipped backward in their seats as if they were headed up a roller coaster; at any moment, Landis expected his breath to be sucked
away when they reached the top and went spilling over. Instead, the windshield remained full of bouncing blue sky.

The mechanic had gone home for the day, and the boy who’d towed them took Landis’s forty dollars and wrote down his name on a grimy legal pad by the register.

“Where you staying at?” he asked.

“What you got?” Landis said. He could hear Bernice outside with Emily, trying to kick a soda out of the Pepsi machine.

“Oh, there’s a bunch of motels. Where you are, here, this is a resort town.”

“
Last
resort, don’t you mean?” said Landis.

“Used to be people come here for the hot springs.”

“And now?”

The boy adjusted his dirty cap. “Just to say they been.”

“Sounds like my wife’s having a little trouble out there.”

“I’ll bet she is. There ain’t no soda in that machine.”

Landis didn’t find this surprising. The whole town seemed to him as if it had been emptied of its contents. Or maybe more like a stage set—one of those fake towns you could visit for six bucks, where desperadoes shot it out with lawmen in the middle of the street every day at noon.

“Any of these cars for sale?”

The attendant looked dubiously out toward the side of the lot where, next to the wrecker, there were three parked cars, one on blocks. “The Nova, maybe. You’d have to talk to the owner. He went down to Hatch today.”

Landis had four hundred dollars in cash with him, along with a maxed-out Discover card. He wasn’t sure about Bernice. He knew there was a roll of bills in her purse, but he had no idea how much it came to.