Tumbledown (36 page)

She stepped carefully around the clutter on the floor and made her way to the bedroom. Beetle Man wasn’t coming back. She could tell by how dirty the place was. Did she ever go get the wheelbarrow? It belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Hoeksema who lived next door and liked to swim in their swimming pool without any clothes, which Karly didn’t do even when Mr. Hoeksema said it was okay, he would go inside. Her mom said when in doubt keep your clothes on. She had her clothes on now. Her pants didn’t smell very good, and the sweater was hot until she turned up the a.c., which she did by turning the number
down.
Down was up. That was so funny.

She smiled and went into the bathroom, which was on the way to the bedroom, to look at her smile in the mirror over the bathroom sink. She looked just like she thought she would look. That was what people liked about her, how she looked. And it was the same. Why wasn’t Beetle Man coming back? What he said and what he meant by what he said were different, like that game he couldn’t teach her, where she was not supposed to say a whole list of words to make him guess a word like
Oz,
and she couldn’t say
wizard
or
Toto
or
Dorothy
or
good witch
or
tin man,
and what in the world was left while sand was running out of the little tipper? “You could’ve said, ‘Not in Kansas no more,’ ” he told her, “or whatever, it don’t matter. Do another one.” This time he didn’t even turn over the sand tipper, and the card said
rain check
and it took a long while for her to say, “Put your hand out the window,” and then they both played solitaire and now he wasn’t coming back.

Her desktop computer was still making light on her desk by her bed. It was supposed to screensave, but sometimes it didn’t screensave. Her screensaver was jungle animals. Her favorite jungle animal was the meerkat like in
Lion King
and also in the San Diego Zoo, where she had seen all the jungle animals on her screensaver. It wasn’t Beetle Man who took her to the zoo, but her mom and sister when they visited last time. She missed her mom and sister, and her father, who was dead and used to tell stories to her when it was bedtime about all the mountains he would cross to be with her. They were hard mountains, but he always made it.

Earlier that night, on the internet, she had taken the
If you were a Muppet what Muppet would you be?
quiz, and she was Elmo, which was the best one to be unless you were Kermit or Big Bird. Before that, she took the
Friendly Clouds–Unfriendly Clouds
personality test and scored 80 percent, which was good and promised fair skies, and she did the
Do Aquarians Have More Fun?
and it said that she did have more fun. Her ranch on Saturn was growing corn as tall as tall buildings, and as soon as they sprouted corn on the cob there were only two more levels before she was an honorary Saturn citizen, which would give her a golden hoe for her satchel. She used to wear a golden ring on her finger so people would think she was married, but it was plastic and the golden wore off. She was so tired, so very tired, but sleepy was different from tired, and the house was scaring her by having no one else in it for so many days now and getting so dark.

She clicked the computer screen button to make it go off. She pulled her ID folder necklace over her head and changed into her pajamas. Not the pajamas that Beetle Man gave her because they were uncomfortable on her bottom, but the ones that her sister gave her that had Josie and the Pussycats playing guitars. Beetle Man said her life was too complicated for him anymore and he didn’t like men coming over to hit him, which she had thought he was making a joke. Jokes were hard to get, but she liked them. His joke was about her life. That was what he said,
her complicated life.
What was funny about her life? She didn’t like being alone in her house all the time, which wasn’t so very funny.

What does the all alone girl in her house say?

Wash my clothes, please, and the sheets.

The phone isn’t working even a little bit.

Some of the sounds are so frightening to me.

She had another phone right next to her bed, and she wouldn’t even have to get out of bed to call someone. Her mom and sister didn’t like calls during sleeping hours, but would Billy mind? She liked him because he was always nice to her, but the phone beside the bed didn’t work either. Rhine was always nice to her, too, and Alonso, too, but Rhine went to bed at ten o’clock and Alonso didn’t talk on the phone very good, and the phone didn’t work, anyway.

She could call Mick at any time of the whole night, but he always wanted to talk about marrying him. He could drive, but he wasn’t a grown-up, and you could only marry a grown-up. Everyone knew you married a grown-up. One you liked. She only liked Beetle Man part of the time, but he was good at telling her which things to do and reminding her of all those things she kept forgetting. He wasn’t coming back, and Mick wasn’t a grown-up, and Mr. James Candler owned a house with bad trees and when she wore a skirt, he looked at her legs even though he tried not to look at her legs. But her skirts were all dirty.

What was she wanting to say on the phone? Not just
hello.
Not just
hey.
Not just
checking in.
She picked up the phone and pretended. “Hi, Billy, it’s Karly from the sheltered workshop. You told us to call you Billy and not Mr. Billy Atlas. How are you tonight, Billy? You gave me your number on a square of paper and the phone works so I called you.”

What would he say to her?

Hi, Karly. I’m so happy you called me on the telephone. That is why I gave you the square of paper, so you would call me on the telephone.

“Here I am calling you,” she said. “It’s not just to say hello, Billy Atlas. I’m feeling very . . .
poured out.
If like the orange juice is empty and you’ve already swished water in it and drunk that, which I did yesterday. The grocery is too far, except for the Sonic, and I lost Mr. and Mrs. Hoeksema’s wheelbarrow when Beetle Man drove away forever. I like orange juice in the morning and at night, but my mom says just mornings.”

What would he say to that?

I will get you a new wheelbarrow.

“Why doesn’t my phone work?” she asked him. “Why did Beetle Man not come back? Where is the TV clicker? Can you show me one more time how the washing machine works? What mountains would people like my dad go over to see people like me? Why is it so hard for me to pick up everything on the floor when I am all alone in the house? Why is everybody liking the way I look so much? Why is being nice to everyone you meet dangerous my mother says? Why is everything so wrong when I do it?” She remembered the other joke she had written down, but she didn’t know where to find it. She wanted to tell Billy Atlas the joke but she didn’t want to put the phone down. “Why does the woman and man—they’re married. Why does the husband and the wife take the umbrella in bed?” She waited, laughing. The phone made no sound, like he couldn’t think of the answer to the joke. She couldn’t think of it either. “It was something really funny,” she said, laughing harder. “And I left my real umbrella someplace,” she said. “I lose things.”

When she was through laughing, she said, “Good-bye, Billy. See you Monday.” She put the phone on the phone holder. The whole room was the color of water you shouldn’t drink. Wasn’t that so funny? In a while, it would be morning, and she would sleep. In almost no time at all.

If you could see time, she thought, it would look just like this.

Violet found Billy Atlas barefoot at the kitchen table, fresh socks in his lap, eating homemade salsa—his specialty, she recalled—from a bowl, like soup. His face was pale, his natty hair standing up on the back of his big head. She tried at that moment to like Billy Atlas, but the best she could manage was a vague fondness, much the way one feels about a bad dog that has nonetheless been in the family for years. He looked up hopefully at her, spoon in his mouth, but then his face fell.

“Oh, Billy,” she said. “Why don’t you get yourself a life?”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing.” After a moment, he added, “Good morning.”

That his girl from the night before was gone, he didn’t need to say. The hangdog look said it all. He likely had a bedroom disorder, a deep psychological wound that would not permit normal relations with a woman. He had always been a mess. She didn’t understand his friendship with Jimmy, which was deep itself, with a long history. For that reason alone, she should value at least the fact of Billy Atlas, but the same thing—the fact of him—made it hard to do. She fixed a pot of coffee and declined a second offer of salsa.

“It’s good on toast,” he insisted, but her refusal was firm.

“I remember when you ate almost nothing but cereal and potatoes,” she said. “What happened to your woman friend?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just don’t know where she is. I woke up and the bed was empty. I mean,
I
was in it but she wasn’t. She might have to work today. I guess she took a cab instead of waking me. That’s thoughtful if you think about it.”

“Then why are you down in the dumps?”

“This isn’t the dumps,” he said. “This is only a neighborhood or two away from more-or-less content. A warehouse district, maybe, but not too far from home.”

“Where’s Jimmy?”

“Taking her home, I imagine. Or maybe he’s still asleep. She lives in Ocean Beach, which would be a helluva taxi tab. The thing is, I sort of woke up when she got out of bed, but I thought she was peeing, you know? I didn’t rouse myself. I thought it was better to stay under.”

“You thought it was better?”

“I get very shy, sometimes,” he said, “especially—”

Violet changed the subject. “How did you meet?”

His eyes darted around the room as if following a hornet, and Violet understood that he was about to lie to her.

“She had a flat and I changed her tire.”

“How chivalrous, you and your lug wrench. What does she drive?”

“A car.”

She flashed on the rental that she and Arthur had picked up in Chicago—this was on their odd, lovely honeymoon—a tiny red thing, like a fire ant, and her father had called it
hideous.
Her father was an artist, and the car offended him. Violet was not going to let Billy off the hook. “Was it a big car?”

The eyes again, flying around. Perhaps this meant he was a basically honest person, she thought, this complete inability to lie persuasively.

“A Dodge Dart,” he said at last. “That was the key to the whole hooking up.” He smiled, showing his too-big teeth. Billy had been the first boy of James’s group to have a car, but it was that homely Dodge Dart, old even then, the same miserable, stinking car she was driving the night before, lost in Onyx Springs. What would her father think of that car?

“That was lucky,” Violet said. “You must know everything about Darts.”

“I can change a flat. The thing is, what I was going to say before . . .” He lowered his voice. “You think a woman in bed with you expects sex?”

Violet poured the remainder of her coffee into the sink. “I’m going to shower.”

“But do you think—”

“Yes, Billy. There might be exceptions, I suppose, but if she spends the night in your bed, probably so.”

He nodded sadly. “I thought so, but I didn’t know how to make the first move. Then after a while she was asleep. Or acting asleep. And then I was asleep, acting part of the time myself, but sleeping, too.”

“Touch her hair or her cheek,” Violet said and blushed. “Did you kiss her?”

He eyed the socks in his lap. “We talked some. She said she just wanted to sleep, but cuddling was okay. I cuddled, but I guess she—”

“Good,” Violet said. “That’s good. I’m going to bathe.”

“She asked about you, actually. Wanted to know what you’re like.”

Violet inhaled sharply. She comprehended with a sudden certainty that this woman was Jimmy’s girl. She couldn’t guess at the complications, but she understood the woman did not love Billy Atlas, and Billy knew it.

“I don’t want to know how you described me,” she said.

“It was all good things.”

She knew this would be true. Billy was not one to put down others, or even to genuinely see their bad parts. He
was
like a dog—a good dog, at that: house trained and utterly devoted, in possession of a repertoire of simple tricks.

“If everything you said about me was good,” Violet said, softening, “then you didn’t give her the straight story.”

Billy laughed, shaking his head. “You’re maybe the best person I know,” he said, and in the same breath continued, “Do you think if I sent her flowers, it would be too much?”

Violet was touched by the offhand compliment. Yet she wanted to correct him, reveal all her flaws, tell him how, at the end, she had wanted her husband to die. What would he think of her then? Instead of speaking, she placed her hand delicately on his shoulder.

He angled his head up at her. “You’re thinking flowers is too much after just one date?”

“I think you should save your money.” She patted the shoulder, ready to leave the kitchen but his shoulder was sticky. “Have you been eating honey with your salsa?”

“Oops,” he said.

She stepped to the kitchen sink, thinking—for no good reason that she could see—of the day she first caught on that something was wrong with her husband. He already knew, of course, had the diagnosis, the prognosis, had read stories about the course of the disease and what it did to the family and friends, the toll it took. He had decided to hide the fact of it for as long as he could, pretending some days to be stiff from an imagined workout, or claiming he was getting absentminded and a mental lapse had caused his clumsiness.

One morning in their kitchen—she loved that kitchen and how it filled with early light—she caught his reflection in the window, saw him lower his head to slurp coffee from the cup like a cat dropping its head to a water bowl. “What is it exactly that’s wrong with you?” she asked. She chastised herself later for the sentence, as it pretended to know—to have known—and she was only just making the discovery.

He straightened up. She could see as much in the window’s reflection, but she did not turn around, instinctively knowing not to take the full brunt of it face to face.

“I should have known I couldn’t hide it from you.”

“How bad?”

He took a deep breath in through his nostrils, which made a whistle. “Love, as bad as we might be able to imagine.”

She turned then and in the turning she metamorphosed into the wife of an invalid, and even now, as she adjusted the water in the sink to wash her hands, she had not completely stepped away from that role. Arthur was buried in Tiverton, his childhood home, but she was still nursemaid, the grieving wife, only now the object of her attentions was less cooperative than ever, and her hands quaked with idleness, quaked with obligations she could no longer keep.

“Good morning, sinners,” Lolly said, stretching in the kitchen doorway, her hands above her head, the top to her modest white pajamas rising to expose a strip of bare flesh. The lovelorn Billy seemed to appreciate that glint of skin. What a dopey smile.

“Where’s Jimmy?” Violet asked.

“Snoozing,” Lolly said. “He had a terrible time getting off to sleep last night. He kept waking me without really waking me, all toss and turn. Normally I’d have Florence Nightingaled him, but I was just too knackered.”

“Scientists have proven,” Billy began, but the sound of the front door opening stifled him. They all held themselves still and listened. The door closed. Someone approached.

The young woman was in the same attractive black dress she had worn the night before, carrying a cardboard tray of disposable coffee cups, a plastic bag dangling from her wrist. “It took me forever at that place,” she said and smiled doubtfully. “I’m Lise.”

In the flurry of introductions and the awkward shuffling about that followed, Violet backed away from the table and watched. It should have made her hopelessly uncomfortable to have guessed that Lise was her brother’s lover and then to see her here chatting with her brother’s fiancée, but perhaps her character was irretrievably flawed: she rather enjoyed it.

Lolly decided that the appropriate topic for conversation was the magnificence of Billy Atlas, intuiting perhaps that the hapless lout needed all the help he could get. The women sat on either side of Billy, and he politely pushed his morning salsa bowl to the middle of the table. He draped his arm around the back of Lise’s chair. She unconsciously leaned forward, away from his claim, putting her elbows on the table.

“You are so lucky,” Lolly was saying. “Billy’s such an angel.”

Vague abstractions,
Violet thought,
they come in so handy.

“Are you English?” Lise asked suspiciously, and Violet took a liking to her.

“Oh, heavens no,” Lolly said, “but after living there, I can’t seem to shed the accent. I suppose I’ll pick up the California
twang
if I stay here long enough.”

If only her cell phone worked in this country, Violet thought, she would make a video. There should be some record. Lise had taken some trouble with her hair, and it looked much as it had the night before. Lolly had also put in effort with her hair, which was beautifully disarrayed, the type of frowsy morning look that turned men into slaves. All that was missing was her sleeping brother. She lifted the water handle and switched on the garbage disposal, which, like everything else in this house, was a cheap model that made a fantastic amount of noise.

“You’ll wake Jimmy,” Lolly said.

Violet took her time cutting off the grinder. “I wasn’t thinking, was I?”

She had missed some of the conversation. Billy was telling a story. Violet realized with a start that he was talking about her mother. “She had me pose with my underwear on—I was a tighty-whities guy back then,” he said. “But the painting showed me nude. A twelve-year-old in the raw, sitting in a kitchen chair, a ladderback chair. I know that ’cause that’s the title of the painting:
Ladderback Boy.
”

Violet had never heard this story. She crossed the room and took a place at the table.

“I was holding a cat in my lap, but you could tell I was in the raw, only I hadn’t been. Hadn’t had a cat, either. She added the cat and subtracted the undies. And,
man,
the grief I got from my parents.
Those Candlers are not respectable people. What filth are they exposing you to?
” Billy laughed and then deadpanned, “My people are a simple people.”

Violet knew the painting. It was one of her favorites of her mother’s, but she had never made Billy to be the naked boy. More surprising, though, was how his parents thought of her family. Her parents were artists and professors, and all the children in the neighborhood liked to gather at the Candler house—including Billy to a greater degree than any other. That Billy’s parents looked down on her family was shocking.

She realized the others were staring at her. Evidently, she was making a face. “That painting, I was just trying to remember. Yes, it’s in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. They put together a traveling show of Mother’s work a couple of years ago—maybe ten years ago—and they acquired three or four of her pieces. That was one of them.”

“I’m a museum piece,” Billy said proudly. “It’s about time.”

He might have gotten a laugh but Jimmy had entered in his pinstriped pj’s, stepping on the punch line. He did not do a double take, but he widened his eyes and offered a clumsy smile.

“This is my brother Jimmy,” Violet said gleefully. Her cheeks hurt from the spread of her lips. “Jimmy, this is Billy’s girlfriend, Lise.”

Lise stood. They shook hands. If Violet had harbored any doubts, the handshake eradicated them—Jimmy’s eyes seeking the ceiling, the floor; Lise’s sly, regretful smile. They were lovers. She was forcing the issue. And Jimmy boy, clearly, was feeling the pressure.

“I think I’m too hungover to talk,” he said. “Pretend I’m an inanimate object.”

Violet handed him the remaining cup from the cardboard tray. “Lise ran out for coffee and bagels.”

Jimmy smiled a thanks to Lise and took a sip. “I need to nuke this,” he said, meaning, presumably, the coffee.

Lise wanted to flee. She had not intended to make James suffer. She had not meant to make him angry. What had she meant to do? She could not lay hands on that. They had moved to the living room, everyone in sleeping gear but her, feet on the coffee table, she and Billy and Lolly on the couch, Violet in a kitchen chair, and James—trying to hide his smoldering anger by feigning a hangover—in the La-Z-Boy. Above them, that awful pretend piece of art, a glass nest designed by someone who’d never seen a bird. Why in the world had he bought this travesty of a house? His hand covered his eyes. She hadn’t wanted to leave without seeing him, that was all. She wasn’t by nature cruel. James’s sister asked her a question.

“I work at a clothing store, a fancy boutique in La Jolla. This dress came from there. I’ll be paying for months to—”

“It’s smashing on you,” Lolly said. “How did you meet our Billy?”

“I changed her tire,” Billy said quickly.

“Before he worked at the sheltered workshop,” James put in, “Billy parked cars in San Diego.”

“I understand you drive a Dart,” Violet said.

After a second’s pause, Lise said, “I drive a Rio. A Kia Rio. It wasn’t a Dart,” she said, firmly, glaring at Billy. “You’re deluded.”

“I thought it was a Dart,” he said happily.

“Did he force you then?” James asked. “Saved you on the highway and then forced you to go out with him? Emotional blackmail?”