Virgin Territory (16 page)

In any case, Doug wants to be there to capture the moment on film, and he tells us that it would be better if we postponed Desirée’s shoot, just for a couple of days. He promises that as soon as the hoopla blows over, he’ll be ours 1,010 percent. As a way of making it seem as though he actually cares about our project, he encourages us to use the time wisely, to get Desirée’s speech together, and to have her practice it in front of a mirror, not just once but over and over, as many times as necessary. No sense going in front of the camera cold, he tells her. If Desirée intends to project the kind of confidence and poise that beauty queens are famous for, he tells us, she’ll need plenty of practice in front of a mirror.

And then he’s off.

We’ve been spending the last couple of days coaching Des and suggesting topics for her to discuss into the camera, topics such as her hopes for a better life, her thoughts about global warming, fashion, schooling, losing her home, living out of a car, and, of course, her mom. Once she gets going, she’s even able to talk about the Bible and what it means to her; and thanks to Crispy,
she gives a killer lecture demo about the business of turning the other cheek.

Angela isn’t exactly ignoring me, but she isn’t giving me any encouragement, either. Meanwhile, I’m wondering,
When … when are we going to have an opportunity to kiss again?
I’m so not in the moment; I’m somewhere up ahead, where life hasn’t happened yet and the Angela I’m dreaming of is as crazy about me as I am about her.

“What about my evening gown?” Desirée asks us. “I’m going to need a gown for the competition.”

We all give this some thought. But we all come up empty-headed.

Then I remember.

Before Marie moved into
the place
, she made Doug pull down a trunk from the attic. She opened it, and much to our surprise, she had several fancy gowns stashed away in there. Marie insisted that they come with her to
the place
. She claimed that if Frankie Rey ever took her dancing, she’d need something suitable to wear. Who were we to deny her? Doug saw no harm in allowing her to take the gowns to the home. They were the leftover artifacts from Marie’s early career in show business, but now they lived full-time, wrapped in plastic and smothered in mothballs, at the back of her closet. With some alterations, one of them might fit Desirée.

“It’s worth a try,” Angela declares when I tell her.

We take a taxi out to
the place
, and I’m so eager to impress
Angela that I use my own money to pay the fare. The driver thinks that we’re do-gooders on our way to visit an elderly shut-in.

“Awful nice-a you kids, goin’ and doin’ a good deed like that on such a day,” he says over his shoulder.

“It’s always such a nice day,” Crispy says. “This is Florida.”

When we arrive, Sally is on duty at the front desk. Sally is an older woman with cotton-candy hair and a face made up like a powdered doughnut. Her job is to man the desk on Tuesdays and Thursdays and act as though she owns the place and everybody in it. She tells us that Marie is having her bath and cannot, under any circumstances, be disturbed, but we are welcome to wait in the reception area as long as we keep quiet and don’t cause trouble. I turn on the charm and try to get her to make an exception, but she goes all Teflon on me and nothing sticks.

The reception area is a clean, well-lit room off to the side of the front entrance. This is where friends and relatives hang out while waiting for their oldie. Because there are no clocks in sight, time has a way of going on forever there. In keeping with the overall decor, the room is done up in shades of beige—beige industrial carpeting, beige floor-to-ceiling drapes, a textured beige wall treatment, and upholstered straight-backed chairs, also beige. An accent of color is provided by the artificial flower arrangement (pale peach and light blue with green leaves), which is stuck into a beige ceramic pot and set on a faux-colonial end table. The pictures on the wall are large-format photographs of
the natural world: sunsets, rainbows, banks of azalea bushes in bloom—reminders of the stuff you might feel nostalgic about while sitting in this beige, artificially cooled, minimum-security holding environment.

The four of us—Angela, Desirée, Crispy, and me—are waiting to see Marie.

“I feel like maybe I’m turning into an old person just in the time we’ve been sitting here,” Crispy mumbles into his chest. He’s slumped into one of the beige chairs in the reception area, his legs stretched out in front of him and his arms crossed.

“Imagine what it’s like for the oldies who actually live here,” says Angela.

“Don’t make me,” is Crispy’s smart-mouthed reply.

“What if your grandmother says no?” asks Desirée. “What if she won’t let me have her dresses? Or what if they don’t fit? What if they’re too old-fashioned?”

A dad type in a light blue sport shirt enters and approaches the reception desk. He’s carrying a potted plant with a satiny bow tied around it. You can tell he’s a regular, because Sally sits up when she sees him and laughs out loud at the first thing he says. He signs the register, and she waves him in. After he disappears down the long carpeted corridor, she picks up a small hand mirror and examines herself.

I remember what Doug told us: if a girl wants to project the kind of confidence and poise that beauty queens are famous for, she needs plenty of practice in front of a mirror.

“How long’re we planning to hang out here?” Crispy wants to know.

“What else do we have to do?” Angela asks. “We’re trapped in this town until further notice. Let’s make the best of it.”

He sighs and slumps farther down in his chair, like a convict resigned to serving out the rest of a life sentence.

“We don’t have to stay, you know,” I say to the group. “We could go.”

“But what about my dress?” cries Desirée as though she’s already a beauty queen who’s been deposed.

Just then, I hear my name—my true name: “Dylan!”

Ora Jones is one of the attendants who works with Marie at
the place
. A tall black woman with a handsome face and a 150-kilowatt smile, she’s seen it all. Like most of the attendants who work here, she wears hospital scrubs printed with cartoons of balloons or unicorns or Hello Kitty. This afternoon, Ora shows off an outfit featuring a thousand yellow smiley faces floating on a background of bright teal blue.

“Marie is ready for you now,” she says, her Caribbean lilt making each word out of her mouth sound delicious.

We all follow her down the long, beige corridor toward Marie’s unit. Ora warns the gang about Marie; she tells them that the old girl is a real character, a card, the whole deck. But then she goes on to explain that there’s been a big “ruckus” because Doug suspects that someone has been taking his mother for joyrides. “Who can blame him?” Ora asks. Lord knows she isn’t
criticizing Doug for “keeping a tight eye” on his own mother. “A lot of the sons and daughters don’t even visit,” she says; they just park their people in a room and pay the bills. Doug is different. He comes. He visits. And he knows what’s going on—most of the time. Apparently, Ora herself isn’t much bothered by Marie’s talent for “slipping the knot” or causing a ruckus. “I seen plenty a ruckus in my day,” she tells us. Experience has taught her to roll with the punches, and besides, no worries, because Marie always finds her way back to where she belongs.

“Look who come to see you,” Ora says as we enter Marie’s room. “Your grandson Dylan and his friends. Sit up and sparkle now. You got company.”

Marie has one of the better rooms at Crestview; it overlooks a stretch of lawn and a stand of luscious palm trees. The sun pours in her window during the morning hours, but by the hottest part of the day, it has inched its way over to the other side of the building. Her wing is called South Side Unit, but the residents refer to it as Sunny Side Up, because almost every morning, like it or not, they wake to blazing sunshine. But it’s past lunchtime when we arrive, and the final slivers of light are making their way across the last of Marie’s three windows.

“Hey, Gram. These’re my friends. I brought them by to meet you. This is Angela. And Desirée. And Crispy.”

Some days Marie talks a blue streak, tells stories about the good old days, about her life as a dancer, about her trips around the world—London, Paris, Istanbul—about how she once saved
Tony Bennett’s life by making him cough up a chicken bone at a New York restaurant called Jilly’s. This is not one of those days. Instead of chatting, she just sits there arranging and then rearranging her stuff: tissues, remote control, reading glasses.

I do the introductions, but just as I’m explaining where I met my new friends, Marie looks up at me and asks if we’ve come to spring her from the joint.

“What do you mean?” Ora inquires as she leans toward Marie and straightens her blouse. “You live here.”

Marie looks around, appraises the place, and then gives Ora a crooked glance. “So they say,” Marie remarks. “So they say. But they also say that living is what happens to you when you’re waiting for your life to happen. Well, I’m waiting. I’m waiting.”

Crispy lets out a laugh. Marie instantly focuses on him and points her polished fingernail at him. “He knows!” she calls out like a game-show contestant who just guessed right on national television. And now that she has his attention, she continues, “Let me tell you, back in the day, when I was living in New York City, dancing at the El Dorado and burning up the town, I wasn’t waiting for anything. It was all happening. Now
that
was living, lemme tell ya.”

“I hear you,” says Crispy, peering at Marie over the top of his white-framed sunglasses.

“Did you used to dance at the El Dorado?” Marie asks him with the utmost sincerity.

“Um,” he says. “No.”

The El Dorado was a semi-swanky nightspot in Midtown Manhattan back in the 1950s; it had parquet dance floors, velvet curtains, and a chorus line of girls like Marie who kicked up her heels for a few bucks a night. My granddad fell in love with Marie the first time he laid eyes on her, or so the story goes. She ignored him, but he pursued her, and eventually she was won over by both his persistence and his promise to take her around the world in style. As the CEO of a company that developed industrial plastics, Granddad had to travel, and Marie was always more than willing to go along. Even after Marie had Little Doug, she insisted that travel was the way to go, so she put my father in the care of someone willing and then off she went with Granddad to wherever. Travel was the passion of her life.

These days, of course, she’s going nowhere.

“Is this a surprise?” Marie asks Ora. “These people visiting? Was I expecting them?”

“Oh, she’s a great big kidder,” Ora declares while giving Marie a quick hoist in her wingback chair. “You know who they are. This is Dylan and his friends.” Then Ora turns to us and says, “Everybody on this floor is so jealous of Marie ’cause she got visitors comin’ to see her all the time. Isn’t that right, Marie? Who’s got the most boyfriends?”

“I do!” Marie announces with plenty of pride in her voice and a wicked grin spreading clear across her face. Nothing makes Marie happier than thinking of herself as the belle of the ball; but that’s nothing new, she’s always been that way.

“Just don’t tell your granddad,” she reminds me. “You know how jealous he can get.”

“Granddad won’t find out,” I promise her. Of course, I don’t mention the fact that the guy has been dead for years.

“You haven’t told him, have you?” she asks Ora as she grabs hold of the woman’s thin brown wrist. “You haven’t told him about Frankie Rey?”

Ora reaches over with her free hand and picks up some random thing from Marie’s mahogany dresser; it’s gold, the size of a child’s fist, a thing that’s meant to change the subject.

“Will you lookie here,” says Ora, expertly sidetracking any further thought concerning the imaginary Frankie Rey. Ora is a pro who knows the ropes and every conversational pitfall. “See what these nice people brought you? A present.”

She places it in Marie’s lap. Marie wants to be surprised and pleased, but as soon as she gets hold of the thing, she looks up at Ora suspiciously. Marie may be slipping, but she remembers that this thing is a prize among her possessions. And yet she can’t be entirely sure, so she just smiles.

“You don’t like it?” Ora wants to know.

“It’s all right,” answers Marie, and then she places it on the table beside her medication.

The little gold hunchback has an outsize head and extended ears; he wears a jagged crown, a long robe, and a mean face. There’s plenty of snaggy, intricate handiwork along the bottom of his metal vestment. It’s not a thing to cuddle up to, that’s for
sure. In fact, the god looks extremely unhappy with his current surroundings, as though he’s thinking,
How the hell did I get here? What am I doing in this place? When do I get to leave?

“Desirée here is in a beauty pageant,” I announce, trying to get the conversation back on track.

“Is that right?” Marie asks, brightening.

The words
beauty pageant
have done the trick; they cast a sudden spell over her, and she sits straight up in her wingback. Her eyes take on some of their old shine, and after she gives Des the once-over, she begins to gesture madly toward the closet door. Something is preventing Marie from forming the words, but Ora has had plenty of practice with this kind of thing, and she knows exactly what to do. She quickly throws open the closet doors, and we get a glimpse of the wrapped-in-plastic remains of Marie’s past and the dim glittery hopes of Desirée’s future.