On the roadside, Lawrence stands for a brief moment as if waiting for a bus. In the heat, he removes his tie and drapes it over his forearm. He removes his coat and does the same. His nose is bleeding good now. He sees: the horse is enormous, a sand dune in the road, almost white in the sun. Lawrence must resist the urge to go to it, lay upon it, feel its coarse, rounded side beneath him. “Hey!” he hears the fence worker call, still from afar but closer now, waving his hat like a flag. “Hey, man!” Lawrence responds by regarding the horse a final time, then walking, then trotting, then running. In a few minutes, he figures he will hear a siren far behind him; the police will come to block the road, to inspect the car, to marvel at the horse. In a few minutes, he will throw his tie and jacket into a culvert, remove his shirt, his belt, his pants. He will find an exit. He will stagger down it in search of a gas station where he can use the bathroom and drink from the sink and throw his plaid thermos into a trash can. He will handle a public phone. He will call Susan to tell her he is running late.
When those things are taken care of, he’ll stand in his briefs and undershirt and loafers, with his suitcase and green banana, and take it all in: the fast-food restaurants serving Angus pressed through sieves, the hotels where men and women crawl over one another’s bodies as if climbing out of hell. He will allow himself to finally see Anne for who she is: buried and dead—a snake winding in one eye socket and out the other, her lower jaw falling from her face like soft fruit, her ruined brain now just a smear of paste. He will allow himself to see who he was before his mother died: a boy who could crack a live turtle with a hammer, who could tie a brick to a deaf kitten and drop it into the creek’s dark bend, smiling. He will allow himself to take another look in his father’s bottom drawer, the one Lawrence opened once and once only, the one with the lined bullets, and the stacked pistols, and the magazines of women sprawled and arched in utter disarray. He’s the sort of man who might visit one of those roadside spas. He’s the sort who might seek one out on purpose, not just on a whim. Lawrence continues on, hot and winded, and he knows, he sees, what will come to pass. He’s running down a road. He’s stumbling down an exit. He’s going up to one of those spas and staggering toward its door to have a better look. If the door is glass, he’ll cup his hands around his eyes and take a good look inside. But if the door is plain and windowless, he’ll have no choice but to knock.
THE ENTERTAINER
MRS. BILLINGSLEY ASKS Rachel’s mother, not Rachel, if Rachel would like to accompany them to the beach for two weeks. “There’s no television, no AC. It’s almost embarrassingly primitive, but Rachel is just so entertaining. Such a delight. I know she’d make my girls happy.”
This is how Mrs. Billingsley puts it to Rachel’s mother over the phone, one evening after Rachel has been particularly engaging at tennis, and Rachel’s mother, in her outdated kitchen, still humiliated by her divorce, her hatchback, her teeth, replies: “Yes! Yes! Absolutely!” without even asking Rachel if going to the beach for two weeks with the Billingsleys is something she wants to do.
If Rachel’s mother’s own life is unsalvageable, her daughter still has a shot. She pictures what Rachel can look like in five years if she goes to the beach and puts on a good show for these folks, meets the people they know. If Rachel is willing to do her little song-and-dance thing at night while the Billingsleys drink gin, tell some of those Helen Keller jokes she picked up at summer camp while the Billingsleys scrape crab claws with silver forks, teach the talentless Billingsley girls how to macramé, lip-sync, hula hoop; Rachel, if she’s lucky, might end up as decadently bored and unafraid as they are.
Of course, Rachel will have to learn how to starve herself, how to volley, how to operate aging dick, but these are small prices to pay. Rachel’s mother can at least teach her something about the not-eating. Think of your hunger as a wheelchair, she’ll tell Rachel before she leaves for the trip. Something you can never get out of, but something that will get you where you want to go, even if it’s uncomfortable.
“I don’t want to go,” Rachel says, when she learns of the plans.
“Too late now,” her mother answers.
Rachel feels like hired help, a jester for the elite. Rachel’s mother feels something akin to hope, like the hand of God is touching her for the first time in a decade.
The Billingsleys fly to the beach in a private King Air twin-turboprop. The girls, Devlin, fifteen, and Davenport, seventeen, straddle Rachel agewise and know her only through the tennis clinic that Rachel’s mother paid for, like her summer camp, on a low-interest Discover card. They buckle themselves loosely in adjacent leather seats across from Rachel and their mother and exhale in unison.
“Was there not a Lear?” Devlin says.
“Or a Citation?” Davenport adds. Their voices pout but their mouths do not, as if their faces are afflicted by a practiced palsy.
“The girls are used to jets,” Mrs. Billingsley explains. “But this is what we get when the men have first dibs.”
“Fuck men,” Devlin says.
“No thanks,” Davenport answers. “I’m going to be a lesbo.”
Rachel stares at the sisters and they stare back in such a way and for such a time that Rachel begins to wonder if this is her cue to begin entertaining everyone. To start diffusing things, as she always does, with her nonthreatening plumpness, her simple face, her clever puns. It’s why she was invited, after alclass="underline" to do what she does at tennis. Introduce the joyless to the concept of joy—if not in a way they can experience, at least in a way they can witness.
“You know any lesbos?” Davenport asks. “You went to camp. Camps are crawling with lesbos.”
Rachel waits for Mrs. Billingsley to chime in, to say something like, “Davenport, please,” or “Knock it off, girls.” But instead, Mrs. Billingsley tilts her head back for a nap even though the plane has yet to depart. “Lesbos,” she snorts with her eyes closed. “What goes where?”
Rachel’s mother works in the basement of a bank counting checks with the eraser end of a pencil. She hears three things, eight hours a day, five days a week: the thipthipthip of the erasers, the asylum hum of the fluorescents, the cheery, insufferable banter of her co-workers: all women, all obese, all over sixty. All of them inexplicably—infuriatingly—content with their lives.
“One of them told me a recipe for layered pudding today,” Rachel’s mother tells Rachel the night before her trip. “You should have heard her. You would have thought she was explaining how to deliver a baby. ‘First there’s a layer of vanilla pudding. Then there’s a layer of strawberries. Then there’s a layer of nondairy whipped topping.’” Rachel’s mother groans. “It’s called Cool Whip, you idiot. It doesn’t make you sound smart to call it something else. It makes you sound like someone who’s worked in the basement of a bank her whole, pathetic life who thinks calling Cool Whip nondairy whipped topping puts a stamp in her passport. Please. Like she even has a passport.”
Rachel’s mother looks hard at Rachel. “This is what it’s come to, Rachel. Pudding people. For a while there, your father and I had a chance to make something of ourselves. We were on the verge of a country club. But now? The city park.”