“It wasn’t like a retablo because I didn’t have anything to be thankful for, but it was this little arrangement that helped me think about Mommy. It had this little napkin that was in her purse that night and a lipstick and then that little photo of us together — I cut you out of it, Daddy, because this is for Mommy — and that silver hairbrush that had been on her bureau, it even had some of her hair in it—”
“Not my hair,” Ginger mouthed, shaking her head.
“It was just something I could dwell on, and—”
“You shouldn’t be dwelling on this, honey,” Carter said.
“—they were these meaningful things I’d collected, and Alice knew that. She knew that! And we were in my room and she sneezed and then she grabbed the little napkin right off my arrangement.”
“Honey, why don’t you sit down while we talk.” Carter gestured to the edge of the bed opposite to where Ginger had settled herself.
“I don’t want to, Daddy. Daddy, what am I going to do?”
“I never carried paper napkins around in my purse,” Ginger said. “What kind of person does she think I was?”
“I don’t like it here, Daddy. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Sit down, honey.”
She looked directly at the place where Ginger was, he could swear she did.
“I don’t want to sit down. What good would sitting down do?”
“Honey, what would you say if I told you Ginger visits me sometimes, that she comes right into this room. What would you say?”
“Poor Daddy,” Annabel said.
Well, that’s sensible, Carter thought.
“How do you make it happen, Daddy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you pretend?”
“God, no.” Carter pointed. “She’s right over there.”
Annabel looked disconsolately through the empty space.
“She’s developing your chin, Carter,” Ginger said, “which is too bad. You could slice a roast with a chin like that.”
“You have to be serious sometimes, Daddy.”
He had never seen Ginger more incarnate. She was pulsating with an almost animal energy. No longer content with just existence after death, she had to be active as well. That day of sailing — but of course there couldn’t have been a day of sailing. Even so, he could picture the good ship Revelance borne on the back of a great fish, though surely in Ginger’s case the fish part was coincidence.
“Ginger,” he said, “your daughter wants to think about you, to make contact, and you’re being most inconsiderate, Ginger, by failing to respond. You were never as demonstrative toward Annabel as you could have been, and now’s the time.”
“Daddy,” Annabel cried, wringing the napkin, “don’t! You’re scaring me.”
“She’s not very plucky, is she?” Ginger noted. “Not much spunk. Charge wasn’t long on spunk either, as I learned to my disappointment.”
“She has my chin,” Carter said loudly. “You said so yourself.”
“Daddy, Daddy,” Annabel said.
“Honey, what would you like to say? Maybe this should be our approach.”
“Mommy,” Annabel said, “if you’re there, I don’t think you should be.”
“That’s very good,” Carter said, brightening. “Very good, honey.”
“Your opinions are laughable,” Ginger said, then laughed. Annabel was gravitating toward her. “Noli me tangere,” Ginger warned.
“Oh, please,” Carter said. “Isn’t that overly dramatic?” Still, it probably wouldn’t be helpful to actually touch … he tugged Annabel back.
“Must you involve everyone you know in our relationship?” Ginger complained. “This is between a man and a woman, you and me, two great antipodes of the universe. Why drag family into it? I’m asking for very little, only you.” She made a dramlike space between two fingers, which triggered in Carter the desperate desire for a strong drink.
She was becoming so bold she was practically thrumming. She’d show up at his parties next. Surrounding himself with others would soon no longer help. She’d be leaping into his arms, and then no one need bother calling a physician, any coroner would do. And to think that chance had brought them together so many years before, sheer chance. Surely he hadn’t been destined for this as a child, small for his age but then suddenly growing, thriving, at St. George’s. The open window with its eight-over-eight lights. The huge sills dusted with crumbs for the sparrows. The coldness of his sheets. The clock tower overlooking his world of happy preparation. To persevere and grow! Their inquiries had been ontological in nature. Oh, happy happy years of preparation. But then the preparation stopped.
The phone rang. “Donald!” Carter said. “Listen, I can’t talk just now, let me call you back.” But after hanging up, he found himself alone. The air felt particularly worn out, depleted. He then recalled what his idea had been: he would abandon this room to Ginger! No more imaginative than throwing a bone to a beast, perhaps, but still. “Yes!” he shouted. He would leave this room, just shut the door and never enter it again. All his favored possessions were collected here, but it was also the place where Ginger and her horrors gathered and pooled. Donald’s adjustments hadn’t helped. So let Ginger have it, let her muss it up to her heart’s content, take scissors to his fox-and-hound tie, scrawl obscenities in his books, smash his favorite whiskey glass into the whirlpool bath, scribble lipstick on his favorite pillow.…
Then he had a quick, keen vision of leaving the entire house behind, leaving the country and traveling for a year, maybe more, with Annabel and Donald. He saw the three of them on the cool verandas of mountain haciendas, chatting with other guests in the intoxicatingly dark nights, everyone attractive and world-weary, everyone quietly fascinated with the three of them and their story, which they would never disclose. They would rent villas and walk in the rain. Lease fine apartments filled with light and flowers. There was more than one way to resist, while accommodating, the temptations of a difficult time.
36
Emily was putting some words together. She wanted to protest a summer school excursion she’d been forced to take part in. “Would you ride your bike down and get our burritos, Emily?” her mother said. “Just tell them to charge it to my account.”
J.C. was sprawled on a cheap plastic reclining chair that Emily’s mother had purchased especially for his comfort. He wore shorts this simmering day and spritzed himself occasionally with a water bottle her mother had also provided. On his feet he wore sandals from which his massive toes poked rudely.
“Watch this,” he whispered to Emily’s mother. “Hey, Pickless,” he said, taking the key ring from his pocket and removing the smallest of the keys. “Stop by the post office and get my mail. It’s Box Forty-two. It’s to the left, one row up from the bottom, three over.” He pressed the key into her palm.
Emily hadn’t opened a post office box for weeks, not since the mother of her colleague Cedric had allowed her to open theirs. Cedric had never forgiven Emily for this and said he’d hate her for the rest of his life — a nasty, snotty, crappy hate, an icy hot hate mean as a hatchet, a fat white hate that would eat slowly at her like the worms in her grandmother’s grave. But Emily was not alarmed, for she did not consider Cedric a worthy adversary.
“I knew that would tickle her,” J.C. said to her mother. “A little kid’s mind is a simple thing to figure.”
“It’s sad that as one grows older, one’s pleasures become more complex,” her mother said.
Emily gave her the startled, walleyed look of one unconscionably betrayed. She wondered if it was possible that in the future she and her mother would fail to recognize each other. She ran to her bicycle and rode quickly away, stopping at the post office first. The last time she’d been here, she saw a dachshund wearing a sun hat. Someone said to it, “You’re very well turned out today, I see. You must’ve heard the weather report.” But there was no one in the building this time except for a woman and two little girls, who were squabbling over whose turn it was to open their box. The boxes were bronze and ornate with a little square of glass. Emily piously looked at the children, who were whining and carrying on. The mother, or whoever she was, finally chose one and nudged the other back, and the one not selected sat down on the floor, put her head on her knees, and wept.