She saw the marble. There was the perfume bottle. Then she saw it, curled and winking on the dust by the lizard’s hole. A pretty lizard lived in there, with a big purple fan at its throat. That had to be it, Emily surmised, though it couldn’t be the whole thing. It didn’t look like it was the whole of anything. Some ants were already investigating it in the way they investigated everything, by crawling all over it. She stuck out her foot and nudged it a little. It looked pretty unexemplary. She nudged it around, then tipped it into the hole and tapped it in. It seemed a little spongy and didn’t want to go all the way in, so she ground it in.
Later that night, Emily sat at the foot of her mother’s bed, eating from a can of pumpkin pie filling that Ruth the Neighbor, beside herself with excitement, had brought over.
“He was a good man. He was attracted to me. Sometimes we had fun together. Oh, I know it wasn’t your fault, honey, I know. Knowing that is the only thing that’s keeping me sane right now. The only thing that’s keeping everything in perspective.”
“It is?” Emily said.
“A bomb,” her mother said. “I can’t believe, a bomb.” She was rubbing cold cream into her cheeks. Emily supposed that because of the seriousness of the exceptional event just past she wasn’t using her Facial Flex, a bizarre device that she customarily placed in her mouth for five minutes just before retiring, to combat muscle sag. Emily could tell that her mother wanted more than anything to use it, but out of respect to J.C. and his first night in the hospital she wasn’t.
“Do you want me to go away for a while?”
“What a thoughtful suggestion. Maybe. Not far.”
“Mom!”
“Then don’t say things you don’t mean, Emily! I can’t even think with you tormenting me like this. I thought you meant going to bed, to sleep. If you can sleep tonight, more power to you.”
Both of them were silent, mother and daughter, neither of them thinking much about J.C. but instead of how stimulating and surprising life was. To Emily it felt a little like Christmas Eve.
“A bomb,” her mother marveled. “The world has entered our lives.” She screwed the lid back hard onto the cold cream. “I know you never thought he hung the moon, honey, but I have needs.”
Though Emily wished that she herself had needs, all she could manage was colleagues, which, being as she didn’t even want them, didn’t come close to resembling needs.
“I’m just afraid that after this, people are going to think we’re kind of unwholesome,” her mother said. “This must not be made the centerpiece of our lives. I don’t want you to think of yourself as being bad or peculiar.”
“You mean strange?”
“We mustn’t be discouraged, Emily. Did you get a chance to talk to that nice medic today? He’s terribly nice. I met him in that class I took. He came in and gave a little slide show on the dangers of not knowing what to do in an emergency. Maybe when things settle down a bit, we’ll all go to the movies together.”
“I don’t like the cinema, Mom, you know I don’t.”
“Well, then, he and I will just have to go by ourselves, won’t we?” her mother said.
Emily finished the pie filling. Her mother continued to speak about the medic, who preferred to be referenced by his last name rather than his first. She said she liked this trait in a man.
Emily assumed that John Crimmins was in the past and was glad of it. Would she be required to send him a get-well card? Her mother looked tired and unhappy and confused but then she reached for the Facial Flex, which was in what she called her jewel box on the bedside table. There were no jewels within, but Emily knew that the device with its tiny rubber bands was special, slowing time’s progress on a personal level, her mother having told her as much in a more carefree moment. Her mother slipped the thing into her mouth, arranged her jaws, and sighed.
37
The portion of the dresser that Annabel had made into a little memory square looked bereft now that the paper napkin had left it. That napkin had lent the scene some sincerity. Alice couldn’t imagine where that violent sneeze had come from.
She was all right now. For a while she had saved, quite inappropriately, those stupid cigarette butts of Sherwin’s. But when they started looking like everyone else’s stupid cigarette butts, she threw them away. She couldn’t have distinguished them from someone else’s if her life depended upon it. Love was funny, the way it came and went. She gnawed her knuckles and looked at the orphaned items on Annabel’s blueberry-colored bureau, which now, because of her, seemed unable to transcend their nature. The sad thing was that Annabel had really tried with this, the tackiest notion in the room. Everything else was so tasteful, so perfect, the result of serious, practically pathological consumer coding. This assemblage had perhaps been Annabel’s first tentative clumsy baby step toward appreciating something larger — in this case, reductively, death, but with some work maybe something grander, like real life — and Alice had inadvertently, spontaneously messed it up.
Annabel returned and went directly to the bureau. Without a glance at its unevocative surface she pulled open a drawer and took out a beige cashmere sweater. She removed the one she was wearing, the gray one. Rather, it was shale. She didn’t have gray. She didn’t have beige either. God, beige. What were they thinking of back then? Ecru. It was ecru. Changing sweaters always soothed Annabel.
“Daddy thinks Mommy visits him in his room,” she said. “He thinks she’s in there now.”
Alice was relieved she was still speaking to her. “Why doesn’t your mother come in here?” she said. “Did you ask her to?”
“She won’t see me. I mean, I guess she sees me, but she won’t let me see her. I don’t think Mommy ever liked me. She was in love with Daddy.”
“You weren’t one of those awful children who were always asking, ‘Who do you love more? Me or Daddy? Me or Mommy?’ were you?”
“Maybe,” Annabel said. “Maybe I was.” Though she had never truly dared. It would have been too horrible to know, and alarming either way.
“Well, you’re paying for it now.”
“You are incapable of empathy with another human being, aren’t you, Alice? You must lack a gene. You’re just kind of abnormal. You’re like a fifth child or something.”
Alice was not offended.
“Your desert is so creepy,” Annabel went on. “I don’t even like the clouds out here. I think they’re creepy too.… This would never happen back home.”
“The desert has a tradition of very fine clouds,” Alice said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Why is she here and not here? It’s not right. Have you noticed how much weight Daddy’s lost? It’s like he’s being drained.”
“Why can’t your mother just stay around if she wants? What’s so awful about that?”
“This is not Latin America,” Annabel said coolly.
“What does Latin America have to do with it?”
“In Latin America these things happen, but not here. Didn’t you ever have to read any of their novels in school? It’s because their culture is oppressed or suppressed or something.”
This sweater was coral. And this one was dusk. She had never thought dusk especially flattering, at least with her coloring.
“This is an interesting thing that’s happening to you,” Alice suggested.
“It’s not happening to me at all. It’s happening to my mother.”