Snap, p.14
Snap, page 14
Roxy even thought of saying to her, “Listen, my boyfriend and I, we stole your car, we took it to the beach. I mean, thank you. I mean, we’ll bring it to the car wash, vacuum it out, wash the windshield.” Because she knew that Ida wouldn’t get mad. Ida wasn’t the type. She’d be happy just to have the car back. But by the time Roxy thought of this, Ida had already climbed down the steps and rode off on her clumsy, noisy bike. From behind the glass pane in the door, around the sheet her mother hung as a curtain, Roxy watched Ida disappear up Mulberry Street. She thought of following her. She was in love. And then Sammy had come, and that was that. And now they are back on the beach. It’s a giant party. Radios mixing up songs, kids spitting watermelon seeds, Sammy playing with the car keys. He can’t seem to bring himself to put them in his pocket, but keeps tossing them into the air so they jangle and spin, Ida’s rabbit’s foot flashing a neon blue. Blanket over her arm, Roxy follows him across the hot, bright, body-spangled sand. She believes very suddenly in luck. Her own. Nothing bad can ever happen to her. Nothing. The beach smells of peppermint. She sidesteps a striped umbrella, spreads the blanket on an empty spot they find, miraculously, among the bare, knotted limbs of the other bathers. Flops down on her belly, turns the radio on, then sometime later picks her way along the beach toward the tide line’s damp border. Seaweed, filamentous red algae, small, speckled crab shells, bits and pieces of Styrofoam kickboards and soaked T-shirts. Roxanne walks through all that to the clear salty water, and without diving in lies back upon the swell and lets it carry her.
6
ROXY MISSES HER DATE with her father that Sunday night, of course.
Not that she had really intended to keep it. However, under normal circumstances he would have been difficult to avoid, standing as he did on the sidewalk outside Baskin-Robbins while she wiped the counters and then wandering in for a cone (strawberry) when it came time for her to leave.
But neither the Sunday itself nor its circumstances were as usual.
“As long as I’m driving a stolen car,” said Sammy, “we may as well have fun.”
So she and Sammy left for the beach again. The day was overcast, the bridge empty, the sand nearly deserted. Even the water seemed calmer, more melancholy than before. Sammy parked the car but they didn’t get out. They opened the windows and just sat there not saying anything. Sammy ripped open a box of Entenmann’s chocolate-covered doughnuts and gave her one, and she ate it thinking of things that anybody else might do with her boyfriend on a chilly day on a beach. They could wander the strip to Woolworths, buy a Frisbee. They could get stoned. They could go to a real restaurant, a movie, a video arcade. Monique and Jim would drive someplace secluded, make love on a sand dune. Maybe that was why Sammy was acting so quiet, just swallowing his doughnuts, hardly looking at her. She wore turquoise pants to mid-calf above burnished ankles. The thing you used on your foot to get the dead skin off was called a pumice stone, she remembered. Maybe they could buy one along with the Frisbee. But she couldn’t even bring herself to mention the idea of shopping. Never had a box of doughnuts vanished so quickly, and then the silence between them felt suddenly important, as if the doughnuts were fuel and Sammy was waiting for takeoff. Maybe he was going to insist, then. And maybe she’d just do it, then. She supposed they could do it in the car on the blanket, although anyone could walk by and look inside.
But then the motor started, the car was backing out of the lot and Sammy was saying, out of the blue, “Here’s what we do. We drive down Page and I let you off at Capitol Landing at the railroad overpass. I drive around and you walk up to the house and knock at the door. If Mrs. Mack answers, you just give her the cake money, but if no one answers then we leave the car in the driveway, just like we found it.”
Roxy was shocked, as if they’d finally started fucking in the closet and Sammy’s mother had walked in wanting her bird skirt. On the other hand, what a relief.
“That sounds okay,” she said after a while, hiding her surprise. “But what if Mrs. Mack is home? I pay her, okay, but then what do we do with the car?”
Sammy bounced a fist on the dashboard. Roxy thought, If she’s home, 1 can go in and sit down and talk and I’ll explain everything, and she can show me the cake, and then another day I can go back again and she can show me how she makes the flowers.
“Park it in the schoolyard, mail her the keys,” said Sammy. “Call the cops anonymously. I don’t know. Something. I can’t get into this anymore.”
“We didn’t really do anything wrong,” Roxy said. She was looking at things from Ida Mack’s point of view, once they’d explained themselves. It had been nothing but a funny, romantic adventure; school was out, and the beach was too far away to walk. Well, it was better than hitching, Mrs. Mack would say.
“Only a felony, Roxy. God.”
“I don’t look at it like that,” Roxanne said truthfully.
7
ROXANNE looks at everything truthfully, but with a truthfulness based on her own, pure, flawless intentions.
So that later on, when she and Sammy have actually made their way into the Mack’s house, having parked the Rabbit safely in the driveway, Roxanne still does not feel that what she is doing is wrong, or even illegal.
Simply, Ida Mack was not at home, but the situation had altered and warranted investigation. For instance, the front door, which had been locked when she and Sammy had first tried to deliver the wedding cake money on the day that they took the car, now stood open. From beyond it through the mesh of the screen door drifted a horrible rotting stench, as if a person had died and were decomposing.
Roxanne even thought to herself, But it doesn’t seem right that a person like Ida Mack would stink, even if she was dead.
Sammy goes upstairs bravely in search of the corpse. Bodies are commonly discovered in bathtubs, he shouts, while in the kitchen Roxy finds a slab of raw flank steak rotting on a platter in the open refrigerator. There are other things, too, that smell. Yellowed broccoli flowers, soft, oily cheeses and cartons of watery yogurt. Some legs of a barbecued chicken, some squishy grapes and half an apple, a quart of sour milk and one of turned cider. Roxy wonders, What is the sum of these parts? Nothing seedy, nothing rotten or degrading. Just an empty house. A good one, too. From the kitchen archway can be seen the L shape of the dining and living rooms; shell-white tongue-and-groove walls whose trim and wainscoting have been painted the yellow of egg yolk. The brick fireplace a dot of blood-red floating in vivid liquid. No curtains on the windows, just whitewashed rolled bamboo blinds more light than shade. Wispy plants hang from the curtain rods. Roxy mists them with water from an orange spray bottle she spots on a window sill. Hunts down more plants, mists them as well, puts the bottle back in place and surveys the glossy wood-floored territory. Where she is boss. She tells Sammy what to do and he does it, cowed by the very nature of her injunctions. Scoop the dead fish out of the fish tank, wrap them in newspaper coffins and bury them out in the garden, in a ring around the birdbath. The birdbath is sunken, a sloping pond in a lush terrain of ivy and dewy violets. Fill it with water, trim the ivy just a little and then latch the two gates, which are swinging and creaking. Mow the lawn, too. She means to keep him outside a little longer while she busies herself in the solitude of Ida Mack’s kitchen. A person who has illegally entered a house does not wipe the insides of the refrigerator bins, is what Roxy tells herself. A person who has wrongly inhabited a house does not sweep the steps, or gather dishtowels, hand towels, bath towels, sheets and pillow cases, to be stuffed into the washing machine and laundered.
Or cook a pot of whole-wheat noodles to be sprinkled with parsley and sesame seeds. Or lie out back on the swaying hammock in the rich evening light, after having eaten her fill. Sammy lies on his back with his legs spread wide around the saddle of the hammock so his toes disappear in the dense green grass. Still dressed in her swimsuit and slick red shorts, Roxy straddles him and plays with his open shirt collar. Between them floats the knowledge that they’ve never had a bed and now they have one, they’ve never had privacy and now they have it, they’ve never had time and now they do. Upstairs in the house the Macks’ bed is low to the ground, a water bed encased in a whitewashed frame and covered with a cotton spread of giant peacocks strutting in a row. The floor, too, is whitewashed, so the peacocks, adorned here and there with actual feathers, are afloat in immaculate, groundless space. Sammy had called her upstairs to check it out, flopping down upon the undulating birds and shutting his eyes. She saw him peering up at her from under his lids. When he beckoned, the longest tendrils of the peacocks’ bright tail feathers beckoned as well. How inviting it all was. But Roxy said no, not yet, they had to cook dinner first. With this she escaped to the stairs and the kitchen, where she drained the noodles and waited for Sammy to sprinkle on the sesame seeds. After dinner she said, “Let’s go out in the yard. It’s too nice out to stay in the house.” Not true. Outside is muggy and heavy as flannel. Inside is redolent with fragrant cross breezes and flickering, leafy shadows. The fireplace bricks are uncommonly smooth and reflective, like stones in a moving brook. On a desk in the kitchen sits an oval mirror on a wooden stand containing tiers of small, open drawers crammed with cool nickels, pennies and dimes. In the pantry is a jug of red cooking wine, from which Roxy drank as she waited for Sammy, feeling poignantly alone as she often wished to feel, a figure in a still, sunny kitchen. That the kitchen was not her own did not trouble her one bit. But when Sammy came down she had to stand near him while he sprinkled in the sesame seeds. He made a great show of cooking, tasting the starchy tines of the fork.
Now, on the hammock, it seems coarse to suggest that she would like to go in and have a shower. So she leans over and just kisses him, aware of locks of her hair falling among the twisted rope knots of the hammock, and of the way she holds herself distinctly away from his body, not yet allowing him all of her weight. She wishes he would shut his eyes. Maybe if she were to shut her own … But then, how would she know? What bothers her as usual is that while she is so composed, so calm and still and pleased and self-contained, Sammy is losing control. How he pants and pulls, and pushes his fingers insistently along the cloth at her crotch while from out of his throat come strange, rhythmic sounds as if he’s climbing the steep incline of his own breathing, up up up up up. Now he pulls her against him; the hammock sinks and sways. Soon his finger dives in and swims slow, deep circles around which she feels herself begin to revolve. Round and round, and up up up up up. Sammy’s penis is out of his swimsuit, the head hot on her belly, probing and begging. Behind them the empty house winks in the dusk. Roxy takes him in her hand, squeezes and tugs. In seconds he comes on the hammock.
She sits up, his semen thick on her fingers, and smiles at him as she climbs off the hammock onto the grass and into the waiting house. Upstairs she pulls off her suit, watching herself in the full-length mirror, and steps into the shower to masturbate, although that had not really been part of the plan. She has several orgasms, then soaps and rinses, finds a razor and shaves her armpits although they are already hairless and smooth. She chooses almond shampoo and Pantene Creme Conditioner. On a glass shelf lies a decorative comb of clear plastic. She swoops her damp hair upward, fastens it loosely behind and then, experimenting with the dimmer switch, watches her pupils dilate in the mirror. Three orgasms in just under a quarter of an hour, she is thinking. How many does that make in a day? And wraps herself in the soft, strange, generous indigo towel. At home the towels are limp, silk-screened with outdated tourist attractions.
In a minute, though, the indigo towel is familiar. As is the bathroom itself, its narrow mirror unevenly lighted by round white bulbs, its narrow twin cabinets stocked with toiletries. Even the bottles with their lotions and oils seem intimately to belong to her. She feels whole again, safe in Ida Mack’s bathroom, lovely and entire as an egg. Spies a toothbrush in a cup near the sink, and close by on the countertop a tube of Tom’s Anise Toothpaste. Reaches for it. At once Sammy comes in, opens the door and starts circling her as if he thinks he can do it again already. It comes to Roxanne with a shock that he probably can. She hadn’t thought of that. Beyond the hallway through the open bedroom door she has a glimpse of the Day-Glo peacocks lined up on the bed, displaying.
Now what?
“You’re all gooey,” she says playfully, but is dismayed to see that Sammy is too worked up to be distracted. He has buried his face in her breasts, has wrapped one leg around both of hers and with his hands kneads the flesh of her backside sprinkled with talc. He seems unlike a boy, all of a sudden, he seems older, and he moves her here and there in a desperate way around the tiny, steamy room and through the hallway and onto the spreading peacocks. Roxanne has misted herself with a sandalwood cologne; her pubic hair is frosted with the flavorful scent.
Sammy is sobbing.
However, things don’t seem to be going as they might. Roxanne opens her legs, Sammy prods and bats crazily against her body but cannot get in. Finally his penis springs against her thighs with a wet, hot spasm.
Sammy screams.
From her vantage point beneath him, Roxanne gazes past the scream onto the dusky orange-white ceiling and then around the room itself, which is wonderfully quirky, spare and strange, like a scene from a fantasy. Ida didn’t decorate this room, Roxy thinks, she invented it. First the peacocks floating on the low, wide bed. In lieu of night tables, wide-mouthed urns glazed with whorls of leafy roses and topped with sheets of smoked glass. In lieu of reading lamps, a row of wired candles affixed to the wall above the headboard, their glass flames tinted a suggestive rose. In lieu of curtains, some head scarves tied ingeniously in each of the five square windows. Roxanne hadn’t noticed them earlier. Two scarves to a window, the outside corners tacked to the window frame, the four inside ones cleverly knotted to form flimsy, billowing, saillike curtains. Against the five open screens in an evening breeze, the knotted scarves flutter and breathe. The scarves are unmatched transparent paisleys.
Sammy moans, slick with perspiration. A drop of it falls on her face.
Roxanne thinks: This is exactly what I would have done, if I had thought of it, all my scarves for curtains. That’s what I’ll do, in my own windows, when I have my own windows, someday.
And then: How long can I stay here? Forever? A month? One night?
The room moves like a cloud upon a stiff, invisible current of air.
Now Sammy rolls off of her, onto his back. The mattress heaves, shifts and finally, with a gentle, fluid rocking, settles again.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“That’s okay,” Roxy answers. And then, remembering her father, “Anyway, I’m missing my stupid date.”
8
STILL, missing her date with her father, Roxy knows precisely what she is missing. These dinners are all alike. Roxanne wonders if there is something necessarily sleazy about being in a bar with your father, or if her father in particular, and the bars he takes her to, are what make it sleazy. The bars are always different but the same. Fake leather, of black or red or green. Chandeliers like Ferris wheels Hipped on their sides, hanging so low you’re afraid to stand up. Creasy carpeting and Happy Hour. Happy Hours, in the bars her father takes her to, are for unhappy people with no place to go and no one to go with; everyone shows up straight from work. To break the ice, the women slip out of their shoes. At a buffet table on a raised wood platform covered with red paper, there’s a spread of stale cold cuts, cheeses, deli rye and melon slices. Roxanne prefers the garnish to the actual fare. She loads her plate with paper-thin slices of oranges, sprigs of wet parsley, radish roses and cupped lettuce leaves still aglitter with melting ice chips, for her father’s sake she rolls it all up delicately along with a little horseradish, and nibbles it tamale-style.
Her inventiveness astounds him. Everything about her astounds him. Of course. He’s in love with her.
She is glad the bars he takes her to are dark, for it embarrasses her to think of the sight of the two of them sitting together at the small table, their elbows practically touching. Does everyone know he’s her father? Do they think she’s his girlfriend? Her father is big on synthetics, and in the dim light his shirts have a false, silvery sheen. He wears a patchwork leather cap to conceal the fact that his hair is thinning. Or maybe he’s bald already. Roxanne doesn’t understand what the big deal is. She’s seen plenty of good-looking bald men. He’s not good-looking anyway, so what difference does it make? The cap is a big joke between Susan and Annette: Does he remove it in the shower? In bed? He’s always in the middle of a mid-life crisis, is what Susan says about him. He was in one at age twenty-two, when Susan first met him, before Roxy was born, and he’ll be in one till he dies. He’s always eager and sad, like a frightened pet, and nervous, at least with Roxanne. He’s a poor listener, although practically all he does is ask questions and stare at her while she plays along and answers them.
“I like to think I can catch up on you just by taking you out for a drink,” he might say. “How’s Sammy? You’re still seeing him? Has he graduated? Did he get his car? What about your girlfriends? You behaving yourselves? You girls have any academie interests yet? What do you like in school these days, Roxy? Anything? History?”
“Math,” Roxanne replies.
“Thats great, Roxy. Study economics.’
“I want to be a theorist.”
“You’ll do it, too. I know it. That’s a noble thing. I admire that, Roxy. Sure. I’ve always admired you, Roxy. I always thought you were magic.”
That’s because I am magic, is what Roxanne thinks, but never says. She tilts her chair back, glances up at the ceiling. Sometimes there’s a mirror on the ceiling, sometimes one the whole length of the opposite wall. Sometimes the mirror is behind them, and then the thought of it is terribly important as if she knows she is missing something; something is getting past her. Pretty soon she’ll ask him how the store is, although she checks it out every once in a while if she’s in Richmond visiting Monique. Monique always goes in first, to make sure he’s not on the floor. Then they saunter in together like shoppers, chattering and dangerously swinging their bags. Surprisingly, her father’s store is really nice. It carries mostly china and glassware, although he’s been handling a line of porcelain dolls as well, their white faces painted like the faces of playing-card jokers, peaked and amused. The dolls are crafted in California and dressed elaborately in sleek clown costumes. They’re the best thing in the store, yet he’s never once mentioned them to her. Instead he tells her how he has constructed a small alcove, lined it with shelves and painted it blue and white, for a Wedgwood display. He tells her he has Wedgwood in other colors now, too, not just blue and white. Gray and white. Black and white.
