The widows adventures, p.14
The Widows' Adventures, page 14
Ray hired Alonzo and the breaking of windows stopped. Ray still owned the laundromat, but over the years he had sold shares of it to Alonzo, who had overseen the laundromat’s expansion into the stores to either side of it, who had put his wife and children on the payroll, and who now lived in a three-flat two blocks away, renting the other apartments to his parents and his brother’s family. Ray received each month from Alonzo a statement and a check for his share of the laundromat’s proceeds.
Ray moved back in with his parents for a few months after Alonzo began to run the business. Ray was required only to appear at 4:00 A.M., the slowest period of the day, to pick up the money and close the day’s books. Alonzo met him cheerfully at the front door. Ray never went in the back room again; that was now another man’s home.
But Ray’s time was no longer filled with anything of interest. He hung around the house, read, slept, joined his mother in an Old Style, dropped in on his father at the office, made a pest of himself. At some point he decided to travel a little, packed his things, and departed. He lived first in Boulder, Colorado, and after a year there bought a failing laundromat two blocks from the university campus. He installed new machines, painted, laid all-weather carpet, rolled a jukebox into the corner, and then for three weeks let everything run for nothing: free music, free snacks, free washers and dryers.
He still owned that store, and received a monthly check and statement, but when he headed west again after two years he had learned never to give anything away. Once the prices went back on the machines, the kids stopped coming. They had places on campus to do their laundry. His return on the Boulder store was twenty-five percent of what he made from his Chicago location, and it took nearly a year to make back what he had spent in that three weeks of something for nothing.
Ray owned five laundromats in Southern California when he returned to Chicago for his father’s funeral. He took a flight that was intended to be nonstop to O’Hare, but which was forced down in Denver with mechanical problems. During the three hours it was expected to take to find a new plane, Ray rented a car and drove to Boulder. He planned to drop in on his laundromat; his surprise would startle the manager with his omnipresence. He sat for several minutes across the street from the store, fully intending to turn off the engine and go inside. He could see the manager through the window filling a detergent vending machine and speaking to a young woman doing her wash.
The sun was warm on Ray’s legs; the rental car was too small for him, a tall man, overweight. And as he sat there he could not think of one good reason to go inside. The thought of springing himself on his employee now seemed the idea of an untrusting owner. It was enough that the man was busy during the few minutes Ray had happened to witness him in secret.
An older man came down the street carrying a basket of wash and as he put his back to the door to push inside, the manager stepped quickly and opened the door for him. The old man interested Ray because he reminded him of his father. He had been seeing such men everywhere. In the airport, sitting in coffee shops, renting cars; dozens of men who startled Ray for the instant he required to convince himself that he was not seeing his father.
He had not yet begun to miss his father. The death was still a novelty, something so strange it was not quite to be believed. His mother had called with the news and after he hung up the phone he thought he might cry. But he hadn’t. It was just a feeling that passed, a hollowness at the back of his eyes. A genuine curiosity descended. For the next several hours he packed, made arrangements for his businesses to operate in his absence, canceled appointments, each task accomplished against a backdrop of detachment. Friends offered condolences when he told them why he had to go out of town and he accepted these uncomfortably, as if he hadn’t earned them. His father was dead; Ray didn’t know how he felt.
Years had passed since he and Vincent had spoken of anything of importance. His father had lost some requisite dimension when Ray moved out. Perhaps sooner than that, when Ray bought his first laundromat. The advice his father might give him on any specific subject would only echo what Ray had already decided to do.
So the father whose death would sadden him would be a much younger man, a memory. He would be the thin, quiet man in sparkling clothes who loved to play games with his children; catch, tag, hide-and-seek. He once took a game of hide-and-seek to such an extreme that when the children could not find him during a bedtime game and grew bored with the search he remained hidden all night (he claimed, though Ray’s mother would never submit to sleeping alone) in the dusty little cave under the basement stairs. He would be the man who winked at Ray when he went to get his mother a beer. The man who went off in the morning to sell real estate, though not every morning, and on the mornings he did choose to visit his office the choice never seemed to have any urgency behind it. Ray accompanied him once and his only memory of that day was of a large, paneled room with maps on the walls, his father on the telephone interminably. He was tossed candy bribes to curb his boredom and fidgeting.
That man was gone now. Gone also was the old man, the flat voice on the phone asking about the machinations of the laundry business, as if that were the most fascinating topic imaginable. The questions and answers would be repeated during each phone call dialed east or west, and that was one reason he didn’t call much anymore.
Now his father was gone and his mother would be lost. The depth of her grief was something he did not want to witness. He feared being unable to help her, or absorb her pain, or match it. Vincent Lockwood had thinned away to a memory for Ray. That was something of a luxury, a gift bestowed in part by his father, who taught his children to move on to their own lives.
But there would be no such thinning out for his mother. Ray feared his father’s death would leave her helpless, an unimaginable state. Or she might deflect her grief deeper inside her, to hide it from her children behind a shield of false enthusiasm, or more beer.
He carried beer for her from the west, in fact. The six warm cans lay wrapped in a towel at the bottom of his suitcase. During a conversation more than a year previously she had mentioned a curiosity about a brand brewed in San Francisco. He would surprise her; he would cheer her a little with the prospect of something exotic when the wake and funeral were over.
She always drank her beer out of a tall blue glass, and she filled the glass only three-quarters full so that the foamy scum could not be seen unless some boorish individual tipped his nose to look down into her cool well of comfort. Usually that individual was Ray. He always asked, “Tea, Mother?” The blue glass and her careful monitoring of the liquid’s level kept the beer a secret from all but her most trusted acquaintances; or so she believed.
She had never embarrassed anyone with her drinking, least of all herself. However, Ray had always suspected that she had hurt Vincent. Vincent brought her beer when she requested it, and bought it for her at the store, but drank little himself. He would be caught by Ray examining her as she sipped from her blue glass, and his look was blatantly perplexed, as if trying yet again to understand what it was he did not provide that she required beer to fill that space inside her.
Ray could never be sure. So much of what they meant to each other was a mystery to him. They had known each other for so long, their love went so far back in time, that it was beyond explanation or understanding to anyone but themselves. They told their children stories of their romance, but these were set pieces, with roles like little plays that skimmed the surface. They were meant to reassure Annie and Ray that love was never a question with them; a way to make their children feel safe in that love. The rest was nobody’s business but their own.
That his father died first had been a huge relief to Ray. His father being left behind by his mother had been a fear of Ray’s for several years, growing more insistent the farther he moved away. His father—light-hearted, smiling, holding his mother’s hand or touching her cheek at every opportunity (once squeezing her breast in a secret movement secretly observed)—loomed helplessly in Ray’s imagination without the presence of his mother. And what must he have thought, relying so exclusively on, loving so devotedly, a woman who drank beer with such relish? Did he ever think it should be the other way around? Did he ever fear she would fail him?
She never had. Not that Ray knew of. And now that his mother had seen his father safely off, Ray wondered what would become of her.
Helene, standing at the bottom of the stairs, woke Ina with her patient cries for assistance. Ina was wrapped in damp sheets, her room in the morning sunshine already breathless with heat. An extended moment was required to place herself in time, location, and circumstance, and when all was in order she discovered herself to be excited.
“Such a life you lead,” Helene said when she heard the scratch of her sister’s step descending the stairs. Helene’s dress was crumpled in that fractional way only a fastidious person would notice. Ina said nothing about it, knowing Helene would not cease talking about her appearance until she got home and changed.
Ina went into the bathroom to inspect the damage to her house, to reassure herself that the previous night had taken place. The room smelled of heated air and pine disinfectant; and an underlying stink of the man trapped so long in her wall, as if in lodging there he had seeped into the wood like a resin, a coating of him shaved off and remaining behind as he was pulled free.
“Did you go yet?” she asked Helene.
“Once.”
“Are you ready again?”
“I think so. Could you get my shot ready?”
“Of course, dear.”
While Helene used the bathroom, Ina poured an Old Style into her blue glass, then set it aside where she could nibble at it while caring for her sister.
Helene double-voided in the morning, the second sample providing a truer measure of her blood sugar, and this sample she presented warm in a five-ounce cup to Ina. Ina set the cup on the counter and after waiting a moment dipped the TesTape in. The yellow paper turned dark blue.
“It’s high this morning,” Ina reported.
“That cheap wine you forced on me,” Helene said. “I had terrible sugar dreams.”
“Poo. It was all the excitement,” Ina said. “Where do you want it today?”
Helene kept in her memory a map of her body, using it to track the rotation of shot sites in order that no part of her skin would be punctured too frequently.
“Thigh. Left,” Helene said, and with a demure extending of her leg pulled her dress up above her hip. Her skin was quite slack and pale, with a blue undertone like a second skin pulled taut beneath the first.
Ina, adept at the dosage monitor developed for blind diabetics, filled a syringe, swabbed alcohol over her sister’s skin (Helene sucked in her breath at the cold), and then pushed in the needle.
Helene did not tense up; she hardly moved. She had learned long ago to disengage her mind from the event so that she operated on a form of autopilot for the half-minute it took to get her shot. Ina spoke only in generalities during these moments; Helene never remembered anything she said.
They ate a meal almost monumental in its lack of excitement: bran cereal, muffins, milk, and apricots. Ina sneaked cinnamon onto her muffin, and beer with her milk. The sky was hazy with pollutants, dust, pollen, and dirt that the heat would not let go.
She saw Po Strode working, her head protected by a wide wheat hat, doing something inconspicuous to her gardens. She did not water or trim, but took full blooms in her hands as if in inspection, and then spoke a few words. Now and then her gaze would drift to Ina’s house, and Ina chose to believe her friend was simply keeping watch.
She said to Helene, “I want to go see my children.”
Helene calmly nodded. Her blank eyes remained steadfast in their patience to learn whether she would be left behind.
“And I want you to take me,” Ina finished.
“Take you?”
“Yes. I want you to drive us to California.”
To her credit, Helene laughed. A short laugh that perhaps was painful, for tears came to Helene’s eyes.
“I thought this through last night—this morning,” Ina said. “After all the excitement, I couldn’t sleep. I honestly believe such a trip can be made. I covered every detail—”
“In your humble opinion,” Helene said.
“You convinced me,” Ina said. “If I hadn’t seen you drive us to Amanda’s I wouldn’t have believed it possible. But you did it. In daylight. In a gargantuan and complex metropolis. Places like Missouri, Texas, the desert—no place would present more of a challenge than where you’ve already driven.”
“Thank you, dear,” said Helene. “Let’s just fly. Have Ray meet us at the airport. He’ll chauffeur us around. He’d do anything for you.”
“Anyone can fly,” Ina said. “We can travel on back roads in the dead of night. From midnight to four A.M., nobody is out and about. During the day we’ll sleep and lounge by the pool. I’ll take you places and describe them to you. It will be the trip of a lifetime.”
Helene sipped her milk, Ina her Old Style. It surprised Ina, in describing the journey, how much it meant to her. For the first time since Vincent had died the time ahead of her had some shape and meaning beyond caring for Helene. She was in an anxious, anticipatory state.
“If it was later in the day I’d swear you were drunk,” Helene said then in a frightened and hateful voice.
“I’m not drunk,” Ina said. “Furthermore, I don’t get drunk.”
“I’m sorry, dear. That was cruel of me.”
“Yes, it was.”
“But it’s such a . . . crazy idea.”
“It can be done,” Ina said. “With care, it can be done. Ask me a detail. I have the answer.”
“Who will watch the house?”
“Yours, Amanda. Mine, Po and Hector. In fact, I may sell mine.”
“You are drunk. Or mad.”
“It doesn’t feel the same,” Ina said. “That thief ruined it for me. I’ve been threatened with death in my own house.”
“Where will you live?” Helene asked worriedly.
“I don’t know. Maybe with Ray? Maybe you’ll like driving me around so much we’ll buy a camper and cruise the night away,” Ina said.
Helene laughed again and Ina warmed to her, that she was being a good sport; the possibility remained.
“Why don’t you learn to drive?” Helene asked. “Then you can drive us to California.”
“So you admit the destination appeals to you,” Ina said, anxious to get that fact on the record.
Helene nodded. “I’d like to visit California.”
“I should have learned to drive when I was young,” Ina said. “But Vincent convinced me it was unnecessary. I had him.” Ina took a sip; a familiar ache had opened within her. “Time has proved him—me—wrong. Now I haven’t the patience to learn to drive. I have you.”
“Who will take the blame when we run down a child?” Helene asked.
“We won’t.”
“We might. We could,” Helene said determinedly.
“What child will be on the road from midnight to dawn?” Ina asked, though the prospect haunted her. The plans she had made, all the answers she had provided to her sleepless queries, could not remove her fear of the unexpected. It was both what she desired and feared most from the trip.
“But if we do?” Helene pressed.
“I will take the blame,” Ina said.
They haggled on through the day, leaving the kitchen for short errands of necessity—to fill a glass, use the toilet, lower the windows against a breezy downpour. And although Helene never said the word, Ina was content in her belief that the journey would be made, indeed was already under way.
Helene was anxious for darkness to fall and asked Ina frequently for a report on the status of the evening. Darkness, Ina understood, would free Helene from the responsibility of returning to her house that day. She was happy to be locked in safe at Ina’s for another night.
“First thing,” Ina said. “We must concoct a credible story. We are going on a trip to California. We are taking your car. A friend of ours is driving. That will explain our extended absence and the absence of the car. Can you leave in a week?”
“A week?” Helene said. “Of course not.”
“Just tell Amanda to watch the house. Then pack. We’re off.”
“What about the car? It needs work,” Helene said. “I’ve got to buy travelers’ checks. We should plan a route. Do we carry food? What about my medical supplies? And what about money? This will be expensive. A week isn’t nearly time enough.”
“Those are all technicalities,” Ina said. “It’s important that we don’t let small obstacles stand in our way.”
They walked to Helene’s house the next day. While her sister sat, fretted, and gave orders, Ina cleaned up the mess. The house already had a stink to it; they should have come back as soon as possible. The sugary floor was alive with ants—and one wide roach who didn’t budge as Ina’s toe descended crackling through him.
She swept everything into a small mountain by the back stairs, scooped the mountain into bags, and carried the bags outside. The Omega was there in the garage. Wide, dusty, with an undertone of perfect patience, the car was the key to everything. She put a hand on the cool shell. She left a mark; fingertips like petals, a crescent of her palm.
Back in the house, the stink remained.
“Something foul,” Ina said.
“I traced it while you were outside,” Helene said. “It’s coming from my and Rudy’s room.”
Ina found it easily enough: a neat deposit of shit in Helene and Rudy’s bed, the covers smoothed carefully over it. A stain, barely damp now, was also on the rug.
Ina stripped the bed in one enraged snap of the sheets and blankets and hurried the bundle outside. On the stain she poured vinegar and rubbed it nearly into a froth, though she suspected the rug was a lost cause. She brought a fan into the room. She directed its fresh wind into her face for a minute before positioning it on the floor.
