Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (25 page)

“Lithuania?” I asked. “A Democrat out-sourcing?”

Petunia laughed. “I’m all red now,” she said.

“I’m amazed,” I said.

“As are my parents,” she said. “Now, it’s all IKEA in here,” she said, opening one of the office doors. “I hope you don’t mind."

"Not at all," I said.

“Cool,” my son said, IKEA being still, for him, in the pantheon of exclusive retail outlets, perhaps mostly because none had existed anywhere near us before.

My son and I entered the first office/living space.

"Oh, no, take the one next door," Petunia said to my son. "It’s got a pinball machine."

"I can’t thank you enough for putting us up,” I said. “It’ll just be a week maybe. Two tops.”

Petunia swatted my humility aside. “Take your time,” she said. “Nothing is going on here.”

I heard the rasp of a pinball rolling down, then the sound of it released and the first ding and bling of bumpers. I’d never get my son out of this place.

"Kitchen’s there…” Petunia said, pointing one direction, then another, “…and bathroom’s there. Showers, too. If there’s no hot, let me know. That was supposed to be fixed."

I nodded. I wanted, at that moment, to be one of those Lithuanians she’d hoped to hire. I wanted to live here and work here and have both pay and a roof over my head. I stepped to the wall of glass windows and drew apart the white curtains still bearing their tags from IKEA:
Ninni Tråd
. I felt like I was in another country. Every few seconds I could see a faint twinkle of light beyond the thick fog that blew against the windows like puffs of smoke.

"Come upstairs," Petunia said. "Let’s catch up. Unless you’re tired. You must be. Take a shower, then come up.“

I turned and Petunia pressed a key and a card into my palm. An access code for the penthouse was printed on the back of her business card. The front of the card said simply,
Petunia Alabaster, ball buster.
No number, no e-mail. The card of a precocious retiree.

“I’ll come up in a bit,” I said.

“And I’ll clear out the amateur Vivaldi crowd. Maybe my husband with them, too. Ugh. Vivaldi.” She laughed.

When she was gone I didn’t even bother to shower. I pushed the futon flat, lay down, and began to pass out to the sounds of pinball, every ding like another neuron flashing off within my head until I was just the ball, ricocheting back and forth among possibilities, a peripatetic hunk of cold steel that just wanted to play the game and not lose, even though, in the end, the ball always ends up lost. I heard the fantom squeal of bus brakes, the rhythm of the road still ingrained within my blood from those days aboard Greyhound.
I’m not moving,
I told myself.
I’m here.

If I was physically still, my mind was still in motion. I dreamt I was flying west. That those endless hours on buses had never occurred, that my baggage was light and my spirit, lighter. On the plane I was seated near the back and there came to me the wondrous smell of rolls, a scent that can’t even be described in words. So luxuriously more evocative is the olfactory language than the language of words. But you know the scent, where you can even smell the pad of butter within its foil wrapper. I thought how wondrous it was to experience these smells there in the cabin’s dry interior, the scent of a hundred rolls knifed open and buttered, a shared comfort at 35,000 feet as me and a hundred dream extras broke bread together.
We are safe. We are safe.
Someone opened the plane’s sunroof (that’s dream logic for you) and we took turns holding our hands out, catching the cold gusts in our palms, mouths buttery and warm.
We are safe.

I woke to the sound of pinball. I was hungry to the point of feeling a little ill. A new day had come, even as I greeted it by rising in yesterday’s (and the day before’s) clothes. I was met by a dazzling view of the city. I couldn’t see the skyscrapers, or any bridges, but it was San Francisco all the same, the real city that had no need to display landmarks to those who know it for its subtler bones. Somewhere, behind a hill, was the sea, and above those unseen waves, a bank of fog. But here, sunshine.

I stepped into the office/bedroom next door. From his wet hair, I could see that my son had, at some point, dragged himself away from the pinball machine long enough to shower. A bread roll hung from his mouth, another, buttered, lay on a plate at his feet. So much for the insularity of dreams.

“Tell me you haven’t been playing that all night,” I said.

He looked at me for a fraction of a second and nodded. He attempted another bite and the roll fell from his mouth onto the pinball machine. He needed to save up his all-nighters for the tougher fare of exams and emergencies.

I heard a laugh and noticed, then, a girl sitting on his futon. She wore the same hue of gray as the futon’s fabric, even her jeans were gray. She was skinny and tall,
sixteen? seventeen?
and had a pierced nostril. I could read the imprint of Petunia’s genes on her chin and eyes. In fact, she looked so much like the Petunia I’d grown up with that I felt a little spooked by her presence.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Eloise.”

“
I’m
Eloise,” the girl said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Rerry Mom,” my son said, then swallowed. “That’s her name, too.”

“Oh,” I said. “It is?”

“I go by Eli,” the girl said.

“How ‘bout that,” I said.

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Go by Eli?”

“No. Just Eloise,” I said.

Eli sat on the futon, an open paper sack lying between her legs. She picked up the bag and handed its yawning mouth toward me.

“Roll?” she asked. “My dad just made them this morning.”

“Thank you,” I said, “I’ll pass.” Dream Eloise would have devoured them in a moment, but I was awake now and knew the kinds of things that dream entities don’t: like how all those days of travel and bus-stop vending machine had left me sorely in need of non-carb nutrition to, you know, get things moving again. (That’s always been the bane of travel for me. The more distance I cover, the less things move, down there.)

I left the two of them and searched out the kitchen, the girl’s eyes on me in a way that was particularly unnerving. I felt examined. In her presence—the presence of someone who looked so much like her mother when we were young—I felt impossibly old. When Eli thought I was out of earshot I heard her say, “Your mom needs a makeover. When’s her birthday?”

“April,” my son said.

“It can’t wait that long,” Eli said. “I could lend you some money if you don’t have any.”

As I looked for the kitchen, my face was caught in a grimace, one that no make-over could likely undue. She was right, though. I
did
need a makeover. A complete, total, reanimation. Still, I had thought I was doing a passable job of faking it within my old shell. I heard Eli laugh at something and it sent a shiver through me. I didn’t like that girl. Or maybe just the name. Why would Petunia give her daughter
my
name?—though I could hardly pretend to have a monopoly on the letters E, L, O, I, and S.

I found the kitchen beyond a folded up ping-pong table, and proceeded to plug in a brand-new coffee maker, then open the cupboards in search of coffee. I was met by the sight of hundreds upon hundreds of those small miniature cereal boxes you get at motel continental breakfasts, summer camps, and cafeterias, each box more colorful, sugary, and chocolate-infused than the last. The scent of my dream returned to me. At the entrance to my son’s room I said: “I’ll take one of those rolls after all.”

“Help yourself,” Eli said from where she stood, having taken over the pinball machine.

I did, all the while keeping my eye on my son as he watched Eli. She was attractive enough, I supposed, though what did my son see in her? He was usually the shy type around girls. But then I realized I was thinking of my son from a year ago, before he’d begun hanging out with the toughs at his school who magnetically attracted their own coterie of girls. For all I knew, he’d had sex, though he’d never mentioned a girl to me. Of course, why would he? Now he was alone (not counting me) in a new city and no girl knew his past. I realized I was watching my son remake himself, again.

“No!” my son shouted, startling me and breaking my thoughts. I had, I noticed, squeezed a roll flat. “No! No! No!”

“What?!” I asked, feeling the electricity of his panic build up and discharge across the air to me. It was like the time his pet parakeet had died a few months before his father and I divorced: Samuel L. Jackson (the parakeet’s name,
not
his father.) The parakeet’s feet-up response to a caged life was, for my son, the personal affirmation of death’s reality. But I was way, way off in judging the source of this new horror.

“And there goes your high score,” Eli said. She pulled back an imaginary plunger and released it, her mouth’s pucker popping as she did so. “On the first ball.” This girl had a Ph.D. in rubbing it in.

“Sick,” my son said, and I could feel his new persona melting before my eyes. “I was up all night, too.”

“Fear not!” Eli said. “I know how to reset it.”

“You do?”

“I sleep up here sometimes,” she said.

“You do?” my son said, and this time I knew he was attracted to her, but as his younger, kinder self. I had to keep on eye on this girl. There was something off. Who says
fear not?
Was she home-schooled? Was she too rich to be normal?

But first I needed coffee and a more substantive breakfast. Scratch that—first I needed a shower; Eli’s comment about a makeover still stung me. Who was going to hire me if I was a sorry sight?

“Can I leave you two alone?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Eli asked.

“It’s an expression,” I said.

“Oh, you mean because your son wants to get into my pants? Don’t worry, Mrs. Spanks. I signed a chastity pledge.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, even though she’d read me clearly.

“I think you did,” she said.

There again was that weird straight-forwardness from Eli. The hallmark of an only child that outwardly seems to know how to sound like an adult but without knowing what to reveal and what to conceal.

I headed for the showers and could hear them talking, still.

“You signed a chastity pledge?” my son asked.

“Of course not, pilgrim,” Eli said, and off shot the sound of another chrome ball.

I showered in the once-promised realm of the Lithuanians. They would have loved it here. A room filled with spacious showers, a stock of high-end soaps and shampoos. Probably they would have become strangely insular, venturing out of the building only for groceries—or perhaps Petunia had planned to have those delivered, too. They would have either hated each other after awhile or gone a little too cozy. There would have been love affairs, etc. The coding would suffer, Petunia would come downstairs and find milestones unmet, software bugs rampant. She’d wander the empty cubicles seeing only the meek ones working, tapping on their keyboards, their eyes following her, waiting to see if she’d head for the showers, and when she did, when she followed the sound of echoing laughter, she’d find her brain trust, her great idea, her Lithuanians, debauched. Instead, though, the showers only held me, Eloise Spanks, imagination on overtime, in need of a makeover. I stood so long under the hot water that the lights went out. I waved, to no one in particular, and was again bathed in light.

Exiting the elevator one floor up, I found that last night’s musical salon had spilled over into this morning. Or if not the music, at least the musicians. An older gentlemen with a beard was asleep on a couch, his arms embracing his viola. I passed two musicians sleeping in a pair of recliners. They faced the TV which was showing a slideshow of images from a tropical rain forest, toucans, waterfalls, and lots of leaves of the kind of shape only an equatorial sun can conjure out of life. One of the sleeping musicians had a bow in her hand. And everywhere: coasters, glasses, each a quarter inch filled with the post-ice watery ghosts of drinks past. I felt hungover just finding the kitchen. But there was Petunia, drinking coffee, made-up, fully dressed, and she lit up when saw me. Beside her at the breakfast nook was, I assumed, her husband. And I use the word
nook
lightly. Beyond the table, the window pointed west toward the hill and the Pacific. The fog bank had moved closer.

“We waited all night for you,” Petunia said, gesturing outward to the three fallen musicians beyond the kitchen.

“Sorry. I wish you hadn’t,” I said.

She put her arm on mine. “I went to bed right after you left,” she confessed, then released me. “Two earplugs, one Unisom: heaven.” She sipped her coffee. “You didn’t look like you’d last another quarter hour. Did my pinball wizard wake you up? I told her to drop off the rolls and come right back down.”

“Eli? No. My son’s sore that she bested him, though.”

“Bested?”

“At pinball.”

“Ah. Well, the sooner they learn from a game, the better they’ll handle it in life,” Petunia said. “Right Lorne?” she said, elbowing the man beside her so that his newspaper rustled. “Say hi.”

“Salutations,” he said.

“Hi Lorne,” I said, extending my hand. “Eloise.”

Petunia’s husband looked me up and down. “You’ve changed,” he said, then looked to his wife. “There’s something different about Eli this morning.”

Petunia elbowed him harder. “It’s too early for your brand of humor,” she said.

“It’s always too early,” he lamented, then extended a hand, finally. “Charmed,” he said, and I knew then that it was he, Lorne, who was the source of his daughter’s strangeness.

“Lorne’s all mine, so don’t get any ideas,” Petunia said, as though the man beside her—well-middle-aged, balding, a paunch that just broke the surface of the table—were life’s greatest catch.

“Sorry Lorne,” I said. He shrugged.

“I don’t want to find him involved in any of your escapades,” Petunia said.

I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m boring,” I said.

“I heard what you told me. Besides, liars are always boring.” Petunia grinned. “Now take a seat.”