Duplex (13 page)

“It’s good to be home,” Eddie replied. He said it to be polite, but as soon as the words left his mouth he realized it was the truth. In a way it was like he’d never left. After lunch he and Mary would walk back to school together. Miss Vicks would be at the blackboard, writing yet another problem in long division.

“How is Miss Vicks, anyway?” he asked, and his mother looked down at her sandwich.

“She died,” Eddie’s father said. “We thought you knew.”

“She hadn’t been well,” said Eddie’s mother. “She hadn’t been well for a long time. That photographer from the paper took some cute shots of her posing on that horse of his—I think he was the last person to see her before she went. The paper used one of them for the obituary. I’ve kept it around here somewhere in case you wanted to see it.”

“That’s OK, Mom,” Eddie said, putting a hand on her shoulder to make her sit back in her chair. “You can look for it later.” He took a sip of his iced tea and frowned. “The thing is,” he said, “I could have sworn I heard her talking to me the other night. Not all that long ago, either.”

“If anyone was going to return as a ghost, it would be Marjorie Vicks,” Eddie’s father said, but Eddie shook his head.

“It was
her,
” he said. “She told me I ought to come home.” He looked puzzled. “She told me to come home and here I am.”

Undaunted, the sun came swimming through the bow window; as if on cue they all lifted a sandwich quarter from their plates.

“Well, however it happened, we’re glad you’re here,” said Eddie’s mother. She was watching to see whether he would eat the sandwich. The sea-legs looked like they came from a crab, but she was pretty sure they’d been produced in a factory. “You’re a grown man. You’ve got a life of your own to live now.” What she was thinking was “if you’re actually alive to live it” only she didn’t dare say it aloud.

The grandfather clock in the corner began playing the Westminster chimes just as it always used to, except out of phase. Eddie used to be afraid of the face on the moon that appeared in the upper part of the dial when the real moon outside became full. Let’s go upstairs and get away from
that,
he’d whisper to Mary—that was how he first got to touch her breasts. They’d been quite small and perfectly hemispheric like teacups. Remember that time in assembly? she’d asked. When you were Mr. Robin and I was Miss Springtime and I forgot my line and you said it for me? Wake up, Mr. Robin! And then I hit you on the head with my wand.

“Actually,” Eddie said. “I’d like to move back into my old room if it’s all the same to everyone.” From where he sat he had a view of the first few steps leading to the second floor. His room had been at the head of the stairs and from his bed he and Mary were able to see into the backyard. He knew without looking that the climbing roses were in bloom.

“You wouldn’t recognize it,” his father said. “Your mother took it over years ago.”

“He snores,” his mother explained. “I could never get any sleep.”

“Of course you need your sleep,” Eddie said. He patted his lips with his napkin, though he hadn’t had a bite to eat.

“Everyone needs sleep,” Eddie’s father said. “Even a famous ballplayer like you.”

Eddie began to get up from the table. “You’re right,” he said, and he realized he had never felt so tired in his life. “There’s a big game tomorrow. I ought to be getting to bed.”

The sandwiches had all been eaten; the juice glasses were empty. Outside it was pitch black. “My goodness,” said Eddie’s father. “Where has the time gone?”

The grandfather clock started to strike but no one was counting.

His mother began clearing dishes, talking softly to herself. “Speaking of time,” she said. “One night, a long time ago, you were late coming home. Do you remember?”

It was all his father could do to keep from crying. “We tried to do our best, Eddie,” he said. He was scrubbing away at a place on the surface of the card table, scrubbing and scrubbing as if there were a spot there even though Eddie couldn’t see anything. “We never knew what happened.”

“I sold my soul,” Eddie said. “I sold my soul to the sorcerer. And this is what I got in return.”

I
F SHE’D ONLY GONE A FEW STEPS FARTHER THE NIGHT before, Marjorie Vicks would have ended up at the back entrance to the Seaview Hotel. The door there had once been bright blue and was built into the wall she’d fallen asleep against, the hotel’s name stenciled in gold across the top of a single small window above the tiny gold image of an anchor. While she slept the weather had taken a turn for the worse. She arose feeling stiff and chilled through; a heavy dew had fallen, leaving her clothes thick and wet, the fate, as she had come to understand, of all women who ran away from home.

A hallway filled with garbage led to the hotel kitchen. The kitchen was empty, a kettle on the verge of whistling on the stove. From the floor above came the sound of someone running a vacuum cleaner. She tried calling “hello” but her lips were stiff and she had trouble forming the word.

She removed her wet jacket. It was warm in the kitchen and something sweet was baking in the oven. When no one answered she pushed through another, brighter blue door in the wall opposite and found herself in the hotel dining room. The room was spacious with four tall windows providing a view of the sea; sitting at one of the window tables was a young girl dressed like the schoolgirls Marjorie had seen outside just before falling asleep. The girl sat slouched over the table, her head propped in one hand, looking toward the water.

“Hello,” Marjorie said again, this time managing to make herself heard.

The girl turned to face her. She had a very round face and an abundance of dark hair like uncarded wool. “Care to join us?” she asked, indicating a chair adjacent to her own. Despite her use of first person plural and the fact that the table seemed to have been set for three, with knives and forks and spoons and flowered dessert plates, there was no one else in sight. “If you want anything to eat in this place you have to get it yourself.” The girl pointed in the direction of the bright blue door, behind which the kettle suddenly stopped whistling.

Marjorie hesitated. During the night she seemed to have turned to a block of ice and the dining room was even warmer than the kitchen. In her condition, the heat might prove dangerous.

The girl studied her face, moving her eyes across different parts of it like someone scanning a landscape. “Everybody has to eat,” she said.

It was ten o’clock in the morning—Marjorie had slept late. The tide had reached its lowest ebb a half hour earlier, laying the beach bare. She could see a brown shoe and a carburetor and a great many piles of seashells and seaweed and dead sea creatures. At some point she realized her teeth were chattering but she couldn’t tell if it was because she was chilled to the bone or because something about her table companion was making her nervous. “Maybe just a cup of tea,” she said, and the next thing she knew the girl had leapt up and disappeared into the kitchen.

She returned carrying two large white take-out cups with lids. “The hotel management is using teabags now,” she warned. She introduced herself as Penny. When she first came here, Penny said, there had been fresh flowers at every table and an attentive wait staff. Now the flowers were plastic and the management used paper placemats instead of lace tablecloths. The hummingbird feeders were still there, attached to the windows with suction cups, but the hummingbirds had been replaced by large moths that arrived at dusk.

How did I get here? Marjorie wondered. It had been a night in summer. There had been a horse and a ferryboat. Later there was a wall and later still there was an animal that might have been a dog. A big dog though, nothing like her own little pet. She could hear the sound the dog’s nails made as it ran along beside her on the other side of the wall. She could hear the rattling of its collar.

“What about those ‘special services’ I saw advertised?” she asked, suddenly remembering the white sheet hanging from the limb of a large tree. “Is the hotel management still making them available?” The tea was lukewarm and had a lot of milk and sugar in it. Even so, it tasted delicious.

“That depends.” Penny leaned back in her chair, lifting her thicket of hair in one clump and positioning it firmly behind her. “Some people find them desirable, others not so much. Are you planning to stay the night? You should, you know,” she said. “The rooms are delightful, especially the corner suites with balconies.”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Marjorie replied.

“A lot of parents stay over,” Penny said. “Those with girls at the school, that is.” She took a sip from her cup and made a face. “It’s amazing how fast tea loses heat in these cups.”

People used to say that being a teacher was like being the mother of thousands but Marjorie knew that wasn’t true. Even the students she’d felt a special attachment to had left her classroom without a single backward glance. They were differently composed, elusive as minnows. “I’m not a parent,” she admitted shyly, finishing her tea and returning the cup to the table. But what exactly
am
I then? she wondered.

Time was making a ticking sound as it passed though there didn’t seem to be a clock anywhere in sight. A vision came to Marjorie of her dog trotting around inside the house, looking for something to eat. Every so often she would forget to fill his water bowl and, small as he was, he would end up drinking from the toilet. She saw him lying on the floor beside the refrigerator with his tongue hanging out like a piece of lunch meat. I’m a dog owner, she thought, that’s what I am. The thing about a vision was it didn’t let you zoom in to see whether your dog had stopped breathing. The ticking was coming from an oven timer, but Marjorie couldn’t tell if it was in the hotel kitchen or part of the vision. Seconds were always passing this way, thimbleful by thimbleful, as were the lives of living beings. This was why you kept getting smaller as you got older; it had nothing to do with bone loss.

Above their heads the vacuum cleaner suddenly stopped; a door banged shut.

Penny looked up at the ceiling. “It sounds like you’re in luck,” she said. “If you change your mind and decide you want a room, that is.”

Marjorie was surprised at how relieved she felt to see Penny tilt her neck. It was ridiculous, she thought, how the old superstitions refused to die. The Horsewomen! Girls of a certain age still managed to have this effect, just as there were still women who claimed to be descended from them—chiefly nurses, a few actresses. In most cases it wasn’t clear if the girls making these claims were looking for praise or pity, like the ones who insisted they cast no shadow. Many families had a photograph of a shadowless female relative tucked away in a drawer somewhere.

“I only dropped in,” Marjorie explained. “I wasn’t planning to stay. I didn’t even bring my purse.”

“That’s what they all say,” Penny said, letting out a sigh.

Just then the tide began to come in. It came pouring onto the beach all at once, filled with fish and who knew what else. If there was a name for this phenomenon Marjorie had forgotten it. A gull sailed past the window and landed atop the carburetor just before the carburetor disappeared under the water and the gull took off. Why did gulls always show themselves in profile, she wondered, never head-on?

Meanwhile Penny began fidgeting with her hair, scooping it up and lowering it, the expression on her face difficult to read. Suddenly she smiled. “Well, look who’s finally decided to join us,” she said, pointing in the direction of the window.

Marjorie turned in her seat but all she could see was the water advancing toward them. The waves had a wild, disorganized appearance, black and green-black with yellow-white fangs and claws. They were very large and they were approaching the hotel at an alarming speed. She rubbed her eyes. If there was someone out there in the water she certainly couldn’t see them. It was hard to believe a person could survive in waves that size. Maybe something really is wrong with me, she thought; maybe I really
am
being borne away bit by bit. Maybe I’m going to get so small I’m going to have to live inside a drum like a fairy.

Penny directed her gaze across Marjorie’s shoulder. “What on earth took you so long?” she asked. “Didn’t you hear the timer go off?” She rose from her chair and began to walk swiftly toward the blue door on the far side of the room that led to the lobby. She was very light on her feet, Marjorie realized, much more graceful in motion than she’d looked sitting down. “Where were you?” Penny said to a girl who was just entering the dining room. “It was my job to watch
her,
” she said, pointing at Marjorie. “It was
your
job to watch the pie.”

The girl appeared to be a little younger than Penny but she was nowhere near as tall and her eyes were an intense bright blue, the kind of color not usually associated with transparent things but with things made of metal like weapons or tools, things that reflected external light but never generated it from within. Aside from her eyes, though, the new girl was a perfect replica of sixteen-year-old Mary—so exact that Marjorie practically fainted at the sight of her. What if Mary was dead and she was seeing Mary’s ghost? She didn’t rule out the possibility based on the new girl’s eyes, since everyone knew that eye color was one of the first things to undergo change in the afterlife.

The two girls embraced vigorously, kissing on the lips and sending their white arms and fingers all around and over one another. Then they came and joined Marjorie at the table.

Blue-Eyes was dressed in the same school uniform as Penny: a blue pleated skirt, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar buttoned all the way to the top, a blue vest embroidered with the school emblem of a flaming child super imposed on a snowflake the same size as the child. On Penny the uniform had a crisp, fresh look; on Blue-Eyes it looked rumpled and damp, not unlike her hair, but maybe that was due to the fact that her hair was as limp and in need of washing as her mother’s often used to be. The girl’s skin, though, emitted waves of coolness the way a person’s skin does after swimming, and there was a blue tint to her lips, which were chapped and ragged as if she’d been chewing on them.

By now the sea had calmed down, the sky resting its palm soothingly across the face of the water. The first scow Marjorie had seen since leaving home appeared, moving very slowly and up so high she could barely tell what it was. Like a gleaming grain of rice, she thought—whereas no matter how far above the sea the scow’s operator managed to get, the sea would never look small to him.

“I’ve heard my mother talk about you,” Blue-Eyes said to her. “The two of you used to be friends—that’s what my mother told me. She used to live next door to you.”

“That’s where I still live,” Marjorie said. “I haven’t gone anywhere. Your mother’s the one who moved away.”

She tried to remember the last time she’d actually been inside number 49. At what point did the community association decide a person wasn’t coming back? They would send her dog to the pound and if no one found him as sweet as she did, he’d be put to sleep. Then there would be an estate sale and complete strangers would walk around inside her house, handling her private things, all of which would have price tags on them.

She couldn’t remember ever having said who she was, either, but both girls seemed to know.

“What do you mean you haven’t gone anywhere?” Penny asked. “You’re
here,
aren’t you?”

Blue-Eyes took Marjorie’s hand. “Do you ever see her?” she asked. “Did you see my mother before coming here?” She leaned forward and stared at her intently. “She was a nice girl, wasn’t she? Did she give you a present for me?”

Marjorie tried to remember. As a girl, Mary had never been what you’d call “nice.” The fact is, she could be moody and difficult to get along with. The other question was easier to answer, since Mary had never given her anything, but Blue-Eyes didn’t let her have the chance.

“Was she a good student?” she asked.

“She was a very hard worker.” Marjorie felt herself being wrung out like a piece of laundry. “She was the class artist.”

“I
know
that.” Blue-Eyes moved closer, bringing with her the chill of her skin, which felt very different from the deep interior chill of Marjorie’s own body. “What about my father? You knew him too, didn’t you?”

Out of all the memories left to her, Marjorie realized, and they were few and far between, she seemed to have held onto this one. It was like a dream, only it had happened. She and the sorcerer were sitting in a booth at the Captain’s Table, the waiter about to arrive to take their order. She was wearing a black dress of the heavy lustrous fabric they stopped making years ago and it set off her skin—back then she allowed just the right amount of animal fat in her diet to keep it creamy, and she hydrated enough to keep it translucent. “Do you always have to be such a goody-goody, Vicky dear?” the sorcerer was saying, lighting a cigarette for her even though he knew she didn’t smoke. “Keep the boy busy,” he instructed, and when she said “What boy?” he looked at her like she was one of the special children in room 12. Then he jumped up and took off down the hall after Mary. It was prom night; she had been a chaperone, though you couldn’t exactly say she’d done such a great job of it.

“Yes,” Marjorie said. “I knew your father. But it was a very long time ago.”

When the sorcerer returned, she remembered, he never took his eyes off her. What he was doing was keeping a firm grip on her gaze so she wouldn’t notice what he was really up to.

“The only human being he’s ever cared about is your mother,” Marjorie said.

“He cares about
me,
” Blue-Eyes said. “Of course that’s different.”

A bell sounded, once, a single loud
ding.
“The timer!” Blue-Eyes said, jumping up and disappearing into the kitchen.

Once she was gone, Penny leaned closer, blinking her eyes at Miss Vicks and looking out at her from under her lashes.

“When she gets this way you have to ignore her,” she said. “She’s not like you and me.”

That was exactly what the sorcerer said, Marjorie thought, a million years ago.