Duplex (16 page)

She could see where the stories came from. The thing’s eyes were large and lustrous as plums, and when they stared at the girl they were filled with an intention so forceful she knew she couldn’t be imagining it. Until that moment neither one of them had any idea of the other’s existence, like the way a baby is suddenly in the world, or a dead person out of it. The thing’s gaze was fixed on a place right above the girl’s head, the place where she knew her thoughts were visible.

Back on shore no one noticed anything. People were eating hot dogs and burying one another in the sand. They opened her up and there it was, someone was saying in a loud voice. A tumor the size of a grapefruit.

Janice rolled over. You’re probably wondering how those girls got to be that way, she said. Because they started out the same as you and me, just like everyone else.

They were all somebody’s darlings, Janice said. They got tucked in, they got presents. They got Suzuki-method piano lessons. Also My Little Pony and Felicity the American Girl, horseback-riding lessons, religious training, ballet lessons, and pets. Also bedtime stories when the nights grew dark. Once upon a time there was a little girl who could be anything she wanted.

Later she couldn’t remember she’d ever even had a mother or a father.

My mom and dad had
me,
said one of the little girls.

But what about that other girl? someone asked. The careless girl who got caught in the breaker?

She’s the one who had to watch it happen, Janice said. She saw everything. The bad news is you’re all descended from her. That’s why you have trouble sleeping—and don’t go trying to tell me you don’t because I know what goes on here at night. The bedroom walls are like paper. The good news is it’ll start getting better once you’re older. Cocktails at five—that’s the answer. If those mothers and fathers hadn’t been drinking their cocktails when the wave broke—if they’d been able to see what was going on, the way the first spray was very light, almost unnoticeable, but that it was followed by a disturbance in the air that was everywhere and was a threat to the whole idea of air, to the idea of breathing air instead of water—if those mothers and fathers hadn’t been drinking cocktails then we’d have gone insane long ago.

In our house my dad’s the one who drinks, someone said. My mom drinks soda, said someone else. But my granny drinks rubbing alcohol.

Suddenly the dark-haired lifeguard stood on the seat of his stand and began blowing his whistle over and over again, louder and louder, violently waving his arms, motioning toward shore.

Speaking of cocktails, Janice said. She looked at the sky and then she looked at her wrist. The sun is over the yardarm, she said; no one knew what she was talking about. She began gathering together the things they’d brought with them to the beach. They were all beginning to gather their things together—it was as if a signal had gone off somewhere.

We can’t leave now, said the curly-haired girl’s little sister. Even though she was often embarrassed by her older sister, she didn’t want her to die. She remembered the time she dreamed her older sister died and it was terrible. She couldn’t stop thinking of Cinderella singing “a dream is a wish your heart makes.”

Both lifeguards had jumped down from their stand and were dragging their boat across the sand and into the water.

Janice seemed affronted. The problem with humans is they think their children are
theirs,
she said. They think because their children came from their own bodies and cells they
own
them, like where we come from points to the future.

By now most of the people leaving the beach had stopped in their tracks and were turned to face the water. The lifeboat rose and fell as the dark-haired lifeguard rowed it through the breakers, the oars lifting and lowering like wings on either side.

Does anyone know who it is? someone asked.

The stuck-up girl, someone said.

It’s that poetry girl, said someone else.

Of course the girl couldn’t hear them, she was so far out to sea on her raft. My darling, my dearest, she said. She had no way of knowing who she was talking to. How long had she been out there?

The sand at the water’s edge was cold and hard, the galaxies revolving on their horizontal plane like a roulette wheel. From the shore all anyone could see was the lifeboat, getting smaller and smaller.

Believe me, you don’t want to be here when they bring her back in, Janice said. It’s not like I didn’t tell her. You have to watch out for your arms and legs if you go that far out. You all heard me, right? The last girl this happened to had bites out of her.

T
HE DAYS CAME AND WENT AND MARY KEPT GETTING older. It had been bound to happen. Her ears worked less effectively, one of them devising a high-pitched noise all its own. The noise reminded her of summer nights and the fathers appearing on the porches, each one with a different way of letting you know it was time for bed. Eddie’s father would put two fingers in his mouth and whistle; Mr. Andersen used a conch shell. It would get dark, the street lamps would be lit, the girls would be singing a sad song as they gathered their trading cards together and said goodnight to one another. Romance was in the air, romance and false hope, not exactly the same thing but linked, like love and marriage. It was all the girls could think of.

My ear is driving me crazy, Mary told Walter as they lay together in bed. She knew better by now than to ask him if he heard what she was hearing. She would draw the curtains and he would open them, his shadow draping over her as he turned away from the window. They were in the vacation house he’d bought as a surprise for Mary—there was nothing intervening between it and the ocean. He thought the house would please her since she had fond memories of it from when she was a girl. Mary’s hair had turned to dross, her skin to paper, but even so Walter liked looking at her. What was happening to her was part of his original bargain, including the sorry condition of her teeth and eyes. The sight of Mary still had the power to arouse his desire. Then she would succumb to desire too, panting a little.

While her husband was at work in the city Mary sat staring at the ocean through the large half-moon-shaped front window. In the morning the waves were quite large but as the day wore on they grew smaller, almost too small to break, as if some long snakelike creature was tunneling along just below the surface. The days wore on, all of them; Mary rarely ventured forth into the sun until it had almost set. Sometimes St. Foy girls would march along the strand two by two in their blue uniforms. Sometimes they would run single file in their bare feet at the water’s edge.

After graduation Blue-Eyes moved back to the city. Mary knew because Walter liked to fill her in on their daughter’s exploits. For some time now she had been working with him; as far as Mary could tell she was doing very well. Occasionally there would be a story on the console involving Blue-Eyes. An interviewer would be asking her about Walter’s latest project, the two of them standing together in an undisclosed location. Once Mary thought she recognized the koi pool in the park at the end of the street where she grew up. Blue-Eyes was talking about modern marriage, a subject Mary was sure her daughter knew nothing about. Blue-Eyes was explaining that she and the interviewer were standing not far from where her mother and father had met. “My father always said it was love at first sight,” Blue-Eyes was saying. “What about your mother?” the interviewer wanted to know. “Oh, my mother.” Blue-Eyes stared straight into the camera as if she knew Mary was watching. “You should ask her.” She went on to say that whatever brought two people together had nothing to do with sex. It had to do with the abyss, the face of the deep, with whatever came before people or animals or life of any kind and what would be left after they were gone.

The way Blue-Eyes was dressed and wore her hair reminded Mary of the caryatids holding the porch roof of the Erechtheion atop their heads as they stared blankly at the wine-dark sea. The caryatids kept on staring even as pieces of their bodies broke off and fell into the water. According to gaze theory, what a person was looking at influenced how another person interpreted the first person’s expression. It always surprised Mary how much she remembered from her art school days. From the quality of Blue-Eyes’s gaze Mary could tell her daughter was looking at infinite space. She was looking at it and figuring out how she was going to be able to make it do her bidding.

“You should be pleased,” Walter said, when Mary told him about the interview. “She got that from you.”

“What do you mean from me?” Mary was at the sewing machine, turning out curtains.

He pointed. “The way you do that,” he said. “She would hang on to your leg and watch your every move—I remember she seemed especially interested when you bit off a thread.”

Mary considered. She didn’t remember Blue-Eyes watching her do anything. It was true, she thought, that during Blue-Eyes’s last year at St. Foy she had contacted Mary to ask her some question about measuring a bolt of a thing the name of which Mary couldn’t quite hear because there was a lot of noise in the background that sounded like sewing machines but could just as well have been a bad connection or something so far beyond Mary’s ability to know what it was it didn’t even bear thinking about. They taught sewing at St. Foy, she knew that much, but when Mary asked Blue-Eyes if she would like a sewing basket of her own fitted with compartments for spools of thread and a pin cushion and a measuring tape, Blue-Eyes informed her she was going to close the port. “A
sew
ing basket, mother?” Blue-Eyes said. “You’ve never even tried to understand me.”

Mary knew this wasn’t true. In a way it was all she had done. The problem was, the bolt Blue-Eyes had unspooled from bore no relationship to Mary. They didn’t make girls more ordinary than Mary had been. She was an ordinary person—that was the whole point.

When Mary was a girl and she went to the shore in the summer along with everyone else, she used to call the house she was living in now the chocolate-cheese house because the walls were pale yellow stucco, the trim dark brown. “It’s called chocolate-cheese but you can’t eat it!” she would announce whenever she and her parents walked past the house. The duplex her parents rented was in a different neighborhood altogether. The difference between a summer rental and a summer residence was like the difference between a human and a fairy. A famous actress had lived in Mary’s house from 1930 to 1954, the same year the United States and Russia conducted aboveground atom bomb tests, releasing radio activity into the atmosphere where it drifted for a while before settling into people’s teeth and bones. Many things had been adrift then and always would be. The fishermen on a boat called
Lucky Dragon
had been especially unlucky, whereas the famous actress married a real live prince. A person could fill page after page with pieces of information like this—all you had to do was consult the console. Mary thought there was more information drifting through the world than there were stars in the sky. The famous actress’s father had owned the business that supplied the bricks that the house Mary grew up in had been made out of and those bricks, like all bricks, kept leaking radioactivity. Not enough to do any harm, not even as much as the machine the shoe store used to X-ray her feet, but still. What good did it do to know this?

Accumulating a storehouse of information could do nothing to alter the fact that when she was a girl Mary had loved a boy and he had loved her. An exquisite bond had existed between them and something had broken that bond and now she would never see him again. He was gone.

“Dead and gone, dead and gone,” tolled the bell buoys. “What are you talking about?” asked the sewing machine, loyal, as ever, to Eddie.

“I could tell you his name but what difference would it make?” Mary replied, getting up out of her chair.

History with all its useless information kept unwinding behind her and in front of her like the movie Blue-Eyes had made out of chopsticks and shelf paper and a shoe box, a long scroll filled with information. It had been a seminal moment, Blue-Eyes told one of her interviewers.

Now Blue-Eyes lived with her partner, a word that reminded Mary of square dancing. The partner’s name was Penny and it was obvious that she and Blue-Eyes felt sorry for Mary and Walter, imprisoned as they were in their modern marriage. The two women possessed a lot of information to corroborate their pity—everyone was so confident now, Mary thought. She supposed that was a good thing, especially if you were a girl.

She walked right up to the window. A shudder passed through the wet edge of the continent; the seabirds took off all at once from the jetty pilings. The problem with having information was that it made you feel like you ought to know when things were going to happen before they actually did. Mary put on her wide-brimmed straw hat and her sunglasses and her terry cover-up and headed for the beach. The beach was practically empty as it usually was at this hour, the young families having gone home to their summer rentals, leaving the prints of their feet behind in the soft white sand the water never reached except during a storm. Cindy Duffy was waiting for Mary in one of the low-slung chairs she brought for them to sit in. She sat on the hard gray sand at the water’s edge; every time a wave came in it got her butt wet. “You’re late,” Cindy said to Mary.

“I was busy,” Mary said.

Of course Cindy knew that she, Mary, was never busy, but she wasn’t going to say so. Cindy, too, was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses and a terry cover-up, the preferred beachwear for women of a certain age. It drove Mary crazy how Cindy made it look like she kept getting older when everyone knew she could go back to being pretty little Cindy XA at a moment’s notice. She will never know sorrow, Mary thought, she will never know loss. Somehow these thoughts failed to console her. The act of pretending to get older had managed to confer a kind of dignity on the robot, making it hard to remember that in actuality it was the size and shape of a needle.

“Busy?” Cindy said. “Tell me about it.” She released a
pouf
of exhaustion. “I’ve had the grandkids all week. Merrilee decided to stay in the city with Bill, and ever since Eddie got Roy that job with the Rockets I might as well be single.”

Mary stared straight out to sea. The sea was a symbol of endlessness but of course it wasn’t endless. Someone in a foreign land was staring back at her at this exact moment. Someone who spoke another language, someone who probably didn’t wish her well but who was, finally, fathomable, not unlike the sea. “How many of them are there now?” she asked.

Cindy held up some fingers but Mary didn’t turn her head to count. “It was nice of Eddie to help us out like that,” Cindy said. “Roy’s always felt he was born to be an announcer.”

“He has the right voice for it,” Mary said.

“I always thought Roy could have been an opera singer,” Cindy said, and she sounded wistful.

It was a beautiful afternoon, the ocean ringed round with strings of clouds, the sky blue and clean. Cindy added more fingers. “Mary,” she said. “Look at me. You know your time is almost up, right?”

“What do you mean?” Mary asked.

She understood perfectly, though. The fingers meant how much time she had left. The problem was she couldn’t tell what unit of time Cindy was referring to. It could be years or months or weeks or days or hours or even—this was too terrible to consider—minutes. Whatever the unit was, she had six of them—three more than the number of Cindy and Roy’s grandchildren she’d seen out of the corner of her eye.

The thing about a life is how hard it is to make it shift course once it’s gotten going. There was no wind, no wind at all.

“It’s up to you,” Cindy said. “It’s always been up to you. Eddie isn’t going to be any help. He doesn’t have the faintest idea what to do. He was just an immature form of the species when he got taken. A little boy, you’d say.”

For some reason Mary found herself remembering a trip with the Darlings to a popular outlet store. Mary’s mother had told her how much money she could spend on a sweater if she saw one she liked. The sweaters were more expensive than Mary thought they would be, the Darlings better off. The only sweater Mary could afford was a cardigan in an unpleasant shade of burnt orange, neither a style nor a color remotely in fashion—she knew when she bought it everyone would feel sorry for her. Driving home from the outlet store she shut the hem of her new sweater in the car door but she couldn’t make herself tell Mrs. Darling what she’d done. The landscape swelled past, houses, trees, phone wires. My poor sweater, Mary thought. Enough of it had been left hanging out that it was probably dragging along the road. Poor, poor sweater! She hated it for being so stupid; it had gotten what it deserved.

And now what? Mary thought.

“Now you have to give this all up,” Cindy said. “
All
of it. Also you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself. The sweater no longer exists.”

Mary had known the robot could read her mind but this was the first time it hadn’t even bothered to pretend that it was doing something else.

“After you threw it away it was picked up by a scow,” Cindy said. “Everything that went into its composition got broken down into parts too numerous and too infinitesimal to ever be brought together again into anything even remotely resembling a sweater.”

“Like the Rain of Beads?” Mary said.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! What is wrong with you people? The Rain of Beads? Get over it!” The robot’s voice jumped to a register that made Mary’s eyes water. For a moment she thought she could see something other than Cindy sitting in the chair beside her. “The Rain of Beads,” the voice echoed, disgusted.

“If I leave him he isn’t going to like it,” Mary said.

“Of course he isn’t going to like it.”

Mary swallowed. It wasn’t just that her eyes were watering, it was that she was crying. “What about Blue-Eyes?” she asked.

But the robot was done with her—she could feel it pierce her heart as it went.

Meanwhile the tide was coming in; Mary stood in the shallows where the littlest waves lapped around her ankles. The chairs were gone, the beach empty, it was growing dark. More than six minutes had passed, meaning the time she had left could be measured in hours, if not eons. Soon Walter would arrive home in his silver-gray car, the same car he’d taken Eddie away in. Then they would sit together watching the moon make a road of light on the water. His great melancholy golden eyes, his splendid nose with its curved nostrils like the drawer pulls on the highboy she inherited from her parents. If she left him it would be as good as admitting that practically her whole life had been a mistake.