Love (4 page)

Sleep came down so fast it was only in dreaming that she felt the peculiar new thing: protected. A faint trace of relief, as in the early days at Correctional when the nights were so terrifying; when upright snakes on tiny feet lay in wait, their thin green tongues begging her to come down from the tree. Once in a while there was someone beneath the branches standing apart from the snakes, and although she could not see who it was, his being there implied rescue. So she had endured the nightmares, even entered them, for a glimpse of the stranger’s face. She never saw it, and eventually he disappeared along with the upright snakes. But here, now, deep in sleep, her search seemed to have ended. The face hanging over her new boss’s bed must have started it. A handsome man with a G.I. Joe chin and a reassuring smile that pledged endless days of hot, tasty food; kind eyes that promised to hold a girl steady on his shoulder while she robbed apples from the highest branch.

2

FRIEND

Vida set up the ironing board. Why the hospital had cut out the laundry service for everybody except “critical staff”—doctors, nurses, lab technicians—she couldn’t fathom. Now the janitors, food handlers, as well as the aides like herself, had to wash and press their own uniforms, reminding her of the cannery before Bill Cosey hired her away for the first work she ever had that required hosiery. She wore hose at the hospital, of course, but it was thick, white. Not the sheer, feminine ones preferred behind the receptionist’s desk at Cosey’s Hotel. Plus a really good dress, good enough for church. It was Bill Cosey who paid for two more, so she would have a change and the guests wouldn’t confuse the wearing of one dress as a uniform. Vida thought he would deduct the cost from her pay, but he never did. His pleasure was in pleasing. “The best good time,” he used to say. That was the resort’s motto and what he promised every guest: “The best good time this side of the law.” Vida’s memories of working there merged with her childhood recollections of the hotel when famous people kept coming back. Even disturbances in the service or drowning accidents didn’t dissuade them from extending their stay or returning the next year. All because of the beaming Bill Cosey and the wide hospitality his place was known for. His laugh, his embracing arm, his instinctive knowledge of his guests’ needs smoothed over every crack or stumble, from an overheard argument among staff or a silly, overbearing wife—ignorant as a plate—to petty theft and a broken ceiling fan. Bill Cosey’s charm and L’s food won out. When the lamps ringing the dance floor were rocking in ocean air; when the band warmed up and the women appeared, dressed in moiré and chiffon and trailing jasmine scent in their wake; when the men with beautiful shoes and perfect creases in their linen trousers held chairs for the women so they could sit knee to knee at the little tables, then a missing saltcellar or harsh words exchanged much too near the public didn’t matter. Partners swayed under the stars and didn’t mind overlong intermissions because ocean breeze kept them happier and kinder than their cocktails. Later in the evening—when those who were not playing whist were telling big lies in the bar; when couples were sneaking off in the dark—the remaining dancers would do steps with outrageous names, names musicians made up to control, confuse, and excite their audiences all at the same time.

Vida believed she was a practical woman with as much sense as heart, more wary than dreamy. Yet she squeezed only sweetness from those nine years, beginning right after the birth of her only child, Dolly, in
1962
. The decline under way even then was kept invisible until it was impossible to hide. Then Bill Cosey died and the Cosey girls fought over his coffin. Once again L restored order, just as she always had. Two words hissed into their faces stopped them cold. Christine closed the switchblade; Heed picked up her ridiculous hat and moved to the other side of the grave. Standing there, one to the right, one to the left, of Bill Cosey’s casket, their faces, as different as honey from soot, looked identical. Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy’s. After that nobody could doubt the best good times were as dead as he was. If Heed had any notion of remaking the place into what it had been when Vida was a little Up Beach girl, she was quickly disabused of it when L quit that very day. She lifted a lily from the funeral spray and never set foot in the hotel again—not even to pack, collect her chef’s hat or her white oxfords. In Sunday shoes with two-inch heels she walked from the cemetery all the way to Up Beach, claimed her mother’s shack, and moved in. Heed did what she had to and what she could to keep it going, but a sixteen-year-old disc jockey working a tape player appealed only to locals. No one with real money would travel distance to hear it, would book a room to listen to the doo-wop tunes they had at home; would seek an open-air dance floor crowded with teenagers doing dances they never heard of and couldn’t manage anyway. Especially if the meals, the service, the bed linen had to strain for an elegance unnoticed and unappreciated by the new crowd.

Vida slid the iron’s nose around the buttons, frustrated once more by the slot in the metal that some male idiot thought would actually work. The same fool who believed a three-ounce iron was better than a heavy one. Lighter, yes, but it didn’t iron anything that needed it, just things you could unwrinkle with your own warm hands: T-shirts, towels, cheap pillowcases. But not a good cotton uniform with twelve buttons, two cuffs, four pockets, and a collar that was not a lazy extension of the lapels. This was what she had come to? Vida knew she was lucky to have the hospital job. Slight as it was, her paycheck had helped fill her house with the sounds of gently helpful bells: time up in the microwave oven, the washing cycle, the spin dryer; watch out, there’s smoke somewhere, the phone’s off the hook. Lights glowed when coffee brewed, toast toasted, and the iron was hot. But the good fortune of her current job did not prevent her from preferring the long-ago one that paid less in every way but satisfaction. Cosey’s Resort was more than a playground; it was a school and a haven where people debated death in the cities, murder in Mississippi, and what they planned to do about it other than grieve and stare at their children. Then the music started, convincing them they could manage it all and last.

She hung on, Heed did. Allow her that credit, but none other to a woman who gave torn towels and sheets to a flooded-out family instead of money. For years before Cosey actually died, while he aged and lost interest in everything but Nat Cole and Wild Turkey, Heed paraded around like an ignorant version of Scarlett O’Hara—refusing advice, firing the loyal, hiring the trifling, and fighting May, who was the one who really threatened her air supply. She couldn’t fire her stepdaughter while Cosey was alive, even if he spent most days fishing and most nights harmonizing with tipsy friends. For it came to that: a commanding, beautiful man surrendering to feuding women, letting them ruin all he had built. How could they do that, Vida wondered. How could they let gangster types, dayworkers, cannery scum, and payday migrants in there, dragging police attention along with them like a tail? Vida had wanted to blame the increasingly raggedy clientele for May’s kleptomania—Lord knows what those dayworkers took home—but May had been stealing even before Vida was hired and long before the quality of the guests changed. In fact, her second day at work, standing behind the desk, was marked by May’s habit. A family of four from Ohio was checking in. Vida opened the registration book. The date, last name, and room number were neatly printed on the left, a space on the right for the guest’s signature. Vida reached toward a marble pen stand but found no pen there or anywhere near. Flustered, she rummaged in a drawer. Heed arrived just as she was about to hand the father a pencil.

“What’s that? You giving him a pencil?”

“The pen is missing, ma’am.”

“It can’t be. Look again.”

“I have. It’s not here.”

“Did you look in your pocketbook?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your coat pocket, maybe?” Heed glanced at the guests and produced a resigned smile, as if they all understood the burdens of inadequate help. Vida was seventeen years old and a new mother. The position Mr. Cosey had given her was a high and, she hoped, permanent leap out of the fish trough where she used to work and her husband still did. Her mouth went dry and her fingers shook as Heed confronted her. Tears were marshaling to humiliate her further when rescue arrived, wearing a puffy white chef’s hat. She held the fountain pen in her hand; stuck it in the holder, and, turning to Heed, said, “May. As you well know.”

That’s when Vida knew she had more to learn than registering guests and handling money. As in any workplace, there were old alliances here; mysterious battles, pathetic victories. Mr. Cosey was royal; L, the woman in the chef’s hat, priestly. All the rest—Heed, Vida, May, waiters, cleaners—were court personnel fighting for the prince’s smile.

She had surprised herself at the supper table, bringing up that old gossip about Cosey’s death. Hating gossip bred of envy, she wanted to believe what the doctor said: heart attack. Or what L said: heartache. Or even what May said: school busing. Certainly not what his enemies said: syphilis rampant. Sandler said eighty-one years was enough; Bill Cosey was simply tired. But Vida had seen the water cloud before he drank it and his reach not to his chest, where the heart exploded, but to his stomach. Yet those who might have wanted him dead—Christine, a husband or two, and a few white businessmen—were nowhere near. Just her, L, and one waiter. Lord, what a mess. A dying body moves, thrashes against that sleep. Then there was Heed screaming like a maniac. May running off to the Monarch Street house and locking herself in a closet. Had it not been for L, the county’s role model would never have gotten the dignified funeral he deserved. Even when Christine and Heed almost trashed it at the end, L stepped between those rigid vipers, forcing them to bite back their tongues. Which, by all reports, they were still doing, while waiting for the other one to die. So the girl Sandler directed to their house must be related to Heed. She was the only one with living family. With five brothers and three sisters there could be fifty nieces. Or maybe she wasn’t a relative at all. Vida decided to ask Romen to find out—discreetly, if he could; otherwise directly, although there was little hope of a reliable answer from him. The boy was so inattentive these days, so moody. A furlough for one of his parents right about now would be welcome, before he got into trouble neither she nor Sandler could handle. His hands hadn’t gotten that way from yard work. He beat somebody. Bad.

Beneath the house under the light of a single bulb, Sandler chuckled. Vida was on her game. He
had
been struck by the girl’s legs. In freezing wind, not a goose bump in view—just tight, smooth skin with the promise of strong muscle underneath. Dancer’s legs: long, unhappy at rest, eager to lift, to spread, to wrap themselves around you. He should be ashamed, he thought, as the chuckle grew into smothered laughter: an over-fifty grandfather faithful and devoted to his wife giggling into a boiler dial in the cellar, happy to be arousable by the unexpected sight of young thighs. He knew his gruffness with her had been a reaction to the feelings she stirred and believed she knew it too.

Sandler peered at the dial, wondering if an
80
-degree setting would be likely to produce
70
degrees in his bedroom, since the current
70
-degree setting was equaling
60
degrees there. He sighed over the problem: a furnace seldom needed in that climate seemed as confused about its workings as he was. And sighed again as he recalled the underdressed girl who must be a northerner indifferent to
30
degrees. He could not imagine what she wanted with either one of those Cosey women. He would ask Romen to check it out. Or maybe not. Asking his grandson to spy would introduce the wrong element into a relationship already lopsided with distrust. He wanted Romen upright—not sneaking around women on some frivolous errand. It would undermine his moral authority. Still, if the boy happened to report something, he would be as pleased to hear it as anybody. The Coseys had always been a heated topic. In these parts—Oceanside, Sooker Bay, Up Beach, Silk—their goings-on had splattered conversation for fifty years. Naturally so, since the resort affected them all. Provided them with work other than fish and pack crab; attracted outsiders who offered years of titillation and agitated talk. Otherwise they never saw anybody but themselves. The withdrawal of that class of tourist was hard on everyone, like a receding wave that left shells and kelp script, scattered and unreadable, behind.

There were cold spots in the Oceanside house, places the heat seemed never to enter. Hot spots too. And all of his tinkering with thermostats and base heating and filters was just that—tinkering. Like his neighbors’, his house was built as a gesture: two-inch nails instead of four, lightweight roofing guaranteed for ten years instead of thirty, single-thickness panes rattling in their molding. Each year Sandler became fonder of the neighborhood he and Vida had moved away from. She had been right, certainly, to leave Up Beach when they did, before the drought that ended in flood, and she never gave it another thought. As he did almost every day, as now, on a very cold night, longing for the crackle of fire in a stingy potbelly stove, the smell of clean driftwood burning. He couldn’t forget the picture the moon turned those Up Beach cabins into. Here, in this government-improved and -approved housing with too much man-made light, the moon did nothing kind. The planners believed that dark people would do fewer dark things if there were twice as many streetlamps as anywhere else. Only in fine neighborhoods and the country were people entrusted to shadow. So even when the moon was full and blazing, for Sandler it was like a bounty hunter’s far-off torch, not the blanket of beaten gold it once spread over him and the ramshackle house of his childhood, exposing the trick of the world, which is to make us think it is ours. He wanted his own moon again releasing a wide gold finger to travel the waves and point directly at him. No matter where he stood on the beach, it knew exactly; as unwavering and personal as a mother’s touch, the gold finger found him, knew him. And although he understood that it came from a cold stone incapable even of indifference, he also knew it was pointing to him alone and nobody else. Like the windblown girl who had singled him out, breaking out of evening wind to stand between garage light and sunset, backlit, spotlighted, and looking only at him.

Bill Cosey would have done more. Invited her in to warm herself, offered to drive her where she wanted to go, instead of barking at her, doubting her accuracy. Cosey would have succeeded, too; he almost always did. Vida, like so many others, had looked on him with adoring eyes, spoke of him with forgiving smiles. Proud of his finesse, his money, the example he set that goaded them into thinking that with patience and savvy, they could do it too. But Sandler had fished with him, and while he did not claim to know his heart, mind, or wallet, he knew his habits.