Pages for You (17 page)

“They get snow in New Mexico, too,” she said. “In the winter.”

“Really?” Anne turned skeptical blue shades in her direction, as if Flannery were a precocious student. “How do you know that?”

Flannery kicked her, drawing a loud “Ouch!” from
THE SUNSHINE STATE
. They were both restless from the airless train hours and needed the wrestling match they would fall into later at their terrible motel. “Because I’m not a complete idiot,” Flannery told her. “I do know some things.” She lay back on the sand, placing a hand over her irritated eyes.

“Oh yes. So you keep saying.” Anne’s voice was smug and lazy in the moist heat, lulling Flannery into a near-doze. “So you keep telling me.” Anne sat up to cover her limbs and chest in a thin layer of sunblock; then neglected to pass the tube, after, to her forgetful, fair-skinned lover.

I
t was after the seafood, wrestling, and squabbling that the pain set in.

Travel can be so full of quibbles and snivelings, if two people don’t know or can’t agree on where they are going Flannery had not wanted this trip, anyway. The clarity of the fact emerged in the far-too-bright sunlight, which was, as she had always suspected, more garish and show-offy than the subtler sunlight she had grown up with; nor was it dignified by blue foothills or grander, more distant mountains. Here there was no land to take hold of beyond the relentless beach and its picture-perfect blue ocean, and no pair of sunglasses could fend off all the color and visual noise that besieged her. When Anne suggested in the afternoon that they drive south down the coast, to close in on the Everglades, Flannery balked.

“Not more time cooped up,” she said, in a voice perilously close to a whine. The poison snaking around her interior had not yet burst out into open crimson—Flannery had no idea how much damage she had done to herself—but sun-sickness soured her and made her an unruly child.

“What, you want to stay somewhere around here?” Anne waved a hand at beachfront hotels shaded in pastels and cocktails. “Too expensive, babe. We’re not this class of traveler—not after the car and the train tickets. Unless you’re planning to lease out your nubile body to some rich old golfers—?”

Flannery was not prepared to get any kind of joke. “Not
here
,” she sulked. “Some motel somewhere. I don’t care where. Just not more time cooped up. I can’t stand it.”

No answer. Flannery felt Anne’s coolness breeze over her, but in truth it was a relief after the enervating heat.

So they compromised, often the worst plan, and drove out of Tampa as far as Sarasota, where they found a motel off the highway. The town was the Home of the Ringling Museum of Art, a proud sign informed them, but by now such an idea could only depress them: they were past being able to enjoy the name’s carnival associations. They found a deserted restaurant, where they ate bad fried shrimp and ran out of subjects to talk about, then returned to their cheap room nauseous and grouchy. Across a scratchy bedspread they chose not to love but to wrestle, a little too sincerely. Already Flannery felt sore—Anne crowed over her victory, and claimed that Flannery was faking her pain, out of bad sportsmanship—but it was when she tried showering and the pellets of water felt like acid rain on her protesting skin that Flannery realized something bad had happened to her. She called out in agony, to an answering silence from the room. Anne seemed unable to greet the news of Flannery’s ailment with anything other than a bland “Oh, that’s too bad.”

Which led to Flannery’s spending a long, wide-eyed night on the other side of the bed from her tossing, fast-asleep lover. The feverish pain allowed Flannery to indulge the sensation that her case was terminal and she would be waking up dead. Even the light sheets seemed like enemies to Flannery as she shivered in her terrible sunburn, feeling the Florida sun break back out of her lobster-red body in vicious, hot waves, and hallucinating a dry voice that told her, already, it was time to go home.

F
lannery woke in the tart dawn light that filtered through the salt-faded curtains. A dim claustrophobia hung in the air like a storm cloud. Anne was sitting by the dresser. Dressed.

“Isn’t it early, to be up and ready? Where are you going?” Flannery could not rub the sleep from her eyes: they hurt too much.

“I thought I might take a walk.”

“Oh.” She yawned. “God, this place reeks. It looks even worse in the daylight.”

“It’s a vile place. There are probably rats napping in the corner.” Anne lit up.

“Hey, do you mind”—Flannery said, without thinking about it—“not doing that in here? If you’re about to go out anyway—”

“Oh,
fine.
” Anne stubbed the cigarette out violently in the tin ashtray stamped with the motel logo,
THE BEACHCOMBER.
She stood to go out.

“Sorry, it’s just that—”

“Fine. I’m going.”

“All I meant was,” Flannery stumbled, “you’ve been smoking so much lately, and sometimes—”

“Oh, here we go.” Anne’s voice was caustic. “I should really cut down a little? I thought you thought my smoking was sexy. A great turn-on.”

“I do. It’s just—” Flannery was too hot to be able to think of the right way to put it.

“So sexy that you took it up, too, so you’d taste like me. That was so sweet.” How bitter she sounded!

“I did, I did.” A sting started at Flannery’s eyes. Don’t cry, for God’s sake, she instructed herself. That would humiliate them both. Instead, she breathed for a moment, to the extent it was possible. “I did, until you told me I looked stupid doing it.”

“Well.” Anne shrugged, as if she were not to blame for the remark. “You did.”

Then she grabbed her cigarettes and went out the cardboard-thin door. Leaving Flannery cool and burning, writhing in the discomfort of her blistering skin.

W
hat was the matter?

What hand had come down to block the light between them, and what relation did it have to the words “University of New Mexico”? Anne was awaiting final word about the job there, and Flannery understood that the uncertainty gnawed at her. She had flown out to Albuquerque in late February to perform her “dance of the seven veils” for the full complement of hirers and would-be colleagues: guest-lecturing, meeting students and other faculty. (It had been a mournful four-day absence but one that allowed Flannery to catch up on Physics for Poets—her science credit—at last.) The signs from that outing were good. “They loved me; they ate me up” was Anne’s optimistic view, borne out by a faculty member who called to tell Anne, off the record, that they wanted her for the job. The committee just had to move through its slow bureaucracy.

So that was all good news. Wasn’t it? Not for Flannery, for whom Anne’s distance next year in New Mexico was a heart wreck waiting to happen. But for
Anne
it was good news. So why was she so testy? “I’m sure you’ve got the job,” Flannery had said to her in mid-Virginia on the train down, to which Anne had snapped, “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

As Anne walked that morning, wherever she might be, the heat kept up its attack on Flannery inside, making her want to sink into the cool softness of a soak in cold lotion or soothe herself by bathing in aloe. She lay spread out flat, limbs flying across the motel bed, hoping the shadowed fetid air was taking from her, slowly, some of the trapped sun. She was thirsty all the time and drank often from a plastic cup of foul-tasting water.

Maybe, her burned brain reasoned, this was how it went between people: silences, sulks, mysteries. The down times, about which there were fewer poems and rock songs. It could not all be love in the afternoon and passion at night, gifts given, notes written, meals fed to each other. Poetry read out loud over sheets still damp from earlier wordless activities. Slow dances while cooking, lingering kisses to Monk.
It can’t all be like that, Flannery.
There had to be the pulling of ugly faces and sudden mutual waves of distaste, annoyance passed back and forth, one to the other, like a hot potato.

Flannery hoped, painfully. She tossed in restless, guessing doubt. And somewhere under the scald and the referred anger
(Anne
was the one who had planned this damned trip to this ridiculous state; and by the way, why had she failed to give Flannery the sunblock?)—somewhere under there, Flannery sensed, ingenue though she was, that this tension might not be in the normal run of a long-lasting love.

Something was wrong.

T
hey drove. It can be a cure-all: the eating of miles can satisfy a hunger other foods cannot.

Flannery drove first, to atone (for what?), or at least to bring the softer curves of tolerance back to Anne’s sharp-lined face. They did not speak. Flannery tried the radio, but the fuzzy sound of outdated hits filled the car with even more tense static, and soon she spun the knob back.
Off
; silence. It was the better position for them just now.

After a couple of hours, Flannery admitted, in an embarrassed mutter, that the pain was unbearable and she would have to find lotion, so they broke off from the road at a sprawling shopping center. In a vast sell-all drugstore Flannery found three kinds of after-sun care while Anne stocked up on tapes, mostly of country-and-western compilations, which were to become the sound track of their uncomfortable journey. They went for a late breakfast at a Shoney’s, a place Flannery translated to herself as the Denny’s of the South—it had similar bright colors and that open, booth-easy layout. She and her mother used to make runs to Denny’s for pancakes, and the place made her homesick for that loved person she had paid so little attention to lately. Her mother. How was she? Flannery ought to send her a postcard. “Guess what! I’m in Florida. A friend and I are driving around, having a great time . . .”

Wordless, the women ate their breakfast. Flannery gained solace from a stack of pancakes smothered in syrup and thoughts of her mother, while Anne dryly crunched her way through crisp bacon and toast. Finally Flannery excused herself from her uncompanionable companion and took her gels and creams to the bathroom, where, with a few minutes to herself, she broke down and cried. Her flesh made her wince and dehydration pounded her head, and she succumbed to an underslept panic that she had, for no obvious reason, become insufferable to her own adored girlfriend.

“Oh,
honey.
” A waitress in a corn-yellow uniform and hair to match came out of one of the stalls and looked at Flannery in the fluorescent-lit mirror with a lipsticked frown of imagined pain. “That is a
bad
burn. Look at you, you poor little thing.” The
you
was a long
ewe
, a drawn-out taffy sound, sweet with sympathy. Flannery wanted to embrace her for it with her flame-skinned arms.

“I forgot the sunblock,” she sniffed, unafraid now, away from Anne, to sound like the dumb kid she was.

“People do it all the time. They just forget how strong that sun can be. Have you tried butter?”

Flannery shook her head. “I’ve got all these creams . . .”

The waitress shook her high head as she checked her hair in the mirror. “Don’t use those, honey. Try butter. It sounds crazy, but it’s very soothing. I swear by a little butter on a bad burn. And you be careful—stay out of the daylight, it will only make it hurt worse.”

Flannery thanked her, cleared up her tears, and returned to the table feeling better. At least she had an ally now against the punishing sun. When Anne went to the register to pay the check, Flannery grabbed a fat handful of butter pats and put them into her bag. She planned to try the waitress’s trick later on, when Anne wasn’t watching. She would be bound to laugh.

But in all that followed, of course, Flannery forgot about the butter. So that another legacy of their blighted vacation was a series of books marked with translucent pages from the melting butter’s calming, widespread salve.

F
rom the fast unhappy car, Flannery saw silver. By the roadside. A still, mournful huddle of luminous fur. But large: person-sized, legend-sized, not the dimension of some poor dog or possum.

“Wait. Slow down. Do you see that?’

“What?” Anne kept driving. She slowed down, fractionally.

“Slow down! Wait. Did you—” Flannery craned her head back, chafing her chest against the seatbelt. “Ouch—
shit.
Did you see that?”

“What?’

Eyeless and soulless as far as Flannery could tell, behind the sunglasses. Mouth unmoved. Skin smooth, soft, lightly tan: flawless.

“Are you even in there anymore?” Flannery wondered, under her breath.

That got Anne’s attention.

“What did you say?” The car slowed, but it was too late now. Her voice was dangerous. “What did you say to me?”

“Why didn’t you stop?”

“For what? You didn’t say what you saw.”

“Because it was so sad and awful.” Flannery, as a kind of rebellious statement, took her own sunglasses off. She squinted sorely into the unforgiving sky that waited at the end of this straight, Everglade-edged road.

“Well, what was it?” Anne sped back up.

“Never mind.”

“Don’t be childish, Flannery. What was it?”

She sighed. “A panther.”

“What do you mean, a panther?”