The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (70 page)

Three cheers for Mrs. Howell’s Fiorinal. It’s eradicated the time perfectly. And Rosie has finally, after all these months, got a truly decent sleep. Two dear little pills took care of Sunday night, then three eliminated Monday, and only five more, actually, were needed to roll Wednesday morning right up to Rosie’s bedside.

For several hours now, Rosie has had to stand up and walk and talk—and she’s been able to, though her hangover still makes an odd, gauzy curtain over everything in view. Just as well: the view has included Elizabeth; the great, rumpled bed, all its noisy turmoil exposed in the glare of Lupe’s day off; and, of course, Harris. Who could not have been friendlier or more pleasant, to Rosie and Jamie as well as to Morgan.

The five of them have stood together, looking at the bedroom walls. There’s no doubt that Morgan is satisfied, although, Rosie notes through her hangover, he’s more muted—softer—than usual; it’ll probably be some time till he runs into Jamie again. And Elizabeth is clearly pleased, in her surgical way. And, naturally, it’s all just fine with Harris.

They’re quiet for a minute or so, turned toward the glinting blue out the window as if a trance had fallen over them. Elizabeth speaks dreamily into the silence. “Let’s get a boat next summer, darling. Let’s get a boat and go sailing off, right into the sky…”

“We’ll discuss this,” Harris says.

Elizabeth laughs. “Sloth,” she says affectionately. “You know you’ll love it…”

They make their goodbyes. Morgan delivers his gracious little speech of thanks to Jamie, and, as Elizabeth begins her gracious little speech of thanks to Morgan, Harris takes Rosie’s hands in both of his and looks at her. “The important thing,” he says in a low, vibrant voice, “is to keep painting, Rosie…Trust your talent. Trust your future.” And he gives her a special little smile—formal, final, but just for her. She’ll see that smile more vividly, she knows, in the starkness of memory, when the curtain rises.

“It’s been real,” Jamie says to a wall, and turns to Rosie. “Ready?”

“Just a moment,” Rosie says. “Let me wash my hands.”

The slip glimmers as though it’s been waiting for her; it tumbles into her arms as she touches it. A rescue? Oh, no, not at all. Rosie stuffs it violently into her backpack as she will later stuff it violently to the rear of Vincent’s dusty shelves, and then, she assures herself, she’ll never give these people another thought.

But what will
they
think, Elizabeth and Harris? Or, to put it more precisely, what will Elizabeth think, and what will Harris think? Because—Rosie removes a fleck of paint from the faucet—they’ll be thinking about her, all right. They will. Yes,
let
them think about her…

“Good? Not good?” Mr. Laskey said. “What do you say, girls?”

“Kiss kiss,” Alice said, making two spoons kiss, and Janey was just staring rudely into space, so it fell to Kyla (as it had all day) to make things all right. “It’s perfect,” she assured Mr. Laskey, and, true, the old-fashioned gleam and clatter, the waitresses in their pastel uniforms, the glass dishes with their ice-cream spheres, the other little groups of wealthy tourists and even New Yorkers, all of this would be exactly what her mother was back home picturing.

Spring vacation had been hurtling down toward Kyla for weeks and weeks, at first just a fleck troubling the margin of her vision, then closer and larger and faster until it smashed into place, obliterating everything that wasn’t itself, and Kyla’s mother was dropping her off at the Laskeys’, where they were waiting for her, and Mrs. Laskey was smoothing Janey’s dress and giving little Alice a hug, and for one fractured and repeating moment Kyla was saying goodbye to Richie Laskey, and then the car door shut Kyla in with Alice and Janey and Mr. Laskey, and Mrs. Laskey and Richie were waving goodbye, and Alice began to cry at the top of her lungs, as though she were being snatched away by killers. “Oh, grow up, Alice,” Janey said.

The airport was gray and shiny, like a hospital where Kyla was to be anesthetized and detached hygienically from home. A corridor of shiny gray time sucked her in along with Janey and Alice and Mr. Laskey, and then the crowd in which they were to be conveyed away compressed itself into the tube of the airplane.

“You get the window seat,” Janey said to Kyla. “You’re the guest.”

Seven days, Kyla had thought; seven days before she could go home, seven days of being the guest, seven days of having to have a good time—even though she was with Janey Laskey. “That’s okay,” she said. “Take it if you want it.”

“You take it,” Janey said. “I’ve been on lots of planes before. I get to go on planes all the time.”

Kyla looked around for Mr. Laskey, but he was already settled into the seat across the aisle from Alice, and one of the stewardesses was leaning over him, laughing and laughing, as he told a joke about a fox and a bunny rabbit. And Kyla would have taken the window seat then (because someone should show Janey she couldn’t always get away with that sort of thing) but the thought of her mother’s pleading look intervened, so she just shook her head and sat down, thunk, where she was.

Janey shrugged. “Okay,” she’d said, squishing her porky rear end past, to the good seat, “I guess some people don’t like it. Some people are scared to look out the window.” She opened the big book she was carrying and squinted down at it, following the print with her finger; her thin hair, the color of cardboard, drooped forward; obviously she should be wearing glasses.

Poor Janey. “What’s your book about?” Kyla asked.

Janey jumped slightly. “Oliver
Twist
?” she said, and looked at Kyla. “Is about orphans.”

“
Sor
-ry,” Kyla said.

Air whooshed through some little spouts above them, the lights flickered, and a heartless angel’s voice instructed them to strap themselves in.

No, Kyla thought. No no no no no. She closed her eyes; the gravity of her will flowed around the seats and into the little compartments:
The plane was growing heavier and heavier
—it would sit, the plane, heavy with her will; darkness would come; someone would open the door, and they could all go home. But for one instant there was a flaw in her concentration—or was it in her sincerity? Her will was flicked aside like an insect and the plane rose, through a great roaring.

The stewardess returned to make a big fuss over Alice. “Kindergarten,
already
?” she sang out, amazed, to Alice, who confirmed this with a gracious nod. The stewardess straightened up, twirled a bit of stray hair around her finger and tucked it back into place, smiling brilliantly at Mr. Laskey. Janey stared at her with loathing and then turned to the window.

“Guess what you can see from up here,” Janey turned back to say to Kyla. “You can see the bodies in the lagoons.”

“There are no bodies in the lagoons,” Kyla had said firmly, for Alice’s benefit, but Alice was playing happily with the safety instruction card, like someone who has no troubles in the world.

“They look just like mermaids, except they’re face up,” Janey said. “Their hair floats, and their legs are green and slimy.”

“Don’t,”
Kyla said.

“Eleven-year-old Courtney Collier disappeared from the mall at ten o’clock this morning while her mother was buying a new tie for Mr. Collier,”
Janey said.
“‘Courtney was a beautiful little girl,’ authorities said. ‘We’re totally positive it was a sex crime.’”

Seven days; seven more days. Minus the three hours and fifteen minutes between getting from the Laskeys’ house to wherever it was they were now. Minus this second. Minus this second. Kyla leaned across Janey to see: Naturally there were no dead girls. You couldn’t even see the lagoons—all you could see were clouds.

Now most of that seven days was over with. Sunday night Kyla had settled into the room she was to share with Janey and Alice, with the blue carpet and the alien blue-flowered wallpaper, and she’d carefully put her clothing into a bureau drawer or hung it on the hotel’s heavy wooden hangers—how strange it looked on those hangers in that big, dark closet that smelled like wood and furniture polish and very faintly of other people, though nobody in particular. Then she and Janey had to play Brides with Alice to calm her down and they had all gone to sleep.

“I want you girls in bed early,” Mr. Laskey had said, “except on the nights we’ve got tickets. And there are going to be some serious naps around here. Agreed? The days will be pretty strenuous, and I don’t want to arrive back home with three little zombies. Now. I’ll be right next door, but I’m looking forward to a little stress-reduction myself, and you have an entire hotel staff downstairs at your disposal. Kindly take advantage of that unusual fact. If you need anything, Donald will be at the concierge’s desk every afternoon and night.”

And it
had
been…strenuous. On Monday evening they’d gone to a restaurant with waiters in tuxedos, where Kyla had worn the new party dress her mother had gotten her for the trip, and Tuesday night she’d worn the dress again, when Mr. Laskey let them stay up late and they’d gone to a show with poor people who were singing and dancing. And yesterday evening they had gone to another amazing restaurant, in Greenwich Village, where everyone—all the waitresses and all the customers—looked like models. And during the days they’d gone to the Empire State Building and the Planetarium and the Statue of Liberty and the Museum of Natural History and various other museums (which Janey claimed to enjoy) and they’d walked in the big, dirty, interesting park with the little fringe of silver buildings at the edges, and they’d gone in a horse-drawn carriage, and had taken a boat around the whole island, and along with all that there had been a revolving display of fascinating delis and coffee shops and people you couldn’t believe had even been
born
, and long, sludgy naps in the sad blue room where it seemed Kyla had been living with Janey and Alice forever.

So now there was only tonight and then Friday and then Saturday, and on Sunday they’d get back in the plane, and on Monday morning Kyla would wake up in her own bed and all the big blank obstacles that at one time had been between her and home would have dissolved into a picture she could remember for her mother at breakfast.

Because at the time something was happening, of course, you didn’t know what it was like. At the time a thing was happening, that thing was not, for instance,
New York. New York
was what her mother was at home picturing. The place where you actually
were
was a street corner with wads of paper in the gutter, or it was standing there, facing the worn muzzle of the horse that had pulled your carriage, or it was sitting in front of a little stain on the tablecloth.
It
really wasn’t
like
anything—it was just whatever it was, and there was never a place in your mind of the right size and shape to put it. But afterwards, the thing fit exactly into your memory as if there had always been a place—just right, just waiting for it.

On Monday morning, she would be home. She would be telling her mother over breakfast all about
New York.
And Kyla would know—because she’d be remembering it—just what
New York
was
like.
But today was the biggest obstacle so far. She was so tired that her body kept forgetting to do things in its usual way—even to sit in its chair properly, and Alice was easily upset, as though the nightmares that had plagued her all night long were rustling and hissing at her feet. And Janey was behaving…
abominably
, so Kyla had to be extra careful about everything. “It’s just perfect,” she said.

“Yes, this, girls, is New York as it used to be,” Mr. Laskey said. “Genteel, clean, gracious…” He sighed.
“Oh, where are the snows…”

Janey rolled her eyes.

It was preferable, Kyla thought, when Janey just
said
whatever horrible thoughts were in her mind. Otherwise, they just leaked out and dripped all over
your
mind…

“Try to have a wonderful time, darling,” Kyla’s mother had said. “And make sure to remember everything for me.” And she looked at Kyla so sadly and sweetly.

Her mother was far away now. And tiny, standing there and peering through a dark distance for Kyla. Oh, why did her mother look so sad? Why?
Kyla
knew: because of her, because she had made her mother feel bad. She had made her mother feel—and this was a fact—as though she had forced Kyla to go on this trip against her will. And now, there was her mother, tiny and fragile across the miles, straining anxiously, as if Kyla had become lost right in the field of brilliant stars that at home shone so sparsely and coldly and far away.

Mr. Laskey raised his hand in the air to summon a waitress. “We’ll see if the ice cream is as good as it used to be,” he said.

“When Grandfather Laskey used to bring you here,” Janey intoned.

Mr. Laskey hesitated. “Yes, Jane…” he said seriously, as though Janey had brought up some interesting point (but soon, Kyla thought, and her insides felt odd and sparkly, Mr. Laskey was going to decide to get angry) “…when Grandfather Laskey used to bring me to New York—”

“—on business!” One of Alice’s spoons said enthusiastically to the other.

Janey snickered.

“Put those spoons down, Alice,” Mr. Laskey said. He signaled again for a waitress. “It’s not nice.”

Alice dropped her spoons on the table and put her hands over her face. “Aha,” Mr. Laskey said as a waitress appeared. “There you are.”

The waitress smiled unhappily around the table. “What pretty blue eyes,” she said to Alice, who was peeking skeptically through her fingers.

The waitress turned to Kyla first. She would be supposing, Kyla thought, that Kyla was one of them—that she belonged to the handsome man who only had to raise his hand in the air to bring over a waitress. Kyla, and not Janey. Because no matter how much Mrs. Laskey paid for Janey’s clothes (plenty, Kyla’s mother said), Janey always looked as if she’d been dressed out of some old lady’s trunk. Yes, the waitress was smiling in such a kind and unhappy way—she must be admiring Kyla’s soft brown hair, the dainty little skirt and sweater her mother had chosen for her at Baskin’s. The waitress herself was not pretty at all. Although that, of course, made no difference. Just, it was what Kyla could feel
Janey
was thinking. “I’m sorry,” Kyla said. “I haven’t decided.”

“So what can I get you, doll face?” the waitress asked Alice.

“What will it be for Alice?” Mr. Laskey said.

“Ice cream for Alice,” Alice confided huskily to the waitress.

“Yes?” Mr. Laskey said. He smiled at the waitress. “Are you sure? Or do you want cinnamon toast?”

Alice looked at Mr. Laskey uncertainly. “Cimona…” she began, and halted warily.

“Do you know, Alice,” Mr. Laskey said, “that this is one of the few places on the planet, along with our hotel, that still has cinnamon toast on the menu?”

He looked at the waitress, who made a little giggle and then looked surprised at herself. “That’s right,” she said.

Mr. Laskey tugged a lock of Alice’s soft hair. “She’s been eating nothing but cinnamon toast since we got to New York,” he said. “Haven’t you, Alice?”

Alice appeared briefly puzzled, then nodded vigorously.

“Good old Alice—sucking up to everyone as usual,” Janey remarked, in some neutral area between audible and not audible.