Wit's End (16 page)

It was all a tangle. Addison was reaching for something lucid—something about living on the edge of an unknowable, unreachable world. A world stranger than anything any writer would ever imagine. A deep, deep place, and you could see only the surface. But she couldn't make it cohere.

In that old
Ellery Queen
interview, when Addison was answering questions about Holy City, she'd also tried to talk about the imagination. What she'd said then was that fiction is always some sort of mix of the real and the made-up. “We live in gossipy times,” she'd said. “There's a type of critic who reads only to search for hidden autobiographies. For whom the story and the writer are one and the same. The imagination gets short shrift. But that's the interesting part—the part you can't explain or understand. Or teach or talk about. That's where the abracadabra is.”

The interviewer had responded that we live in a time of science. “What if,” she had asked, “the imagination turns out just to be those memories you don't remember?” And then she offered a compromise. “Or it could all be chemistry? Neurons firing?”

“Ka-pow,” Addison had said, another answer best described as evasive.

Many, many times before and many, many times after that interview, Addison had told the story of her first dollhouse and the unfortunate late little Mr. Brown. She'd told it so often that the story had replaced the memory, and there was, by now, no memory of little Mr. Brown, only the memory of telling the story.

Here is a different story about her first dollhouse: it takes place before Mr. Brown, when Addison was three years old. This was back when they'd lived on Pacific. She'd never told anyone this story, because she didn't remember it. No memory, no story, no memory of a story.

Her mother had had a headache, so Addison had been told to play outside. She was collecting snails in the plastic bucket she took to the beach. She had vague plans for these snails—something thespian, a family drama they would star in. She'd found five so far by following their slicks into the ivy. When it comes to escaping, the whole game is rigged against the snail.

A black car stopped in front of the house and a man got out, came into the yard. He left the car engine on. Bing Crosby was singing Christmas songs on the car radio. The man knelt beside her. He wore gray wool pants, the knees stained with grass, mud, and motor oil. “I'm here to take you to see Santa Claus,” he said.

Addison knew that she wasn't supposed to wander off by herself, but to leave in a car with a grown-up to go see Santa Claus was another matter entirely. The man helped her put the lid on her pail and weight it with a rock so the snails wouldn't escape. Then he put her in the passenger seat. When she rode in the car with her parents, she sat in the back. She had a wooden Budweiser box with crayons and books inside, and she could sit on top of the box and see out the windows. The novelty of being in the front seat wore thin after a while, since there was so little she could see.

The man driving didn't speak to her, but he smiled and winked and sang along to the radio. The road began to climb and wind. Tree branches slipped by overhead. By the time the car stopped, Addison was asleep.

The man slammed the door, came around, and woke Addison by lifting her out. He carried her through a shaded yard, up three steps onto a porch. He knocked on the door and set Addison down next to a rocker with a spider web between the arm and the seat. The paint on the rocker was peeling. Inside the house, a dog barked.

A woman opened the door. “I got her,” the man said.

“Well, she's just a little peanut.” The woman's voice was hearty. She stood aside to let Addison in. “Hello, peanut.” She was wearing stockings that bagged around her knees, and a pair of embroidered Chinese slippers on feet as small as a child's.

The man saluted Addison smartly as he left. There was no sign of Santa Claus, but an excited terrier danced around Addison and licked her face.

“I don't want any accidents,” the woman said. Her voice was less friendly now. She took Addison by the hand into the bathroom, removed her panties, and set her on the toilet, toward the back since she was so little she might fall in otherwise. “You're a big girl,” she said with an admonishment in her tone. “You wipe yourself and call me when you're done.” And she closed the door behind her, the dog pawing it from the other side.

Addison didn't have to go to the bathroom. She slipped getting down, so one of her shoes touched the toilet water, which splashed onto her sock. She dried the shoe with toilet paper and stepped back into her panties, struggling to pull them on. “I'm done,” she said, but a long time passed before the woman came back and held her up to the sink to wash her hands.

“If anyone asks,” the woman said, “you remember it wasn't my idea to bring you here. You say that if anyone asks.”

The house smelled of hair spray and cigarettes. There were doilies on the backs of all the chairs, and ruffles around the bottoms that hid balls of dust and dog hair. A different man arrived, wearing blue pants with black shoes that tied. He was chewing gum. “Hey there, Buddy,” he said to the dog, and, “Welcome, madame, to our humble abode,” to Addison.

“She's just a little peanut,” the woman said, all friendly again.

“Come here, little peanut,” said the man. He lifted Addison in his arms, carried her across the room to show her a shelf with a dollhouse on it. He smelled like licorice. Addison had never seen a dollhouse before, and this was an elaborate one—three floors, twelve rooms—a hinge in the back to open and close it like a book. The man pulled up a chair for Addison to stand on, and he showed her how the grandfather clock kept real time. He let Addison hold it up to her ear to hear the ticking.

There were tiny china dishes in the dining room, painted white with blue flowers, and even tinier cutlery. “You could have a tea party,” the man said. “Go ahead and set the table.” He opened the icebox to show her a ham and a cake.

“I want to talk to you,” the woman said, and she and the man left Addison on the chair. There was a nursery with a little crib, and a rattle inside. A dressing table with a mirror and a powder puff. A library with bookcases, only the books were painted onto the shelves.

Santa Claus still hadn't appeared, and by now it was lunchtime. Addison was called to the table and given a glass of lemonade and a tuna fish sandwich. The man ate quickly and left. Addison drank the lemonade and moved the sandwich from one side of the plate to the other. “I don't know what the rules are where you live,” the woman said. “Here we stay at the table until we've finished our food.”

Those were, in fact, the rules where Addison lived. But her mother toasted the bread when she made tuna sandwiches so it wouldn't get wet. She cut the crusts off and she didn't mix in sweet pickles. She didn't use so much mayonnaise that it soaked all the way through. Even so, there were plenty of times when Addison had to sit at the table until her mother gave up. This woman turned out not to have nearly her mother's staying power.

“I can't spend the whole day babysitting,” she told Addison. “You go play outside now.”

“I want to play with the house,” Addison said.

“It's not for playing with,” the woman told her. “It's for looking at.”

“I want to look at it.”

The woman sighed. She said all right, then, Addison could look if she took her shoes off so the chair didn't get dirty, and didn't touch anything, but then, when Addison took her shoes off, her wet sock left a spot on the chair that the woman saw. She shoved Addison's foot back into her shoe. “How did your foot get wet?” she asked. “Did you have an accident?”

She made Addison sit on the toilet again, and this time Addison did have to go. “Who lives in the house?” Addison asked as the woman washed her hands.

“They're all dead,” the woman said.

Which suggested to Addison that the house was maybe up for grabs. The woman dried Addison's hands with a towel that had little pink-cheeked angels on it. “Play outside,” she told Addison, and Buddy wanted to go with her, but the woman wouldn't let him; she said he'd get dirty.

Addison sat on the porch steps because there was a spider on the chair. She collected leaves and pinecones to make tables and beds, but they didn't come out well.

Eventually her father arrived. He drove up in their old green DeSoto and snatched her from the porch. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Did anyone hurt you?” And then he put her in the car, where she sat on the Budweiser box and watched him talk for a long time to the woman. And then her father told her to climb into the front seat so he could see her while they drove all the way home.

There was a great fuss over her at dinner, and she sensed that if she asked at just that moment for a dollhouse she was likely to get it, even though money was tight and she'd been told many times that Santa had already bought her Christmas present.

That night her father and mother both sat on her bed and said that she was never, ever to get into a car with someone she didn't know, no matter what. Santa Claus would never want her to do such a thing, and anyone who said he did was lying.

The next day she was given a whistle to wear around her neck. If someone she didn't know asked her again to get into a car, she was to blow hard on the whistle and not to stop blowing until her mother or father came. She was made to practice until the sound came loud and clear.

She'd forgotten about the snails in the pail, and they died. Usually Addison saved empty snail shells if she found them, but there was too much guilt associated with these. They were buried in their shells in the backyard beneath the rosebushes. She tended their graves until, within the month, she and her parents had moved to the house on California.

Addison wore the whistle until she was six. She took it off when she started school, since no one else there wore a whistle. By then she had forgotten why she had it. The only residue was an odd suspicion attached to Santa Claus (which made it strange that she had so many of him up in the attic). And, in the backyard on Pacific, the graves of the snails.

A
ddison's metaphors were running aground on the facts of global warming. Instead of the inspiration of the edge of wonders, the way she had seen the ocean for most of her life, what she now envisioned was the ocean empty, the waves rolling on like a great, lifeless clock, dead water curling over dead water. It seemed that was what she should be talking about, except it wasn't what she'd been asked to talk about.

Rima watched as Addison wrote and scratched out and wrote again, and she could see she was in the way down here, even though she wasn't the one doing the talking.

She went upstairs to her bedroom, but Tilda was already there, cleaning, sweeping, mopping. Judging. (To be fair, Tilda had not once mentioned how Rima's shoes had appeared like magic under Martin's bed. She'd been polite enough. It was maybe just Rima's imagination that Tilda felt the need to clean her room often and with great vigor, as if you never knew what might have been going on in it.)

Rima came downstairs again. She decided to get out of the house, and took the unprecedented step of asking Addison if she could borrow the car. The keys were by the back door in a little dish shaped like a scallop, and if Rima remembered to put them back, that was where they'd be next time she wanted them too. Or so it would be pretty to believe.

Now what? Where to? She sat, engine idling, and considered her options. She could take a hike, there was supposed to be great hiking in Santa Cruz, but that would require going inside again, asking Tilda where to go and how to get there. She could go back downtown, look in the shops. Yet even in the best of moods, she wasn't really a shopper, and she wasn't in the best of moods and she planned to get worse.

All these days, she'd been looking out her window at the tops of roller coasters and some ride that looked like a radio tower, and Oliver would never have let so much time pass without making the scene at the boardwalk. (
Killer Klowns from Outer Space
had been filmed there! Also some Clint Eastwood movie Rima couldn't remember, but Oliver would have known it.
The Lost Boys,
of course.
The Lost Boys!
Back when Kiefer Sutherland had been a perfectly respectable vampire and not the detestable government agent he'd become.)

Plus it seemed a suitable place for a virulent bout of self-pity—the boardwalk in autumn, all deserted and haunted by its summer gaiety.

She thought it would be easy to find, since its drops and roller coasters remained visible at most points in the drive. It wasn't. She passed the
Lost Boys
railroad trestle, crossed and recrossed the river and overshot and doubled back, and finally she turned onto a street of brightly colored stucco buildings—yellow, pink, and blue, with arches of a faintly faux nature, and tiled roofs. The blue-and-white roller coaster loomed above her, seagulls flying in and out of the coils of track. It was all a lot cleaner than she'd expected.

She parked in the parking lot and followed the painted bare footprints to the street. To her right were an arcade, a surf shop, and a blue building identified as “Neptune's Kingdom,” with a painted shark grinning down from one side of its door and an orange octopus floating on the other.

She walked past the empty ticket booth, through an archway to an alleyway to the boardwalk. She was facing a ship. Behind her, a row of gargoyles leered down from the façade of something called the Fright Walk. Entry to the rides was blocked by a chain across the stairs, and the blue-and-white roller coaster was being worked on by a couple of mechanics. This was probably a good thing, roller coasters being maintained this way. And yet, Rima was less inclined to ever go on one as a result of seeing it. It raised the question.