The rooms had screen doors in use, the solid doors behind them left open. White towels were suspended at eye level inside the screen doors for privacy. The door locks were hook latches. A bulb from the ceiling lit the room, controlled by a string to the headboard. The wallpaper had long, rust-colored water stains. We could hear the other roomers grunt and groan and shuffle around, and one of them fell hard in the night. The mattress was very high on old springs, and we swayed back and forth if either of us turned, rolled together to the soft middle. Mary looked beautiful coming out of the community bathroom with her shiny-washed face early in the morning. We left three dollars on the bed.
We crossed the silver-colored iron bridge over the Suwannee, heading out of town with two large steaming coffees. The river was fogged in; a white, chilled valley.
* * *
In odd, hilled towns we found retired whites coming and going around pharmacies that still had soda fountains, and outside these towns, coming and going in school buses, migrants working orange groves. We walked into groves to watch the picking. We were never questioned. We may have looked like a welfare team, reporters, a landed woman and her heir, I do not know. We would look at the workers from the edge of the action; the workers at us from cherry pickers, trucks, pallets of fruit. Mary, wearing a sweater cape-style, would walk on after a spell, as if the operations were satisfactory. I followed, a young man pulled for these inspections from a golf course.
We drank screwdrivers for two days after the first of these visits, toasting the plight of the poor, and then we could not stand them anymore and went back to good, sour tonics.
In one grove we walked up on a hognose snake. I surprised Mary by picking it up in the middle of its cobra act. I showed her the snake's small upturned nose for shoveling out toads from their shallow beds. She stood about ten feet away-eight feet too far to see the nose architecture-and said, "Fascinating."
"I was a fool for snakes once," I said. Mary looked at me as if I'd said the most outlandish thing a man in a golf suit holding a snake can say to a woman pretending to survey her citrus millions. I put down the hognose, and he instantly performed his death act. I did not bother to explain.
Somehow we wound up in a hotel bar cuts above our roadhouse tastes, a well-thought-of old place a little north of Deerfield Beach. By 11:30 someone at the hotel had decided we were looking for work there, and we were found uniforms-Mary's a chambermaid affair, mine butler-before the lunch rush. It was a Reuben and tongue crowd. I proclaimed myself no waiter, and the same someone who'd assumed we wanted work said, "No problem." I was told to stand against a wall with a green towel over my arm.
CARLISLE: Mizress Drown to St. Louis, she say for an unpacific number of weeks. We had the sheets already in the barns. Say she would ax that good Reynold buyer to look it before market and inside bid and we'd do fine. We did. That's all I got to say. All I know.
And that was Carlisle's total statement in the trial attempting to implicate him in the mulatto-child drowning. A cool fellow. Then his benign and likable cockiness, smoking cigars all over town with his mistress Drown delivering their alleged progeny in St. Louis. I stood against the wall with the green towel on my arm realizing that Carlisle, too, knew how to capitalize on liability, and watched Mary, nearly fluorescent, play the part of a waitress in Florida.
I overheard a table, apparently an employer selling a new applicant on a position with the firm: "All our people are key people. We access you right away to in-house and can interface you after security with on-line for larger work. Compensation packages are just super. And our reputation is one of just super as far as fairness to everyone."
Employee; "My title would be. .?"
Boss; "Software Specialist. Another?"
Boss orders them more double martinis.
Mary and I leave in late afternoon, walk a fishing pier, and study all the bad luck. It is a spectacular sight to see a school of pompano streak through a disarray of baited lines without touching one; the fishermen standing up, the yellow flares of the fishtails sharp as knives slicing through the lines, the fishermen sitting down.
My friend Tom is part of the world which concerns itself with hot and cold armadillos, and I am not. How did this happen? We were in the same program, the same office, taught the same undergraduates the same chemistry. We appreciated the same scientists. Then he went to Oak Ridge and I went to Bilbo's.
When we pass armadillos, I remark to Mary, "That one looked hot," "That one was cold," and she has no idea what I'm talking about, and does not want to know. Her hair blows madly, whipped thin as cotton candy by the wind.
* * *
We are somewhere, now, between social sets; we have done pool halls, open-air bars behind gas stations, and club-sandwich beach clubs. We are presently in a luncheonette vein. Nothing declared, no policy: it is just that two days ago we quit the hotel jobs and have been eating $1.89 lunches in dime stores, served by large, sweaty women who are not unhappy.
Today I have passed another test. It happened that we took a booth next to four hefty women. Mary had her back to them; I faced them, looking over her shoulder. Neither of us took any note-studying the proposition of meat loaf against stuffed pepper-until a trim man with a cane approached them and one of the women said, "The Avon man cometh." She then gave him a playful sock in the arm, and he gave them all a devious smile, sat down, and ordered some coffee. I saw all this, Mary did not, but it was clear to me she heard it: her head was up in a fixed, listening pose, her eyes bright.
The trim man sipped his coffee elegantly and said without self-pity, "I was in Pampers for two months."
The women issued noises of mild condolence. "Wearing a diaper is not all bad," the man said, a gleam in his eye. The women seemed satisfied by this remark: they seemed to have an immense respect for him.
One of the women suddenly said, "It poured down rain right in the mall parking lot. Before I got inside I was sopping wet, so I went into May Cohen's. They had these blouses for three dollars on a table? I said, I'll take it and change and wear it. The one I was wearing was stuck, you know, to my bra-" She paused, and the women looked at the man for a moment, during which he did not move or look directly at any woman.
"Anyway," the woman picked up, "they were marked down from twenty-three dollars and I thought I had me a buy."
Another woman felt the material of her sleeve.
"That's the one?" a third woman asked.
"Yes, honey, that's why I'm telling you this." The remaining two women felt the material.
"Well. Everything has a gimmick. You won't believe this. Look. This is why it was three dollars."
The woman stood up, moved a distance from their table, and shrugged her shoulders several times, ending in an arms-straight-down posture, standing woodenly and slumped before them. Her sleeves had slipped down six inches past her hands, giving her the aspect of a rayon ape.
"Can you believe it`?" she said. "Everything has a gimmick."
The other ladies clucked a good-natured disgust. The trim man was stoic, uncommenting, sipping his coffee. The woman had modeled her shirt directly to him, her bra not precisely invisible in this dry blouse. Mary never turned to witness this scene, but she watched me watch, and I believe that I passed. It is a kind of theater no hack playwright could stage, and I believe that is what she wants me to see in this and in every other mundane adventure we happen to witness. Mary is getting younger by the day. We are ever more lost to the practical world, more located in our desired universe of self-directed drama.