So she was not in her old safe home when Frederic came through and blew just about everything else away, was not with Melvin back on the bay. All the little old cottages that had been there since the thirties and forties, including the one she rented, were lifted off their blocks or wrenched from their pilings and drifted, floating, till they folded into flattened ruins. The old wooden boat she’d clung to floated all the way to the Winn-Dixie by the bridge, and they wrote a story about her in the Islander: “Rub-A-Dub-Dub, a Girl in a Tub,” though it wasn’t even a tub at all. The Passport survived, the drugstore, a piece of the Hangout, the Lighthouse, a couple of other little motels. Everything else was just washed-out dunes and debris, the outer peninsula past her mama’s house scattered with the flotsam of beach retreats: washer tubs and dryer drums, twisted bedsprings, busted stoves and sand-scoured frying pans and Dutch ovens and butcher knives and forks and spoons from rickety beach-shack kitchens, toilet tanks and commode seats, and the pages of thousands of trashy paperback novels scattered like dried and warped discolored autumn leaves. She worked inland for two years, at a little joint on 59, and then on the bay on the other side of Fish River, a bar and restaurant there, a little more upscale. Time passed. At twenty-four she could feel herself aging in increments as small but distinct as the ticks of a clock. She could feel the fluid swirl in each tiny cell, microscopic planets bound by a body, an infinitesimal universe speeding away from all others. She had a vision of this and was stricken with fear that woke her at two, three in the morning parched and dizzy. She grasped at others to decrease her speed, Biloxi gamblers, itinerant roofers, lonely old snowbirds, and finally mostly regular local trash, reaching for them as she sped past, and at this speed they had no faces, no names. In this manner she tumbled through time all the way to the very end of it. Doesn’t matter which one did it to her, which gaptooth left her here in the palmettos beside the trail in the wildlife preserve along the beautiful white dunes of Bon Secour Beach. It was done.
Are You Mr. Lonelee?
I THOUGHT I HEARD A WOMAN SNEAKING UP ON ME IN the grass. This is the predatory season for women, when men lie pale and naked in their yards like dazed birds. I let my head drop casually over the side of the lawn chair, open one eye, look. No woman. It could have been the birds.
You never know what will come up from behind. I take a shot from my flask and shift in the lawn chair. Even the mailman, crossing the yard to the neighbor’s house, can make me jump and stare.
Two days ago this woman snuck up on me and watched me for five minutes before I knew she was there. I jumped up and the beer resting on my stomach spilled.
“Look out, there, cowboy,” she said.
She was stunning. Very young, tall, and tanned, wearing jeans and a T-shirt that didn’t cover her browned belly, where there was a single gold ring piercing her navel. Her hair, maybe a natural blond, was cut short and stood up on her head as if she’d been shocked, but her expression was calm. She sat down on the edge of the lawn chair and took a sip of what was left of my beer.
“Are you Conroy?”
I nodded and glanced at her navel. “Who are you?”
“I’m working on that,” she said with a little laugh from her throat. She drained the rest of my beer.
“All right,” I said, for I’d been trying to loosen up a little the last few months.
“I got your name off the mailbox,” she said.
I INVITED HER IN for a colder beer and she didn’t leave for two days. I think she was just hungry, mostly. I took a shower and when I came out she was at the kitchen sink, ripping bites off a cold roast chicken I’d had in the fridge since Friday.
During those two days, she took about eight showers, walking naked from the billowing steam of the bathroom and padding about the place drip-drying or coming up to me and pressing herself into my clothes until I was wet, too, and when I took them off she pulled me into the bedroom, or onto the sofa or the floor. She pinned me down and rode me, come to think of it, like I was one of those mechanical bulls in bars. I think she even slapped my thigh one time.
I looked up at her from the laundry room floor, my head wedged into a pile of wet towels. “Really, you know,” I said, “I think I need to know your name.”
“Sylvia,” she said.
“Sylvia,” I said. “All right, then.”
But you can never tell what will come up from behind. I take another shot from the flask and close my eyes, let the sun burn the liquid out again. I’m getting brown, burning down to the muscle. All I seem to want is purge.
FOUR MONTHS AGO, my wife died. I’ve tried hard not to think of her since, but it’s proved almost impossible.
My house is full of her things: leftover prescription bottles, a makeup kit, patent leather shoes and sneakers and dainty sandals, a diaphragm that she called her “bonnet,” hair curlers, old grocery lists, wrinkled blouses packed into the backs of drawers, notes asking me to meet her at church that night, hundreds of useless pots and pans, dumb aphorisms on lacquered plaques, sheets and towels with the initials of her maiden name sewn in. The list could go on. I can’t seem to throw or give any of it away. I sleep with one of her favorite old quilts at the foot of my bed.
A month or so after her death, I decided I was going to get away from the house for a while, rent it out, let someone else bother with the mess. I put an ad in the paper and almost immediately this enormous, red-faced, blond-haired woman answered. I interviewed her in my den.
It took me a minute to realize how fat this woman really was. She had trouble getting through the front door. She sat down and took up half the space of the single bed I used for a sofa, and I heard the old springs groan as it sagged. I couldn’t tell if that embarrassed her or not. I really didn’t know what to think.
I rented her my house, though. Partly because I’d have hated to refuse her just because she was big. But also I had the feeling that the house would be safe with her. She promised not to sit in my wife’s old rocker and I rented the place to her then and there. I couldn’t believe she’d brought it up herself. It almost made me feel worse than if I’d said it.