“Codeine?”
“Help yourself.”
She gulps three capsules without water.
“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”
Swollen with air, her cheeks gradually deflate. She counts her top teeth with her tongue.
“You think my head stops hurting at home?”
Ellen lives in the city in one of the company housing towers, the one called Coral Tree. She travels to and from on the company’s electric buses. It isn’t that she lacks a sense of humor, only that in her perverse tropism she turns inevitably toward what is blackest.
Once, with her morbidness tented over me, I gave Ellen a perfectly ripe papaya and said, “Hey, cheer up.”
She said, “No, thanks,” and handed it right back.
Things not explained I can sometimes obtain by osmosis; her movements through a city with 4.3 rapes reported daily, of mariachi bands at the airport and renowned sunsets, where a cylindrical glass hotel shimmers in hundred-degree heat and tar paper flaps on abandoned dream homes three years old. An ocean has been manufactured on flatland dotted with cactus — a semicircular reservoir there, a hydraulic mechanism that goes off like a cannon every forty seconds, crowds who come to ride the artificial surf on their fiberglassed boards. Only the sand beach is real. Ellen goes there to pick up women and I can see her cool, oblique approach, sunglasses retracted into tangled hair, smoke rings casually blown.
I was working late on a news assay. Some globalcorp planning a court case wanted a review of its coverage over the last five years and I’d been a dozen hours or more with the talking heads, dubbing pieces off for the transcript, footnoting as I went. The preliminary work had to be in by morning, but my eyes kept fluttering shut. Enough of tariff barriers and assembly line robotics. Even when I cut all dials to zero, patches of noise kept in-and-outing like radio signals on a stormy night. Fuck this company and that, I was going back to #6 and have some sleep.
But a smoky slant of light stopped me in the hall. It came from the slightly open door of the work cell next to mine, unoccupied for weeks since that Stanford boy poisoned himself with sopors. I stepped closer, peered in. She was small but heavy, and occupied the dark space decisively. A black-and-white scene of dismal resolution, as turbidly underlit as the tapes of a police undercover operation, played silently on the console in front of her. Restless movements, a covey of them, in no way diluted the calcium hardness of her attention. I edged even closer and aimed my beaten eyes.
A girl’s room, scalloped curtains and stuffed animals, the girl sitting on a white canopy bed. She is wearing a loose cotton nightgown. Brushing her hair, she looks into the camera and smiles. Makeup tubes and pots scattered beside her on the bed. She pinches baby fat under her chin, files her nails, swabs her face with alcohol-soaked cotton, squirts white cream into a little round palm, upraised. She smiles again and lifts her nightgown. All the time she looks into the camera, thin mouth rapidly moving, though it is obvious that she’s talking, perhaps singing, to herself; all the time that her sticky white fingers are rippling between hairless lips, sliding back and forth in her rectum.
I was certain, from the moment she entered the frame, that the low-slung woman in the baggy T-shirt was the same one wrapped in cigarette smoke, sitting with her back to me. On screen, the girl’s narrow body disappeared under hers and narrow ankles crossed over her back.
“Touch me and I’ll chew up your eyes,” the decisively placed woman said to me without turning around.
I felt invasive, excited, afraid. I thought of something to say, but what came out was: “I work next door.”
She stood and faced me then, cigarette straight and firm in the corner of a wanly smiling mouth. Her lids were heavy and her hands were down in her pockets as far as they would go, knuckles moving up and down like valves against the denim.
“You look like a real practiced point-shaver to me.”
“Your secret’s safe, don’t worry.”
“There’s no secret. I don’t like men.”
“Me either.”
“That’s not how I mean it.”
“Me either.”
She turned away again, staring at images which I saw now as an abstract shadow play on her tilted face. “And I suppose”—she gave way a little, leaning her weight against the counter edge—“I suppose voyeurism comes with this job.”
Anyway, I worry about her. Three codeine on an empty stomach, no telling what lines she may have crossed. I’m parked by the antenna field, waiting. The sun descends and wind hums across the guy wires. Buses cluster and I look for my friend at the back of the alphabetical loading line. Could she have passed out? Cracked her head on a sink or something? Then I see her drift around the corner. A security man has her arm, but he’s only supporting her, guiding her along. She boards the last bus, takes a seat in the rear. Her head sags and the hive of tight black curls is squashed against the glass. I wait for the bus to pull out. It’s almost dark. Ellen sleeps with mouth open, reading lights burning all around her.
22
“OH, GO ON AND look,” my mother said, pulling me across her lap. “You’ve never seen the ocean from up here.”
Visible through the TV-shaped plastic window was a green swatch dappled here and there with white.
“Can you see the ship? That tiny thing?”
“Mmm-hmm.
I returned to A Study in Scarlet and my hoarded packets of airline cashews. Across the aisle, my sister hissed her exasperation. She was teaching herself to knit. Like me, Carla viewed this Florida vacation as an ordeal, a decree in the guise of a gift. Very recently, in humiliation rather than triumph, she had donned her first brassiere.
We’d never met Mother’s “dear Cordelia,” widowed by a faulty outboard motor, or the twins we would be expected to make friends with. All we knew was that they lived in Vero Beach, had their own tennis court, and never ate meat.
“If this is such a neat trip, then why is Daddy staying home?”
Carla had an unerring instinct for the conversation-stopper.
All we knew was that Gordo had been sleeping at his office a lot and had come upstairs as we were packing to present us each, amid motions of great secrecy, with a salami.
“You’ll need to keep your strength up.”
Florida, my mother informed me as we taxied to the terminal gate, was unique in all America. All I knew was that the Dodgers held spring training in Vero Beach and that alligators were known to slip by night into backyard swimming pools.
Cordelia Bontempi was blind in one eye, which to an eleven-year-old was the most interesting thing about her. Tim and Dan, the twins, had bad teeth, white-blond hair, and all the latest toys. They were eight and consequently of no interest whatever. Eggplant fingers were dispensed as treats and the wooden wall around the swimming pool was too high for an alligator to climb.
“Ten whole days,” Carla moaned that night. “I may just die.”
She had come to my small room from hers across the hall and, unwilling to sit, paddled around the end of my bed in flannel pajamas she’d outgrown. Her fledgling cones had never been pointier.
“You know there’s not a TV anywhere,” I said incredulously. “Those two little saladheads aren’t allowed.”
“Oh, God.” Carla gripped the sides of her head as if steel balls were clacking inside. “Why can’t Momma ever have friends who are just regular?”
“Let’s eat salami,” I said.
I slept poorly that night, thinking of my sister’s cones and how salami grease had made her mouth so shiny. I knew we couldn’t be real friends anymore and it scared me.
“Why don’t you show them your racing dive,” my mother said, pulling me across the flagstones to where the twins were scraping paint off little metal trucks.