Who ruled here? What did?
Why, the mysteries. It was like the puzzle of the jai alai and drug and dog track ascendancies. It was like those words her children had spoken before throwing out their hands in that game. What was that game? Lorn Som Po. Paper covers rock! Rock smashes scissors! Scissors cuts paper! It made her head spin. Such a mishmash of claims on her attention. The hidden secrets of the upper hand.
SEVEN
There was no guarantee he’d show up. Probably he wouldn’t. But why take chances? So when Dorothy went to bed that night she set the alarm to go off an hour earlier than it usually did. She set it to go off the same time it would if she had an appointment at the beauty parlor, or the doctor’s, or she wanted to beat the heat on a day she went shopping, or if she were going away on a trip. This way she had time for her bath and to lay out her clothes the way she wanted, and to eat her breakfast without having to rush.
She was down in plenty of time. She had time to spare, even. As a matter of fact, if it hadn’t been such a beautiful day she would have gone back inside and sat down on a bench in the lobby till he came. (If he was coming.) But it was, so she was content to stay put, to get away from the air-conditioning and stand out in the wondrous weather. (If it even was weather, and not some gorgeous potion of perfect idealized memory, the luscious aromatics of a childhood spell say, Mrs. Bliss’s, Dorothy’s, charmed skin fixed in the softened, smoothed-over stock-stillness of all temperate sufficiency. If it even was weather this temperate ate sufficiency as absent of climate as a room in a dream.)
She wasn’t the only resident of Building One content to be there, happy just to stand in place, apparently with neither a desire to go back indoors nor the will to continue on the errands that had brought them outside in the first place. Those who’d come down to walk their dogs remained where they were, and so did their animals.
They marveled at the temperature, they complimented the perfect humidity. They congratulated each other on their decision to have chosen south Florida as a place to retire.
“They bottled this stuff they’d make a fortune,” one of them said.
“Put me down for a dozen cases. Money’s no object.”
“It is, but not under the circumstances.”
“Weather like this, you couldn’t bribe me to go inside.”
“What’s that smell? Oranges?”
“Lemons, limes. Something citric.”
“It’s like you just stepped out of the best shower you ever took.”
“It’s paradise.”
“I wish my kids were here today. They never catch the really good weather.”
“I know. Mine are always complaining, ‘Ma, it’s too hot,’ ‘It’s too cold,’ ‘Don’t it ever stop raining?’ ”
Mrs. Bliss joined in the laughter. It was true. They had a day like this once, maybe two times a year, tops.
“And not every year,” someone said as though continuing her thought, or as if she’d spoken it aloud.
What’s that all about, Mrs. Bliss wondered, startled, returned suddenly to her mission, and nervous because the atmospherics were a distraction and might hold them there until the car came for her. (If it did.) What, did she need this, a bunch of strangers standing around like they were seeing her off? (Because, Mrs. Bliss noted, most of their faces were new to her. She’d laid low the past few years, did not often go to the parties in the game room these days, was less and less comfortable shlepping along with her married friends like a fifth wheel. And with her fellow widows, so unhappy and lonely, it was even worse. She didn’t need no grief support groups.) The presence of so many onlookers made Dorothy self-conscious. And if the driver showed up — he was already ten minutes late — in an actual limousine she wasn’t entirely sure she might not just disappear into the small crowd, turn around, and go right back into the building. Louise could make up some excuse for her. Because the thought, just the thought, of these people seeing her helped into a long white stretch limo — she could picture it: the automobile with its gleaming silver wing-shaped antenna mounted on the trunk and the one-way glass that made the passengers invisible; its spic-and-span leather interior got up like a fancy motel room with its absurd built-ins — the speaker phones and cable TV and wet bar and sun lamp and a desktop you let down like a tray top on an airplane — would diminish her more than she already was, turn her pathetic, as if there were no quicker, more obvious way of pronouncing this some redletter day in the life, summing her up in the measly bottom lines of her dressed-up, shined-shoe, queen-for-a-day happiness. What, did she need it? Did she need it?
And then, suddenly, their chatter ceased. They made a collective sound of awe and wonder. The limo pulled into Building Number One’s driveway and stopped beneath the canopy.
The driver got out and walked around the immense length of the car. He was in black livery, and wore high black boots and a chauffeur’s inky cap.
He came directly up to Dorothy.
“Mrs. Ted Bliss?”
“Yes?”
“I apologize for the delay, Madam. There was construction on 163rd Street, and the traffic was backed up.”
“That’s all right,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“When ain’t there?” said the man who wanted to be put down for a case of the perfect weather. “There always is, 163rd Street is murder.”
“Dorothy,” Edna Bairn said, one of the few people Mrs. Bliss recognized, “the car is for you?”
“I’m going on a trip. He’s taking me to the airport.”
“You’re going on a trip?” said the one who thought the air smelled like oranges. “So where’s your luggage?”
Dorothy looked past the driver to the extravagant car. “What I need I’ll buy when I get there,” she said, and allowed the chauffeur to hand her into the limousine.
The penitentiary had been built on landfill along the northern, central edge of the Everglades. They had left the Tamiami Trail somewhere between Sweetwater and Monroe Station and plunged north onto a gravel road that cut through vegetation that reminded Mrs. Bliss of a kind of gigantic tropical salad. The trees here, she supposed, bore the sort of fruit whose names she recognized — guava and plantain, currant, avocado, gooseberry and huckleberry and elderberry, damson and papaya — but had never tasted or, vaguely thinking of them as somehow gentile fruits, brought home for her family. It seemed curious to her now that she had never encouraged them away from their old appetites.
She’d never been much of a sightseer when Ted was alive, and now, even on cruises, was content to play cards in her cabin or poke about in the duty-free shops searching out gifts she could bring back for her children and grandchildren. Ashore, in colonial port towns, it was all her companions could do to coax her to ride with them in an open landau drawn through the narrow cobblestone streets by a team of paired horses.