right? You're very pale."
Bill heard and turned away from the departing white van, his face
worried. If her strongest feelings about Bill were her only feelings
about Bill, now that they were twenty-five years on, she would
have left him when she found out about the secretary, a Clairol
blonde too young to remember the Clairol slogan that went "If I
have only one life to live," etc., etc. But there were other feelings.
There was love, for instance. Still love. A kind that girls in
Catholic-school uniforms didn't suspect, a weedy species too tough
to die.
Besides, it wasn't just love that held people together. Secrets held
them, and common history, and the price you paid.
"Carol?" he asked her. "Babe? All right?"
She thought about telling him no, she wasn't all right, she was
drowning, but then she managed to smile and said, "It's the heat,
that's all. I feel a little groggy - Get me in the car and crank up the
air-conditioning. I'll be fine."
Bill took her by the elbow (Bet you're not checking out my legs,
though, Carol thought. You know where they go, don't you?) and
led her toward the Crown Vic as if she were a very old lady. By the
time the door was closed and cool air was pumping over her face,
she actually had started to feel a little better.
If the feeling comes back, I'll tell him, Carol thought. I'll have to.
It's just too strong Not normal
Well, deja vu was never normal, she supposed - it was something
that was part dream, part chemistry, and (she was sure she'd read
this, maybe in a doctor's office somewhere while waiting for her
gynecologist to go prospecting up her fifty-two-year-old twat) part
the result of an electrical misfire in the brain, causing new
experience to be identified as old data. A temporary hole in the
pipes, hot water and cold water mingling. She closed her eyes and
prayed for it to go away.
Oh, Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to
thee.
Please ("Oh puh-lease," they used to say), not back to parochial
school. This was supposed to be a vacation, not - Floyd - what's
that over there? Oh shit!
Oh SHIT!
Who was Floyd? The only Floyd Bill knew was Floyd Doming (or
maybe it was Darling), the kid he'd run the snack bar with, the one
who'd run off to New York with his girlfriend. Carol couldn't
remember when Bill had told her about that kid, but she knew he
had.
Jast quit it, girl. There's nothing here for you. Slam the door on the
whole train of thought.
And that worked. There was a final whisper - what's the story and
then she was just Carol Shelton, on her way to Captiva Island, on
her way to Palin House with her husband the renowned software
designer, on their way to the beaches and those rum drinks with the
little paper umbrellas sticking out of them.
They passed a Publix market. They passed an old black man
minding a roadside fruit stand - he made her think of actors from
the thirties and movies you saw on the American Movie Channel,
an old yassuh-boss type of guy wearing bib overalls and a straw
hat with a round crown. Bill made small talk, and she made it right
back at him. She was faintly amazed that the little girl who had
worn a Mary medallion every day from ten to sixteen had become
this woman in the Donna Karan dress - that the desperate couple in
that Revere apartment were these middle-aged rich folks rolling
down a lush aisle of palms - but she was and they were. Once in
those Revere days he had come home drunk and she had hit him
and drawn blood from below his eye. Once she had been in fear of
Hell, had lain half-drugged in steel stirrups, thinking, I'm damned,
I've come to damnation. A million years, and that's only the first
tick of the clock.
They stopped at the causeway tollbooth and Carol thought, The
toll-taker has a strawberry birthmark on the left side of his
forehead, all mixed in with his eyebrow.
There was no mark-the toll-taker was just an ordinary guy in his
late forties or early fifties, iron-gray hair in a buzz cut, horn-
rimmed specs, the kind of guy who says, "Y'all have a nahce tahm,
okai?"-but the feeling began to come back, and Carol realized that
now the things she thought she knew were things she really did
know, at first not all of them, but then, by the time they neared the
little market on the right side of Route 41, it was almost
everything.
The market's called Corson's and there's a little gid outfront, Carol
thought. She's wearing a red pinafore. She's got a doll, a dirty old
yellow-haired thing, that she's left on the store steps so she can
look at a dog in the back of a station wagon.
The name of the market turned out to be Carson's, not Corson's,
but everything else was the same. As the white Crown Vic passed,
the little girl in the red dress turned her solemn face in Carol's
direction, a country girl's face, although what a girl from the
toolies could be doing here in rich folks' tourist country, her and
her dirty yellow-headed doll, Carol didn't know.
Here's where I ask Bill how much farther, only I won't do it.
Because I have to break out of this cycle, this groove. I have to.
"How much farther?" she asked him. He says there's only one road,
we can't get lost. He says he promises me we'll get to the Palm
House with no problem. And, by the way, who's Floyd?
Bill's eyebrow went up. The dimple beside his mouth appeared.
"Once you get over the causeway and onto Sanibel Island, there's
only one road," he said. Carol barely heard him. He was still
talking about the road, her husband who had spent a dirty weekend
in bed with his secretary two years ago, risking all they had done
and all they had made, Bill doing that with his other face on, being
the Bill Carol's mother had warned would break her heart. And
later Bill trying to tell her he hadn't been able to help himself, her
wanting to scream, I once murdered a child for you, the potential
of a child, anyway. How high is that price? And is this what I get
in return? To reach my fifties and find out that my husband had to
get into some Clairol girl's pants?
Tell him! she shrieked. Make him pull over and stop, make him do
anything that will break you free-change one thing, change
everything! You can do it if you could put your feet up in those
stirrups, you can do anything!
But she could do nothing, and it all began to tick by faster. The two
overfed crows lifted off from their splatter of lunch. Her husband
asked why she was sitting that way, was it a cramp, her saying,
Yes, yes, a cramp in her back but it was easing. Her mouth
quacked on about deja vu just as if she weren't drowning in it, and
the Crown Vic moved forward like one of those sadistic Dodgem
cars at Revere Beach. Here came Palmdale Motors on the right.
And on the lefr? Some kind of sign for the local community
theatre, a production of "Naughty Marietta."
No, it's Mary, not Marietta. Mary, mother of Jesus, Mary, mother
of God, she's got her hands out....
Carol bent all her will toward telling her husband what was
happening, because the right Bill was behind the wheel, the right
Bill could still hear her. Being heard was what married love was all
about.
Nothing came out. In her mind Gram said, "All the hard days are
coming." In her mind a voice asked Floyd what was over there,
then said, "Oh shit," then screamed "Oh shit!"
She looked at the speedometer and saw it was calibrated not in
miles an hour but thousands of feet: they were at twenty-eight