“I’ll go see her soon,” I said now to my mother. I’d made such a promise before, but what the heck: I made it again.
“And,” my mother continued, “Mrs. Lollick at church would like you to come help in the nursery again.” The year before, every third Sunday, while my parents attended the service, I had helped baby-sit in the Baptist church nursery — a large pink room with cribs at one end; at the other hung an enormous gold-framed painting of Jesus, whose upward gaze and caramel-colored locks gave him the look of a dewy Kenny Loggins. This alone made helping in the nursery better than sitting out in the sanctuary listening to the service, surrounded by old women in wool felt hats with fish-netty little veils, long furry animals draped heads and paws and all around the collars of their coats. During the sermons, I had always stared at the bright stained glass — Jesus as Shepherd — and, in my mind, recolored it, in head shop blacks and mauves. My parents had become Baptists after they had married, leaving the Catholic and Episcopalian churches for something they’d felt was more suited to them. Now they never missed a week. They sang in the choir. They ushered. They prayed.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll phone her.”
“And that’s not even my main point here,” said my mother. “The main point is that you seem drifty and unfocused.”
“What?” I grinned up at her and crossed my eyes. It was the sort of response I might have made to Sils, whom it would have cracked up, but to my mother it was only impudence.
She leaned over and slapped me hard across the face. “You heard me,” she said, and slammed the door.
Once, I went too far with the wheelchair; I went all the way downstreet, stopping and staring in the store windows. It was early morning, and no one was there. By the time I got back to the hospital, Sils had already left.
“Sils left,” said Mike. “She didn’t know where you’d gone.”
“I was outside, fooling around with the wheelchair.”
“She thought maybe you got sick of waiting.”
“Oh, well.” “Yeah. Oh, well. She didn’t know. She had to go to work.”
“So do I,” I said. Now I’d have to call my mother. Or a cab. “So, I should go myself.” Mike looked recovered to me. Confident and condescending in that boy way, that way that illness and injury usually eradicated. But now it was back. He was off the glucose drip. He was watching a lot of TV. “I’m glad you’re better,” I said.
“Are you?” He grinned, in, that strange lopsided style he had.
“Sure. What do you mean?”
“I mean, here’s me, all laid up in the hospital, and there’s you — probably with your lezzy fantasies—”
“What are you talking about, you pig?”
“I’m talking about you with Sils, how you act like … I don’t know. I’m just wondering. Thinking out loud.”
I picked up my big rope purse, which I’d left by the nightstand, and walked out.
“Oh, come on,” I could hear him saying behind me. “I didn’t mean anything.”
Isabelle, Herb, my mother, now Mike Suprenante getting on my nerves. My life like an old turnip: several places at once going bad. The next night it was Isabelle again. She called me up to her office, a large, polka-dotted room above the main entrance. I sat down in the card-table chair in front of her desk.
“What’s going on with your register?”
“What do you mean?” I was tense and held my back straight as a board.
“Sometimes you’re short, sometimes you’re over. Are you locking the register and taking the key on your lunch hour?”
“Yes.”
“Are you emptying the drawer and taking the money box with you on breaks?”
“Mostly,” I said.
She looked at me sternly. She wore spike heels and nylons, even in the direst heat, and I could hear one of her legs swing scratchily back and forth. “Don’t do that anymore,” she said about the money box. “We’re not going to do that anymore.”
“OK.”
“We’re going to put you over at the Lakeside entrance tomorrow.”
The Lakeside entrance was unknown to most of the tourists, and so it was always slow there. The times I’d worked there before I’d spent the whole time writing Sils a long note on a spare roll of orange ticket tape. The note had been full of jokes about Stan the security guard and Mary at the gift shop having an affair.
But there was no one to tear tickets there — you tore them yourself — so it was the easiest place of all the registers to sell stubs.
I sat out there by myself that day, writing Sils a note. Hey, bébé, it began, in the same imbecilic way as all the others. What you say we meet for a smokin’ good time tonight?
“Is this an entrance to the amusement park?” asked a middle-aged couple with a young boy.
They read the prices on the board outside. “He’s only two,” said the woman, pointing at the boy. “And he’s only what, eleven?” She pointed to her husband.
“You’re only two?” I studied the boy, who was at least eight.
He shrugged. “I guess.”
“All right,” I said.
“And how about me?” asked the man. He was wearing white shoes, a white golf shirt, and sky-blue pants. His neck and arms were sunburned and corded with veins. “I’m only two, too.”
“Mentally he’s only two,” said his wife.
Once you had seen enough people go through your register you realized everyone was the same: they looked the same, said the same things; they were all the same.
All the same, I scribbled large on my current ticket-tape note to Sils, right in front of them; full of the stupidities that obviously keep their marriage going. I wrote in a careful, loopy script, waiting as they tried to figure out how old they were.
I looked out through my window at the boy. “If you’re not as tall as that sign and at least nine years old,” I said, “you won’t be able to go on the rides alone. It has to do with the park’s insurance policy.” No doubt he’d be back for a “grow-up,” a system Herb had devised to let kids come back to the cashier and pay the difference in admission so they could ride the rides alone. “We’ve got a grow-up here,” he liked to say, ushering some boy to the register. “We’ve got a boy here who suddenly, magically grew up.”
There was money in grow-ups. When no one was looking, you just wrote “grow-up” on a stub, stuck it in the register, and took out the price of a child’s ticket.
“I know,” said this boy now, looking unhappy and trapped.
“Two adults and an under-six,” the couple said to me.
“That’s twenty dollars forty cents,” I said, not pressing any numbers, just pressing No Sale and letting the drawer pop out with a brrinnng.
“How much?” the man asked. He kept looking past the Plexiglas window, trying to get a view of the register total. But the numbers only said “0.00.”
“Twenty dollars forty cents,” I repeated. He gave me the exact change, which I temporarily placed in the register, shutting the drawer. Later, I would take it out.
“There you go,” I said, handing them three ticket stubs. “Keep your tickets for the rides.”
They frowned and waved and pushed their way through the turnstile, then turned the corner into the park and disappeared.
I waited a while before I rang the drawer open to take out the money. I waited to see if I heard anyone, someone just inside the entrance, someone crouching in a bush, someone lurking behind the cashier’s booth, perhaps, where I couldn’t see: someone with a walkie-talkie, or maybe just Stan the security guard on a cigarette break. But there seemed to be nobody, nothing, just the usual distant happy cries of kids, and so I rang the drawer open and then when I looked up over the register I saw Isabelle out of nowhere in her angry clicking spike heels, rounding the corner by the Baa-Baa Black Sheep Petting Pen and walking briskly toward the entrance. She was followed by Herb, who looked red-faced and vexed, and a policeman looking bored but stern — in a professional way. Isabelle pushed through the exit turnstile and knocked on my glass with her knuckles.