Carter Clay (15 page)

Recognition is easier than recall.
Jersey has read this in several of the brain function books she has consulted since the accident, and, listen: as if to provide an example, M.B. now hums along with the soundtrack recording of “De La Tromba Pavin”—though had someone asked her to hum a few bars of “De La Tromba Pavin,” M.B. would not have known that she knew the piece at all.

Dum, dum, dee. M.B. is always nervous while fetching her wine. To cover any possible clink of glass against glass, she hums a little louder while she extracts the bottle from behind the Cascade and the Lysol Disinfectant. Task accomplished, she calls out, “There's that darned owl again! You hear that, Jersey? It gives me the shiver-shakes.”

On the television screen, a not quite fully formed alien has begun to stir on one of the bathhouse massage tables, and the sight makes Jersey squirm. Still, she rouses herself to make a response to her grandmother.

“It wouldn't hurt you, M.B.,” she calls, quite certain of herself, for on several occasions, with the help of M.B.'s shish kabob spears, she has managed to gather—and inspect—a number of the plugs regurgitated by the great homed owls that roost in a line of eucalyptus trees above parking lot H. Amber-clawed rodents, tiny-skulled birds, and frogs—these seem to make up the diet of the great homed owls.

How beautiful the owls were when they tilted the gorgeous plates of their faces to look down on Jersey in the parking lot! To be in the presence of such grandeur made Jersey gleeful, and she called to the birds, “Well, aren't you the prettiest things ever!” Just like her mother. That was how she sounded. She heard it herself, and felt pleased and dismayed: how much of herself could be given over to housing her parents before she found herself with no room to grow?

M.B. peeks through the pass-through once more. Making certain that the movie still occupies the girl. Yes. And, in addition,
the girl now practices what she calls “popping wheelies”—tipping herself back in the chair to balance on its big wheels. This, according to the girl, is something the physical therapists
want
her to do—

“Suppose the owls got in your hair, though, Jersey?” M.B. takes from the cupboard a large novelty mug that she recently purchased at Walgreen's. (IF YOU DON'T LIKE MY PEACHES, HONEY, DON'T YOU SHAKE MY TREE!) “I guess you never heard Patsy's story about Princess?” M.B. unscrews the wine bottle's noisy lid. “How they tried to grab Princess when Patsy had her out doing her business?”

Jersey smiles as she lowers her chair. She loves all dogs, even the ancient Princess, whose old poodle eyes are full of a choco-latey goo that stains her white cheeks, but she doubts Patsy's story. “M.B.,” she calls, “you're missing everything!” The movie's hero—aware that the heroine is in danger—now begins to break into her house to rescue her. At the same time, the aliens are coming, and tonight, in their piglike squeals, Jersey hears something new: the chilling sound of fast tires trying and trying to come to a stop.

“Don't worry about me, kid. I'm gonna do my pillbox and mop up where the darned dishwasher leaked, maybe play a little cards.”

On a few occasions, after the girl first moved in, M.B. had put up with the girl's joining in on the cards. Double solitaire. Which was not solitaire at all, in M.B.'s book. And then M.B. caught Jersey starting a new column with any old card, when
everybody
knew you could only use a king! Luckily, after that the girl never tried to play with M.B. again.

On the kitchen counter, M.B. sets out a collection of bottles marked Beta Carotene, B Complex, C, Goldenseal, Echinacea, A, E, Cod Liver Oil, Zinc, Calcium, Magnesium. These are the pills she will drop into the twenty-eight now empty partitions of her plastic vitamin tote (
SMTWTFS. BF, LUNCH, DIN, BED
) between sips of wine from the mug that she has positioned behind the flour canister, too far back for the girl to reach, should she enter the kitchen unexpectedly.

The bottle of MD 20–20 that M.B. pours from is not the bottle that Patsy Glickman brought over to #335 two years ago, but
M.B. still thinks of it as Patsy's bottle. In fact, on her twice-a-week—lately, sometimes thrice-a-week—visits to the Winn-Dixie, M.B. thinks of
each
bottle of the fortified wine that she sets in her cart as the bottle left behind by Patsy.

As she must. Because M.B. Milhause does not drink alcohol. Has never been a drinker. Neither she nor Lorne. M B. comes from a long line of nondrinkers.

Dark, sweet—while she gets down on hands and knees to wipe up the spill from the dishwasher, M.B. can feel the wine begin to work its way into her tense scalp, her fingertips, her toes.

Two years ago, when Patsy came by with that first bottle of wine, M.B. stuck to iced tea. She felt gratified that she was not such a fool as Patsy—drinking wine, telling loud jokes, wearing gold flip-flops and a muumuu cut low to show the tops of her crinkled old boobs. As if anybody wanted to see!

Still, after Patsy departed that evening, and left the wine behind, M.B. felt awfully dull, and so she decided to see how much of Patsy's high spirits came from the bottle.

Pure panic: that was what M.B. felt the morning after. She could remember enough—dancing around #335, grinning at herself and her grape-blackened tongue in the bathroom mirror, deciding to stay drunk forever—she could remember enough of
that
to be stunned by the discovery that such bliss came at the price of such misery. Her vow: not another drop as long as she lived.

Three days later, however, while squeezing loaves of bread at the Winn-Dixie, M.B. made a startling discovery: the bread section sat across from the liquor section.

Up until that time, M.B. had lived her entire life passing by liquor stores and liquor sections in much the same way that she had passed by the churches of strangers (face forward, never taking a look in). Now, however, it seemed that the plain old Winn-Dixie had thrown wide open the gates to a secret and sublime pleasure dome, a magic palace whose treasures (sparkling bottles of red wines and white and great walls of beers) delivered more than any doctrine M.B. had ever met. Alcohol was not the paradise of Jesus, no, but it could erect an earthly paradise for a time, and that was surely some kind of miracle.

M.B. grabbed a loaf of bread and put it in her cart and started down the aisle toward crackers and chips; but not quite so fast that she missed the chance to form the question:
What would she tell Patsy if Patsy stopped by for the rest of her wine?

The answer that presented itself:
M.B. would simply have to purchase another bottle.

That day, as soon as she reached home—swiftly, feeling efficient and managerial—M.B. opened the new wine, and dumped into the drain the amount of wine (two orange juice glasses full) that Patsy Glickman had consumed during her visit. After M.B. poured the two glasses of wine down the sink, she planned how, the very next time she saw Patsy, she would say—so casually—“You want me to get you that wine you left at my place? It'll just go to waste otherwise.”

That very evening, however, M.B. helped herself to a generous portion of the new bottle, and so had to hurry out the next day to buy another in order to bring the level of the first back to where it ought to be. After the second purchase, M.B. poured wine from the new bottle into the older bottle, but then it seemed—since she would never, ever again have alcohol in the house—that she might as well drink a glass or two from the new bottle rather than pour it
all
down the drain.

With slight variations, this scenario repeated itself some dozen times over the next two months: M.B. promised herself not to touch the wine; then evening came, as evening does, and M.B. found herself walking toward a pale and shrunken figure in order to draw the living room drapes against the night. When the drapes moved along the traverse rod, they made a sound like a crowd of insects or birds or bats. She was alone in the world, and unsafe. Her knees and her bunions ached. Surely one glass of wine would not hurt. The news reports said wine was actually
good
for the heart.

Then came the accident, and M.B. began buying bottles often enough that she canceled home delivery of the
Gulf News
so that she might purchase a copy on her way into the Winn-Dixie and, while she shopped, use it to hide the bottle in her cart.

These days, M.B. no longer bothers to funnel the new wine
into the old bottles. Once she even spoke of the MD 20–20 to the checkout girl. “It's Jewish wine,” M.B. told the girl—babbling, she knew she was babbling—“for my Jewish friend.” She felt a stab of guilt, then, and added a lame, “Not that she's a big drinker, not at all, only I like to be able to offer her something Jewish when she comes by.”

At the kitchen table, M.B. glances at the morning paper's TV schedule to see how late Jersey's movie will run. Because of the early tranquilizing effects of the wine, M.B. has begun to feel—as she often does at this point in the evening—quite sorry for her poor granddaughter; thus, when her shirtsleeve sticks to a smear of jam on the table, why, M.B. just fetches a sponge and does not even make a point of removing the shirt, soaking the sleeve, hanging it up so the girl would have to see it.

Either because of some unevenness in the floor, or the length of the table legs, the kitchen table does not sit quite right, and it taps against the linoleum while M.B. wipes up the jam. She hopes Lorne would have approved of the table. The table is the only piece in the unit that she picked out on her own. Except for Kitty's old twin set in the guest room, Lorne and M.B. picked out everything, brand-new. Powder blue for the carpet and tiles, bittersweet for his leather recliner, a paisley featuring both colors for the living room curtains, the sofa, and the dinette's upholstered seats. When the two of them left Indiana, they donated most of their belongings to Goodwill: tweed sectional; easy chair of beet-colored vinyl; maple hutch whose too-short drawers forever dumped their contents onto people's toes; six black TV trays decorated with gold and red cornucopias; blond oak bedroom set with an always grimy-looking grain.

It is painful but good to remember Lorne testing the leather recliner in the showroom, sitting back and closing his eyes, and M.B. does her best
not
to consider the fact that the chair in which Lorne sat was a floor model, and almost certainly not the chair that now sits in the living room; if M.B. thinks otherwise, she begins to wish she could retrieve the sectional and maple hutch and bad bedroom set. She starts to wish that they had never left Indiana. In Indiana, perhaps Lorne would still be alive, and if
Lorne were still alive, Kitty's accident would not have occurred, because one did follow the other—

“M.B.,” Jersey calls over a noisy, hyperkinetic ad for a cola drink, “aren't you going to watch this at
all?”

M.B. sucks hard on her wine-stained lips, straightening and smoothing the syllables she means to use in her reply. “I'm fine, dear. I've got my cards.”

Jersey sighs. She does not understand why her grandmother's drinking is a secret, but she knows that she is not supposed to know about it, acknowledge it.

While the advertisements play on, Jersey moves closer to the large piece of furniture that houses the television set. “Lorne's shrine” is how Jersey thinks of the thing. A tiny man with a baseball bat on his shoulder decorates the trophy her grandfather received for high school baseball. Next to the trophy: an 8 by 12 sepia photo of Lorne in army dress, skin an eerie bisque, cheeks' blush and blue eyes courtesy of Meyers Studio of Gary, Indiana. And here is Lorne, fishing. Lorne cuts up a watermelon on the front steps of the house that he and Jersey's mother and M.B. shared in Indiana. Lorne and M.B. wear New Year's hats and dine out with friends. A windblown Lorne and M.B. hold hands in front of the sign that marks the entry to Palm Gate Village.

To one side of the “shrine,” half-hidden by a plaque announcing that Lorne Milhause made a hole in one, there sits a color photo of Jersey, Joe, and Katherine. This is a “family portrait,” taken at Montgomery Ward's, at M.B.'s insistence, one day before the accident.

Katherine, seated in the studio's decidedly flabby rattan throne, is flanked by Joe and by Jersey. The photo's background is all golden aspens, apparently meant to trick the viewer into believing that the family vacations in autumnal Colorado. On photo day, M.B. did not approve of any of the clothes that the family had brought from Arizona, so she dispensed costumes from her own closets: for Katherine, a suit of bumpy lime bouclé; for Joe, a plaid sports coat that had belonged to Lorne; for Jersey, a cocktail dress of bronze satin. The effect is ridiculous: the long limbs of Joe and Katherine poke out from sleeves and hems; the
darted front of M.B.'s cocktail dress has collapsed against Jersey's twelve-year-old chest. At the studio, when the trio could not stop laughing at themselves, M.B. snapped at the photographer, “Do you think they're funny?
I
don't think they're funny.”

In the photograph, it is true, they do not look funny. They look—pathetic, impoverished, their skin the greasy ocher of people who must live on the streets and panhandle with creased bits of cardboard that read HUNGRY WILL WORK FOR FOOD.

Jersey's mother used to give money to such people, afterward whispering to Jersey, “We have to remember, that could be us.”
We have to remember.
When they saw the poor. The morbidly obese. People with appalling scars or missing limbs. Blind people. The man who held his mouth open wide and screamed
cuntcuntcunt
as he made his way down the street. People in wheelchairs.

That could be us.

Tears often swarmed in Katherine's eyes at such times. Though Jersey understood the tears, she resented her sense of being trained for disaster, and so did her best to short-circuit the moments by grabbing Katherine's chin and turning it toward herself as she teased, “Are you
crying
, Mom?” Which made Katherine laugh, and apologize. “Sorry. Sorry for being morose, honey.”