Pike's Folly (21 page)

3

Marlene and Stuart returned from Martha's Vineyard feeling even more distant from each other than they had the week before. As soon as they got home, he marched upstairs, found their VHS copy of Heath's video and smashed it to pieces. Marlene didn't try to stop him; he was stronger than she was, physically, mentally, emotionally, in every way.

They didn't sleep together that night. After Stuart had gone to bed, Marlene took a bottle of Clos du Bois to the back porch and spent the next few hours drinking and feeling sorry for herself. With fatigue came a dismal sort of clarity. What she wanted wasn't so particularly extravagant, after all—just to add one or two little sentences to the paragraph that ultimately described her life. She wondered what would've happened if she'd stayed in the theater, if she'd gone to the conservatory as her mother had suggested. Probably nothing. She wasn't pretty enough to make it as an actress. Even those women who specialized in “ugly” roles were, when you saw them interviewed on TV, beautiful. Marlene's kind of ordinary wasn't permitted anywhere but here in the ordinary world.

The next morning, she waited until Stuart left on his daily hour long walk, then took his car keys and drove out of Providence. With no particular destination in mind, she felt a strange pull leading her north into the mountains. Heath would be there and Nathaniel Pike, too. Maybe
they
would accept her, if no one else would.

She wasn't good at reading maps, so she pulled off the freeway and went into a Dunkin' Donuts to ask for directions. The middle-aged woman behind the counter answered her pleasantly at first, then lost patience when Marlene kept repeating the same questions, causing the line of customers to back up.

“It's another twenty miles to New Hampshire,” the woman said for the third time. “Just keep on Ninety-three past Methuen. It's impossible to miss.”

“Ninety-three past Methuen.” Marlene tried committing the words to memory, but there was so much clutter inside her brain that nothing seemed to stick. “Ninety-three, Ninety-three, Ninety-three. I keep getting Ninety-three mixed up with Ninety-five.” She smiled apologetically. “You must think I'm an idiot.”

The woman remained silent behind her cash register, so Marlene looked up at the menu board and frowned at the selections. “I guess I'd better order something, now that I've wasted your time.”

On the counter were various donuts and muffins, none of which looked especially appealing. In the end, she chose a blueberry muffin and gratefully put an extra buck in the woman's tip cup. Back in the car, she set the bag with the muffin in it on the floor of the passenger seat and promptly forgot about it.

True to the cashier's word, Ninety-three led into New Hampshire, where it turned into a toll road just north of the state line. Three lanes fed into the toll booths, and she picked the one with the longest line. When it was her turn, she drove up, put her car in park and reached into the backseat for her purse. “How much is it?” she asked.

The toll taker barely glanced at her. “Seventy-five cents, ma'am.”

His tone was the same as the cashier's back at the Dunkin' Donuts—bored and contemptuous. She could sense his impatience as she rifled through her wallet for a small bill. “Is it the same amount driving the other way?” she asked, handing him a dollar.

He said that it was. She'd hoped to pry a few more words of conversation out of him, but he just gave her her change and waved her through.

By the time she'd arrived in the mountains, she was a basket case. Three hours of freeway driving had given her heart palpitations and a tension headache. The other motorists didn't approve of her, apparently; they crowded her in the slow lane, then made a big, arrogant show of speeding ahead to cut her off. Whatever standards existed for the road, she didn't measure up.

At least the number of cars had dropped off, which allowed her to slow to a crawl in the breakdown lane as she looked for a trail marker. Finally she stopped at a roadside diner to ask for help.

Inside, an elderly male patron said, “If you're looking for that guy Pike, he's about a mile south of the Kancamagus Pass. You can't get to it by a trail. You've gotta wish for it.”

A waitress, who was pouring his coffee, laughed. “He's pulling your leg, dear. Nathaniel Pike's the big joke around here.” She set her coffee carafe down on a hot plate, then took Marlene's map and spread it across the breakfast counter. “You're going to park here, at White Ledge, then follow the blue blazes for about two and a quarter miles until you come to a riverbed with a footbridge running across it. Go over the bridge, walk another ten, twenty paces, then head due east off the trail for another eighth of a mile. Don't worry if you get lost. Just give a shout, and someone'll come looking for you.”

Marlene took the map back and folded it up. “Have you seen it? I mean—”

“No, but my son's been up there six times already. He just started working for Pike last week.” She smiled aggressively. “Pays pretty good, too. Pays better than this dump.”

Marlene thanked both the waitress and her customer and hurried back to her car. The afternoon was waning, and it soon would be too late to start up the trail. But she knew she had to do this today, while she still had it in her.

After another ten minutes of driving, she spotted the trailhead and turned into a dirt lot just off the road, parking under the trees near a pickup with a camper on back. At the rear of the lot was a picnic table, a cast-iron cooking grill and a rusted-out garbage drum filled to the brim with beer cans and paper plates. Other than these few signs of life, the place looked abandoned.

When she got out, she reflected on what had brought her here, not merely to New Hampshire but to this point in her life: the thrill of being seen naked by another person, that terrible, awesome, impossible-to-hold-on-to moment in time. Locked inside that moment was a reality she wished to commit herself to. She wanted to leave all the other realities behind and accept the fate that was predestined by her body.

Do it/don't make me.

Like a woman undressing at home, she took off her shoes and socks, rolled the socks into a ball and stuffed them into the heel of one of her shoes, which she left in the car.

Do it/don't make me.

Everything else followed—her bra, her jeans, her faded yellow panties. As a final casting-off, she threw the bundle of clothes into the backseat, left the keys in the ignition, locked the door and slammed it shut. She felt as though a quantity in the world she hadn't noticed before—a sound, perhaps—had suddenly increased, and she could hear it all around her. Leaving her car, she tiptoed across the lot and started up the trail.

Within a quarter-hour, her feet were cut and dirty, so she stopped to rest on a flat, shelflike outcropping of rock. The forest was still except for the shiver of the wind filling the Kancamagus. With her knees tucked, she picked the black mud from her feet. To her amazement, she found that the keen, hyper-real sense of being naked hadn't worn off yet.

Farther up the trail, she heard voices and turned her head to listen. Through the trees she could see three men and three women proceeding single file. Defying her own instincts, she remained in plain view, waiting for the group to pass.

When the first hiker saw her, she stopped about ten yards from Marlene and stared, slack jawed, as the others caught up to her. The hikers were all in their twenties and thirties; one might think they were college friends who'd kept in touch after school. The men all wore beards, and the women were muscular, prim and simple looking. One of them said, “Hey, what's the matter? Are you all right?”

Marlene didn't answer. All of her attention was focused on certain pinpoints scattered on the surface of her body: her left nipple, a fingernail, a spot above her right knee. With her skin a creamy white, she seemed to have taken off more than just her clothes but also an invisible layer she'd always worn up until now.

The woman asked again, “Are you okay? Has someone hurt you?”

The man next to her added, “Do you need a doctor? Do you want us to get help?”

These questions were echoed by the other hikers. Marlene felt her confidence dwindle. She didn't want their concern or pity. She wanted their admiration.

In a breaking voice, she whispered, “Just look at me.”

One of the women said to her friends, “Come on, let's go. This lady's giving me the creeps.”

The hikers filed past and continued down the trail. The women regarded her more severely than the men, but even the men avoided looking directly at her, preferring to stare down at her feet. Long after they'd passed out of sight, Marlene could hear their scornful laughter rising through the forest. This aroused her, since part of her liked being treated with contempt.

On and on she hiked, until she came to the riverbed the waitress had told her about. The footbridge was narrow and splintery, and she nearly fell into the muddy river as she crossed to the far bank. This high up the mountain, the trees gave way to scrub brush and boulders, and the open terrain made her feel even more naked than before.

Following the waitress's instructions, she went ahead another twenty paces, then turned off the trail and skipped across a field of broken rocks. The ground was murder on her feet, but there was nothing she could do about it. Mercifully, the mountainside sloped downward again, and soon she was back in the forest, only this time without the benefit of a trail. The sun was low in the sky, and she began to worry that she might not find Pike's lair before nightfall.

She eventually came to a small clearing, where she noticed a faint humming noise. The sound was so out of place that she thought at first she was hallucinating, but no—she distinctly picked out the dull roar of a motor, and voices conversing in low, lackluster tones. When she peered deeper into the woods, she saw nothing to indicate where the noise might be coming from. No point in standing here forever, she thought, and called out, “Hello? Anyone? Where are you?”

Like two armed sentries, a pair of young boys appeared, both carrying flashlights and dressed in identical uniforms with name tags pinned to their chests. “Shit!” one of them said. “It's a naked lady!”

Marlene covered her breasts with her hands. “It's okay,” she said. “I'm not going to hurt you. I'm just trying to find Heath Baxter.”

The boys recognized the name. The one who'd already spoken said, “He's working in sporting goods. We'll take you to him.”

“Sporting goods?” Marlene wondered but came out of hiding to follow the boys through the woods.

They walked for another few hundred yards until a faint light, like a will-o'-the-wisp, glowed up ahead. Marlene stopped to catch her breath. “What is it?” she asked.

Neither boy answered. Instead, they swung their flashlight beams around, picking her out in the darkness.

“I'm sorry,” she said and lowered her head. “I know I look disgusting to you.”

The boys didn't understand her, so they turned and trudged on.

At a certain point, the trees thinned out, revealing a vast expanse unlike anything she'd ever seen before. Moving past the boys, she stepped onto a surface of newly spread blacktop. Its smoothness came as a relief after walking on the trail all afternoon. The area around the parking lot was lit up with giant stadium lights that ran on power generators—the motor sound that she'd heard earlier. Beyond this nimbus of light, a deep blue forest extended on all sides, sloping upward to the mountains, which looked remote and two dimensional, like scenery in a stage play.

In the foreground stood Mr. Pike's fully functional Kmart. The sign hung over the main entrance, which consisted of sliding glass doors that opened onto the foyer. Through the display windows, she could see dozens of cashiers standing idle at their workstations. They appeared lifeless behind the glass.

A handsome man welcomed her, and she read the solid gold name tag on his jersey: Nathaniel Pike, Store Manager. “You must be Stuart's wife,” he said. He took little notice of Marlene's nudity, except to glance down at her breasts. His eyes gleamed cheerfully. “You've got balls, lady. I've never met a nudist before.”

Marlene instinctively brought her arms around her chest. The blazing glare of the stadium lights made her feel visible from a great distance. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“Don't be. Hey, you've got nothing to apologize for. I've seen far worse, believe me.”

Pike's creation had a hypnotic effect on Marlene, and she found herself forgetting herself entirely, even as she began to attract the attention of the people inside the store. “It's beautiful here,” she said.

“Come on, I'll give you a tour.” He presented her with his arm, which she hesitated to take. “It's okay, Marlene. No one's going to hurt you.”

Reluctantly, she slid her hand into the crook of his arm, and they crossed the parking lot together. It was all Marlene could do not to cover herself, particularly when they entered the store and the cashiers who'd noticed her through the display window came forward for a better look.

Pike led her farther into the building, past aisles and aisles of shelf stock that looked picked-over, like the day after a clearance sale. Marlene began to suspect that the employees weren't really working for Pike but were living off of the merchandise inside the store. In one section, cashiers who'd gone off shift for the night slept on displays of Sealy Posturepedic mattresses, while nearby a group of stockboys made good use of an electric grill to cook their dinners. The entire store was its own, self-sufficient universe.

“I've got fifty-one employees right now,” Pike explained, “including myself. Of course, anyone's always welcome, but I'm not actively looking for new hires at the moment. Maybe I'll open a superstore next year.”

They'd come as far as the women's clothing department, where a salesgirl with long, sandy blond hair was sale-tagging a display of floral-print blouses, each identical to the one that she was wearing.