Small World (22 page)

Dolly put out a cigarette in the ashtray she was carrying. She reeked at Leyna once more, now sweetly ensconced in her replica :f the Queen’s bedroom.

I'm going up, too, for a swim,’ she announced, and stalked

away.

Roger nodded his approval but she was gone, leaving cigarette smoke behind her like a trail of vapor from a train. She seemed jittery; a swim would be good for her. He’d have to speak to her about smoking, though. It wasn’t good for the plants, or for the dollhouses with their fine furniture, or for teeny tiny Leyna.

Hunger and thirst, those ever popular apocalyptic twins, woke her. She felt so weak. Even the ache all over her body was weak. She could barely open her eyes.

The light in the room had changed, but she could not judge what time of day it might be, except that it was not nighttime. A small lamp shed a little over the bed.

She had lost weight; she didn’t need to look. She could tell just by moving that she was down twenty pounds, at least. This was the way she’d felt after a bout of flu three years ago. It had been weeks before she was herself again. The only compensation had been not having to diet for a while. Coffee milkshakes and sticky buns. And real cream in her coffee.

She was salivating. It relieves the thirst a little, she thought dully. She rolled over and sat up. Her chest immediately protested the effort. Her heart was thudding like an old water pump. She closed her eyes and waited.

This was what a person got for trying to stay in shape. Flat on your ass. She would like to know what had happened to her. And where she was.

Opening her eyes again, she looked at the room. The same room she had seen before through a veil of pain. An old-fashioned room, with antique furniture. Large windows covered with expensive looking draperies. A fireplace with a fire laid and unlit in it. A mirror over the mantel that was disturbingly familiar. The commode by the bed, thank God for that.

Reminded of it, she slithered out of bed and unlidded the pot. The stale force of her own urine assaulted her nose. She wrinkled her nose and held her breath long enough to do her business. This time she was recovered enough to wish for a tissue, but there was no roll of paper hidden discreetly in the back of the little commode.

Back on the bed, she rested from the effort. Someone would come soon and tell her what had happened and where she was. Probably someone had been in and out while she slept. She ignored the evidence of the pot that surely would have been taken away and emptied if anyone had been about. She would find a real bathroom, she decided, and empty it herself. A real bathroom would have water in it, and another of her needs would be answered.

Two doors in the bedroom, and one of them logically had to be a bathroom. Once out of the bed again, she was chilled into consciousness of her own nakedness. Her breasts were cold lumps on her chest. It was as if she had not flesh left on her, only her cold hard bones. There was something embarrassing about standing mother-naked in the middle of a strange place, but she chided herself. The president wasn’t going to come walking in. And that was a strange thought to intrude itself but then, she knew she wasn’t herself. She fumbled, nevertheless, with the bed linen, wrestling the top sheet off the bed and draping it to cover her shoulders. She was slightly warmer.

She limped across the floor, supporting herself on furniture as she went. Once she stopped to rest against a beautiful old wardrobe. It smelled of its finish, polish, sachet, and sawdust, all mixed together. It was necessary, though, to abandon its silken .support and make for the nearest door.

TTie door opened onto a hallway that was one with the room, carpeted with an old Oriental rug and dotted with antiques. Furniture that was by definition old and well made and nearly useless, except to fill appropriate spaces, on the excuse of holding up a pot of flowers or a tatty bust. There were more doors along the way. It was not what she needed just then. She closed the door.

Groping her way along the wall to the other door in the room, she had to pass the fireplace. In the mirror on the mantel, a glimpse of herself as her own ghost, shockingly white, bony, iumped out at her. Her eyes were sunken and dull in great smudgy pits. She couldn’t look at herself.

The knob of the second door gave way to a feeble push. She staggered in, taking in the room at once. Another old-fashioned room but a bathroom. A chain-pull toilet, a claw-footed tub, a basin of the kind that had always reminded her of a heron, asleep on one foot. Her first trembling touch on the basin told her it was cold, sleek porcelain, not plastic or fibre glass. Ignoring the small glass in the filigreed holder on the wall, she reached convulsively ior the faucet. The small c written on the ceramic button inlaid in its handle filled her vision. She jerked the faucet. The water would not come. Again she jerked it, cursing her own weakness. Still, no water. The hot water faucet turned as easily but it, too, gave nothing.

Stumbling to the bathtub, she turned both faucets on, to no result. Groping from bath to toilet, she seized the seat with both hands and lifted it. The bow! was dry. When she dropped the lid, defeated, it sounded like a shutter being dashed against a wall by the wind.

She sank to the floor and buried her head in her hands. The fantasies of soaking baths, cool drinks, and a proper bowel movement dissipated like an oasis in a mirage. What sort of bathroom had no water?

‘Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn,’ she mumbled.

The tears came suddenly, the taps of emotions opened violently. Why was she here, and where was she and why was she all alone? Who had turned off the water and why? There were so many unanswered questions and she couldn’t think, not without food and water. Shivering, she gathered her sheet around her. She was growing colder.

Leaning against the cold surface of the toilet bowl, she whispered, ‘Mummy, I want Mummy.’

In a moment or two she stopped crying. The cold, thirst, and hunger had become more demanding than mere grief and terror. She would grope her way back to the bed and at least be warm. As she rose to her feet, she noticed there was a roll of paper next to the john. Fumbling it from its holder, she clutched it with one hand and her sheet with the other. A very small profit on so painful a journey, but it was something. Later she would empty the chamberpot into the toilet. At least then she would not have to smell her own waste, even if she couldn’t flush it.

The pillows, the velvety quilt, were gifts for which to be grateful. She drew them around her, and closed her eyes again. She was so tired, so tired. Perhaps someone
(Mummy)
would come soon and take care of her.

Roger peeked in at the window. She’d moved. Excitement burbled in his stomach, driving away his heartburn. The bedclothes looked like a war had happened in them. And the little pot was out of its cupboard. She slept now and he didn’t want to wake her, so he held his breath. She needed all the sleepy-bye time she could get. It was part of the compensation process. He wished she didn’t look quite so terrible, diminished, the way his dad had the last six months of his life.

He would bring food and water for her. She would be wanting that when she woke again, especially if she had been awake long enough to use the potty. But first he had to tell someone.

He trotted off to look for Dolly and found her in her bedroom, changing her clothes.

‘Guess what?’

Dolly looked up from doing her shoes. They were all straps, about a million buckles. Roger loved them. Suddenly, though, she fumbled and bit her lip. ‘She’s been awake,’ he announced before she could ask w'hat.

Dolly sucked in a long, shaky breath. ‘At last.’ She bent over her shoes, hurrying now to finish up. ‘I can tell you now I was beginning to get worried.’

‘I’m going to cook up something for her.’ Roger stopped to hug Dolly. ‘I’ll be right back.’

So transported with his little plans was Roger, that he didn’t see she looked after him with the edge of jealousy in her eyes. Seizing a tube of hand cream, she rubbed lotion in her hands, to stop their sudden trembling.

Roger found her peeking through the dollhouse windows when he returned. He bore a plate of scrambled eggs, with a slice of wheat toast carefully quartered, and a glass of orange juice.

‘She won’t be able to eat all that,’ Dolly objected. ‘It’ll go to waste.’

‘I’ll eat what she doesn’t want,’ he volunteered bravely.

Dolly glared at him. He ignored her, happy to have, once at least, put her in the corner. Either she tossed away the small change represented by the grub or she let Roger off his diet. Hee

Hee.

She struck back. ‘You can’t put that Christawful huge plate in

there.’

Then she proceeded to pull up one of the walls of the dollhouse. It made a hideous noise, and Roger peered at Leyna anxiously. She didn’t move.

Rummaging in a china cabinet, Dolly came up with a couple of display pieces, samples of one of the many presidential dinner services. She examined the pieces critically before giving them to Roger. U nsure of what he was to do with them, he stared at them.

Lenox,’ she informed him. ‘Harry Truman picked them out. I like the lilies, don’t you?’

Desperately trying to hold up his end of what seemed to him to be a perfectly insane conversation, Roger mumbled, ‘I like the ones with the eagles.’

Harry Truman, he thought, had nothing to do with these tiny dolls’ dishes; they were copies of dishes the former president had selected. Dolly talked about the furnishings of her Doll’s White House the way his mother talked about her soap operas, like it (or life as lived in the television romances) was more real than real. It must have something to do with women’s monthlies, one more evidence of their cyclical craziness.

‘Eagles!’ Dolly fairly spat. ‘Every goddamn thing in the White House had an eagle on it. I hate them.’

Roger shrugged. His mother would have said what can’t be changed, must be endured. Dolly could stand a dose of that philosophy. He set about apportioning a tiny quantity of the eggs to the small plate.

‘Put the wall back,’ she ordered.

Roger didn’t want to but he tried to do it as gently as possible, for Leyna’s sake.

‘Now take that one out.’

He hesitated.

‘She’s sleeping,’ he objected in a whisper.

‘Well, shit, she’s slept for days. Why did you make this food if you weren’t going to feed it to her while it was hot?’

The logic was unassailable. He moved the wall.

She heard the voices in the distance. They were like the soundtrack of a movie, heard from the theater lobby. Opening her eyes, she sat up. Someone had said something and then ‘eat,’ she was certain of it. There was a rumbling noise, like an old elevator struggling up or down and then the voices again. ‘Eagles,’ she heard. And an emphatic, ‘Well, shit’ and then the rumbling came again, like a small earthquake all around her, and the wall with the windows in it was gone. She stared at it, going, rising upward, and the light poured in, making her blink rapidly. She thought she made out enormous shapes like nothing she had ever seen in her life.

She sat bolt upright in the bed and opened her mouth. Her throat was paralyzed; she could only make a kind of piteous mewing. And then the Hand, a hand as big as she was, bigger than her bed, reached in.

The scream she had been trying to scream tore from her throat. She covered her eyes.

Roger cast a reproachful glance at Dolly. It was fruitless;
she
was staring at the teeny tiny woman, who was crouched in the farthest available point of the bed from the intruders. Dolly reached into the house again. Roger grabbed her elbow. Surely she could see the extent of Leyna’s terror. But Dolly stopped of her own accord, as the thin agonized whine reached their ears. The teeny tiny woman was moaning. It was terrible to hear.

‘What’s wrong?’ Dolly asked Roger in a low, faint voice. There was genuine alarm in her expression.

‘She’s scared.’

Roger placed the little silver tray with its china dishes at the very edge of the room. He began to move the wall back into place, as carefully as he had removed it. Dolly drew back and watched. Leyna watched, too, wide eyed and wary, from a cocoon of bed linen. When the wall hid her from their view, Roger took Dolly by the hand and gently tugged her away.

‘I want to see,’ she hissed.

With both hands on her shoulders, he pushed her out.

‘Sure.’

Roger closed the door between Dolly’s bedroom and the dollhouse-room. He sat on the edge of the bed.

‘Have a butt,’ he said, tossing a pack of cigarettes at her.

She caught them reflexively, stared at them as if she had forgotten what they were. Sighing, she ripped the pack open.

'Let her get used to it a minute. It won’t take long. The human mind can accept anything.’

Roger flopped back onto the bed. His own thoughts fixed on the rest of the scrambled eggs, cooling beside the Doll’s White House.

‘Gimme one of those,’ he requested. Any port in a storm, his mother might say.

The wall descended. She did not breathe until it completed the room once more. She stayed frozen a few seconds, watching to see that it stayed where it was supposed to and then scooted weakly across the floor to claim the tray, simply unable to resist the siren