Small World (29 page)

He passed down a rack of coats. Idly he caressed a shabby fur coat. The fine silky hairs passing through his fingers recalled the day Dolly had sent him to bring her coat from its closet. There was an enormous walk-in closet in her bedroom, full of more clothes than she ever wore. She never gave any of them away, so the range : hemlines and style was an education in the whims of fashion for a couple of decades. The closet had a closet, a chilly slice in the cry back where she kept her furs. He had stepped in casually, ready to grab the right one and walk out, but the fur had been like - water, all around him. Instinctively, he held his head, keeping his

nose in the air, which was heavy with the peculiar dusty smell of the coats, and stagnant and cold as well. Simple claustrophobia created the sensation of drowning, but it had been a wonderful drowning, caressed by the furs.

She became impatient and found him there, shook him loose of his trance. She might have guessed, for that evening, she allowed him to jump her while she still wore the coat. He pretended he was a crew member of the Starship Enterprise, establishing good interstellar relations, this time, with a native of the planet Nutria.

It was light years from the Salvation Army store. He diagnosed space fever, only to be expected when an old spacer like himself makes a planet-fall, after years among the stars. He gave the balding raccoon a final pat and left the store, hoping he could find his way home better than he found his way to this place of the castoff and abandoned.

His last day home was a work day for his mother, but she took a sick day so that she could see him off. She thought it was the least she could do, seeing that he had worked so hard, putting the house to rights. There was nothing Roger could say that would make her go back to work. He was not going to leave without her farewell.

In the space of a week, he’d made the necessary minor repairs around the house. He’d had her car serviced and arranged to sell his own, which had been garaged while he was away. After cleaning out his study in the cellar, he shipped a number of innocuous-looking boxes to Dolly's Manhattan address and carted several loads of one thing or another to shopping-center dumpsters. He was careful to do his cleaning out while his mother worked, in the hope that she wouldn’t notice. What she would feel when she discovered his teenage clubhouse, his home at home, was now empty of all but the mouse-gnawed, scarred furniture, and the dust kitties and spider webs, he preferred not to think about.

He put his duffel bag on the porch. There was nothing else to take besides the minimizer, in its carrycase on his chest like some exotic good luck charm, to deposit in the rental car. His mother waited in the living room, which was dark in the middle of the day, the shades pulled against the sun. Standing near the door, he couldn’t help twitching, wanting to run, to be done with her.

She broke the silent tension between them as if it were a sewing thread, with a quick snap of her teeth.

‘You aren’t coming back, are you, Roger?’

And he had kidded himself that mothers couldn’t read minds.

‘Don’t be silly, Mom. I’ll be back,’ he lied.

‘You took all your clothes away,’ she accused him.

He shrugged. ‘They were too big for me. I gave them to the Salvation Army.’

‘Your car. You sold it.’

‘I told you. It’s not worth maintaining one here. I’ll rent one when 1 come home.’

She had more evidence to marshal.

‘You took your books away, too.’

‘I gave the kid books away. The other ones I might be able to use, so I sent them to New York. Where my work is.’

'And where you’re going to live. You’ll stay there, and never come back.’ Her slack chin trembled in emphasis.

‘I’m staying as long as the job lasts. For Christ’s sake, Mom, a job is a job. It took me months to find this one, and it’s a good one.’

'Don’t swear at me, Roger. I’m still your mother. I expect some respect.’

'Sorry, Mom,’ he mumbled.

'Why Can’t I go with you?’

There, the big question was out of the bag. The last thing he wanted to hear.

It’s a bad time,’ he told her. ‘Maybe later, when I’ve got a good ipartment, and I’m all settled. When we can get a decent price for .he house. And I’m making enough so you won’t have to worry ibout working for anyone.’ He couldn’t think of any more conditions but he tried.

She watched him suspiciously. The set of her face told him she *as buying his line about as much as she once bought his defense ?f being kicked out of graduate school. Behind the close imitation .■>f an Incan mask, the only indictment was made:
If they say you’re rrazy, you must have been acting crazy. What’s wrong with you, Growing away an education? Dad and I sacrificed for you. How could you put your opinions first?

And his answer then:
I was right. They were wrong.
Now she a as
they.
The issue wasn’t so clear-cut.

He stepped hard on his growing panic. He was an adult man; he idn't have to quail before his mother’s disapproval. It was his afe, goddamn it. And excruciatingly late beginning, too.

It’s a woman, isn’t it?’ she said suddenly. Her eyes were bright, marching out the truth in his. ‘That’s why you’re so skinny and

you got all those fancy new clothes.’

Roger blushed. ‘Mom,’ he protested.

It was answer enough. Turning her face into the shadows of the room, she acknowledged she had lost the undeclared war for her son.

He approached cautiously, bent, and kissed the cheek she presented to him. It was cold and slack, with the texture of an aging peach. But it was dry, and that was a relief. She was letting him go easily.

Driving away, he argued with himself. What place could he > make for her in his new life? He might as well be living on another planet. What would Dolly make of her? No, he couldn’t go back, not for good. He shrank from the implied promises of future visits as if they were something catching. It would be sinking back into the past, into a tar pit of guilt. His choice was made. A man had to live his own life.

He distracted himself finally by worrying about Leyna. Before leavinghe had zapped a week’s supply of food. No more than that, as a signal to Dolly that he would be back when he promised, drawn by the magnet of both his dollies.

Feeding Leyna had turned out. to be more of problem than they’d anticipated. Ruta fussed about invasions of her kitchen. He’d installed a bar refrigerator and a microwave in the dollhouse room so that it was now possible to prepare food for their tiny house guest with a measure of discretion. The neat little appliances rather excited him; he would like to have one of each in his own bedroom. But soon, when Leyna was strong enough to care for herself, he would zap them and install them in the Doll’s White House.

Roger thought eagerly that he would be happy to see her again. Very happy. And then, like a pinprick or a bee sting, he realized he meant
Leyna.

There was a new meal; steak, potatoes, green stuff, pie, with a rose in a vase. She thought of restaurants she had been in that affected a single flower on a table. And in those pretentious places she had eaten similar meals, pretty and no doubt high-priced, but with the meat and other cooked food not quite hot, and the cold elements of the meal limp with sitting around. Someone goofing off at the microwave and everything done up hours and hours before the actual meal, to save work.

Still, she ate it. Wouldn’t send it back if she could. Starvation is

a wonderful way to keep the customers in line.

It seemed that the terrible hunger might be at an end. She had a bowl of fruit to snack on, a tin of cookies, a can of nuts. Nourished on a regular basis, thoroughly rested, and in her own clothes again, she felt herself once more. A desire for the physical exercise to which she was so long accustomed formed. Her thigh muscles had thinned and slackened. The bruises were the faintest shadow but her color was too pale, her bones too prominent. If she no longer looked like death warmed over, she still thought she might qualify for a place on a refugee boat. But she had gotten used to it; most of the time, she could look in the mirror and not wince.

She left her bedroom and wandered through the house. The place was uncanny. It gave her the creeps. She was constantly stumbling over objects she recognized. Even more unsettling were the times she expected to find something, a door, a desk, a rug, and it wasn’t there.

At last she found the kitchen, in the lowest story of the house, along with a laundry room equipped to handle a huge establishment. It was all strictly pre-World War II. The laundry room took her back to the one in her grandmother’s house in Chicago, with its huge sinks and presses and wringer washers, but it lacked the distinctive odor, the perfume of bleach, and soap, and heat. The enormous, old-fashioned kitchen was barren of food; if she had managed to find it before she could have starved to death in the middle of it. Like the laundry, it gave no signs of ever having been used. Bewildered, she wandered back upstairs.

She began to feel cooped up. There had been glimpses of green through various windows, but she had not had strength to venture outside. Knowing the South Portico would open onto the greater garden, she chose it for her exit.

Pressing her face to the glass doors, she could see the green of grass, trees, and shrubbery, encircled by a drive that passed just outside. A blur of colors centered in the green; she thought it was some kind of fantastic structure, like a circus tent, or a brilliantly flowered garden. When she pushed open the door, the greenery scented air rushed in upon her, and the faint sound of music reached her ears. The freshness of the air made her realize how iong she had been inside, in rooms where the atmosphere was not precisely stale, but rather preserved, as in a library or museum.

Beyond the distortion of the glass, she saw that the blur of color was a Carousel. It was from there that the music emanated. She

was drawn to it as if by a magnet; whoever can resist a merry-go-round? She watched it whirling by, riderless and ghostly. When it slowed and stopped, she hoisted herself onto its platform without thinking.

After circuiting the parade, she selected a black charger as her mount. She intended to sit on it for only a second or two, pretending to ride, trying to recall the sensations of her childhood, but the merry-go-round wheezed and creaked and began to spin again. As it slowly revolved, she had ample time to jump down. But she chose not to; it was simply too much fun to sit astride her magnificent black horse, riding it up and down, while the breeze of their passage lightened her hair. The smells of the vegetation intensified in the air current, as if they were being sucked liquidly along for the ride. It was glorious.

She stepped down when it stopped. Sometime she would ride it again. First there was too much else to be explored, much more that she need to know, that the merry-go-round could not tell her. It started again as she backed away; apparently it was operated automatically. It was hard to leave it. As she stood and watched it, a memory tried to form itself, struggled in her brain, and then faded beyond reach.

Thoroughly distracted, she turned her back on the music and sauntered down the lefthand arm of the drive. Peeking back at the house she came from, she was disconcerted to realize that a thick copse of trees obscured not only the additions to the White House on either side, but the buildings that should have been visible from the site. It struck her then that there were no additions, for she had not found any of the entrances to the wings within. The exterior was indeed that of the White House, but it was smaller, more compact, more the original White House than the one she had entered as Matt Johnson’s guest. And of course it was only habit that made her look for the familiar landmarks around the White House. If this was not the White House, but some copy, it was unlikely that it existed within sight of Pennsylvania Avenue.

It made her head reel a little. She began to trot slowly away down the drive, looking back at the house every few seconds. The merry-go-round was not as unlikely an addition to the grounds as it might have seemed; she had witnessed enormous colorful tents erected in that very place for garden parties. Nor was it beyond the reach of Matt Johnson’s imagination to plant a whole carousel in the backyard of the White House.

The conftision in her mind cleared suddenly. She remembered the curious disappearance of the Central Park Carousel. Only a few days before her accident. It brought her to a sudden stop, with a pain in her stomach as if she’d been punched. Abruptly, she sat down and covered her eyes, trying to work it out in her head. None of it made sense. A fierce black headache cramped her thinking.

She was carrying a handful of nuts in the pocket of her shorts. When the headache began to ease, she nibbled them. Slowly, her body relaxed and then, as the pebbled surface of the drive began to pinch her, became uncomfortable again. Scrambling to her feet, she shuffled on. Details, she told herself, enough details would paint the picture for her, in time.

Never having been much interested in plants and trees, it was hard for her to recall much about the grounds of the White House. Grass she knew when she saw it, all kinds, and a tree she recognized as a tree. She could tell an evergreen from a deciduous, a red maple from a willow. Shrubberies were bushes, and flowers came in different colors and tended to hug the ground except for climbing vines and sunflowers and hollyhocks. Not hopelessly ignorant, she could grin, but close to it. She knew magnolias by their smell, and a rose is a rose, isn’t it? All that foofaraw came down to not being able to say exactly why this garden, like the White House she resided in, was strangely out of focus.