The Hotel New Hampshire (21 page)

“Mine’s stuck!” said a woman from New Jersey, who’d had a little too much to drink; she had a sharp, squeaky giggle of the mindless quality of hamsters running miles and miles on those little wheels in their cages.

A man from Connecticut turned bright red in the face, trying to lift his chair, until his wife said, “It’s nailed down. There are nails that go right into the floor.”

A man from Massachusetts knelt on the floor by his chair. “Screws,” he said. “Those are
screws
—four or five of them, for each chair!”

The Texan knelt down on the floor and stared at his chair.

“
Everything’s
screwed down here!” Iowa Bob shouted, suddenly. He had not spoken to anyone since after the game, when he told the scout from Penn State that Junior Jones could play anywhere. His face was unfamiliarly red and shining, as if he’d had one more drink than he usually allowed himself—or the sense of his own retirement had finally come to him. “We’re all on a big ship!” said Iowa Bob. “We’re on a big cruise, across the world!”

“Ya-
hoo
!” the Texan shouted. “I’ll drink to that!”

The woman from New Jersey clutched the back of her screwed-down chair. Some of the others sat down.

“We’re in danger of being swept away, at any time!” Coach Bob said, and Ronda Ray came swishing back and forth between Bob and the Dairy parents poised at their well-fastened seats; she was passing out the coasters, and the cocktail napkins again, and flicking a damp towel over the edges of the tables. Frank peeked in from the door to the hall; Mother and the Uricks seemed paralyzed in the kitchen doorway; Father had lost none of the glitter he absorbed from the bar mirror, but he stared at his father, old Iowa Bob, as if he feared that the retired coach was about to say something crazy.

“Of
course
the chairs are screwed down!” Bob said, sweeping his arm toward the sky, as if he were giving his last halftime speech—and this were the game of his life. “At the Hotel New Hampshire,” said Iowa Bob, “when the shit hits the fan, nobody gets blown away!”

“Ya-
hoo
!” the Texan cried again, but everyone else seemed to have stopped breathing.

“Just hold on to your seats!” said Coach Bob. “And nothing will ever hurt you here.”

“Ya-
hoo
! Thank
God
the chairs are screwed down!” the big-hearted Texan cried. “Let’s all drink to that!”

The wife of the man from Connecticut gave an audible sigh of relief.

“Well, I guess, we’ll just have to speak up if we’re all going to be friends and
talk
to each other!” the Texan said.

“Yes!” said the New Jersey woman, a little breathlessly. Father was still staring at Iowa Bob, but Bob was just fine—he turned and winked at Frank in the hall doorway, and bowed to Mother and the Uricks, and Ronda Ray came through the room again and gave the old coach a saucy stroke across his cheek, and the Texan watched Ronda as if he’d forgotten all about chairs—screwed down or not screwed down. Who cares if the chairs can’t be moved? he was thinking to himself—because Ronda Ray had more moves than Harold Swallow, and she was into the spirit of opening night, like everyone else.

“Ya-hoo,” Franny whispered in my ear, but I sat at the bar watching Father make the drinks. He looked more concentrated with energy than I had ever seen him before, and the gradual volume of voices came over me—and always would: I will remember that restaurant and bar, in
that
Hotel New Hampshire, as a place that was always so loud with talk, even if there weren’t many people there. Like the Texan said, everyone had to speak up if they were going to sit so far apart.

And even after the Hotel New Hampshire had been open long enough so that we recognized many of our customers, from the town, as “regulars”—those who were at the bar every night until closing time, just before which old Iowa Bob would appear for a nightcap before he turned in—even during those familiar evenings, with those familiar few, Bob could still pull his favorite trick. “Hey, pull up your chair,” he’d say to someone, and someone would always be fooled. For a moment, forgetting where he or she was, someone would give a little lift, a little grunt, a little perplexed strain would pass across a face, and Iowa Bob would laugh and cry out, “
Nothing
moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We’re screwed down here—for
life
!”

That opening night, after the bar and restaurant was closed and everyone had gone to bed, Franny and Frank and I met at the switchboard and did a bed check on each of the rooms with the unique squawk-box system. We could hear who slept soundly, and who snored; we could detect who was still up (reading), and we were surprised (and disappointed) to discover no couples were talking, or making love.

Iowa Bob slept like a subway, rumbling miles and miles underground. Mrs. Urick had left a stockpot simmering, and Max was playing his usual static. The New Jersey couple was reading, or one of them was: the slow turning of pages, the short breaths of the nonsleeper. The Connecticut pair wheezed and whinnied and whooped in their sleep; their room was a boiler room of sound. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, and Maine all gave off the sounds of their various habits of repose.

Then we switched on the Texan. “Ya-hoo,” I said to Franny.

“Whoo-pee,” she whispered back.

We expected to hear his cowboy boots striking the floor; we expected to hear him drinking out of his hat, or sleeping like a horse—his long legs cantering under the covers, his big hands strangling the bed. But we heard nothing.

“He’s dead!” Frank said, making Franny and me jump.

“Jesus, Frank,” Franny said. “Maybe he’s just out of his room.”

“He’s had a heart attack,” Frank said. “He’s overweight and he drank too much.”

We listened. Nothing. No horse. No creaking of boots. Not a breath.

Franny switched the Texan’s room from Receiving to Broadcasting. “Ya-hoo?” she whispered.

And then it came to us—all three of us (even Frank) seemed to grasp it. It took, Franny about one second to switch to Ronda Ray’s “dayroom.”

“You want to know what a
dayroom
is, Frank?” she asked. And on came the unforgettable sound.

As Iowa Bob said, we
are
on a big cruise, across the world, and we’re in danger of being swept away, at any time.

Frank and Franny and I gripped our chairs.

“
Oooooooooo
!” gasped Ronda Ray.

“
Hoo, hoo, hoo
!” the Texan cried.

And later he said, “I sure appreciate this.”

“Phooey,” Ronda said.

“No, I do, I really
do
,” he said. We heard him peeing—like a horse, it went on forever. “You don’t know how hard it is for me to hit that little bitty toilet up on the fourth floor,” he said. “It’s so far down,” the Texan said, “I have to take aim before I shoot.”

“Ha!” cried Ronda Ray.

“Ya-
hoo
!” the Texan said.

“Dis
gus
ting,” Frank said, and went to bed, but Franny and I stayed up until the only sounds on the squawk box were the sounds of sleep.

In the morning it was raining, and I made a point of holding my breath every time I ran by the second-floor landing—not wanting to disturb Ronda, and knowing what she thought of my “breathing.”

Blue in the face, I passed the Texan climbing between three and four.

“Ya-hoo!” I said.

“Morning! Morning!” he cried. “Staying in shape, huh?” he said. “Good for you! Your body’s got to last you all your life, you know.”

“Yessir,” I said, and ran up and down some more.

About the thirtieth trip I was beginning to bring back the Black Arm of the Law, and the sight of Franny’s missing fingernail—how so much pain seemed focused at this bleeding tip of her hand, and perhaps distracted her from the rest of her body—when Ronda Ray blocked my way on the second-floor landing.

“Whoa, boy,” she said, and I stopped. She was wearing one of her nightgowns, and if the sun had been shining, the light would have shot right through the material and lit her up for me—but it was a gloomy light, that morning, and the dim stairwell revealed very little of her. Just her moves, and her absorbing odor.

“Good morning,” I said. “Ya-hoo!”

“Ya-hoo to you, John-O,” she said. I smiled and ran in place.

“You’re
breathing
again,” Ronda told me.

“I was trying to hold my breath for you,” I panted, “but I got too tired.”

“I can hear your fucking
heart
,” she said.

“It’s good for me,” I said.

“It’s not good for
me
,” Ronda said. She put her hand on my chest, as if she were reading my heartbeat. I stopped running in place; I needed to spit.

“John-O,” said Ronda Ray, “if you
like
to breathe this hard and make your heart pound, you should come see
me
the next time it rains.”

And I ran up and down the stairs about forty more times. It will probably never rain again, I thought. I was too tired to eat anything at breakfast.

“Just have a banana,” said Iowa Bob, but I looked away from it. “And an orange or two,” Bob said. I excused myself.

Egg was in the bathroom and he wouldn’t let Franny in.

“Why don’t Franny and Egg take their baths together?” Father asked. Egg was six, and in another year he would probably be too embarrassed to take a bath with Franny. He was fond of baths now because of all the tub toys he possessed; when you used the bathroom after Egg had been there, the bathtub looked like a children’s beach—abandoned during an air raid. Hippos, boats, frogmen, rubber birds, lizards, alligators, a shark with a wind-up mouth, a seal with wind-up flippers, a ghastly yellow turtle—every conceivable imitation of amphibious life, sodden and dripping on the tub floor and crunching on the bathmat, underfoot.

“Egg!” I would scream. “Come clean up your shit!”

“
What
shit?” Egg would cry.

“Honestly, your
language
, “ Mother said—repeatedly, to us all.

Frank had taken to peeing against the trash barrels at the delivery entrance in the morning; he claimed he could never get to the bathroom when he wanted to. I went upstairs and used the bathroom attached to Iowa Bob’s room, and used the weights there, too, of course.

“What a racket to wake up to!” old Bob complained. “I never thought this is how retirement would be. Listening to someone peeing and weight-lifting. What an alarm clock!”

“You like to get up early, anyway,” I told him.

“It’s not
when
that I mind,” said the old coach. “It’s
how
.”

And we slipped through November that way—a freak snowfall early in the month: it really should have been rain, I knew. What did it mean that it
wasn’t
rain? I wondered, thinking of Ronda Ray and her dayroom.

It was a dry November.

Egg had a run of ear infections; he seemed partially deaf most of the time.

“Egg, what did you do with my green sweater?” Franny asked.

“What?” Egg said.

“My green sweater!” Franny screamed.

“I don’t have a green sweater,” Egg said.

“It’s
my
green sweater!” Franny shouted. “He dressed his bear in it yesterday—I saw it,” Franny told Mother. “And now I can’t find it.”

“Egg, where’s your bear?” Mother asked.

“Franny doesn’t have a bear,” Egg said. “’That’s
my
bear.”

“Where’s my running hat?” I asked Mother. “It was on the radiator in the hall last night.”

“Egg’s bear is probably wearing it,” Frank said. “And he’s out doing wind sprints.”

“What?” Egg said.

Lilly also had medical problems. We had our annual physicals just before Thanksgiving and our family doctor—an old geezer named Dr. Blaze, whose fire, Franny remarked, was almost out—discovered during a routine check that Lilly hadn’t grown in a year. Not a pound, not a fraction of an inch. She was exactly the same size she’d been when she was nine, which was not much bigger than she’d been at eight—or (checking the records) at seven.

“She’s not growing?” Father asked.

“I’ve said so, for years,” Franny said. “Lilly
doesn’t
grow—she just
is
.”

Lilly seemed unimpressed by the analysis; she shrugged. “So I’m small,” she said. “Everyone’s always saying so. So what’s the matter with being small?”

“Nothing, dear,” Mother said. “You can be as small as you want, but you should be growing—just a little.”

“She’s going to be one of those who shoots up all at once,” said Iowa Bob, but even he looked doubtful. Lilly didn’t impress you as the sort who would ever “shoot up.”

We made her stand back to back with Egg; at six, Egg was almost as big as Lilly at ten, and he certainly looked more solid.

“Stand still!” Lilly said to Egg. “Stop standing on your toes!”

“What?” said Egg.

“Stop standing on your toes, Egg!” Franny said.

“They’re
my
toes!” Egg said.

“Maybe I’m dying,” Lilly said, and everyone shivered, especially Mother.

“You are
not
dying,” Father said, sternly.

“Frank’s the only one who’s dying,” Franny said.

“No,” said Frank. “I have already died. And the living bore me to death.”

“Stop it,” Mother said.

I went to lift weights in Iowa Bob’s room. Every time the weights rolled off the end of the barbell, one of them struck the closet door, and it opened, and out fell something. Coach Bob was terrible about the closet; he just threw everything in there loose. And one morning when Iowa Bob dropped a few weights, one of them rolled into the closet and out rolled Egg’s bear. The bear was wearing my running hat, Franny’s green sweater, a pair of Mother’s nylons.

“Egg!” I screamed.

“What?” Egg screamed.

“I found your damn bear!” I yelled.

“It’s
my
bear!” Egg yelled back.

“Jesus God,” Father said, and Egg went to Dr. Blaze to have his ears checked, again, and Lilly went to Dr. Blaze to have her size checked, again.