The Parallel Apartments (18 page)

“How about both?” said Justine, starting the car. “I'm rich. Somebody bought one of my collages at Flightpath Coffee. Thirty-five bucks.”

“Good for you, darling,” said Lou.

“Good for you, darling,” said Dot. “Don't run over your spider.”

No one mentioned what had gone on inside the Sherpa's house.

Justine began to take them regularly to their late-afternoon thrice-weekly appointments at Sherpa's. Justine was never asked inside, and frankly was happy to sit in the car and listen to KVET. Afterward, they would drive through Wendy's, then go right over to Dan's and get a booth, where Lou would order three hamburgers and a Coke and Justine would order one hamburger and a Dr Pepper, and Dot, wrapped in her afghan, would devour her Frosty and fries.

Justine would then take everyone home. Lou would nap for a while in the garage, and Dot would read, do puzzles, and sleep, often in strange positions, laughing and cursing and gesturing. Justine would go to her room and masturbate with what she was certain was illegal lechery and élan to fantastically invented scenarios involving her guidance counselor, Gracie Yin, which always ended with excellent, whipping orgasms that quickly withered to shame and guilt, mitigable only with homework and macaroni and cheese and later a visit with Dot, if she was awake. Around midnight, she'd go back to her room again, masturbate some more, despair, listen for Charlotte to stir and creep around the house while it was quiet. Finally, around two in the morning, when she heard Lou opening and closing the side door to the garage and starting the washing machine, Justine would fall asleep.

* * *

One afternoon in the beginning of February, Archibold Bamberger, Livia's boyfriend, was at the house baking Shrinky Dinks with odd symbols on them and placing them atop doorjambs around the house, muttering convocations over each one. As he went about his enterprise, Justine followed him around, complaining about how broke she was. The two of them lowered their muttering and complaints to whispers when in the living room, so as not to disturb Dot.

Archibold's silhouette recalled that of the Liberty Bell. Always sitting daintily on top of his head was a large straw sun hat, the beaded hatband of which read
I ♥ COBLYNAUS
. From under the sun hat his long, stout, brown-gray macrame ponytail ran down his back. All of Archibold's shirts were soiled along the spine where the ponytail lay, an effect most obvious in the oversnug white T-shirt in which he was presently encased.

While he consecrated a Shrinky Dink to the bathroom doorjamb, Justine recognized with no little appall that several long locks of Livia's distinctly black hair were interlacing his fuscous do. It had never been easy, or desirable, for Justine to picture any of her relatives in sexual activity, but seeing her adoptive mother's dismembered waves enshrined in another person's ponytail was somehow way more disturbing than picturing her bouncing around on some faceless lover, her big boobs flippery-floppering about.

Archibold turned, lifting the ponytail into orbit.

“I think I can get you a job,” he said.

“Really? How?”

“I'm a magazine and newspaper deliveryman. I deliver to bookstores and newsstands and grocery stores all over town. And in one of those places I know a lady looking for a smart girl.”

“Is it Crammed Shelf?” said Justine, excited; she'd always wanted to work in the city's largest and hippest bookstore.

“I do deliver there, it's true,” said Archibold, with what seemed like a little pride, “but that's not where.”

The next day a certain Fanny Kimball, the manager of DeLeon Drugs on DeLeon street, called and offered Justine an after-school position.

“Archibold Bamberger indicated you were looking for a job,” said Fanny. “Well, I need a self-motivated person whose only flaw is perfectionism and
whose only reason for speaking is to agree with me, to manage our famously comprehensive magazine and newspaper arena, as good as or better than Crammed Shelf's. Make your own hours. Can't pay you no minimum wage, though, so you can just forget about that. But you can keep the unsold magazines, minus the covers, that's what we send back for credit. And you can buy candy at 10 percent over wholesale and sell it to your friends at school. Plus you'll see Archibold when he delivers. So there're perks. Whaddaya say?”

“Okay.”

Fanny paid $1.97 an hour, in cash, on Mondays. Justine put in more than thirty hours every week, about half of those on weekends. It was nice to see Archibold, who came by almost every day with papers and new issues of magazines. Sometimes they went to lunch together across the street at the Circle-Star Steakhouse, a greasy spoon that opened in 1912 and that might not have been cleaned since, such was the connatural sticky, smoky, deep-fried disposition of the place. They would order chicken-frieds and talk about magazines, the occult, and, occasionally, the bearing of the odd family unit that comprised the population of Justine's house.

“I think,” Justine said one afternoon between chews of a steak so tough she'd had to pick it up from the plate with her bare hands and tear a piece off with her teeth, “my grandmother might be warming up to Lou. I wonder what went wrong in the first place.”

Archibold looked at Justine, open, wide-eyed, flushed at the temples, as if he might start crying.

“I wonder,” he said finally, looking down and digging the biscuit out of the loch of cream gravy on his plate, which he'd surrounded with saltines.

Justine sensed prevarication, but said nothing. She didn't really want to know. Probably irreconcilable differences, a term she'd learned from
L.A. Law
last week. But it didn't matter; Charlotte and Lou seemed on the verge of reconciling. Justine wondered if they'd fall in love again.

Now Justine thought
she
might cry.

“I'm buying,” said Archibold, putting an end to the threat of waterworks.

“Thanks, Archibold.”

“You're one of my favorite entities, Justine,” he said, leaning over and tapping out a rhythm on her head with his fingers. “You and your mother.”

That was one thing they never talked about: Livia.

* * *

Fanny kept her word about the back issues, so Justine was soon nose deep in collage materials. Fanny also kept her word about the flexible hours, so Justine was still able to run Dot and Lou around town. She did not, however, keep her word about the cheap candy.

“Changed my mind. Instead, I will give you one cent for every person you persuade to buy a candy bar here.”

“Okay. Thanks, Fanny.”

“You're welcome. You can start by making that little boyfriend of yours eat my candy.”

“Troy?” said Justine, blushing. She didn't realize anybody knew she had a boyfriend. She wasn't sure if he even
was
a boyfriend. They hung around each other a lot, but he didn't turn up in any of her fantasies. She was quite faithful to Gracie there.

“The one that looks like Eddie from
The Courtship of Eddie's Father.
”

“I guess. I don't know him too well yet, but I think Troy only likes savory snacks. I'll try, though.”

“Good girl.”

On Valentine's Day, Justine came home from a two-hour shift at DeLeon, where she'd been made to paint the employee bathroom Pacification Pink in order to keep the pharmacy employees calm while doing their business, to find Lou, Livia, Charlotte, and Archibold sitting around Charlotte's bird-watching table in the kitchen, playing cards. She had never seen all of them together in the same room before.

“Hi,” said Justine.

“Hi, darling,” said Charlotte, reaching behind her to give Justine's arm a friendly squeeze. “Liv, greet your child.”

Justine expected a grumpy and brief
hi
from her quasi-mother, but instead both she and Archibold put down their cards and turned and smiled at Justine.

“Hi, Justine.”

“Hi, Livia.”

“Hi, Archibold.”

“'Lo, guv.”

Everyone took simultaneous pulls on their beverages: beers for Charlotte and Livia and Coke for Lou. Archibold consumed about two fingers of a cloudy, bluish fluid in an Erlenmeyer flask personalized with a masking-tape label reading
ARCHIBOLD'S DON'T TOUCH
in green ballpoint.

“What're you playing?”

“Pinochle.”

Everyone seemed mellow, as though it had just been mutually agreed upon that the indiscussably uncomfortable living situation could be tolerated if cards were played and social beverages were drunk.

“Lou, we gotta go pretty soon,” said Justine.

“Mm,” said Lou, frowning at his cards. “I believe plans've changed.”

“Really? What're we doing now?”

“Better check with Dot on that.”

“Arch, we need to go soon, too,” said Livia, patting her boyfriend lightly on the arm.

“Mm?” said Archibold.

“I want to go over to the used-record store, that new place out on Montopolis, to look for Ye Moppe Hedds records. We've never been there.”

Archibold responded by pouring a drop of Livia's Tuborg into Charlotte's ashtray and watching it intently for a moment.

“Growrl,” he said finally.

“Bad luck, Arch?” said Livia, tugging on his ponytail.

She smiled at him, and then glanced over at Lou, who was still in a pinochle fugue. Justine observed her watch Lou, all the while absently milking Archibold's ponytail.

Eventually Archibold plucked his macrame pride out of Livia's hand and said, “Moocow dry.”

Livia jumped. She began to titter. A blush, starting at her forehead, fell like a madder veil over her face. Justine saw her adoptive mother as she might have been at Justine's age, in high school, when she was gaga over the legendarily perfect Burt Moppett. A moment of pity for Livia transfixed Justine, and she caught herself staring at her precisely as Livia had been looking at Lou.
Pity is the most poisonous form of contempt.
Some shrink had once cut Justine down after she told him how on the way to therapy she'd begun to cry at the sight of a dramatically deformed teenaged girl on the bus.
You have
no
idea what that girl thinks and feels.

Lou finally extracted a card from his crooked fan and placed it on the table. Immediately Charlotte trumped him.

“Dammit.”

Lou began to fiddle with a dirty bandage on one forearm.

“What happened, Lou?” said Justine.

“Aw, nothing, just a little old cut I got on the job.”

Justine had no idea what Lou did at the Registry, a job he'd recently taken. Now Lou was gone from nine to four most days. Justine could not imagine working at the Registry. She'd rather work in a pumice mine.

Justine went into the living room. Dot was sitting up on the divan, reading one of her old leather books, Dartmouth in her lap, endeavoring to lick the volume's gilt spine. The books had been intriguing from the first day Justine'd seen them, no titles or authors on the spines or covers, well read and a bit scuffed but tidy and sturdy, like books in an eighteenth-century scholar's working library. They looked Oxfordy, Cantabrigian; weathered but succulent, seductive but forbidding; rare. Maybe they
were
rare, worth thousands. First editions of some kind.

Dot produced from somewhere a small fountain pen with a tiny, needlelike nib, and began to write on the page she'd been reading.

“Are you about ready?” said Justine, sitting down next to Dot, sneaking a glance at the open page. It was covered with the tiniest cursive she'd ever seen, one large paragraph of which was preceded by today's date in a barely larger hand. A diary. “Lou's caught up in one of Charlotte's pinochle massacres.”

“It doesn't look like we're going today, baby.”

“Really? How come?”

Dot put down her book. Was the other one already full? Or waiting to be filled? How long had she been keeping them?

“I'm a little better today.”

“Really? So that guy Sherpa's treatments are working?”

Justine reached over and scratched Dartmouth's hamlike sides while Dot scratched under his collar. Dartmouth, always in spectacular appreciation of the wonder and glory of life, seemed to have transcended to an even sublimer plane of being.

Justine noticed Dot had painted her nails green. On a paper towel on the floor was constructed a neat pyramid of cotton balls tinted kelly, like old, grass-stained golf balls.

“I believe so.”

“You look pretty excellent.”

“Bless your heart.”

“So what does he do?”

“Sherpa? Well, he hasn't really done—”

A moderately unrestrained group chuckle from the kitchen.

“—a whole lot except give Lou recipes for potions to make me, and sometimes Lou brings him dried herbs or some such that Sherpa brews into hot teas. He never says much. The real treatment—it's just one appointment, five hours or so—doesn't start until around early April, once I've been ‘prepared,' as he puts it.”