The Visiting Privilege (8 page)

I
nside, the auto train was violet. Both little girls were pleased because it was their favorite color. Violet was practically the only thing they agreed on. Danica Anderson and Jane Muirhead were ten years old. They had traveled from Maine to Washington, D.C., by car with Jane's parents and were now on the train with Jane's parents, 109 other people and 42 automobiles en route to Florida, where they lived. It was September. Danica had been with Jane since June. Danica's mother was getting married again and she had needed the summer months to settle down and have everything nice for Dan when she saw her in September. In August, her mother had written Dan and asked what she could do to make things nice for her when she got back. Dan replied that she would like a good wall-hung pencil sharpener and satin sheets. She would like cowboy bread for supper. Dan supposed that she would get none of these things. Her mother hadn't even asked her what cowboy bread was.

The girls explored the entire train, north to south. They saw everyone but the engineer. Then they sat down in their violet seats. Jane made faces at a cute little toddler holding a cloth rabbit until he started to cry. Dan took out her writing materials and began writing to Jim Anderson. She was writing him a postcard.

Jim,
she wrote,
I miss you and I will see you any minute. When I see you we will go swimming right away.

“That is real messy writing,” Jane said. “It's all scrunched together. If you were writing to anyone other than a dog, they wouldn't be able to read it at all.”

Dan printed her name on the bottom of the card and embellished it all with X's and O's.

“Your writing to Jim Anderson is dumb in about twelve different ways. He's a
golden retriever,
for god's sake.”

Dan looked at her friend mildly. She was used to Jane yelling at her and expressing disgust and impatience. Jane had once lived in Manhattan. She had developed certain attitudes. Jane was a treasure from the city of New York currently on loan to the state of Florida, where her father, for the last two years, had been engaged in running down a perfectly good investment in a marina and dinner theater. Jane liked to wear scarves tied around her head. She claimed to enjoy grapes and brown sugar and sour cream for dessert more than ice cream and cookies. She liked artichokes. She
adored
artichokes. She
adored
the part in the New York City Ballet's
Nutcracker Suite
where the Dewdrops and the candied Petals of Roses dance to the “Waltz of the Flowers.” Jane had seen the
Nutcracker
four
times,
for god's sake.

Dan and Jane and Jane's mother and father had all lived with Jane's grandmother in her big house in Maine all summer. The girls hadn't seen that much of the Muirheads. The Muirheads were always “cruising.” They were always “gunk-holing,” as they called it. Whatever that was, Jane said, for god's sake. Jane's grandmother's house was on the ocean and she knew how to make pizza—'
za,
she called it—and candy and sail a canoe. She sang hymns. She sewed sequins on their jeans and made them say grace before dinner. After they said grace, Jane's grandmother would ask forgiveness for things done and left undone. She would, upon request, lie down and chat with them at night before they went to sleep. Jane was crazy about her grandmother and was quite a nice person in her presence. One night, at the end of summer, Jane had had a dream in which men dressed in black suits and white bathing caps had broken into her grandmother's house and taken all her possessions and put them in the road. In Jane's dream, rain fell on all her grandmother's things. Jane woke up weeping. Dan had wept too. Jane and Dan were friends.

The train had not yet left the station even though it was two hours past the posted departure time. An announcement had just been made that said that a two-hour delay was built into the train's schedule.

“They make up the time at night,” Jane said. She plucked the postcard from Dan's hand. “This is a good one,” she said. “I think you're sending it to Jim Anderson just so you can save it yourself.” She read aloud, “This is a photograph of the Phantom Dream Car crashing through a wall of burning television sets before a cheering crowd at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.”

At the beginning of summer, Dan's mother had given her one hundred dollars, four packages of new underwear and three dozen stamped postcards. Most of the cards were plain but there were a few with odd pictures on them. Dan's mother wanted to hear from her twice weekly throughout the summer. She had married a man named Jake, who was a carpenter. Jake had already built Dan several bookcases. This seemed to be the extent of what he knew how to do for her.

“I only have three left now,” Dan said, “but when I get home I'm going to start my own collection.”

“I've been through that phase,” Jane said. “It's just a phase. I don't think you're much of a correspondent. You wrote, ‘I got sunburn. Love, Dan'…‘I bought a green Frisbee. Love, Dan'…‘Mrs. Muirhead has swimmer's ear. Love, Dan'…‘Mr. Muirhead went water-skiing and cracked his rib. Love, Dan'…When you write to people you should have something to say.”

Dan didn't reply. She had been Jane's companion for a long time, and was wearying of what Jane's mother called her effervescence.

Jane slapped Dan on the back and hollered, “Danica Anderson! What is a clod like yourself doing on this fabulous journey!”

Together, as the train began to move, the girls made their way to the Starlight Lounge in Car 7, where Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead told them they would be enjoying cocktails. They hesitated in the car where the train's magician was with his audience, watching him while he did the magic silks trick, the cut and restored handkerchief trick, the enchanted saltshaker trick and the dissolving quarter trick. The audience, primarily retirees, screamed with pleasure.

“I don't mind the tricks,” Jane whispered to Dan, “but the patter drives me crazy.”

The magician was a young man with a long spotted face. He did a lot of card forcing. Again and again, he called the card that people chose from a shuffled deck. Each time that the magician was successful, the audience participant looked astonished and thrilled. Jane and Dan passed on through.

“You don't really choose,” Jane said. “He just makes you think you choose. He does it all with his pinkie.” She pushed Dan forward into the Starlight Lounge, where Mrs. Muirhead was on a banquette staring out the window at a shed and unkempt bush that were sliding slowly past. She was drinking a martini. Mr. Muirhead was several tables away talking to a young man wearing jeans and a yellow jacket. Jane did not sit down. “Mummy,” she said, “can I have your olive?”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Muirhead said, “it's soaked in gin.”

Jane, Dan in tow, went to her father's table. “Daddy,” Jane demanded, “why aren't you sitting with Mummy? Are you and Mummy having a fight?”

Dan was astonished at this question. Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead fought continuously and as bitterly as vipers. Their arguments were baroque, stately and, although frequently extraordinary, never enlightening. At breakfast, they would be quarreling over an incident at a cocktail party the night before or a dumb remark made fifteen years ago. At dinner, they would be howling over the fate, which they called by many names, that had delivered each of them to the other. Forgiveness, charity and cooperation were qualities unknown to them. They were opponents
pur sang.
Dan was sure that one morning, Jane would be called from her classroom and told as gently as possible by Mr. Mooney, the school principal, that her parents had splattered each other's brains all over the lanai.

Mr. Muirhead looked at the children sorrowfully and touched Jane's cheek.

“I am not sitting with your mother because I am sitting with this young man here. We are having a fascinating conversation.”

“Why are you always talking to young men,” Jane asked.

“Jane, honey,” Mr. Muirhead said, “I will answer that.” He took a swallow of his drink and sighed. He leaned forward and said earnestly, “I talk to so many young men because your mother won't let me talk to young women.” He remained hunched over, patting Jane's cheek for a moment, and then leaned back.

The young man extracted a cigarette from his jacket and hesitated. Mr. Muirhead gave him a book of matches. “He does automobile illustrations,” Mr. Muirhead said.

The young man nodded. “Belly bands. Pearls and flakes. Flames. All custom work.”

Mr. Muirhead smiled. He seemed happier now. Mr. Muirhead loved conversations. He loved “to bring people out.” Dan supposed that Jane had picked up this pleasant trait from her father and distorted it in some perversely personal way.

“I bet you have a Trans Am yourself,” Jane said.

“You are so-o-o right,” the young man said. He extended his hand, showing a large gaudy stone in a setting that seemed to be gold. “Same color as this ring,” he said.

Dan could still be impressed by adults. Their mysterious, unreliable images still had the power to attract and confound her, but Jane was clearly not interested in the young man. She demanded much of life. She had very high standards when she wanted to. Mr. Muirhead ordered the girls ginger ales and the young man and himself another round of drinks. Sometimes the train mysteriously would stop and even reverse, so they would pass unfamiliar scenes once more. The same green pasture filled with slanty light, the same row of clapboard houses, each with the shades of their windows drawn against the heat, the same boats on their trailers, waiting on dry land. The moon was rising beneath a spectacular lightning and thunder storm. People around them were commenting on it. Close to the train, a sheen of dark birds flew low across a dirt road.

“Birds are only flying reptiles, I'm sure you're all aware,” Jane said suddenly.

“What a horrible thought!” Mr. Muirhead said. His face had become a little slack, and his hair somewhat disarranged.

“It's true, it's true,” Jane sang. “Sad but true.”

“You mean like lizards and snakes,” the young man asked. He snorted and shook his head.

“
Glorified
reptiles, certainly,” Mr. Muirhead said, recovering a bit of his sense of time and place.

Dan suddenly felt lonely. It was not homesickness, although she would have given anything at that moment to be poking around in her little aluminum boat with Jim Anderson. But she wouldn't be living any longer in the place she thought of as home. The town was the same but the place was different. The house where she had been a little tiny baby and had lived her whole life belonged to someone else now. Over the summer, her mother and Jake had bought another house that he was going to fix up.

“Reptiles have scales,” the young man said, “or else they're long and slimy.”

Dan felt like bawling. She could feel the backs of her eyes swelling up like cupcakes. She was surrounded by strangers saying crazy things. Even her own mother often said crazy things in a reasonable way that made Dan know she was a stranger too. Dan's mother told Dan everything. Her mother told her she wouldn't have to worry about having brothers or sisters. Her mother discussed the particular nature of the problem with her. Half the things she told her, Dan didn't want to know. There would be no brothers and sisters. There would be Dan and her mother and Jake, sitting around the house together, caring deeply for one another, sharing a nice life together, not making any mistakes.

Dan excused herself and started toward the lavatory on the level below. Mrs. Muirhead called to her as she approached and handed her a folded piece of paper. “Would you be kind enough to give this to Mr. Muirhead,” she asked. Dan returned to Mr. Muirhead and gave him the note and then went down to the lavatory. She sat on the little toilet and cried as the train rocked along.

After a while, she heard Jane's voice saying, “I hear you in there, Danica Anderson. What's the matter with you?”

Dan didn't say anything.

“I know it's you,” Jane said.

Dan blew her nose, pushed the button on the toilet and said, “What did the note say?”

“I don't know,” Jane said. “Daddy ate it.”

“He ate it!” Dan exclaimed. She opened the door of the stall and went to the sink. She washed her hands and splashed her face with water. She giggled. “He really ate it?”

“Everybody is looped in that Starlight Lounge,” Jane said, then patted her hair with a hairbrush. Jane's hair was full of tangles and she never brushed hard enough to get them out. She looked at Dan by looking in the mirror. “Why were you crying?”

“I was thinking about your grandma,” Dan said. “She said that one year she left the Christmas tree up until Easter.”

“Why were you thinking about my grandma!” Jane yelled.

“I was thinking about her singing,” Dan said, startled. “I like her singing.”

In her head, Dan could hear Jane's grandmother singing about Death's dark waters and sinking souls, about Mercy Seats and the Great Physician. She could hear the voice rising and falling through the thin walls of the Maine house, borne past the dark screens and into the night.

“I don't want you thinking about my grandma,” Jane said, pinching Dan's arm.

Dan tried not to think of Jane's grandma. Once, she had seen her fall coming out of the water. The beach was stony. The stones were round and smooth and slippery. Jane's grandmother had skinned her arm.

The girls went into the corridor and saw Mrs. Muirhead standing there. Mrs. Muirhead was deeply tanned. She had put her hair up in a twist and a wad of cotton was noticeable in her left ear. The three of them stood together, bouncing and nudging against one another with the motion of the train.

“My ear is killing me,” Mrs. Muirhead said. “I think there's something they're not telling me. It crackles and snaps in there. It's like a bird breaking seeds in there.” She touched the bone between cheekbone and ear. “I think that doctor I was seeing should lose his license. He was handsome and competent, certainly, but on my last visit he was vacuuming my ear and his secretary came in to ask him a question and she put her hand on his neck. She stroked his neck, his secretary! While I was sitting there having my ear vacuumed!” Mrs. Muirhead's cheeks were flushed.