Tumbledown (44 page)

“It’s a zoo,” Maura said. “It’s helped me, but it’s still a zoo. I just happen to be in the best part. Mick and I have the nicest cages.”

He expected Barnstone to admonish her, but she was sly-eyed and ready to laugh. “It’s not really a zoo,” he put in, “though Maura
is
an anteater.”
Snooting up the ants,
he thought to say, but let it play only in his head.
Snozzing up the nosy
. . . He pulled himself back, like yanking a string that straightens a puppet, a marionette, the proper puppy puppet,
ruff, ruff,
the rough edges of the assembly machine at the sheltered—listen! Listen to Maura’s mouth.

“Hah,” she said flatly.

“More like a factory,” Mick said, “pretty good factory, where the workers—let’s say it’s a car factory—where they’re trying to convince the cars to build themselves.
Build yourselves, you cars you.
Like an Audi or Nissan factory. Ford. Caddyshack. And there are all of these parts on the conveyor belt, and the counselors, here’s Mr. James saying
The fender bone’s connected to the chassis bone,
and we chassis types are trying to lure the fender over—here fender, fender—but it’s harder than he sounds.” He bursts into laughter and the others follow.
Good good good,
like a river good. But watch it now, watch it now. Slip and you’ll drown. River’s deep. River’s wide. Swim, little buddy.

All of a sudden it was later, maybe seconds later, maybe minutes later, the conversation accelerating again, Candler girls asking questions, Maura shooting something at him and Mick slapping it back over the net. She explained the hierarchy of the dorms, that the psychologists—
see-cologists?
Shouldn’t it be
see-cologist?
Or
sigh-cologist? Psycho-ologist?
She was still talking, that Maura, and he joined in about the workshop, about Rhine, Vex, Alonso, skipping over Karly, each knowing, without saying a word, to pass her by, like their brains were one brain hovering in the room, a flying saucer brain, and Maura yanking on his arm and in his ear the wet lisping whisper of one friend to another, Maura
lispering:
“Thlow down, monkeyhead,” and remarkably, again, he did it, the whole carnival ride giving up the spin, slowing,
thlowing,
simmering down.

He told a story about a girl who was in the sheltered workshop before Maura started, how she wore more and more makeup until one day she got on the van with her entire face covered in lipstick. “Crews just let her work. Hup two three four. During the lunch thing . . . the lunch
stop,
I asked her why she painted her face with lipstick, and she said
I’m swallowing myself.
” Saying it made him see her in one of the women there, the woman Lolly sitting right there, covered with lipstick, hair to chin. “I’m swallowing myself,” the girl had said to him, and later she said something else. What’d she say later?

There was a lot of silence in the room, like the noise in his brain had maybe exploded and this was the after. “She scared me,” he said. “She’s still around still, not in the workshop.” Later she said what to him? Don’t repeat it, whatever it turns out to be. She said what? Don’t repeat it. She said, “I want inside me again.” And later yet: “Don’t you want it, too? To be inside yourself?” Should he tell the others or swallow the words?

“I love that story,” Lolly said. “This is just what we wanted, isn’t it?” she asked Violet, who merely smiled and then spoke to Mick.

“It’s lovely to get to know you, Mick. You saved me that night.” She told the story of getting lost and meeting him, making herself out to be a birdbrain and Mick to be kind and generous and valiant. He wanted to tell everyone that it was Violet who had been kind, but Lolly burst in again.

“I can’t understand why James wouldn’t tell me all this. He’s so close mouthed about it.” She stopped abruptly, staring. Andujar stood just beyond the hallway. Maura called to him by name. Barnstone introduced him to the women. He nodded at them but did not speak. He took a chair slightly removed from their circle and nibbled on a single cracker for the longest time. He wore a green baseball cap, a long-sleeved shirt, and dark pants. The cap did not go with the nice clothes and called attention to itself, as if it were a necessary anomaly, covering a patchwork of hair, or the scars of recent surgery, or gears and the mechanics of a machine, or there could be a bird under that hat pulling a worm that is part of his brain.

“It’s all so much clearer to me now,” Lolly said, the lipstick gone from her platypus.
Her platypus?
Her platelets? Her puss! A mouth was a puss in some of those black-and-white movies!
You got the kinda puss a guy just wants to smack.
Mick kept his laughter inside like a bright light. He could surf this wave all the way to shore.

“Keep in mind,” Barnstone said, “these two are maybe the smartest, liveliest—well, lively without being merely disruptive—folks of everyone at the Center.”

“Including the staff, I gather,” Violet said.

“No one on the staff scores too high on the
lively and interesting
scale, do you think? With certain exceptions, of course.” She batted her eyes dramatically for a laugh.

Braying from the vicinity of the kitchen caused their heads to turn. Beyond the sliding glass door someone was splashing in the hot tub while another person looked on.

“Holy fuck,” Maura said. “It’s Mr. Shrimpy.”

“Oh,” Barnstone said, glancing at her watch, “that’s Cecil and his cousin. I told them they could use the tub. They’re two hours early, damn them. I’d introduce you, but it might give his shit of a cousin a way to slip free.”

“Cecil Fresnay,” Mick said. “Like Wednesday only Fresnay. Used to shelter in the workshop with us.”

“He was fricking horrible at it,” Maura said. “He did like one box a week.”

“I’ve known Cecil since he was a baby,” Barnstone said. “His parents were my clients. They’re both mentally retarded, but Cecil is
not
retarded—or challenged or impaired or whatever term you want to use—and we need to determine what his problems are, but there’s no money for it. Candler put him in the workshop as a favor.”

Violet made herself stand. She told the others that she wanted to meet Cecil, and when Lolly started to rise, Violet added, “Let’s don’t overwhelm him.” She had to get out of that room. She liked Patricia Barnstone well enough, and the kids were sweet, but she was weary to the core of Lolly’s interrogation of them.

When she stepped through the sliding door, Cecil quit splashing and the cousin gave her a furtive, hopeful look. “Don’t for a minute think that you can leave,” she said. She introduced herself but didn’t linger, strolling to the limit of the yard—a well-kept lawn with catalpa trees. She found a spot in the shade, ready to depart and yet without any interest in being home.

The cousin, she noted, held a cell phone to his nose. She considered borrowing it and calling Billy Atlas to come rescue her. The tree trunk felt good against her back. She tried to imagine what exactly she was going to do with herself, but Cecil made whale sounds, which rendered concentration impossible. Instead, she recalled an afternoon lunch in London with Arthur and an Irish author of short stories. This was in her early days at the publishing house, long before she and Arthur were an item. He was merely her boss, and it was her job to arrange the luncheon. She surprised him by asking if she could come along. The author was one of her favorite writers.

They ate at a brightly lit bistro near the author’s hotel. Arthur was reissuing three of the man’s early books that had been out of print for years with the hope of luring him away from his much bigger publishing house. Violet was delighted that the great man looked exactly like his jacket photo, and she was pleased, too, by his manners and by his charming brogue, but the conversation was tedious. “I should have warned you,” Arthur said afterward. “Meeting a writer is always a letdown. They’re never as interesting as their work. If they were, then they would have failed their books. They write to be better than themselves.”

She felt the same peculiar deflation now. Mick and Maura were not boring but they were hardly the fascinating creatures she desired. The desire was voyeuristic and childish, but she had enough character to admit that she had come to this house because of it—not to teach Lolly a lesson or anything else she might have told herself.

From the hot tub came an announcement. “Trees have people in them,” Cecil Fresnay said. “It’s how they get arms.” He raised his own pale limbs to demonstrate.

Billy Atlas was impressed with the cleanliness of his car and unembarrassed at the things Violet had found in there, including the vibrator, which he’d bought as a present for Dlu, way back when Jimmy was first dating her, and then hadn’t given to her when he realized it was a bad idea. What had tipped him off? He couldn’t remember. Dlu: Jimmy was an imbecile not to marry the woman. When he ditched her, he cut her out of both their lives. Before leaving for Onyx Springs, Billy put all the debris Violet removed from the car in grocery bags and fitted them in the backseat, and he insisted that he ride back there. It was his stuff; no one else should have to sit by it. One day he’d sort it all out, the stuff that was junk, the stuff that was history.

He didn’t know his way around, but Onyx Springs wasn’t a big city and the freeway divided it neatly in two. If he approached the freeway he knew he was going the wrong direction, and within minutes of leaving Violet and Lolly at Patricia Barnstone’s, he was approaching the freeway. He pulled into a convenience store. He needed a city map.

The Buy-N-Go was neat but poorly stocked. The guy behind the counter didn’t greet him when he entered, and the last mopping had left streaks on the green concrete floor. The clerk had a goatee, which made it hard to tell for sure, but he appeared to be scowling.
Excuse me for keeping you employed,
Billy thought. He was pretty sure that several of his workshoppers could do this work, and maybe that could become his specialty: training them to be convenience store clerks. There was room in the senior citizen’s cafeteria for another work center. He’d need a cash register, some shelves, and a bunch of things to sell. They could fake the cooler.

He grabbed a diet root beer and a city map. He didn’t like diet sodas, but he was serious about his exercise regime. So far he’d lost half a pound, and even that depended on what time of day he stepped on the scale. Still, it was something. And now he was getting his own place. Well, not his
own,
exactly, but he was leaving Jimmy’s soap opera before it exploded. Not that soap operas literally exploded, but Jimmy’s was going to. Billy didn’t like to think ill of his best friend, but Jimmy couldn’t stand to see Billy have Lise, and now he was trying to have his cake and eat it, too. Though, really, what else could you do with a cake?

“That it?” the bearded clerk asked.

“What’s Buy-N-Go pay these days?”

The man snorted. “Minimum wage to start, and then if you work your ass off for a few years, they’ll give you minimum wage plus fifteen cents. Place sucks. I’m just doing it till my probation is cleared, then I’m fucking outta here. That’s eleven fifty-nine.”

“For a map and a root beer?”

“I don’t make the prices.”

“Can I just look at the map and put it back?”

The clerk sneered. “Whatever. You want the drink?”

“Not really.”

“If you’re not buying anything, take a hike. What? This look like a fucking library?”

“I used to work in a convenience store. For like a decade in Flagstaff.”

“That supposed to make us brothers or something?”

“I just know you can let me look at the map if you want to.”

“Flagstaff is my least favorite city in the entire country. I got arrested in Flagstaff for
sleeping.
Can you believe that?”

“I slept there all the time and never got arrested.”

“Count yourself lucky and get outta my store.”

Billy left. That guy could use his training course for sure. Billy pulled back onto the street, heading away from the freeway. Could he actually think himself lucky? He was giving up free rent and Jimmy’s soap opera for another place with free rent and maybe his own soap opera. It was time he had his own, wasn’t it? He didn’t want to get too optimistic about it, but why not him? It might be a complicated way to live, but at least he was needed, and hey, everybody else had stuff in their lives.
Get yourself a life,
Violet said to him, and okay he was doing it. He should have said to her,
Doctor, heal your own life.
He hadn’t because her husband was dead. Billy wished he had met him, some old British guy, and their mom—Violet and Jimmy’s mom—hadn’t approved of him. Billy was still friends with their mom. Sometime soon he’d call her and tell her how her kids were doing.

He passed a tire store and a hardware store and a couple of vacant buildings. He was nowhere near the place, but as long as he was driving away from the freeway he was headed in the right direction. That was worth something, no? To be headed in the right direction? He’d just look for trees. He had been there once before, but nothing on this street looked familiar, and he had not bothered to notice the name of the street where Karly lived. She needed someone to help her get by. Most people were like that, except for Violet Candler and a few like her, those insanely competent people who seemed to carry around a whole world inside themselves, and they hardly needed anybody. Billy felt again regret for never having met her husband, one of the few who had made his way inside Violet’s shell.

Jimmy was not like his sister. He might be as bad as Karly. Her mess maybe looked worse, but it had taken the two of them only a few hours to put her house in order. She had enjoyed the work, singing songs and laughing. Billy liked it, too. Not that he had a sudden passion for washing dishes or vacuuming rugs, but he liked showing her where to find the liners in the grocery store, how to change the vacuum bags, how much soap to squirt into the sink. “Why’d you wrap the soap and your toothbrush in an Arby’s wrapper?” he asked her. Her face pinched in concentration. She said, “I thought if there was a trip I was taking I’d need them.”