What was the name of that street? Commodore Perry Boulevard?
Holly heard the storm door rattle. She pushed herself up from the bed. The room spun a half-circle and ratcheted backward until again it was level. She grabbed her robe from the floor. Nicole Fennessey had come over to Holly’s side of the duplex, carrying a large square of glass. She said she wanted to fix a broken pane in Holly’s bedroom, and she walked right through the house into the back room before Holly had a chance to make the bed or straighten up. Nicole was tall, willowy, with a rope of fine blond hair dangling down her spine. Nicole showed Holly the tiny stencil marks on the glass, the letters “TG” at every corner. Tempered glass. Holly tried to focus on the tiny stamp.
“I don’t scrimp on important things,” Nicole said. “Now, tell me about this fire you had over here. Rennie said it was a conflagration. If you want to burn trash, we share that barrel out in front—”
“It wasn’t my fire,” Holly said. Dizzy, she sat down on the bed. “Did Rennie tell you I started that fire?”
Nicole was holding a special cutting blade in one hand and a rubber-tipped hammer in the other. She tapped the rubber hammer against her chin while she was looking at Holly. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here, but my job keeps me on call.”
“You work at the hospital?”
“I’m a massage therapist at Newport Jai Alai and I have private clients all around town. I’m gone all hours. I can’t be here to referee the neighborhood.”
“I guess not,” Holly said. Holly’s lips felt swollen and tingling, like a pincushion.
“At least you can’t call me a slumlord. I keep my property in good condition,” Nicole told Holly. “But what happened to you? Did I wake you up?”
Holly nodded. Nicole seemed on the defensive and she described her busy schedule to Holly. “Massage therapy is a combination expertise. It’s an important alternative. There’s the mental-health industry, but they forget about the body. They talk and talk and never lay a finger on the patient. Actually, I’m like a psychiatrist. I’m an educated ear. My job is mostly listening. Even if they don’t say anything, you listen to that. The silence. I’m kind of a transcriptionist with my hands.”
Holly had been in the house only a few weeks, but she had watched Nicole coming and going at odd hours, her long blond braid swinging like a silk pendulum. Sometimes Holly heard the telephone ring.
She heard it right through the wall.
Within minutes after the first jangle, Nicole left the house, carrying a large flat leather portfolio just like an artist might use to transport drawings. Nicole told Holly that the portfolio was actually a lightweight massage table with collapsible legs and imitation leather veneer.
“I take my table to every job,” Nicole said. “Otherwise they think they can get me into their bedrooms where they recline on their Perfect Sleepers. If they try something I fold up the table. I break the legs down, crunch, crunch, crunch. I’m out of there before anything happens. My business is portable. I take my table, my bottle warmer—that’s for the Egyptian oil. Ointment goes right in my pocket to keep warm.”
“Egyptian oil?”
“Yeah, it’s basically just baby oil with some sassafras.”
Nicole stood on a chair and tried to remove the top grille from Holly’s bedroom window. Nicole was still wearing her nightgown, a satiny sack that outlined her hips and buttocks each time she reached up with her arms. Holly wondered if Nicole was aware of how she looked. Holly remembered what her husband Jensen used to say to her; he often said that she looked “ripe.” Then Holly realized that she was always thinking too much about sex. Anything could make her think of sex. She looked away. Even the silver finger loops of a scissors left out on her dresser. Everything in the book had either curves or erect lines. Egyptian oil had an erotic ring.
Nicole asked Holly for a table knife to scrape away the old caulk and Holly handed one up. Nicole maneuvered the little window onto the bed. Holly wanted to ask Nicole if she had a particular mate, or if she was, like Holly, single. Except for the matter of sex, a solitary existence was attractive to Holly after years of being paired up with a heel. Being single might be thought of as a pursuit, not a default. She had read about the success of celibate career professionals in a woman’s magazine. Women can become their own erotic guides. The article joked about masturbation in double entendres; the writer invented terrible puns, such as: “In a pinch,” women can “singlehandedly—”
What was so newsbreaking about that? Just the other weekend, Holly had masturbated in a dressing room at Sears. She had noticed a middle-aged salesclerk in the appliance department. He had a small mole on the left side of his chin. A beauty mark of some distinction. A tiny maroon button half hidden by salt and pepper stubble. It looked undeniably erotic.
Holly said, “Are you raising those kids alone?”
“Do you see a father figure waltzing around?”
“It must be difficult.”
With the window removed, Holly listened to the little bird, its bright program.
Nicole told her, “Don’t feel funny about it. It’s the American way.”
Holly said, “After being married, it’s hard to reinvent yourself.”
Nicole dropped the hammer to her side and peered at Holly. “You do look a little shaky.”
“Shit, does it show?”
Nicole looked at her. “You feel that bad, do you?”
Holly straightened up. “Really, I’m fine. My ex-husband, he’s not even stateside, so that’s a relief.”
Nicole took the rubber hammer, tapped a pane loose from the frame, and collected the broken glass in her palm. Then she measured the windowpane and marked the new piece of glass. She scored the glass with the special knife and tapped it gently with the rubber hammer, making a clean break along the scored edge. When she was finished, she rested the new pane inside the frame and puttied the edges. Holly couldn’t help admiring the way Nicole handled a man’s job.
“When Rennie was sick last year, I went over to give her foot massages. There’s a spot on the instep that corresponds to the bowel, the large intestine, but Rennie didn’t want me to do it. She’s likes to be self-sufficient, you know.”
“Rennie told me that she almost died,” Holly said.
“Colon cancer.”
“Does she have one of those awful bags?”
“No, it was too late for that. The doctors couldn’t remove all the cancer. No sense chopping her up. It would have been closing the barn door after the cow got out.”
“What’s the prognosis?”
“Of course, it’s hopeless, but I bring her raw almonds from The Golden Sheaf.”
“That hippie store?”
“Call it what you want. Almonds are supposed to have some healing substance like laetrile. I get a pound for her and she eats them, but I guess she knows it’s a shot in the dark.”
“She’s skinny, but she looks tough.”
“Staring death in the face gives Rennie a zing.”
“Shit.”
Nicole said, “She’s not scared. Rennie said at her age she has to keep looking down the well and hollering for the echo.”
“It must be a mess with those two brothers—”
“Well, she can’t rely on them. If I don’t see her one day, I try to go over to make sure, and she’s always fine. She’s got her clam rake and she’s down at low tide poking around, or she’s in her shack organizing her ceramic jewelry inventory, carding whatever she has left or separating different sizes of beads into coffee cans. Until she got sick, she had a souvenir shop on Bowen’s Wharf. She still has a jewelry kiln in the shack, but she’s not producing much. You know, I bet some of the glazes she used were carcinogenic. Some of it had lead, anyway. Lead helps color along, I don’t know why.”
“She make those earrings you have on?”
Nicole fingered the gaudy plastic baubles clipped to her ears. “No, these are Bakelite. These are collector’s items, they’re like gold now.”
Holly looked at them. “Who would have thought plastic would be something fashion important in the nineties?”
“This was virgin plastic. The very first stab at it.”
Holly nodded. The talk of Rennie’s cancer had made
Holly think of her father, who had died of cancer just two years earlier. She wasn’t speaking to her father prior to his diagnosis and when they connected it was too late.
Their rift occurred when Holly had gone over to her father’s place after her mother left him for another man. “How can you let her walk out on you like this?” she had asked him.
“What’s the point of making trouble,” he said.
“She took all your furniture. You paid for it and she took it.” The living room was empty except for a few pieces. Feathery helixes of dust twisted along the baseboards every time the heat came on. “What are you going to do about it?” she said.
Her father sat in the one remaining vinyl recliner the color of Campbell’s corn chowder. Holly had always depended on her father to take her mother to task for the wrongs she committed against Holly, which were numerable. Her father’s sudden surrender was a personal affront to Holly; she felt he was deserting her.
“Oh, come on,” she told him, but she couldn’t cheer him. She lost her patience.
“Worm,”
she called him. The last word she had ever said to her father—
Worm.
Holly returned to nurse him when he became sick. But he didn’t recognize her. Her imperial regret, worse even than burning Jensen’s bed, was the one-syllable word she had flung at her father. After her father’s death, the hospice volunteer gave Holly a cardboard circle, a Grief Wheel. Grief has a structure; it has stages, remissions, and surges. The stages were “Shock,” “Protest,” “Disorganization,” “Reorganization,” and “Renaissance.” Within these stages there were cognitive, affective, and somatic manifestations such as “anger,” “accusation,” “meaninglessness,” “intense anguish,” “self-hate,” “eating disorders,” and even
“chest pains.” A red plastic arrow selected each stage and offered a list of its corresponding symptoms. Holly didn’t imagine Rennie’s two sons would find comfort in a Grief Wheel, although she had kept it; it was somewhere in her belongings.
Holly picked up a sliver of glass from her bed linens. How could Nicole come in there and litter her sheets with these shards? She shifted the conversation to Willis Pratt. “I think Rennie’s son is crazy,” Holly said.
“Which one?”
Holly thought that certainly Nicole would know she was referring to Willis Pratt.
“You mean the banker? He’s a vice president in precious metals at Fleet National,” Nicole said.
“Precious metals? Really?” Holly imagined the gold ingots and platinum bars like neat foil sticks of unsalted butter.
“Yeah, and he’s an expert investor. You know, all those funds and things. He’s made himself rich. He’s got money to burn. Oops, sorry—”
Holly wasn’t too happy with it. “Money to burn” was an everyday figure of speech, wasn’t it? If people kept dredging up ancient history, Holly would never get ahead.
“Sorry,” Nicole said again, tipping her face at Holly.
“Sure, no problem,” Holly said. “What about the younger guy? The one with the broken arm. He came in here and busted up the kitchen decorations.”
“Which decorations?”
“The spoon. The spoon is half gone.”
“That’s part of your damage deposit right there,” Nicole said.
Holly couldn’t tell if Nicole was joking or not.
“He came in here and broke it off the wall. He’s a fried egg.”
Nicole shrugged. “He’s temperamental, but he’s on Rennie’s side. Rennie’s other son wants to put her away at Château-sur-Mer, and she’s not budging. I think he’s trying to get something official and put her in there against her will. She can’t pay her taxes. That’s when the government agrees to step in. Until then, it’s a family matter.”
“How do they know she’s going to die?”
“Sweetheart.” Nicole looked at her. “We are all—”
“Shit.” Holly didn’t like the mannerism.
“Dying at home is the goal.”
“In her own bed. I see.”
The window was in. Nicole heard her telephone ringing. Her son, Lindy, came over to get his mother. Nicole went back to her side and in five minutes she was dressed in her uniform: mustard-color exercise tights and tunic. She hopped into her car. As Nicole backed out of the driveway, Holly heard a horrible squawk. Holly looked out her window to see that Nicole had stopped the car. Nicole had backed her car over the collie puppy. Holly ran down the porch steps and together they pulled the dog out from under the car. The puppy nipped at Holly; its pain was telling it orders. Its jaws snapped, but its eyes looked at Holly with sorrowful recognition. The dog was badly injured. Nicole stood up and swore. She looked at her wrist, twisted the watch face between her thumb and forefinger.
“Stupid dog. She sleeps under the fucking car. But I guess she’s all right,” Nicole told Holly.
Holly stood up. “Wait. I don’t think it’s all right. It looks bad to me,” Holly said.
Nicole’s two children, Lindy and Sarah, stood behind Holly, Nicole across from them. The dog’s jaw dropped open and it began to pant.
“I have my appointment,” Nicole said.
“You’re going to give a massage? Now?”
“When I get back, I’ll take her into Sakonnet Animal Hospital. I think I have a credit there for fifty dollars.” She left the dog at Holly’s feet. Nicole’s children were crying. Nicole got behind the wheel of her salt-encrusted Saab and shoved it into reverse.
Rennie came out of her house and stood on the porch. “It’s the pelvis,” Rennie told Holly. “I can see from here, it’s crushed.”
“Jesus Christ, I can’t believe she drives off and leaves me here with this dog. Her kids—” Her hangover was holding on. She hadn’t eaten breakfast. She should have fixed herself a bull shot just to get going. She had booze in her cupboard, but she didn’t have any bouillon cubes.
The two children walked back to their house expecting Holly to terminate her involvement. Lindy put his arm around his little sister’s shoulder.
“Wait. Lindy—” Holly called to the boy. “I’ll take the dog to the vet.” The children turned around to face her. They looked like children in a Walter Keane painting. Their big, oversized eyes stared at her in wary gratitude, their mouths blank.