Travelers Rest (14 page)

T
here was the door and there was the key. And when she used the key, when she opened the door, there was a sensation of doing the same thing over and over, as if she opened the door in some cascading dream that tumbled down upon itself, repeating and repeating. She tried not to open the door often, because the door opening seemed important and not to be taken lightly, but sometimes she felt as though she was constantly using the key and opening the door. She would suddenly find herself standing with the key in her hand, the door in front of her, and she would think to herself,
Why do I open the door?,
and she would answer herself,
Because you have the key.
So she would open the door, whether she was dreaming or she was awake, it was often difficult to tell, and on the other side she would find narrow stairways stretching up and down, rising on the one hand as if they would extend beyond the clouds that dropped the snow so incessantly, descending on the other into a place that seemed infinitely cold and black, a tunnel without end. Or she would open the door and find herself on a snowy street at nighttime, the shops closed, the smell of smoke in the air. Sometimes she would turn the key and open the door and step into a room exactly like the one she was leaving, a mirror image of itself, and she would be staring at her own face, a face that belonged to a woman who was, like her, standing in the doorway and holding open the door. And sometimes when she looked into the actual mirror, on the front of the armoire, she would glance away and think that, out of the corner of her eye, she had seen the mirror image performing some different operation from the one she was performing, maybe a moment ahead or a moment behind. And sometimes when she used the key to open the door, or stood outside on the snowy street and looked up at the window, as she had that first time, she would see a woman much like herself standing in the room and preparing to use the key, or turning a snow globe slowly in her hands, or lying there asleep. When she saw these women, she imagined herself doing the same things they were doing, or even
remembered
herself doing the same things they were doing, and sometimes even remembered herself
remembering
having done these same things.

The reason it was so important to keep using the key to open the door, at least periodically, just to check, was that soon now she would open the door and find something completely different. She didn't know what this different thing would be, except that it would be something she hadn't yet encountered in life, but it would somehow be familiar, in the same way that a scent in an entirely new place could suddenly draw you back to sometime long ago, when you had entered a place that smelled that same way. The hotel, from the moment she'd arrived, had been full of these sensory impressions, these things that wanted, somehow, to be memories. And soon, using the key to open the door, she would come upon the final one of these impressions, the one that unlocked the meaning of everything in the same way that, yes, a key unlocked a door.

Meanwhile she seemed to be in such a constant state of activity, or at least her mind was, what with the stream of thoughts, dreams, recollections, whatever they were, of doors, and keys, and rooms, and windows, that she hadn't had much time to consider what might be going on beyond her room, beyond the door, outside the hotel, past the ever-falling snow. She knew the real world was out there somewhere, and there were times when she thought she was in it—always, interestingly, when she was locked in the room, and never when she used the key and opened the door and found herself elsewhere. Much of the time she felt like more than one person, a set of multiplied selves, living on several planes. Maybe that was because she was starving.

She had not forgotten about Dewey or Tonio or Robbie. Far from it. What had happened, clearly, was that
they
had forgotten about
her.
This wasn't anything to worry about overmuch—she was having far too good a time here in her small, quiet room with her door and her key and all these thoughts that she was able to keep to herself.

When she wasn't preoccupied with the door, usually when she was lying in bed and hovering close to sleep, she had taken to thinking back on her life, which was something she normally didn't have time for. But now, in the room, as time continued to move ahead (or at least she assumed it did, though she had no way of knowing, and it was true that time didn't seem to pass at all, the only way to measure it being the screen of snow outside the window, which was so constant and uniform that it didn't seem to move in either space or time), she felt it stretching back as well, the way the Ashley River in Charleston flowed back and forth with the incoming tide.

She hadn't realized how constricted her life had become, how tightly wound into the present moment, or at least the day or week—what night was Dewey's basketball game, was she going to have to get a babysitter if she wanted to go to her book club or was it one of the nights Tonio would be home early, how many days could she wait to go grocery shopping, did she have stuff in the fridge to whip up something for dinner, whose turn was it in the car pool to pick up the kids from school, had she agreed to volunteer at Helping Hands this week, were they really almost out of toilet paper again, why was there a clunking noise in the undercarriage of the Nissan, how long could she wait before calling someone about the problem with the gutters, why had all Dewey's socks disappeared, was it time for the cat's flea medicine, when would the interim report cards come home and had Dewey left his in his backpack again, was it a good idea to refinance the house, when was Dewey's last dentist appointment, was it too late to cut back the azaleas, who loaded the dishwasher wrong, was it too hard for Tonio to take thirty minutes out of his schedule to mow the overgrown patch of lawn that looked so shitty out the window, or was she going to have to do that herself? She was constantly busy, and yet she never felt like she was really
doing
anything, as if she'd never figured out, in her whole life, what exactly to do with or for herself, the only thing she'd ever fully committed to, really, being to marry this man and raise this child. That in itself had been enough to keep her so occupied that she never had time to think.

But now her thoughts swelled like a great expanded breath, gathering in all the moments from her past that had lingered just outside her memory. When she was eight or nine years old she and her mother and her two older sisters had lived for a while in Mammoth Lakes, California, and she had gone to a school run by a guru who had taken a vow of silence. Every day the guru would arrive in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, emerge in his flowing robes when the door was opened for him, and approach the school, smiling his closemouthed smile, shuffling his sandaled feet, the tiny fingers on his tiny hands gently tapping together in front of him. Instead of speaking, he wrote messages on a chalkboard hung from a string around his neck, and what she remembered now was the way the chalk sounded when he wrote, the way the students all grew quiet, and how her eyes would drift to the bright morning sunlight coming through the window.

It must have been just a little later—she was still too young, she knew, to be wearing a bra or starting her period—that they moved to Gold Point, Nevada, a ghost town inhabited by only a few diehards trying to cash in with tourists on the run-down mining camp and wood-planked stores, convincing parents to let their kids pan for gold in the ice-cold river. Her mother had moved them there with her current boyfriend, who operated the only bar left in town. She remembered the walk home from the small school (maybe twenty kids, total, grades K through twelve, in a converted barn) and a boy named Griffin Turbin, who, she suspected at the time and still did to this day, had a crush on her and followed her down the dusty main street with the collapsing storefronts and the vacant lots strewn with broken glass and rusted hubcaps and plastic bags blowing like tumbleweed, shouting her name and laughing and making fun of her clothes, which, actually, took her a lot of time to pick out and coordinate, since all she had were other people's castoffs or things her mother had picked up from Goodwill or J. C. Penney. She'd felt, from the very start, a strong need to present herself well, especially since her mother and her friends, with their shapeless dresses and patched-up jeans and patchouli and excessive body hair, obviously didn't care. So, if Griffin Turbin was trying to tease her into liking him, he was picking the wrong way to go about it by ridiculing her skirt, which was a cute corduroy that had maybe gotten a little worn in the seat but was the best she had, and her paisley blouse and maroon scarf, the combination of which she'd spent half an hour debating in front of the foggy bathroom mirror.

She decided to ignore Griffin Turbin and walk on, imagining that there were actually people watching from inside the empty stores with the broken windows. They would see, if they were looking out, a girl who could take care of herself, who could rise above circumstances. As she thought this she realized she no longer heard anything from Griffin Turbin behind her, and she took this as a sign of victory, began imagining how her icy treatment of this crude boy, who was so unlike the boys she had grown up around in California, who were always either too cool or too indifferent to stoop to Griffin Turbin's level, would play out at school from now on (“now on” meaning, probably, considering the typical length of her mother's infatuations, another month or two), how it would earn her a much-desired
solitude,
when suddenly a cracking sound made everything else stop and disappear. Here in the room, all these years later, she remembered it as a sound more than a feeling, although certainly she must have felt it, too, the rock hitting her right at the base of her skull, but she remembered it as a reverberation, something almost echoing, and then what she remembered next was not turning to see Griffin Turbin—she never looked back to see if he was running away, if he was standing there defiantly, jeering at her—but looking down at the ground to see the rock lying at her feet. She remembered the slow trickle of blood down the back of her neck as she walked on, refusing to give Griffin Turbin the satisfaction. That was really her last memory of Gold Point, since the rock incident proved to be the catalyst for her mother's decision to get out of town. She never saw Griffin Turbin again.

She remembered a particular day in some beach town along the California coast, in wintertime. This would have been sometime before either Mammoth Lakes or Gold Point, back when she was maybe six or seven, when the rush of cities and towns and houses and apartments and neighborhoods and schools was so confusing that she had to count on her sisters to tell her where she was, a geography of transience that could be recaptured only if she was to actually
call
her mother, who probably, maddeningly, wouldn't remember any of it anyway. On the day she remembered, there was a hard, white quality to the air, like bone, and a coldish sun cast long shadows down the sidewalk where her mother browsed through clothes on racks—peasant skirts and silk bandannas and muslin blouses. She was cold inside her mother's beat-up Datsun wagon. Her sisters weren't there that day—they were considerably older, after all, could do their own thing and usually did, which maybe explained why they had seemed such a small part of her childhood—so she was able to sit quietly in the car and watch her mother on the sidewalk, a little bit of fog creeping up the passenger window whenever she exhaled. Through the windshield was a view of an almost empty beach, a few people walking their dogs, hugging themselves in coats and sweaters, their hair tossed by the wind. The waves arrived on shore rough and angry.

And then for a second she froze right through. She had turned her attention back to her mother, who was trying on a big turquoise necklace she could never actually afford and talking to a blonde salesgirl whose hands were tucked inside a heavy wool sweater, and it occurred to her suddenly that her mother had completely forgotten about her in the car, that she didn't exist, in that moment, for anyone in the world other than herself. She couldn't have named the feeling at the time, but she remembered it vividly, and now, here in the room, thinking back, it seemed like the defining feeling of her childhood, the feeling that only her mother connected her to the world, that without her mother she would be off in some airy, unmoored place all alone. It was because of this feeling that she both loved her mother and resented her, both now and then. But that day at the beach must have been the first time she had ever felt it, and the freezing came right up her legs into her chest, and she couldn't breathe, her breath trapped somewhere inside her and the window unfogging inch by inch, and because she was scared her hand lurched up from her lap and her fingers stretched out to tap the window and get her mother's attention…and then her fingers stopped moving, her hand hovered in the air motionless, and she sat examining the back of her hand and her skinny wrist and the lining of her coat sleeve. The fog returned to the window. The ice ran out of her the same way it had come in and she felt wonderfully warm, a little bit sleepy, and, most of all, utterly alone. It felt good to her. The moments stretched one into another slowly and smoothly and she could see time's passing by her mother's movements, the smile on the salesgirl's face, or, if she turned her head, by the steady push of the steel-blue waves and the scurrying of the sand birds. But alone there in the car, time didn't seem to pass at all, as if the moment were suspended or widening, almost as if it were giving birth to something, and her hand never moved, never completed its tapping. She was waiting for something, something that was
bound
to happen. She'd had that feeling all her life.

And now, here in the room, what she remembered best was how in that moment when she had felt so alone, so
only,
but also at the same time so connected to the whole causal process of everything else that moved outside the window, so subject in some way to destiny or fate, she had seen the dirty white cuff of her cheap nylon jacket above her elbow, how the coat was dingy and too small, and she had determined right then that when she was a grown woman she was going to have nice, clean clothes that fit her right, and her children were going to have them, too. She remembered that thought and that dirty coat sleeve as if they were happening right now, in this new solitude, as if that solitary moment and this one had bypassed time and slipped alongside each other.