Small World (28 page)

‘That’s not very likely, is it?’

Roger put his arms around her. He was a spy leaving his little woman to plunge into some mad, foolhardy act of daring-do. He kissed her lightly. Let her remember him at this moment, a thin smile on his lips, acting as if he really thought he might survive to

return.

When the door closed behind him, Dolly smashed a Chinese vase that was old when Christ was crucified onto the tiled hearth of the tireplace. It was the only available substitute for shouting at him, dancing on his frigging head. He was taking the minimizer away. What if his goddamn plane crashed and it was destroyed? What .Yould she do then? He had no right to take it. It wasn’t fair.

During her dance class, she worked herself into something like calmness. Lunch was deadly quiet. She had gotten used to Roger’s roolish face staring at her over the avocadoes and shrimp. The place seemed so still and empty and she knew that only meant she '*as lonely.

She thought she had given up married-people habits forever. Now she would not be able to sleep on his side of the bed, not for a l ing time, when the invisible property lines disintegrated. To •'•hom would she talk, to whom tell the silly things that happened every day? She knew the drill; she had been through it before. It just a habit, she consoled herself, more breakable than the trbacco habit with which she fouled her mouth and lungs every day.

Of course, she would miss bedtime. He had a wonderful sexual pliability. Tabula rasa he had come to her and she had written the -:ige directions until suddenly, he caught on. It had been amusing; still, when did that kind of thing ever last? Let him piss away his time holding his dreary mother’s hand.

She drifted to the dollhouse room, standing in the doorway a long time. It wasn’t her room alone anymore. Roger had claimed it, altered her Doll’s White House substantially, and in doing so, made it partly his. It was Lucy, all over again, only more so. Lucy was circumspect in her possessiveness. She never forgot who paid the bills.

And now Roger dared to tell her how to take care of their house guest.

‘Leave her alone,’ he said. ‘She has to learn to live in a new world.’

Dolly circled the room restlessly, trying not to look at the big dollhouse. When she decided to allow herself one small peek at the bedroom window, she found the room empty. Listening carefully, she heard nothing. The bathroom door was closed. Was she in the can or not?

Going from window to window, she wished Roger had put in the cameras he had been talking about, seemingly forever. At last, she found her in the China Room, studying portraits. Lucy had discovered some extraordinary teenage boy in Texas to do the reproductions of the paintings in the White House. The Christy portrait of Grace Coolidge that Leyna was looking at just then was one of his nearly flawless efforts. As Dolly looked through the window, Leyna seemed to sense her presence and turned to her. Neither woman so much as blinked.

‘The red dress in the wardrobe,’ Leyna said in her high tiny voice, ‘it’s that one.’

Her color was high; she was apparently both excited and frightened by her discovery.

‘Yes,’ Dolly agreed. ‘I’m sorry it didn’t fit.’

Leyna shuddered.

‘I’ll get your clothes,’ Dolly offered.

Leyna stood silently before Grace Coolidge’s portrait. She had seen it before, the day that Matt Johnson had given her the Grand Tour. It was just a publicity stunt, meant to generate speculation in the gossip columns that she and the nation’s first bachelor president since Wilson’s widowment were romantically interested in each other. You scratch me, I’ll scratch you, and only the public is conned.

Never mind that the whole press corps and his mother knew that Matt Johnson was a single-track homosexual. Women took to him as quickly as men did, because he was a relentlessly charming bastard, but his sexual bent was clearly defined. He had no personal friends of either sex, only allies, enemies, and sex partners from either camp.

It flitted through Leyna’s mind when she first began to identify the curious place where she found herself that for some reason, Matt Johnson had elected to tuck her into a state bedroom while she recuperated. It was a wild thought, dismissed immediately. There were too many things out of place for this house to be the White House she had known. It was not quite right, as if it were in a different dimension, another world.

Yet here was Grace Coolidge’s portrait, and all the china patterns she had seen the day of that publicity tour. Ugly china she thought it then, and still thought now, and that made her remember some of the more notable examples. She couldn’t be ■ mistaken.

Struggling out of bed with a mild hangover, she had eaten everything left from the previous night’s meal. It made a screwy sort of breakfast, but it did the trick. The carbohydrates and about a quart of clear water flushed the shakes from her system .She had a nice soak in the tub and rewrapped her sheet. It was getting a bit crumby and smelled distinctly of spilled stale beer, but it was all she had. She brushed her freshly washed hair with a silver backed brush from the set that gleamed on the top of the dresser. Lovely things, sensual in their cool grace.

The wardrobe mirror told her she looked a little more alive. She twitched her sheet at herself and grinned. Now that she had satisfied, for the moment, her hunger, she discovered a new ippetite. She had always been a solitary, content with herself. It was not any real desire for friendship, or companionship, that blossomed in her. Just the need to see a person the size of herself, a whole, sane being, to corroborate her own perspective. Not parts of people the size of fairy tale giants. Not Eyes, Mouths, Hands.

She steeled herself to go exploring again. The unnatural silence c f the place had to end sometime. Sooner or later, the house must answer back.

Still, Dorothy’s gray Eye found her in the China Room. Leyna wondered what part of her mind had thrown up the Other One, tiie brown-eyed Giant who seemed so much kinder and gentler to

her.    *

W"hen Dolly returned with the clothing, she found Leyna had -era rned to the safety of her bedroom. Opening a window noisily, 'he slipped the neatly folded pile of clothing into the room. Then she waited avidly for the little woman inside, watching her from the shadows of the bed hangings, to dress.

When the Fingers had withdrawn a safe distance and time from the window, Leyna retrieved the bundle from the floor. She knew them instantly: her jogging shorts, shirt, and brassiere. Once she touched them, she couldn’t help hugging them to her. The first concrete evidence that she had once existed in another world.

The Eye returned to the window. Stricken with irrational guilt, Leyna hid the bundle behind her back. She stared back at the Eye, appalled by its enormous gelatinous sphere mooning at her through the glass. At last she could hold herself no more; she broke and ran for the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. It was a mistake. She was still too weak. The sudden exertion made her vision swim red and black behind her closed lids. She staggered and sank onto the toilet seat. Her stomach rebelled. Just in time, she turned and flipped the lid, losing her breakfast in the bowl.

Huddling by the cold wall of the bowl she wished to slip back into bed, into sleep, to wake up with the new nightmare behind her. With an ear-shattering grinding and shuddering, the bathroom wall was abruptly torn away. She screamed, more in anger than in fear. There was no place to hide in the narrow room; she was trapped.

The Eye, now part of a Face as large as the bathroom wall it displaced, stared at her. Its Nose was as long as she was. A great, gaping, red-rimmed Mouth breathed foully on her. She could fall into the Mouth like Alice down the rabbithole and never be seen again.

‘Don’t hide from me!’ Dolly roared at her.

Leyna covered her ears. Tears streamed over her cheeks. The bundle of clothing slipped from her grasp to the bathroom floor.

In a softer voice she was ordered, ‘Get dressed and I’ll put the wall back.’

Leyna moaned. Spittle bubbled down her chin. She had to seize the side of the bathtub to pull herself upright. The knots she had tied in the sheet to costume herself were rocky and stiff. Fumbling with them, she broke fingernails and scraped her papery knuckles raw. In a few minutes, the sheet puddled on the floor around her feet. She shivered violently, covering herself unconsciously with her hands.

‘Come now, we’re all girls here,’ Dolly said, and hooted. ‘Get dressed.’

Leyna began, trying to remember what she had done with her clothes. She fished them out from under the crumpled sheet. The bra was the hardest part. A sports bra with no hooks to catch, it had to be pulled on and kept from twisting itself. Then the shorts and shirt and she stood clothed again.

'Nasty thing,’ Dolly reprimanded. ‘Don’t wear panties like a good girl, do you? Always ready, aren’t you?’

Leyna shook her head vigorously in denial. She was not a bad girl. There was not enough spittle in her mouth to explain her personal idiosyncrasies about running dress.

'You ran away,’ Dolly went on.

Leyna bowed her head.

'You didn’t wait for these.’

Leyna looked up. On the tip of an enormous Finger, her jogging sneakers, with socks stuffed neatly under the tongues, pointed their red toes at her.

Dolly began to hum as she slipped the wall back into its slot. The sound broke over Leyna in continuous waves that vibrated like the tires of huge trucks passing in the night. In the silence that followed, Leyna went to her knees. Her mind was a blank screen. No clear thought focussed on the white wall of emotion. She crawled, on hands and knees, back to the bed.

Holding her breath, Dolly watched her. For long moments she siared at the huddled form under the blanket. She smiled, toyed with a pack of cigarettes, but did not light one. She had no desire to smoke. For once, she was having fun.

The screen
door was off its hinges just enough to throw the whole door out of line. Roger made a mental note to fix it before he left. It was just one of half-a-dozen superficial out-of-order flags around the house. His absence showed in minor ways.

Dropping his duffel bag on the porch, he pushed open the door, carrying only the minimizer in its camera case with him. The house was empty, silent except for the drip of the kitchen faucet. He had planned it this way, wanting a quiet time in which to look things over and gird himself before his mother arrived home from work.

He opened the refrigerator. She had stocked it for her prodigal son. Hesitating for a second between a stick of pepperoni and a
j'ar
of pickled eggs, he chose the pepperoni, hooked a beer, and trotted purposefully down the stairs to his Fortress of Solitude.

Among the dusty cobwebs of the cellar, the beer went down like lemonade. Anticipating the soldiers that remained in their neat plastic nooses in the refrigerator made him feel mildly perverse.

His absence showed in the workshop in the film of dust over the grime and trash of his past life: fingerprints, rusty can rings, grease, and oil smears. The place smelled stale and looked tacky.

He ran a hasty inventory, rummaging through cupboards and shelves, mentally marking what he ought to ship East, what he ought to destroy or discard. In the morning, he would go to a market or liquor store for boxes.

Overhead, the screen door opened with a scream, and he heard the clip clap of his mother’s sensible heels. Wiping mouse turds from his hands on a handy rag, he picked up his pepperoni. He locked up quickly and trotted up the stairs, shouting gaily, ‘Mom! That you?’

That night, they went to dinner at a fancy restaurant in a big new shopping mall. She prattled; he slipped easily bade into the old habit of hearing without listening. Bending his elbow over steak Diane and getting mildly plastered on an expensive, sour-tasting wine, he allowed the flow of her chatter to pour over him like a caress. Deep in his own alcohol-dimmed thoughts, chewing lustily on a chunk of rare meat, he didn’t notice for some time when she stopped talking. He looked up when the silence penetrated to catch her watching him with a gleam of tears in her eyes.

He wiped his mouth, feeling distinctly like a terminal patient whose condition is being kept from him.

‘Something wrong, Mom?’ he asked, unable to think of anything else to say.

Slowly, sorrowfully, she shook her head. But she reached across the table, grabbed one of his hands and clutched it convulsively. Roger let her hold on, but he shifted uneasily in his seat, hoping no one in the restaurant would notice.

‘I'm just so glad you’re home again,’ she snuffled. Burying her face in her hanky, she muffled her sobs.

There was nothing Roger could say to any of it. And it didn’t seem quite the right moment to mention he was going back East as soon as he could dispose of his gear and settle her.

A couple of days later, Roger shocked himself by losing his way to the Salvation Army store on Redondo Street. After delivering a box of his old duds, he wandered around the store, having a look-see at the old baby stuff and flaky television sets. A woman pawed over a jumbled heap of second-hand nightwear on a table. Another tried on an assortment of shoes. A clerk grinned hopefully at each of them in turn. Roger was overwhelmed, in a most un-Roger-like way, with sheer anomie. It was giving away his old and comfortable clothing, he told himself, and knowing :hat soon, strangers would pluck them from the general ruck and hold them up in a critical light. And losing his way, in a town he ~ad lived in most of his life. The sense that something was Happening to him, something he couldn’t stop and that might never end, that would be forever, oppressed him.