Monday, Monday: A Novel (16 page)

And Delia turned and saw Shelly. Jack’s hand was still on the door. He, too, was looking at Shelly.

The child plopped down on the floor and took up a plastic tomahawk decorated with feathers. Her mouth made a perfect O as she riffled her fingers across the feathers.

Delia said, “Shelly? Hi.”

Shelly replied so quietly she hardly heard her own voice. “Hey Delia.”

They stared at each other. “It’s hard to believe this,” Delia said.

“Yes, it’s kind of strange.”

“You’re working here?”

“Yes. She’s beautiful.”

Delia turned and looked at the child. “She is, isn’t she?”

The sunlight made a halo out of the girl’s wispy curls while she examined the bright feathers on the shaft of the tomahawk.

“Is this awful for you?” Delia asked Shelly. “To have her here?”

“It’s like a miracle,” Shelly said. “It’s wonderful. I love having her here. And she looks like…”

“Like who?”

“Like my mother, a little. Maybe it’s just her hair that does. But her skin is the same, too. It’s fair like my mother’s. Oh, I never thought I’d see her again.”

Jack allowed the door to swing closed, jangling the bells. He smiled at Shelly.

“What did you name her?” Shelly asked.

“We named her Carlotta,” Delia said.

“Carlotta Stone,” Shelly repeated. “That’s beautiful.” She had tried to guess at the name, but had never thought of Carlotta. “It’s perfect. Is it a family name?”

“My mother’s,” Delia said.

The child picked up a souvenir ashtray and studied the picture on it. “Moke!” she said, waving the ashtray at Jack.

“Because I smoke,” Jack explained.

He tried to coax her to give him the ashtray, telling her it would break if she dropped it, but she clutched it and shook her head, saying, “Have it, have it,” until he distracted her with a Barbie-size doll dressed as a mermaid that he took from the top shelf, and she surrendered the ashtray. The doll had eyes that opened and closed, and Carlotta played with them, prying them open and gazing into the glassy orbs.

“She likes anything shiny,” Delia said.

Jack stacked the ashtrays out of her reach while Carlotta nestled the mermaid into her lap and plucked aggressively at the feathers on the tomahawk. Delia said, “Sweetie, don’t pull those feathers out.” When Carlotta saw her coming to take the tomahawk she shrieked excitedly, yanking a handful of feathers. Delia tried to pick her up, but Carlotta sprawled on her back, turning herself into limp weight. Jack lifted her up while Delia brought the tomahawk to the counter. “We’ll need to buy this,” she said with a rueful smile.

“Can I buy it for her?” Shelly asked. “I can glue the feathers back on.” Searching under the counter for glue, she felt as if none of this really was happening—it seemed impossible to be seeing the child up close and in real life instead of in memories and dreams. She only remembered her wrapped in the blanket, making the little mewling sounds.

And now Carlotta had started to fuss and squirm in Jack’s arms. Shelly picked up a snow globe from a cluster for sale on the counter, shook it, and offered it. Carlotta dropped her handful of feathers to take it, and brought it close to her face to study the falling snowflakes. It was a water scene with a background of painted ferns and mermaids and a small plastic floating figure of Ralph the swimming pig. The snowflakes made no sense in this underwater scene, but the child was transfixed, and shook the globe to watch the flakes and the tiny pig floating in the water. She looked directly at Shelly, almost as if she remembered her, and Shelly saw that her eyes had remained blue.

“So, do you want tickets to the rides?” Shelly managed to ask. “Have you been here before?”

“I was here as a kid, in the forties,” Jack said, and she wondered if maybe he had come on a family outing, perhaps with Wyatt along, and the idea gave her a heartbreaking feeling. The place had been her escape from thinking of Wyatt, and she didn’t want to envision him here as a boy, peering into the green waters or running along the trails in the Hanging Gardens across the river.

Jack was mercifully unforthcoming. “Mostly I just remember the pig.”

“You’ll want tickets to the underwater show, then,” Shelly said.

“I think we’ll want tickets to everything.”

“Carlotta will love the glassblower,” Shelly suggested. “He’s in the cabin across the river. Tell him Shelly asked if he’d make a goose with a golden egg. It’s amazing to watch him do that. And you might take the ferry over instead of the sky ride. A lot of kids get scared on the sky ride.”

“I’m more likely to get scared than she is,” Jack said, pushing Carlotta’s curls out of her eyes.

“She’s adventurous,” Delia added.

Carlotta was still peering into the snow globe and shaking it every few seconds.

Jack paid for the tickets, but Shelly didn’t allow him to pay for the tomahawk. “And I want to give her the snow globe, too,” she insisted, dreading the tinkling of doorbells that would mean the magic was over, and would leave her to think of Carlotta every time the bells jangled again.

When the moment of parting came, Shelly was unable to speak. What words could do justice to her feelings? Delia thanked her again for the gifts, and was already at the door, Jack behind her, carrying Carlotta, who was shaking the snow globe, when Shelly called impulsively after them. “Will you stop back in after you’ve seen everything?”

Delia turned and looked at her but didn’t say anything for a second. Shelly wished she could reel the words back in so that these beautiful moments would not have an awkward ending. But then Delia said, “Why don’t you join us for the submarine show?”

She gasped at the thought. “I’d love to! Oh Delia, that is so nice of you! I’ll get someone to fill in for me. The show starts at noon. I’ll wait for you at the submarine.”

When they left, she ran to the restaurant and traded hours with a waitress named June. “I’ll take your whole day on Sunday if you’ll fill in for me at the gift shop for an hour today,” she promised. She primped in the bathroom and put on lipstick, then waited on customers, dusting every shelf and singing songs to herself—even “Swanee River,” which she had been too sad to sing that last day in the hospital. Nothing seemed sad now. She felt as if she had been living the last year in a play, and now the lights had come on and she could see a world out there. Everything she was living was only a small part of the real picture. There were possibilities that she had not thought of. She could even just walk off the stage and into the world. What Charles Whitman had done to her, and the love affair with Wyatt, and having to give up the baby wasn’t her whole life—there would be chance meetings and other surprises. Because here she was, on a sunny spring day, and her baby, now beautifully named Carlotta, with orange curls, had been carried back into her life by the same people who had carried her out of it, and Shelly was going to sit with her and watch a swimming pig in an underwater show.

At noon, she was waiting outside the submarine theater when Jack and Delia came walking up the path, Carlotta perched on Jack’s shoulders. “How has it been?” Shelly asked them.

“We’ve had a very fun time,” Delia said.

“Goat,” Carlotta said. “Chicken. Ball.”

“Yes, the chicken plays basketball,” Shelly told her.

Carlotta pointed at one of glass-bottomed tour boats anchored at the dock and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Fish swimming.” She opened her mouth in imitation of a fish, revealing four small teeth. Then she seemed to remember something, and shook her head vigorously, pounding her fist on the top of Jack’s head. “No, no, Lotta,” she said loudly.

“She’s telling you she was evicted from the saloon for beating on the player piano,” Jack said. “We’re hoping it’s the last time she’s thrown out of a bar.”

The entrance to the theater was a thatched roof flanked with crossed spears. A girl named Jenny, wearing a flowered sarong and greeting the dozen or so ticket holders, came over to talk with Shelly. She chatted with Jack and Delia about the show and gave Carlotta a handful of corn to feed the ducks while waiting. It was a breezy day and not too warm. Willows along the bank swished their long limbs over the ground. When the submarine surfaced, the audience on board exited by a ramp, and a guide invited the waiting crowd aboard.

“Hey, Shelly!” the guide said when he saw her. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?’

“June’s filling in for me. I want you to meet my friends Jack and Delia Stone, and their little girl, Carlotta.”

“Welcome!” he told them. “Right this way. Watch your step.”

The submarine was a long rectangular theater built to descend as water was let into the ballast tanks. Several rows of bleachers faced a wall of windows that revealed a view of the fiberglass volcano.

Shelly sat in the front row with Jack and Delia as Carlotta ran up and down in front of the glass with three other small children. Beyond the window, a Polynesian maiden emerged from the cave of the volcano, coaxing Ralph the pig behind her with a milk bottle. The volcano suddenly emitted a puff of smoke, and Carlotta stopped running and stared at it. A rumbling sound crackled over the loudspeaker, followed by a deep voice saying, “The volcano is angry. It will erupt and create great danger if Glurpo the village witch doctor cannot appease its anger.”

The witch doctor, a college student whom Shelly knew as Brad, appeared on top of the volcano, wearing a necklace of shells and a loincloth and waving a spear over his head. He fumbled the spear and dropped it, then picked it up and dropped it again, and he did this several more times while the audience in the submarine laughed. “Our fate is in the hands of Glurpo,” the recording said.

The submarine began to descend. At the first sensation of movement, Carlotta climbed into Delia’s lap and watched as the waterline crawled up the window and the Polynesian girl dived into the water. Ralph performed his famous swan dive after the girl, creating an explosion of underwater bubbles, his legs paddling furiously and his snout straining after the bottle. The magnifying aspect of the water, in the split-level view as the submarine descended, made Ralph’s pink underside look disengaged from the rest of him, his cloven hooves pulling furiously at the water and his rump muscles straining. Corn was tossed to the ducks from above, and they dived deep, stretching their necks for the kernels that fluttered toward the bottom. Carlotta was so thrilled with the anomaly of the upside-down ducks that she shook her snow globe furiously and climbed out of Delia’s lap to get closer to the window. Turning to look at Shelly, she said, “Ducks coming!” as seriously as if she were announcing the queen of England.

Shelly whispered, “Yes, look at them,” and watched the child’s warm breath clouding the glass.

When the theater was entirely underwater, a second Aquamaid emerged from a gigantic clam that was anchored to the bottom of the river. She carried a drawstring bag and sipped air out of a hose in a swarm of bubbles that floated upward. High above her, on the surface, Ralph’s hooves paddled back toward the volcano, and the girl who had been swimming with him descended and performed a languid ballet with the girl from the clam shell, their long hair floating about them and their air tubes drifting alongside.

Watching Carlotta at the window, Shelly wanted to pull the child into her arms. She had never felt so much longing for anyone, except for Wyatt, and that had been illicit. This was pure.

The Aquamaids spread a cloth over a tabletop and opened the drawstring bag, removing bananas and clusters of grapes and sticks of celery, on which they slowly dined, wiping their mouths with napkins. They drank from bottles of soda pop and took delicate sips of air out of their hoses, letting the bubbles shimmer up to the surface. Glurpo splashed into the midst of their picnic, his large flippers thrashing about in the water, the fringes of his loincloth attracting schools of fish. Shelly could see him glancing at her through his diving mask, and she gestured toward Carlotta so that he would take note of her. He swam to the window, pressed his mask to the glass directly in front of Carlotta, and blew bubbles into her face until she let out a squeal of happiness.

Shelly wished she could stay here forever, under the surface, as in a dream, in a make-believe place with a swimming pig and a fake clam and college girls in sarongs, and Carlotta.

But the Aquamaids had finished their picnic. They shook their napkins in a dreamy way and ascended slowly, trailing their hoses. The submarine began to rise.

Feeling the upward movement, Carlotta shook her head and said, “Down! Down!” When the surface began to take over the view, she put both hands against the glass as if to hold the waterline in place and stop its descent on the window. She squatted to see the last underwater remnants, pleading “Down, down,” until the theater jolted to a stop at the surface and she flung herself into a heap and cried miserably while Delia knelt beside her and tried to comfort her. People had to walk around her to exit, and Jack finally lifted her against his shoulder and carried her out as she wept.

Shelly felt wretched, watching this. She wanted to go back down, down, herself. Seeing the underwater show through Carlotta’s eyes had made her fall in love with the lovely vision—the backward curve of the Aquamaids as they performed their synchronized ballet, and the unhurried swarms of perch, and even Glurpo and his ridiculous act.

“Maybe you can bring her back again,” she suggested to Delia over Carlotta’s cries as they exited the ramp.

“I think we’ll have to,” Delia said.

When they were on solid ground, Shelly purchased a nickel’s worth of duck feed from a dispenser near the boats and gave it to Carlotta to distract her from pouting, and then lingered, feeling self-conscious and extraneous to the family but wanting to watch Carlotta toss the pellets to the ducks. “Are you going on the sky ride?” she asked.

“She’s getting pretty cranky,” Delia said. “We should probably do that another day. It’s her naptime. She’s been teething.”

Carlotta toddled off after the ducks, and Delia ran after her. Jack and Shelly sat on a bench near the sidewalk. Two boats were tied at the dock in front of them, and a third moved slowly toward them on the water, the passengers peering down into the viewing window. The guide’s voice boomed through a microphone: “As we pull into the shaded area under the trees, you’re about to see a school of the famous monkey fish. These are a rare kind of fish, because if you wave at them, they’ll wave back.” The passengers waved and broke into laughter.