The Collective (21 page)

"They were supposed to bring the car right out to the plane," Bill said, already starting up the Type A shit. This she didn't like, but at least she didn't detest it the way she detested the plummy laugh and his repertoire of patronizing looks. "I hope there hasn't been a hitch."

There hasn't been, she thought, and the feeling swept over her full force. I'm going to see it out the window on my side in just a second or two. It's your total Florida vacation car, a great big white goddam Cadillac, or maybe it's a Lincoln - And, yes, here it came, proving what? Well, she supposed, it proved that sometimes when you had deja vu what you thought was going to happen next really did happen next. It wasn't a Caddy or a Lincoln after all, but a Crown Victoria - what the gangsters in a Martin Scorsese film would no doubt call a Crown Vic.

"Whoo," she said as he helped her down the steps and off the plane. The hot sun made her feel dizzy.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing, really. I've got deja' vu. Left over from my dream, I guess. We've been here before, that kind of thing."

"It's being in a strange place, that's all," he said, and kissed her cheek. "Come on, let the wild rumpus start."

They went to the car. Bill showed his driver's license to the young woman who had driven it out. Carol saw him check out the hem of her skirt, then sign the paper on her clipboard.

She's going to drop it,
Carol thought. The feeling was now so strong it was like being on an amusement-park ride that goes just a little too fast; all at once you realize you're edging out of the Land of Fun and into the Kingdom of Nausea.
She'll drop it, and Bill will say "Whoopsy-daisy" and pick it up for her, get an even closer look at her legs.

But the Hertz woman didn't drop her clipboard. A white courtesy van had appeared, to take her back to the Butler Aviation terminal. She gave Bill a final smile-Carol she had ignored completely-and opened the front passenger door. She stepped up, then slipped. "Whoopsy-daisy, don't be crazy," Bill said, and took her elbow, steadying her. She gave him a smile, he gave her well-turned legs a

goodbye look, and Carol stood by the growing pile of their luggage and thought,
Hey there, Mary...

"Mrs. Shelton?" It was the co-pilot. He had the last bag, the case with Bill's laptop inside it, and he looked concerned. "Are you all right? You're very pale."

Bill heard and turned away from the departing white van, his face worried. If her strongest feelings about Bill were her only feelings about Bill, now that they were twenty-five years on, she would have left him when she found out about the secretary, a Clairol blonde too young to remember the Clairol slogan that went "If I have only one life to live," etc., etc. But there were other feelings. There was love, for instance. Still love. A kind that girls in Catholic-school uniforms didn't suspect, a weedy species too tough to die.

Besides, it wasn't just love that held people together. Secrets held them, and common history, and the price you paid.

"Carol?" he asked her. "Babe? All right?"

She thought about telling him no, she wasn't all right, she was drowning, but then she managed to smile and said, "It's the heat, that's all. I feel a little groggy - Get me in the car and crank up the air-conditioning. I'll be fine."

Bill took her by the elbow
(Betyou're not checking out my legs, though,
Carol thought.
You know where they go, don't you?)
and led her toward the Crown Vic as if she were a very old lady. By the time the door was closed and cool air was pumping over her face, she actually had started to feel a little better.

If the feeling comes back, I'll tell him,
Carol thought.
I'll have to. It's just too strong Not normal

Well, deja vu was never normal, she supposed - it was something that was part dream, part chemistry, and (she was sure she'd read

this, maybe in a doctor's office somewhere while waiting for her gynecologist to go prospecting up her fifty-two-year-old twat) part the result of an electrical misfire in the brain, causing new experience to be identified as old data. A temporary hole in the pipes, hot water and cold water mingling. She closed her eyes and prayed for it to go away.

Oh, Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

Please ("Oh puh-lease," they used to say), not back to parochial school. This was supposed to be a vacation, not -
Floyd - what's that over there? Oh shit!

Oh SHIT!

Who was Floyd? The only Floyd Bill knew was Floyd Doming (or maybe it was Darling), the kid he'd run the snack bar with, the one who'd run off to New York with his girlfriend. Carol couldn't remember when Bill had told her about that kid, but she knew he had.

Jast quit it, girl. There's nothing here for you. Slam the door on the whole train of thought.

And that worked. There was a final whisper - what's
the story and
then she was just Carol Shelton, on her way to Captiva Island, on her way to Palin House with her husband the renowned software designer, on their way to the beaches and those rum drinks with the little paper umbrellas sticking out of them.

They passed a Publix market. They passed an old black man minding a roadside fruit stand - he made her think of actors from the thirties and movies you saw on the American Movie Channel, an old yassuh-boss type of guy wearing bib overalls and a straw hat with a round crown. Bill made small talk, and she made it right back at him. She was faintly amazed that the little girl who had worn a Mary medallion every day from ten to sixteen had become this woman in the Donna Karan dress - that the desperate couple in that Revere apartment were these middle-aged rich folks rolling down a lush aisle of palms - but she was and they were. Once in those Revere days he had come home drunk and she had hit him and drawn blood from below his eye. Once she had been in fear of Hell, had lain half-drugged in steel stirrups, thinking,
I'm damned, I've come to damnation. A million years, and that's only the first tick of the clock.

They stopped at the causeway tollbooth and Carol thought,
The toll-taker has a strawberry birthmark on the left side of his forehead, all mixed in with his eyebrow.

There was no mark-the toll-taker was just an ordinary guy in his late forties or early fifties, iron-gray hair in a buzz cut, hornrimmed specs, the kind of guy who says, "Y'all have a nahce tahm, okai?"-but the feeling began to come back, and Carol realized that now the things she thought she knew were things she really did know, at first not all of them, but then, by the time they neared the little market on the right side of Route 41, it was almost everything.

The market's called Corson's and there's a little gid outfront,
Carol thought.
She's wearing a red pinafore. She's got a doll, a dirty old yellow-haired thing, that she's left on the store steps so she can look at a dog in the back of a station wagon.

The name of the market turned out to be Carson's, not Corson's, but everything else was the same. As the white Crown Vic passed, the little girl in the red dress turned her solemn face in Carol's direction, a country girl's face, although what a girl from the toolies could be doing here in rich folks' tourist country, her and her dirty yellow-headed doll, Carol didn't know.

Here's where I ask Bill how much farther, only I won't do it. Because I have to break out of this cycle, this groove. I have to.

"How much farther?" she asked him. He says there's only one road, we can't get lost. He says he promises me we'll get to the Palm House with no problem. And, by the way, who's Floyd?

Bill's eyebrow went up. The dimple beside his mouth appeared. "Once you get over the causeway and onto Sanibel Island, there's only one road," he said. Carol barely heard him. He was still talking about the road, her husband who had spent a dirty weekend in bed with his secretary two years ago, risking all they had done and all they had made, Bill doing that with his other face on, being the Bill Carol's mother had warned would break her heart. And later Bill trying to tell her he hadn't been able to help himself, her wanting to scream,
I once murdered a child for you, the potential of a child, anyway. How high is that price? And is this what I get in return? To reach my fifties and find out that my husband had to get into some Clairol girl's pants?

Tell him!
she shrieked.
Make him pull over and stop, make him do anything that will break you free-change one thing, change everything! You can do it if you could put your feet up in those stirrups, you can do anything!

But she could do nothing, and it all began to tick by faster. The two overfed crows lifted off from their splatter of lunch. Her husband asked why she was sitting that way, was it a cramp, her saying, Yes, yes, a cramp in her back but it was easing. Her mouth quacked on about deja vu just as if she weren't drowning in it, and the Crown Vic moved forward like one of those sadistic Dodgem cars at Revere Beach. Here came Palmdale Motors on the right. And on the lefr? Some kind of sign for the local community theatre, a production of "Naughty Marietta."

No, it's Mary, not Marietta. Mary, mother of Jesus, Mary, mother of God, she's got her hands out....

Carol bent all her will toward telling her husband what was happening, because the right Bill was behind the wheel, the right

Bill could still hear her. Being heard was what married love was all about.

Nothing came out. In her mind Gram said, "All the hard days are coming." In her mind a voice asked Floyd what was over there, then said, "Oh shit," then
screamed
"Oh shit!"

She looked at the speedometer and saw it was calibrated not in miles an hour but thousands of feet: they were at twenty-eight thousand. Bill was telling her that she shouldn't have slept on the plane and she was agreeing.

There was a pink house coming up, little more than a bungalow, fringed with palm trees that looked like the ones you saw in the Second World War movies, fronds framing incoming Learjets with their machine guns blazing-

Blazing. Burning hot. All at once the magazine he's holding turns into a torch. Holy Mary, mother of God, hey there, Mary, what's the story-

They passed the house. The old man sat on the porch and watched them go by. The lenses of his rimless glasses glinted in the sun. Bill's hand established a beachhead on her hip. He said something about how they might pause to refresh themselves between the doffing of her dress and the donning of her shorts and she agreed, although they were never going to get to Palm House. They were going to go down this road and down this road, they were for the white Crown Vic and the white Crown Vic was for them, forever and ever amen.

The next billboard would say "Palm House 2 Mi." Beyond it was the one saying that Mother of Mercy Charities helped the Florida sick. Would they help her?

Now that it was too late she was be-ginning to understand. Beginning to see the light the way she could see the subtropical sun sparkling off the water on their left. Wondering how many

wrongs she had done in her life, how many sins if you liked that word, God knew her parents and her Gram certainly had, sin this and sin that and wear the medallion between those growing things the boys look at. And years later she had lain in bed with her new husband on hot summer nights, knowing a decision had to be made, knowing the clock was ticking, the cigarette butt was smoldering, and she remembered making the decision, not telling him out loud because about some things you could be silent.

Her head itched. She scratched it. Black flecks came swirling down past her face. On the Crown Vic's instrument panel the speedometer froze at sixteen thousand feet and then blew out, but Bill appeared not to notice.

Here came a mailbox with a Grateful Dead sticker pasted on the front; here came a little black dog with its head down, trotting busily, and God how her head itched, black flakes drifting in the air like fallout and Mother Teresa's face looking out of one of them.

"Mother of Mary Charities Help the Florida Hungry-Won't
You
Help
Us?"

Floyd What's that over there? Oh shit

She has time to see something big. And to read the word "Delta." "Bill?
Bill?"

His reply, clear enough but nevertheless coming from around the rim of the universe: "Christ, honey, what's in your
hair?"

She plucked the charred remnant of Mother Teresa's face from her hair and held it out to him, the older version of the man she had married, the secretary fucking man she had married, the man who had nonetheless rescued her from people who thought that you could live forever in paradise if you only lit enough candles and wore the blue blazer and stuck to the approved skipping rhymes -

Lying there with this man one hot summer night while the drug deals went on upstairs and Iron Butterfly sang "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" for the nine-billionth time, she had asked what he thought you got, you know, after. When your part in the show is over. He had taken her in his arms and held her, down the beach she had heard the jangle-jingle of the mid-way and the bang of the Dodgem cars and Bill - Bill's glasses were melted to his face.

One eye bulged out of its socket. His mouth was a bloodhole. In the trees a bird was crying, a bird was
screaming,
and Carol began to scream with it, holding out the charred fragment of paper with Mother Teresa's picture on it, screaming, watching as his cheeks turned black and his forehead swarmed and his neck split open like a poisoned goiter, screaming, she was screaming, somewhere Iron Butterfly was singing "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and she was screaming.