After Bathing at Baxters Read online

  In Number 5 Loretta lies on her stomach in the sky-blue dressing gown Henry likes drinking from a glass of iced water. There is a bottle of bourbon on the side table in the plastic cover that the liquor store checkout girl wrapped it in, but Loretta thinks she’ll save that for later, after Henry arrives. She imagines the two of them curled up on the bed late at night toasting each other in neat bourbon. Even now Loretta can’t stop congratulating herself on how things have worked out, on Henry being in this part of the county for a copier salesmen’s convention and wanting to get back together again, and Henry’s wife being away in Maine for the weekend visiting her folks. Loretta checks her watch. 7 p.m. An hour, maybe, or an hour and a half and then Henry will be here, dusting his hands down on his knees that way he has, telling her how fine-looking she is and how much he’s missed her. Loretta rolls over onto her back and lights a cigarette, like in a movie with Michelle Pfeiffer or Ellen Barkin, where the girl lies in the darkened room on the unmade bed so that when the phone rings and she starts up her breasts tumble into her hands like ripe fruit.

  Joe and Ella jostle into each other in the kitchen, where Larry stands slicing tomatoes with a long-handled knife. He has a trick of throwing each tomato in the air and catching it on the blade as it falls. ‘Like that tie,’ Ella says, and Joe nods self-consciously. Neither of them knows how to behave in front of Larry, who is eighteen and saving up to pay his way through medical school. ‘You put them extra towels in Number 3?’ Ella asks. Joe shakes his head and looks at Larry. Larry smiles. Another thing about Larry is that he has this habit of quoting details from all the medical textbooks he reads, details about tapeworms and inflated livers and all the weird stuff that can kill you. Ella wishes secretly that Larry would say some of this stuff now, but Larry stays quiet and flicks another tomato effortlessly into the air. ‘And the sign,’ Ella tells Joe. ‘You could at least have fixed the sign.’ Joe shrugs, the way he has done every Saturday night these last five years, the way he did when his mother died, the way he did when Billie-Sue told them she was moving in with some longhair over at Carson Lake. The wind scrabbles at the window. Outside Ella can hear heavy car tyres – a station wagon, maybe, or a Pontiac – crunching up the dirt in the driveway.

  In Number 7 the Fergusons continue the argument they began twelve hours ago over breakfast and carried on through the three-hundred mile drive east from Kansas City. On the TV screen in the corner of the room a grey-haired man in an expensive-looking suit is talking to a glamorous woman in a one-piece bathing costume, and Mrs Ferguson watches them as she argues. ‘You got no right,’ she says bitterly. ‘Driving her home like that in broad daylight, staying out there on the patio for a coupla hours like it was a free show for the neighbourhood. No right at all.’ Mr Ferguson lies sprawled over the bed counting cigarettes from out of a bent, crimson packet. There are seventeen. He flicks one up from between thumb and forefinger into his mouth, focusing only on the moment, the noise of the flints colliding beneath the chromium of the lighter. Mrs Ferguson’s voice is a faint susurration, like rainfall heard a long way off.

  In the kitchen Larry is frying gammon slices in a big open frypan. When each slice is done he transfers it from the pan onto the glass hotplate under the grill. Ella sits watching him from the kitchen table. There is no sign of Joe, who has gone to checkout the new arrivals in the lobby. Eventually Larry says: ‘I mean, take your lungs, right? Say you cut them open and pulled all the surfaces out flat, how much of them do you reckon there’d be?’ Ella frowns. ‘I guess I don’t know, Larry,’ she says. She thinks for a moment, hard, not wanting to seem stupid. ‘About the size of a blanket maybe?’ Larry grins, takes another gammon slice out of the pan and puts it on the hotplate. ‘Couple of baseball pitches more like,’ he says. Ella listens, open-mouthed. Larry is eighteen years old and all that, but Ella thinks he is the most interesting person she has ever met.

  In Number 4 Mr and Mrs McCormack rest side by side under the pink coverlet, watching the light fade in blues and greys over beyond the outhouse wall. Snowbirds, both of them, been on the road for five years with the trailer and the mobile home until Mr McCormack got sick, which is why they’ve been spending time in the motels and the resthouses. Their joint age is a hundred and sixty-three. The light fades some more and the cartoons on the silent TV give way to a re-run of The Golden Girls, which is a series Mrs McCormack likes but doesn’t care to turn up for fear of waking Clyde. Mrs McCormack checks the alarm clock on the bedside table and finds that it is eight o’dock. A whole eleven hours until it goes off. Mornings are the worst times, listening while Clyde rolls over in bed, trying to figure out whether he feels good or bad. Most mornings these days he feels bad, and Mrs McCormack resigns herself to another day of TV, catnapping and watching Clyde drowse his way through the long summer afternoons. For a moment Mrs McCormack feels panicky and wants to reach out and touch Clyde under the coverlet, prod him until he’s awake, but then she calms down again. She remembers seeing Clyde this way before and every time he’s gotten himself right again. Always figured that he could sleep himself back to health. Mrs McCormack watches the light again and then wonders fretfully just what it is that she’s going to do about Clyde, about the way Ella looks at her in the mornings, about the three-ton mobile home in the driveway which will be falling apart soon with no one to check the tyres or clean out the portable sanitary closet. She takes a hand mirror out of her bag and starts to check her make-up before thinking that this is a foolish thing to do and throwing the mirror on the floor where it lies amid the trail of used tissues, cash dispenser receipts and old copies of Senior Citizen magazine.

  Lying on the bed, Loretta wonders what time Henry will come. He said eight or nine, but Loretta doesn’t mind when it is, just so long as he gets there. She imagines him striding into the room, not even bothering to knock, and sweeping her up in a bear-hug. Loretta’s glass is empty again, so she sashays over to the table by the door and pours herself some more iced water out of the pitcher. She thinks about opening the bourbon, only this would be mean on Henry, to start drinking before he’s arrived. In the end she tugs off the plastic cover and measures herself a finger. After all, Loretta reflects, there isn’t anything else to do, here in a motel in Missouri, listening to the cars on the freeway and waiting for Henry.

  Joe stands uncertainly in the doorway of the diner. There are only three or four people in there eating the gammon slices and the steak and tomato platters, and Joe doesn’t know whether to walk on in and say hello. Eventually he decides not to and moves off into the lobby where Ella is checking in a couple of blond-haired guys with thick moustaches and backpacks. Couple of faggots, Joe reckons, and good luck to them. He guesses that his tolerance goes with the job. Being a motel owner doesn’t leave you much time for scruples. Ella now, she just hates faggots. There are five, six rooms free right now, but Joe knows, just as he knows the wind won’t let up till dawn, that Ella will book the two blond guys into the worst one and then try and charge them double for room service. He wanders out onto the back porch where it is quite dark now and light shines through curtained windows. There are raised voices coming from Number 7, but Joe doesn’t stop to listen. He and Ella used to go on like that sometimes, back in the old days before he gave up the insurance job. Joe wonders about Billie-Sue for a while, and whether this had anything to do with it all. He decides not, pads back inside where he can hear laughter coming from the kitchen, wondering what crap Larry is telling Ella now.

  Mr Ferguson lies on his back, stripped down to his vest and undershorts, counting the cigarettes. He wonders about going out to the lobby for a fresh pack, but this will mean putting his pants back on so he forgets the idea. Mrs Ferguson is brushing her hair with short, angry strokes. ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘You lay a finger on me and I’ll holler so loud every cop in the state’ll be here.’ Mr Ferguson shrugs, like the guy in the cartoon whose wife buys a sofa out of the catalogue without telling him. ‘Have it your own way,’ he says.

  Ly
ing on her back in the darkness, Loretta wonders what she’ll say to Henry when he arrives. She remembers a movie where this girl sits there waiting for her boyfriend to come back from New Jersey or Vermont or someplace, and when he gets there she simply says nothing, just folds up into him. Loretta wonders if she’ll be awake enough to do this. She reaches over and looks at her watch, which has a luminous dial, and discovers that it’s 10.15. After that she switches on the light again and takes another drink, thinking maybe this is how Henry will find her, sitting up in bed sipping liquor and giggling. She thinks about the copier salesmen’s convention, and that it’s a pity Henry doesn’t do something more glamorous – be a cop, say, or sell real estate. But then Loretta doesn’t think she’d like to go out with a cop and you need qualifications for selling real estate, so perhaps it’s for the best. She takes another drink and listens to the wind, which is getting up now and, she thinks, kind of scary and comforting at the same time.

  In the kitchen Larry is finishing the dishes, while Ella puts the unused gammon slices back in the freezer. Joe, wandering in through the yard door, hears him say: ‘And you ain’t gonna believe me, Mrs Jenks, but twenty-three inches is the record for a dick. Some old negro they had in a hospital in St Louis.’ Ella roars, but Joe stays quiet. He wishes Larry wouldn’t say that stuff to Ella, but it hasn’t ever occurred to him to ask him not to. The phone rings and Ella picks it up, turning round so that Joe can see the look on her face change from irritation to anxiety. ‘Baby,’ Joe hears Ella say, ‘baby, where you been?’ and Joe realises that it’s Billie-Sue, Billie-Sue on the end of some phone, in some call box a thousand miles away most probably. Larry tries to catch his eye, but Joe isn’t talking. He moves off again into the shadow, shoulders down, his head twisted to one side.

  In Number 4 Mrs McCormack thinks that she’ll try shaking Clyde just one more time and then if nothing happens she’ll go for help. Making this decision gives Mrs McCormack confidence. She can see herself tugging Clyde’s arm, see him roll over and say, ‘What’s with you then?’ in that way he has. She pulls hard on Clyde’s hand, pressing down on the fingers hard enough to hurt, staring all the time into Clyde’s wide-open eyes, but nothing happens. For a moment Mrs McCormack wonders what to do. She cannot get the thought of the mobile home out of her head, wondering who’ll drive it away, who’ll pay for it and for her. Then she remembers the deal she did with herself, that it’s already midnight and most likely people will be asleep and that somehow this will make it worse.

  Joe, standing in the shower-room in his pyjamas, hears the crash of glass on stone and knows instinctively that the neon sign has gone down in the wind. In a way he is pleased at the interruption, as Ella went straight to bed after Billie-Sue’s phone call and Joe isn’t too keen on disturbing her. He moves through the empty corridors to the lobby, where the night lamp is burring and Mrs McCormack stands timidly in front of the reception desk. ‘Can I help you?’ Joe says politely – he is always polite to Mrs McCormack – but he knows what has happened, and Mrs McCormack knows he knows. They look at one another steadily for a while, without speaking, while the insects whirl crazily round the lamp.

  At 2 a.m. Loretta wakes up in a roomful of fight. Henry is standing over her waving the empty bourbon bottle in her face like it was a TV reporter’s microphone. He is tired, she thinks, and the bald patch on the crown of his scalp is showing even more. ‘You’re paralytic, you know,’ Henry is yelling. ‘Just a disgrace, you know that?’ And Loretta laughs uncontrollably, as if it were the funniest thing she had ever heard. Outside the blue emergency lights dart and flicker.

  McKechnie’s Diner, 9 a.m.

  From the washroom window Lila watches the smoke move up from beyond the trees: thick, ochre-brown smoke that hangs over the lines of pantsuits and towels Ella McKechnie has drying on the big hickory clothes-horses. For some reason the smoke makes her think of the old days, back in Indiana, and she concentrates for a while on these distant, phantom images – a maple tree that grew over the back porch, seeing Bob coming in over the fields wearing that shirt she bought him out of a catalogue – until someone hammers on the washroom door and there is the sound of feet moving in the passage outside. Lila doesn’t care too much about the hammering – the only person she defers to around here is Mr McKechnie, and it isn’t his time for the washroom, not for an hour – but still she pulls herself up off the can and starts putting make-up on her face from out of an old vanity case lying on the window rest There is a message on the bag says Elegant Living, and Lila can recollect buying it twenty years ago in Macey’s and wondering what elegant living was and how you lived it.

  The smoke is disappearing now, drifting away across the tree-tops down to the creek, and Lila figures it’s that Larry Frazier over at the garage, most likely, burning car tyres again. Mr McKechnie doesn’t like Larry Frazier, nor the bikers who hang around Larry Frazier’s forecourt, nor the smell of the sump oil. ‘Guy is a cracker,’ Mr McKechnie will sometimes say late in the evening, getting confidential over a Coke or a whisky sour, and Lila will nod and hold her glass in the way the celebrity guests do on the Dick Cavett Show. There is more knocking on the washroom door, and Lila frowns slightly so she can fix her eyes, watches as the creases run in chevrons down each side of her face. She blinks a couple of times, pushes open the door and stares out into the corridor, where there is a punk kid with yellow hair and K-Mart sneakers smoking a cigarette up against the wall. Lila shrugs, adjusts her waitress’s uniform – they still have dinky bomber jackets that say McKechnie’s diner – moves past him into the sweet, syrupy air.

  In his office out behind the checkout till and the Coke dispenser Mr McKechnie sits staring at the mail. A dozen letters maybe, circulars, bills, junk from the Reader’s Digest and the NRA, a card which Mr McKechnie can tell by the handwriting is from his brother in Tampa Bay. Above his head a fan winnows the stale air. The phone on the desk buzzes, but Mr McKechnie carries on sifting, like a kid rooting through a toy box after his favourite muppet doll, until, sure enough, right at the the bottom of the stack he finds the letter with the Tennessee Loan Bank stamp. Putting it on the desk at right-angles to the photo of Ella and the framed citation from the Guild of Kentucky Restauranteurs, he looks through the window to the diner, where there are early customers ordering breakfast fries or studying copies of the Lafayette Sentinel while they wait for fresh coffee to brew. A tall guy in his twenties wearing a suit sits smiling in front of a plate of hash browns, and Mr McKechnie, who is 180 pounds and five feet six, looks at him for a while, wondering what it must be like to be twenty-five and work as a lawyer or in real estate instead of being fifty with the bank talking about repossession and non-renewable loans. Was an article Ella read him the other night from one of her digests about looking on the bright side and controlling your life, but Mr McKechnie doesn’t believe in that stuff, ever since the steel cable snapped above the car hoist ten years back and sent a ton of metal down onto his leg. Took three operations and a metal plate to get him to walk again, and even now a stroll across the yard leaves him out of breath. Reaching down beneath the desk, Mr McKechnie fingers the ridge of hard skin above his knee, waits for the little shiver of pain to edge along the bone, wondering all the time what Ella will say, so that in the end the thoughts merge and for ever after the letter will remind him of pain, Ella’s face seen through the perspex divide, the young guy in the suit smiling over his breakfast.

  Back in the diner Lila takes side orders: French fries, apple pie, milk shakes. Over the years Lila has evolved a formula to remember her customers by, stripping them down to the basics of looks and gesture. The guy in the suit is Steel Nose; the punk kid is Corn Hair; the old man who comes in every morning for a popsicle is Dentures. Never fails. Sometimes the waitresses trade shorthand gossip about the customers with her: ‘Steel Nose left me a dollar tip’; ‘You catch the mess Dentures left under his seat?’ Lila stoops down to whip a plate off an empty table and then swerves to avoid Duane, the kid Mr McKechnie h
ires to swab the floors, as he moves past with his mop and pail. Lila smiles and Duane says ‘Howdy Miz Lila’, which though Lila thinks Duane is a weird kid, what with his rat’s-tail hair and the black T-shirt, she kind of appreciates. She peeks up at the perspex divide, but Mr McKechnie is slumped down over his desk, as the fans beat above his head, and Lila knows that his leg is hurting him again. Lila feels sympathy for Mr McKechnie, has done ever since the day three years back when he picked her letter out of the pile of application forms and gave her the job, even though there were two twenty-year-olds with torpedo tits showing off their legs in the waiting area. For a moment Lila wonders what Bob would have said about Mr McKechnie, but somehow this comparison doesn’t help and she concentrates instead on cleaning up a chair where someone has left two pieces of pie, an empty pack of Merits and two state lottery tickets. Above her waitress’s cap the flies whirr and cluster.

  Back in the bungalow Mrs McKechnie stuffs clothes into a travel bag. Pantsuits, jeans, sneakers, a pair of high heels she bought in Louisville last Fall when they were there on a day trip. Mrs McKechnie doesn’t know what the weather’s like this time of year in California, but she guesses it’s going to be hot. Outside the window the smoke is drifting in again from across the trees, and Mrs McKechnie figures that it’s typical of Larry Frazier to play a stunt like that, today of all days. She peers up hopefully at the yard and the line of cars, but there isn’t anyone there except Duane carrying cans of bleach in from the outhouse, and Mrs McKechnie recollects that she never did like Duane, what with the hardcore magazines he keeps out back in the store and the looks she’s seen him giving the waitresses, and that not having to talk to Duane again will be a whole heap of fun. The travel bag is nearly full now, with just a lamé windcheater waiting to be packed in somehow, and Mrs McKechnie considers it for a while, remembering finally how Eugene gave it to her at Thanksgiving a while back, and wondering if she’ll care to be confronted with it in three months’ time in LA. But there are going to be worse things, Mrs McKechnie thinks, than remembering Eugene watching her pull open a mound of tissue paper. She rolls the windcheater up into a ball, squeezes it inside the plastic bag lying on the window sill, stows it away.