Uncertain Ground (15 page)

We urged Emmett away from the roulette wheels and returned to the dining room. Aunt Bertha suggested that after all those lessons we really should dance.

It was a tiny crowded floor, but I could follow Emmett. He moved easily and naturally with the music as if he’d never had a lesson in his life and didn’t need one.

“What kind of act were you putting on?”

“When?”

“You know when! Aunt Bertha and I were trying to teach you how to dance, and you acted like you didn’t know. You could hardly drag yourself around the floor.”

“I don’t know how when people are watching me.”

“People are watching you now! All those people in the booths, Aunt Bertha, Uncle Mowrey—” I waved to them as we went past.

“They aren’t telling me how. Nobody’s saying put this foot here and that foot there.”

He stopped in the middle of the floor and did a jerky imitation of the pattern we’d tried to teach him. “Besides I forget what I’m doing when I’m dancing with you out here.” He gathered me to him and moved back into the crowd.

I tried to pull away from him slightly, to keep a little space between us. It seemed ridiculous for him to insist on this intimacy when none actually existed between us, not even the casual, everyday intimacy of friendship.

His arm tightened around me.

“Let go!” I whispered.

“No.”

I couldn’t see his face, but I was sure he was laughing.

Luis, walking through the other dancers, said hello to two or three people on his way toward us.

“Here comes your spic.”

“Will you quit being so stupid!”

Luis tapped Emmett’s shoulder, but he ignored him.

“Let me dance with Luis, Emmett.”

“No.”

“If you won’t, I’m going to scream.” I said quietly. I hadn’t known … hadn’t planned on what I might do.

“Here?”

“Here!” I almost shouted.

“All right.” His voice grated. He let go of me so suddenly I had to steady myself against Luis. Turning away from us, he brushed into another couple, excused himself and swaggered off the floor toward the roulette room.

Luis looked down at me, took my hand, and put his arm around me leaving just the amount of space I’d tried to keep between myself and Emmett. He was a good dancer, better than Emmett. We moved around the floor so naturally it seemed we had been dancing together for years. Except for the day we sat on top of the seats talking about his brother, this was as close as I’d ever been to Luis. Now he was holding me, and for the first time, we were touching each other. I wanted that closeness to go on and on. Parted from the struggle with Emmett, held lightly, I was blissfully free for a moment.

Then the combo changed from playing a jazzy version of
Ruby
to
Among My Souvenirs,
a song I’d liked when I was dating Tony Gregory and hated now.
Some letters tied with blue. A photograph or two. I see a rose from you among my souvenirs.
I had the letters. He’d sent me a picture of himself. There were no roses. When I was with him the song seemed to be about someone else’s nostalgia, but once we’d parted, it was nothing but a long aching sigh of my own longing. Hearing it, I was filled with self-loathing. I didn’t want to be sentimental about Tony. I thought I should let him go, yet longing, I was discovering, couldn’t be
easily governed. I wished I’d had more time with him. It seemed Tony, like Emmett, just wanted a girl, not me specifically. I must have talked myself into thinking he loved me since my place was so quickly taken once I was gone.

Luis was saying something. I’d been so lost in the music I could hardly hear him. He was asking something. What was it?

“Your cousin—?”

“Emmett’s jealous, I guess. He doesn’t want me to be with anyone else.” What else could I say? How could I explain his abruptness? I couldn’t tell Luis, “My cousin doesn’t like you because you’re part Mexican. And I’m … I’m not even sure you like girls!” The falsity of everything hit me … dancing with him while longing for Tony, trying to deny Tony, utterly denying Emmett.

We’d danced to the far edge of the floor. I couldn’t see Bertha and Mowrey. I thought the night would never be over, that I’d spend hours dancing with Luis who was now lost in his own silence. In the hours to come, I would have to dutifully eat my supper while chatting with Aunt Bertha and Uncle Mowrey. After that we’d all probably go watch Emmett play roulette. That I was there at all dancing on the edge of a floor suspended over the waves I could neither see nor hear was too unreal. Aunt Bertha and Uncle Mowrey had been so determined to show us a good time. I detested every minute of it and detested myself as well for being ungrateful.

If I could have seen Bertha and Mowrey, would I have acted as I did? Would their presence, the continual sight of two middle-aged married people have anchored me somehow? I doubted it. At that point they were only people I liked well enough. And if my parents had been sitting there instead of the Mcleans, perhaps they wouldn’t have mattered much either. I had to be free of the lot of them, free of all demands, free of Emmett, of Luis, of Tony. The entrance to the corridor was across the room. Threading my way through the other dancers, past the gray-haired
maitre de
, I ran almost silently over the carpet’s swirling leaves down the long hall to the double glass
doors where the man Uncle Mowrey had called Frank stood staring at me.

“Celia! Wait!” Luis called. He was somewhere in the hall behind me.

Frank raised his eyebrows slightly as though asking me silently if he should open the door or not.

I couldn’t wait on Frank. I pushed the door open myself and looked down the long canvas-covered tunnel where lights had been turned on inside. At the far end there was nothing but darkness.

“Where are you going?” Luis was beside me.

“I don’t know. I hate this place!”

I started walking down the pier and almost fell when one of my heels got stuck in a crack between the planks. Balancing myself by holding onto his arm, I took off my shoes and carried them, one in either hand.

“Your aunt and uncle— Won’t they be worried?”

“I can’t help that either.”

We were at the end of the marquee. A fresh wind billowed round my skirt. I kept walking to shore. On either side I could see black waves rising and falling leaving a white line of foam lit by the city’s lights on the seawall.

Pausing for only a minute, we stepped off the pier then ran through traffic veering right to the opposite side of the wide boulevard, lined at this point, with souvenir shops, a motel and little clubs. Their neon signs,
88 KEYS, TWIN PALMS, THE PIRATE’S DEN
, glittered and blinked yellow, red, green in the night.

Immediately in front of us was the small carnival we never went to. A double line of bulbs arced over the entrance to it. I stared toward those. One bulb was burned out. At the far end of the carnival’s grounds I could see a roller coaster outlined by lights writhing against the sky. Keeping my eyes on its highest curve, I started wandering toward it conscious of the gritty sand and pebbles under my stockinged feet. Far down the midway over the heads of the crowd, the coaster’s cars sped up and down
its looping curves. Around me a babble of voices rose and fell like the murmuring sea.

“Where are you going?” Luis was still beside me.

“I don’t know. I had to get out of there. I … I couldn’t stand it.” I bumped into someone.

“Well, pardon you!”

A skinny old lady eating ice-cream out of a pint carton. Chocolate. I stared at the green plastic spoon resting in the carton. She’d eaten almost the whole pint.

“I was on my way over to them slot machines.” She pointed with the spoon toward a row of machines lining the walls of an open booth. Someone was in front of every one of them. I half expected to see Emmett’s back, his familiar height, his slack stance.

The old lady licked the spoon meditatively and stared at me as if she meant to continue, and I was the only barrier in her path.

I brushed blindly past her and ducked into an open door.

“Hey!” A man’s voice shouting. “Hey, you can’t go in there!”

I had nothing with me, no purse, no billfold. I looked around to see Luis paying the barker. A violent burst of wind blew my skirt up. There was another doorway. I ran through it to mirrors—a wall of mirrors reflecting thin, fat, elongated, squeezed up, bent, stretched, totally distorted versions of myself crying, a shoe dangling from either hand. I dropped my shoes.

“Celia, come out,” Luis called.

“I can’t.” I was alone with the mirrors.

“If I go away, will you come out?”

“No.” I closed my eyes. “Where are you?”

“Here behind you. Open your eyes.”

“No.” I walked with my hands outstretched toward his voice.

“Open your eyes. What are you afraid of?”

“The mirrors. They’re all so crazy … worse than the one at Aunt Bertha’s.”

He covered both my hands with his.

I turned around, pushing both his hands aside and opened my eyes to the absolute whiteness of his shirt, then I backed slowly into the room again while looking down at my feet. Dirty. Stockings full of runs. Slowly I raised my eyes to the hem of my skirt, my belt. I circled around and raised my eyes again, this time toward the mirrors. I ran my fingers through my hair.

“I really do look peculiar. Even in a true mirror I would look strange.”

Luis shrugged. “So do I.” His tall body had been shoved into all the same distortions as mine. I stared at a reflection showing us both too thin on top and shortened at the bottom. Our legs were like Uncle Mowrey’s under his newspaper except much shorter and fatter.

“Why does anybody think these are funny?”

Luis shrugged again. “Some people do.”

“They’re ugly … just ugly.”

He smiled. “That’s part of it … part of what we see all the time … ugliness, cruelty. …”

Death, I thought, but remembering his father didn’t say. I turned back to the mirrors glancing at each distorted reflection, so I could see myself as a whole gallery of freaks capriciously designed by a mind I didn’t know. Then I looked away from them to different parts of my body, to legs, arms, hands, comparing them to the caricatures I saw against the wall. My own arms and hands were actually thin. I knew my back was straight enough, and I would never weigh 350 pounds.

“Luis, let’s get out of here.” I picked up my shoes.

He took my hand and led me back through the darkened corridor.

We ordered hamburgers in a diner three or four blocks from the beach. I called Aunt Bertha at the Balinese Room and told the necessary lies … that I was sorry, that I’d felt ill and had gone outside for air. Luis didn’t try to reach his father. Under the glaring fluorescent lights we drank awful coffee, ate greasy hamburgers with too much mustard on them, wiped our mouths
on paper napkins we grabbed from a chrome holder on the table. Still tasting onions and mustard, I vowed our supper was better than anything I could have eaten at the Balinese.

“Want to go back?” Luis offered.

I shook my head. “Not me. You go if you want. I can walk to the house.”

“It’s too long a walk from here. I’ll take you.”

It was so dark that night, so black. Streetlights made little pools of yellow we drove through. Luis dropped me off at the Mclean house and went back to his father, back to the Balinese.

Living at the Mcleans’ that August continued to be like living through repeated summer storms. Dark gray clouds piled up, sweeping winds blew bursts of rain for a while, then all was quiet again, sunny, calm. Heat crept back over the island. A little breeze blew in from the Gulf.

Emmett lost nearly three hundred dollars playing roulette at the Balinese the night we were there. Bertha didn’t appear concerned, nor did Mowrey. Perhaps Bertha had also played and lost. More likely she considered empty pockets the safest solution to Emmett’s passion for gambling. The odd part was he’d played at the same table as Luis’s father. In four or five spins of the wheel all of his money was swept toward Mr. Platon who, Emmett said, didn’t know him from a dog on the street. This contempt was, I thought, only a reflection of Emmett’s feelings about someone seeing him lose. For a day or two he seemed contrite.

As for my leaving the club, my aunt and uncle remained mercifully silent. Bertha did ask about my illness. I described a headache and a slightly upset stomach. Too much sun, too many fried shrimp for lunch maybe. “Queasy,” was the term I used. I’d been queasy.

Bertha readily accepted the explanation. Like my mother, like all the Chandler women, she believed in the almost magical properties of food. “Something you ate” could be blamed for illness or, on the other hand, could inspire health.

Emmett was harder to deal with.

“You sleeping with that Meskin?”

“Why do you have to call Luis names? He was your friend first.”

“That’s what he is … Meskin.”

“His mother was from Galveston. She was born on the island. His father came here from Mexico. Luis was born and brought up here. He went all through school here. So did his brother. He was killed on Guam.”

“So he’s half a Meskin.”

“What difference does it make?”

“You sleeping with him?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“I thought you came down here to keep me out of trouble.”

“Keep your own self, Emmett.”

I pulled the sheets off my bed, folded them, and stacked them on top of my pillow. Emmett had followed me back upstairs after breakfast. He’d been kneeling beside his bed going through pockets of the pants he’d stuffed in his suitcase in search of money he might have overlooked. From the bottom of my bed, I caught hold of the spread and pulled it up over the mattress cover. Grabbing up my pillow and sheets, I started out the bedroom door clutching everything in a big messy bunch.

“Where are you going now?”

“That’s none of your business either. What I do in the daytime, who I sleep with at night is my concern, not yours, nor anybody else’s.”

Emmett pulled at one corner of a draggling sheet.

“I don’t think you and the Meskin ought to be using Aunt Bertha’s bed sheets in the back seat of her car.”