If one of Justine's high-school friends had uttered that question in that tone, it would have implied this addendum:
You better not be talking about me.
Lou chuckled politely. “Art.”
“I'm going to visit them in New Orleans,” said Justine.
“That right.”
“That's right.”
“And, Lou, when will you be on your way back to the Crescent City?” said Charlotte, who took another sip of her first beer and then another. Then it was gone. She had a sip of Justine's beer. Charlotte rarely finished a beer or a cigarette; such practices she considered vulgar. When she did finish one, it meant she was brooding or furious or in some way out of kilter.
“Mother, Lou has said he's here to take his friend to a doctor.” Livia's tone, punching the
doc
in
doctor,
suggested that she thought Charlotte should allow them to stay as long as they wanted.
“That has been mentioned,” said Charlotte.
No way,
she meant, thought Justine. Justine thought Charlotte was being a little harsh, and for a change felt some defensive sympathy for Livia, who seemed as infantile and destabilized as Justine had ever seen her.
“So what's wrong with Dot?” Justine said quietly.
The kitchen was as cold as the upstairs, and the beer had made her shiver
for a moment, but the forge-red complexion of the conversation was making Justine perspire with curiosity.
“Dot's sick, darling,” said Lou, looking down into his Coke bottle. “We're here to see a specialist.”
“She just appears sleepy to me,” said Charlotte. “And she has infected our new puppy with languor.”
Charlotte extinguished her cigarette with a quick jet of tap water, then put the butt in a trash can under the sink. She usually let the door under the sink shut gently, but this time she let it slam.
Then Justine caught Livia looking at her in a way she'd never seen. Eyes slightly narrowed and her mouth open, not to speak, but as if to draw words back in that she wished she hadn't uttered. Normally when Livia gave her a look of any kind, Justine would be quick to comment, rebut, or rebel, but this one was freighted with something she could not name, and never knew Livia carried. It frightened Justine at first, but then she noticed that Charlotte and Lou, in turn, received the same look.
Charlotte wore no occult look. She just seemed put out, which was, for Charlotte, a guise for ire. After all, a stranger had annexed her puppy and passed out on her divan; her petulance was understandable. Still, Justine seldom saw her this nettled.
Lou's expression had lightened a little, but he did not look directly at anyone except to glance out into the living room at Dot every few minutes, leaning forward to see around Livia's body, which was blocking the doorway.
The first chance she got, Justine was going to corner Lou alone and ask him what was happening. Some kind of horrible family secret? And what does Dot have? It looked like AIDS, that big blotchy, bruisy red patch. There'd been this skinny guy at ASH with AIDS, Charlie. His blotches had been similar. They'd finally taken him to a hospice, where he lasted about four days, finally dying alone, without any family, only some grouchy hospice cat in his bony lap. Lou, Justine was sure, would tell her the truth.
“Your companion, Dot,” said Charlotte finally, “may stay on my divan until her appointment. And you, Lou, may stay on Livia's purple-heart-awarded dead-war-hero husband, Burt Cornelio Moppett's, army cot, in the garage.”
“Motherâ” said Livia.
“Now I am going to take a short nap and then bake a ham and warm up black-eyed peas and everyone shall have a large helping, as we are each going to need it.”
And with that atypically bold and revealing discharge, Charlotte walked into the living room, lifted a snurfle-squeaking Dartmouth off of Dot, who made no sound, and took him upstairs. She went into her room at the end of the hall and shut the door firmly. Not a slam but not a click, either.
Usually the sudden absence of such an electromagnetic being as Charlotte Durant affected a room like a pulled tooth affected a person's skull; a drafty, saline, confusing vacancy. But this time, with Lou and Livia still there, the emotional potency vibrated almost as much as it had before Charlotte left. Nothing was said.
On the divan Dot groaned and laughed in her sleep.
“When does she see her doctor?” said Livia, stuttering slightly, her arms crossed concretely, as though girding herself.
“I reckon soon, but he's a busy man. Famous. Folks come from all over.”
“So you might be here awhile.”
“I just don't know,” he said. “I just don't know.”
I just don't know,
he said one more time, mostly to himself.
“The garage,” said Livia. “You might as well be outside, it's so chilly in there.” After a pause, she said: “We can't have that.”
“Why, I don't mind a bit,” said Lou, who appeared to mean it. “I'll be out from underfoot, there.”
Justine and Livia had shared a room until Justine turned twelve, when Livia moved into Charlotte's room with her. The rearrangement had come about following a terrific three-way fight that was officially about thermostat settings but was really about the small house's sudden invasion by Justine's olid and huffy puberty. The solution pleased no one: Livia, having lived with Charlotte more as sister than daughter since 1951, welcomed this reversion even less than she had welcomed Justine's admission to the family in 1971; Charlotte, a turbulent sleeper who occasionally rose to her feet while still in deep REM to wander around the house naked talking to herself and sometimes placing phone calls, was furious to have to share her room with the nosiest of all three Durants, the one who would likely follow Charlotte around during a somnambulism and listen for secrets to be divulged; and Justine, who thought she'd wanted the room to herself,
after the reformation found herself not in liberty but relegated to a kind of Durant-family purdah.
This view changed to one of appreciation and relief when the world of masturbation, and the household privacy its success and piquancy depended on, was revealed to her one afternoon while watching the
Banana Splits,
the episode where Fleegle opens a barber shop. It was not the skit that got her attention, though, but the following production of the show's theme, “The Tra La La Song”; more specifically, a riveting go-go dancer wearing a print minidress and ankle-boot platforms, and whose shimmies, hair-tosses, and shapely legs drew Justine first to the edge of her bed, then to the floor, then six inches from the screen, watching for glimpses of the sixties siren, who appeared for only an instant at a time, such was the editing style of the period. The segment was over in two minutes, and the orgasm, which Justine achieved on all fours hunched over a Dressy Bessy hand mirror angled so that her manipulations were visible, was over in less than a minute. As the years went by, she never took for granted the luxury of having her own room in a two-bedroom, three-person house.
And so it came as a surprise not only to Livia but to Justine herself when Justine said, “You can have my room, Lou. If you want.”
“Justineâ” said Livia, her confusion and unsureness growing even less subtle, but now glazed with a strange, slumber-party anticipation. It was foreign, this composite look in her mother. It worried Justine. She couldn't recall the last time she'd worried about her. After all, Justine regularly extinguished her in daydreams, and in waking life regarded her as some immortal Jurassic prototurtle so tough as to have practically no natural enemies and which could fell a cycad with a single beak-snap. Justine did not want to worry about her mother. She was now realizing how long she'd taken for granted just how valuable it had been to not have to worry about her.
“I wouldn't mind the garage,” Justine said, imagining the thrill of masturbating under the muffle of a dozen blankets. “For a change.”
No one said anything.
“Thank you, darling,” said Lou, “but I'll be just fine out there.”
For the first time, the three people in the room seemed to share what felt to Justine to be the same emotion: relief. Lou smiled. So did Livia. Justine tried not to, but she couldn't help herself.
* * *
Lou set up Burt Moppett's old fold-up canvas army cot right in the middle of the garage, over the grease stains. Justine trawled the house for blankets and came up with a half dozen of variable insulating properties. Lou kept his shaving things on a low shelf next to the breaker box, and a change of clothes hanging from a higher shelf occupied largely by clay pots, dusty books of S&H green stamps Charlotte had filled but never cashed, and a third-full bottle of Smirnoff that had been there for years and years and that Charlotte, during particularly trying times, would visit to fashion herself dirty martinis. The bottle's level had fallen roughly a half inch per year for a decade, until Justine turned sixteen and became weird, at which time the level fell three inches in a few months.
Just before Lou settled in, Justine removed the bottle and dumped it out in the alley.
Dot lived on the divan under old, soft sheets, surrounded by little boxes of animal crackers, her little green suitcase, paperback biographies Justine brought her from the school library, and a TV-dinner tray piled with makeup, rubbing alcohol, a matching pair of old leather books in Baggies, witch hazel, pills and vitamins and vials of strange elixirs Lou would make in the kitchen while hulking over a double boiler and squinting at a xeroxed, staple-bound pamphlet of recipes entitled
Draughts,
which he'd gotten from Dot's specialist, an individual he and Dot referred to only as Sherpa. Dot often had Dartmouth on her lap, at least until Charlotte came home from her bank-teller shift at Braunschweiger's Savings and Loan downtown, and took him away.
Charlotte, when she was not at work at the bank, spent much of her life daintily smoking and sipping beer at her kitchen table, a vantage which offered the most panoptic view of the surrounding property: the backyard, the garage door, the utility closet, the upstairs hallway, the bathroom door clear at the other end of the house, and the whole of the living room, including Dot on her divan. The door that permitted this view had probably been open since 1951. The day Dot and Lou arrived, Charlotte closed it.
Justine, who as a rule holed herself up in her room as much as possible, found herself more and more in the company of Dot, saying hello when she cut through the living room on her way out, stopping for a minute to sit on
the end of the divan, fetching Lou out of the garage for her, running little errands for both of them.
One Wednesday Lou asked Justine if she would run them out to Sherpa's office.
“Long drive, short appointment,” said Lou.
“Sure.”
The “office” was a house way south of Slaughter Lane, deep among unmanageable cedar and juniper, neighborless, completely invisible from the road, even in winter.
Justine parked at the end of the long dirt-and-flint driveway.
“Back soon.”
A trail that started where the driveway left off was so steep that Lou had to carry Dot.
While listening to the car radio and peeling off her nail polish as Dot and Lou were inside consulting with Sherpa, Justine saw a big tarantula crawl down the trail.
“I saw my first tarantula,” Justine said, when Lou and Dot got back to the car. “Big.”
“In the middle of winter?” said Lou, absently. He was arranging Dot in the front seat, making sure the seat belt went over the partly sunbleached-blue-to-gray afghan that she had become attached to and which Charlotte had told her to keep. His manner with Dot was firm but gentle, intimate but bedside, competent but hesitant and thumby. It reminded Justine that even though they'd been staying at the Durant's for more than two weeks now, no one really knew Lou and Dot's relationship. His pertinence in her life, hers in his. They seemed like siblings more than anything else, but that was the only impossible relationshipâsomeone surely would've referred to Dot as a great-aunt at some point. Whatever its nature, the relationship had clearly been in place a long time.
“It's pretty warm for mid-January,” said Justine. “Maybe she got barn sour in her burrow and decided to go for a walk.”
Dot had her eyes closed and did not say anything. Justine was paralyzed for an instant.
Had she died
?
“Mm,” said Lou, shutting Dot's door and climbing in the backseat. Dot emerged from her transitive state to say:
“What seventeen-year-old uses the term
barn sour
?”
“I read it in a book last week,” said Justine, her cheeks numb. “I wanted to fit it into a sentence as soon as I could.”
“That Sherpa fellah's barn sour,” said Dot. “He could use a walk in the sun.”
“Tarantulas are scary,” said Lou, “and they do bite hard enough for a man to wail from, but they won't hurt you in the long run. Anyone want to stop and eat?”
“Dan's,” said Justine.
“Wendy's,” said Dot. “Frosty and french fries.”
“Okay,” said Lou, sounding beaten and exhausted.