Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

“Bella!” said Robin one dinnertime. “Are you okay? This veal is scrumptious! Try some.”

“I’m fine.” Obediently she speared a cube of repellent meat from Robin’s plate. “Yummy,” she lied.

One night a figure crept into her dream — familiar, but uncharacteristically placating. “Eat, darling!” her mother cried. “You’re supposed to diet, not starve.”

The next morning Bella created an edifice of waffles on her breakfast plate, and topped it with strawberries and whipped cream. But she couldn’t swallow more than a bite. “I have to…” she said, and left Robin and Melinda and Luke and managed to get to her room.

And there was the tiny woman, tightening the linen, smoothing the pillows. In another ten hours, during dinner, she or one of her mates would drop foiled candies onto these same pillows. Now she extended a hand toward the bathroom as if to say it was clean and ready.

“No,” Bella said. “I just want to lie down.” She did lie down. The woman stood still, perhaps puzzled. They looked at each other, one horizontal, the other vertical. One oversize, the other diminutive. One running a real estate office in preparation for operating a complicated enterprise, maybe a cruise line…the other skilled at cleaning people’s bathrooms. The maid was younger than she had seemed that first day. Her dulled face gave an initial impression of age, but she was no more than twenty. At last she resumed her work. She polished the knobs on the built-in drawers while Bella watched. She hung the cloth on a wheeled device that carried all her utensils and pushed the thing out of the room. At the door she again looked impassively at Bella. She did not say anything: not good-bye, or adios, or the Swedish ahyur, as some of the ship’s higher staff liked to do, imitating the yellow-haired officers and the rarely seen crew. Her language, whenever she did use it, would be one of those Indian ones, Chibchan, maybe, or Kuna. Yesterday afternoon in the library Dr. Hartmann had spoken of the languages. He said that certain ones were making a comeback and others were extinct, like the dodo.

“Dodo,” Bella giddily called; but the maid was gone.

After the library Bella usually went to the sparsely attended casino and played roulette and surrendered, as slowly as possible, the ten dollars she had allotted to this daily indulgence. But on the final afternoon of the cruise she skipped the library in favor of the beauty shop, where she endured an overenthusiastic shearing that exposed her long neck. Her earlobes looked huge; she covered them with turquoise clips she’d bought for her mother in the colonial port. Then she went to the casino. There she won four hundred dollars. It was a gradual process, this change of luck — win a little, lose a little less, win a little more — and she realized after a while that she was being helped, now and again, by nearly invisible signs from the croupier: a frown, a nod, a tiny shake of the head.

She found Robin and Melinda and Melinda’s family at poolside. “Look!” And she showed the roll of bills.

Robin raised a merry face. “Did you rob somebody?”

“She made a killing,” Melinda corrected. Then, because her brother was fretful, she joined him on his chaise.

“Oh, Bella!” Robin said. “Get yourself something wonderful. In the gift shop Luke bought a darling mahogany box…”

“No…I’ll pay myself back the amounts I lost. But the rest of this is the house’s money — the ship’s. Let the Golden Swan buy us a farewell dinner. At the French restaurant, or the Italian. Which do you prefer?”

“French!”

They wore their best clothing, which had until now hung in their tiny closet. Robin’s outfit was a bright blue shift ending at midthigh. Its shoulder straps had little bows. She looked silly and very sweet, Bella thought. Bella’s outfit was a gauzy black skirt, long but not so long as to conceal her ankles, and a black jacket. She wore high heels, and again the turquoise earrings — they seemed to be hers now. She looked fantastic, Robin told her.

Certainly Dr. Hartmann seemed to think something similar — he stood up when they entered Les Deux Fleurs, and gave Bella an intent look. “This afternoon the library was bereft,” he informed her.

Bella noted his tuxedo and wondered if he had expected something different from this cruise — something other than his usual solitude. She wondered too if her malnourished state was making her fanciful, or maybe even acute. She had already guessed that the ship had taken on cocaine in the narco port. There had been some quick feverish activity on the dock, and the person wearing the captain’s uniform was not the same man who had shaken her hand at the party.

There were familiar faces in the French restaurant. And while the cousins were sipping cocktails, the three women friends came in, the lawyer glamorously got up in red, the social worker in a silk pantsuit. The housewife, in sequins, looked game, looked brave…looked done for. Bella saw that the poor woman was ill — ill again —and she knew all at once that what the three women shared was disease, the same disease probably, a rare and desperate one. They had met in a hospital for some bold treatment, in a special hospital, maybe in a city strange to all of them. “Classmates? Not exactly,” the lawyer had said. Bella confided this intuition to Robin, who said, admiringly, “Of course!”

Bella finished her onion soup. She left most of her lapin. She gave all of her crème brûlée to Robin. Afterward — after Bella had paid and tipped with the lovely chance money — they walked out of the restaurant only slightly tipsy, passing the three women taking the last dinner of their last annual reunion, passing Dr. Hartmann’s empty chair.

“What a wonderful trip,” Robin sighed. She wanted to go to the final party. Bella would read in their room for a while — she’d finish that story about the magician — and then join her cousin.

Tagged suitcases stood in the corridor. All of the luggage would be collected at 2:00 a.m. Bella and Robin would put out their own suitcases at bedtime. Now she entered the stateroom, took off her shoes, removed the candy from her pillow and tossed it onto Robin’s, and lay down. She didn’t read, though. She thought instead about the three afflicted friends, about Dr. Hartmann, about the double life of the Golden Swan. She awarded a moment of compassion to the graceless Luke. She considered Melinda, experienced in solicitude at an early age, destined to enter one of the helping professions.

She had neglected to close the door. The maid passed, carrying an empty basket — it must have contained the candies. Bella leaped up, and from the doorway watched the narrow form slip along the corridor, avoiding the suitcases. At the end of the corridor were service stairs. The maid opened the door leading to those stairs. It swung closed behind her.

Curiosity…it was a new form of hunger. Bella, shoeless, closed her own door and ran to the service one, and paused— uno, dos, tres —and opened it.

The stairs were spiral, winding around a central post, enclosed within a rough yellow cylinder that matched the color of the maid’s uniform. There was a groove at shoulder level for the hand to grasp. The dark head was one revolution below. Bella paused on the top stair as if it were a plank. Then, fingers within the groove, she plunged after the maid. The funnel of stairs drew them silently downward. The maid ignored doors indicating new levels. All at once, she disappeared. Bella saw that the stairs had ended. Then she herself was at the bottom, looking into a…place.

It was a large room with no portholes. Its light was the same reddish brown of the library, the casino, her stateroom — light that had been stored, rinsed in rusty water, and then released. Shades of blue were unknown here. Sky and ocean seemed miles away. There was a trestle table in the middle of the room, bolted to the floor, and two benches on either side of it. There was the smell of baking — that heavenly bread she’d grown to detest. From tiers of bunks attached to the walls came snores. Beneath the room, the ship’s engines — diesel these days, Dr. Hartmann had mentioned, not steam — throbbed. Otherwise, no sound at all.