Kathryn Davis - Duplex

“Good-bye, Mother,” Blue-Eyes said, tipping her cheek in Mary’s direction for a kiss.

“I’m not going anywhere until you say you love me,” Mary said. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a flickering curtain of light just above the umbrella stand. This could mean her age was catching up with her and her cornea was coming loose or it could mean there was actually something there.

“I love you, Mother,” Blue-Eyes said, but she didn’t sound convincing. She, too, was looking in the direction of the wall above the umbrella stand. “Tell Dad he did the right thing,” she said. “Not coming.”

“He wanted to come,” Mary said, “but he had work to do.”

Blue-Eyes turned to face her. “He would have died,” she said, and when Mary laughed she shook her head. “For real,” she said. “Dad would have died for real. Don’t you understand anything?” She returned her attention to the wall.

“It’s time for you to leave,” the old woman told Mary. She maneuvered her walker around so that it faced the empty hallway, then she looked back over her shoulder. “As for you, young lady,” she said, “it’s time for you to come inside.”

Blue-Eyes followed the old woman down the hallway. It seemed to go on forever but eventually they arrived at an elevator. “I’m the only one allowed to operate this,” the old woman told her. It was the kind of elevator where you pulled open a brass gate and slid a heavy lever in place before you could get it to move. “The girls are at dinner,” the old woman said. The elevator began to ascend in small jerks like a Ferris wheel. “You can join them after you get settled in.”

Blue-Eyes’s room was about the same size and shape as the vestibule. The only difference was that it had a window facing the water; in the morning she would have a good view of the sun coming up above the still-dark strand. The room contained a narrow bed and a dresser; there was a thick layer of dust on the baseboards and the empty bodies of horseflies and June bugs in the space between the storm and interior windows. The old woman told Blue-Eyes the last girl who’d stayed in the room had died in it; she choked on a saltine after refusing to do as she was told.

Folded at the foot of the bed was a set of long underwear with a note pinned to it explaining that in the interest of saving money the building was kept unheated. Blue-Eyes had no need for long underwear but how was the school expected to know that? She put the clothes she’d brought with her away in the dresser and sat on the bed — the mattress was thin and seemed to be stuffed with straw, but otherwise wasn’t too bad. Oddly, this was one form of comfort she’d found she couldn’t do without.

Somewhere nearby the sound of singing started. Blue-Eyes left her room and followed the sound until she came to a wide landing at the head of a formal staircase, the newel posts topped with tense-looking creatures with wings, supposed to look like angels. If you stared at them long enough though — just as she’d done with the flickering curtain of light in the vestibule — you could see the wings twitching, the eyes shifting this way and that. Brightness poured up the staircase from below but not high enough to reach the landing. The old woman with the walker stood at the far side of it, beckoning to Blue-Eyes to hurry up.

Inside the chapel there were girls of all ages and sizes, not arranged in any obvious order, all of them wearing sky-blue uniforms. Blue-Eyes slid into an empty pew near the back. The service was a mystery to her; she’d never been in a place like this before, and the book she’d been handed at the door was crammed full of different-colored bookmarks. At some point the girl with frizzy dark hair who’d opened the front door for them slipped into the pew behind her and tapped her on the shoulder. “Come to my room after,” she said, handing Blue-Eyes a piece of paper with her name and room number written on it. She was called Penny, which made sense, since her face was round and her features in faint relief like on a coin.

The service seemed as though it would never end. Finally a nun got up to snuff the candles, releasing a thread of smoke straight from each wick. The smell was sweet, the candles — as Blue-Eyes knew from reading the brochure — a product of the school’s own honeycombs. One by one the sisters filed through a side door, the ones who were able bending a knee to bow deeply before the altar. The girls went out the same door they’d come in through in a disorderly crowd. No one was talking to anyone else. That was the rule: you had to keep silent all night long until after breakfast.

The later it got the harder the wind began to blow, rattling the windows. The school buildings were set high on a hill and were very old. At one time they’d been painted white but now they looked almost silver. Every night the wind came pawing at them, taking their paint away bit by bit, filling the night with particles. Everything vulnerable was on the move, dropping shadows. The light got blocked the way it always did at night, letting people sleep.

Back home Mary tried contacting her daughter but the receptor wasn’t working. Blue-Eyes did this all the time — it was nothing new. She would put things in the port the way children put jelly beans up their nose, the difference being that it didn’t result in a trip to the doctor and it cost a fortune to fix.

Walter was at a meeting; he wouldn’t be home until much later. When he stayed out late like this, Mary had no idea when he got in. The next morning he would be sitting at the kitchen table in his plaid bathrobe with nothing on underneath, reading the newspaper and drinking coffee like a normal husband. There would be a pile of defrosted waffles on his plate but Mary was pretty sure they were only there for show, as if to provide the illusion that he was having a regular breakfast. The eyes of the cat in the clock that used to belong to her parents would jerk from side to side and he would give the paper a little shake. This was a signal for Mary to untie the sash and let the two halves of his robe fall away, revealing his erect phallus. She could straddle it or take it in her mouth — the choice was hers. When she was finished he would keep her coming with his fingers. Sex with him was never disappointing the way it used to be with Eddie, but she figured that was because she couldn’t ever forget it was Eddie she was having sex with, making it harder for her to completely lose herself in the act.

Mary tried Blue-Eyes one more time; the receptor still wasn’t operational. The house felt especially empty and the dark sky out the picture window seemed oddly loose like fabric there was too much of. Please don’t let this be happening, she thought. When Walter said what he did about Space Drift that night in his apartment she’d thought it was one of those things like the Rain of Beads that had happened a long time ago and would never happen again.

Never again, Mary thought. She sat down at her sewing machine and began attaching the waistband to the skirt she hadn’t finished making in time for Blue-Eyes to take it with her to school. As she sat there the moon appeared in the picture window. It was close to full but not quite — nothing out of the ordinary in the way of a moon but beautiful nonetheless.

Whatever she had felt for Eddie — and, really, she wasn’t sure what that had been, only that it had been everything for her — she chalked up to the fires of youth, which she told herself were behind her. She was encouraged to feel this way, to belittle everything that had happened between her and Eddie. Time healed all wounds, everyone knew that, just as they knew the moon was a rock and nothing more. It came out of the place where the Pacific Ocean was now; a monkey had landed there and then people had walked on it. She would get over feeling sad about Blue-Eyes, too, but not immediately. For the moment she preferred to feel sad.