Kathryn Davis - Duplex

The way Blue-Eyes was dressed and wore her hair reminded Mary of the caryatids holding the porch roof of the Erechtheion atop their heads as they stared blankly at the wine-dark sea. The caryatids kept on staring even as pieces of their bodies broke off and fell into the water. According to gaze theory, what a person was looking at influenced how another person interpreted the first person’s expression. It always surprised Mary how much she remembered from her art school days. From the quality of Blue-Eyes’s gaze Mary could tell her daughter was looking at infinite space. She was looking at it and figuring out how she was going to be able to make it do her bidding.

“You should be pleased,” Walter said, when Mary told him about the interview. “She got that from you.”

“What do you mean from me?” Mary was at the sewing machine, turning out curtains.

He pointed. “The way you do that,” he said. “She would hang on to your leg and watch your every move — I remember she seemed especially interested when you bit off a thread.”

Mary considered. She didn’t remember Blue-Eyes watching her do anything. It was true, she thought, that during Blue-Eyes’s last year at St. Foy she had contacted Mary to ask her some question about measuring a bolt of a thing the name of which Mary couldn’t quite hear because there was a lot of noise in the background that sounded like sewing machines but could just as well have been a bad connection or something so far beyond Mary’s ability to know what it was it didn’t even bear thinking about. They taught sewing at St. Foy, she knew that much, but when Mary asked Blue-Eyes if she would like a sewing basket of her own fitted with compartments for spools of thread and a pin cushion and a measuring tape, Blue-Eyes informed her she was going to close the port. “A sew ing basket, mother?” Blue-Eyes said. “You’ve never even tried to understand me.”

Mary knew this wasn’t true. In a way it was all she had done. The problem was, the bolt Blue-Eyes had unspooled from bore no relationship to Mary. They didn’t make girls more ordinary than Mary had been. She was an ordinary person — that was the whole point.

When Mary was a girl and she went to the shore in the summer along with everyone else, she used to call the house she was living in now the chocolate-cheese house because the walls were pale yellow stucco, the trim dark brown. “It’s called chocolate-cheese but you can’t eat it!” she would announce whenever she and her parents walked past the house. The duplex her parents rented was in a different neighborhood altogether. The difference between a summer rental and a summer residence was like the difference between a human and a fairy. A famous actress had lived in Mary’s house from 1930 to 1954, the same year the United States and Russia conducted aboveground atom bomb tests, releasing radio activity into the atmosphere where it drifted for a while before settling into people’s teeth and bones. Many things had been adrift then and always would be. The fishermen on a boat called Lucky Dragon had been especially unlucky, whereas the famous actress married a real live prince. A person could fill page after page with pieces of information like this — all you had to do was consult the console. Mary thought there was more information drifting through the world than there were stars in the sky. The famous actress’s father had owned the business that supplied the bricks that the house Mary grew up in had been made out of and those bricks, like all bricks, kept leaking radioactivity. Not enough to do any harm, not even as much as the machine the shoe store used to X-ray her feet, but still. What good did it do to know this?

Accumulating a storehouse of information could do nothing to alter the fact that when she was a girl Mary had loved a boy and he had loved her. An exquisite bond had existed between them and something had broken that bond and now she would never see him again. He was gone.

“Dead and gone, dead and gone,” tolled the bell buoys. “What are you talking about?” asked the sewing machine, loyal, as ever, to Eddie.

“I could tell you his name but what difference would it make?” Mary replied, getting up out of her chair.

History with all its useless information kept unwinding behind her and in front of her like the movie Blue-Eyes had made out of chopsticks and shelf paper and a shoe box, a long scroll filled with information. It had been a seminal moment, Blue-Eyes told one of her interviewers.

Now Blue-Eyes lived with her partner, a word that reminded Mary of square dancing. The partner’s name was Penny and it was obvious that she and Blue-Eyes felt sorry for Mary and Walter, imprisoned as they were in their modern marriage. The two women possessed a lot of information to corroborate their pity — everyone was so confident now, Mary thought. She supposed that was a good thing, especially if you were a girl.

She walked right up to the window. A shudder passed through the wet edge of the continent; the seabirds took off all at once from the jetty pilings. The problem with having information was that it made you feel like you ought to know when things were going to happen before they actually did. Mary put on her wide-brimmed straw hat and her sunglasses and her terry cover-up and headed for the beach. The beach was practically empty as it usually was at this hour, the young families having gone home to their summer rentals, leaving the prints of their feet behind in the soft white sand the water never reached except during a storm. Cindy Duffy was waiting for Mary in one of the low-slung chairs she brought for them to sit in. She sat on the hard gray sand at the water’s edge; every time a wave came in it got her butt wet. “You’re late,” Cindy said to Mary.

“I was busy,” Mary said.

Of course Cindy knew that she, Mary, was never busy, but she wasn’t going to say so. Cindy, too, was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses and a terry cover-up, the preferred beachwear for women of a certain age. It drove Mary crazy how Cindy made it look like she kept getting older when everyone knew she could go back to being pretty little Cindy XA at a moment’s notice. She will never know sorrow, Mary thought, she will never know loss. Somehow these thoughts failed to console her. The act of pretending to get older had managed to confer a kind of dignity on the robot, making it hard to remember that in actuality it was the size and shape of a needle.

“Busy?” Cindy said. “Tell me about it.” She released a pouf of exhaustion. “I’ve had the grandkids all week. Merrilee decided to stay in the city with Bill, and ever since Eddie got Roy that job with the Rockets I might as well be single.”

Mary stared straight out to sea. The sea was a symbol of endlessness but of course it wasn’t endless. Someone in a foreign land was staring back at her at this exact moment. Someone who spoke another language, someone who probably didn’t wish her well but who was, finally, fathomable, not unlike the sea. “How many of them are there now?” she asked.

Cindy held up some fingers but Mary didn’t turn her head to count. “It was nice of Eddie to help us out like that,” Cindy said. “Roy’s always felt he was born to be an announcer.”

“He has the right voice for it,” Mary said.

“I always thought Roy could have been an opera singer,” Cindy said, and she sounded wistful.

It was a beautiful afternoon, the ocean ringed round with strings of clouds, the sky blue and clean. Cindy added more fingers. “Mary,” she said. “Look at me. You know your time is almost up, right?”

“What do you mean?” Mary asked.

She understood perfectly, though. The fingers meant how much time she had left. The problem was she couldn’t tell what unit of time Cindy was referring to. It could be years or months or weeks or days or hours or even — this was too terrible to consider — minutes. Whatever the unit was, she had six of them — three more than the number of Cindy and Roy’s grandchildren she’d seen out of the corner of her eye.