Alice McDermott - After This

“Probably,” she said to her daughter, “it’s best to have left this for last. Probably after you see this you won’t want to see anything else.”

Together, months ago, they had watched on TV as the statue arrived. Or at least they had seen the crate that contained it as it was lowered from a ship. One of the world’s most profound and precious works of art, taken from Rome for the first time in history. The television showed men reaching up to touch the wooden crate as it slowly descended. Carved by the artist in his youth, nearly five hundred years ago.

And the line was moving. Shuffling, really, as if the hot asphalt pulled at their feet, and with so little distance between them all that each step brought the bump or brush of another body, a bare forearm, a soft hip. The touch of a toe against your heel. Among the fair’s sweet, pervasive smell of Belgian waffles, there was a stirring of human odors, perfume and aftershave and sweat and hair warmed by the sun. The odor of breath as they all turned to one another to say, “At least it’s moving.”

The tall old man in front of them wore a yellow plaid shirt, short-sleeved. Although his arms were tanned, his puckered elbows were chalky. He had missed a belt loop in back. Beside him, his wife was fanning herself with a map of the fair. Despite the heat, there was a white pillbox hat pinned to the back of her head. She wore a floral shirtwaist dress and the flesh beneath her arm moved like a pink hammock filled with something heavy. She turned to the mother and daughter to say that the lines had been terrible all day long. They’d waited forty-five minutes to see It’s a Small World. More than an hour and a half at the Bell Pavilion. There was an orange plastic dolphin on her dress, a gift from the Florida exhibit. She said they’d brought their son along, who was on leave, but he’d already gone back to the hotel to cool off. He told them he did enough standing in line in the army.

For Annie, the lines, the crowds, the restricted view while she waited, were all part of the fair’s adventure, like being led, blindfolded. At the end of every wait-it had been happening all day-wonders were revealed.

(She and her mother, who did not drive, had steered a green convertible into the dark, past dinosaurs and the invention of the wheel and into a shimmering city of tall white towers, the threshold of tomorrow. They had sat-after the hour wait-in a moving theater as a mechanical family, as real as her own, lived through the 1800s and the 1900s and into the next century, only their faces unchanging. They’d watched gray dolphins leap out of a blue pool and hang suspended above the ordinary Queens skyline. They’d walked quietly through the spiced air of Asia, where tiny chimes sounded softly and incense was burned, and through a chilly Alpine village that actually smelled of snow. They’d sat side by side in a moving chair that took them past lunar bases and underwater farms and along a glittering continental highway while a voice like God’s told them, whispering softly into their ears, that the present was just an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.)

The line shuffled forward three more steps. Constricted by the space between them, Mary Keane reached back carefully and pulled her blouse away from her spine. She felt a bead of perspiration roll down her back. And then another. Cascading, she thought. “I’m melting,” she said. Behind them, the man with the woman on his arm was reading from a guidebook. Annie felt the edge of the paper against the back of her head.

“They shouldn’t have moved something so old,” he said. “Something could have happened to it.” And the woman on his arm made a sympathetic noise and then seemed to readjust herself, as if she were turning in bed.

“God, it’s hot,” she said and Mary Keane turned to nod at her, “Isn’t it, though?” Farther behind them there was a family, parents and two teenagers, limp shouldered and unhappy. Then what might have been a church group of pastel men and women, all with name tags and crosses on their breasts, fanning themselves with identical paper fans printed loudly with the name of an Atlanta funeral home.

Above the rooftops of the Belgian Village, the sun had gone from orange to red-so fiery now it might have been lifted from some creation tableau itself. Might more appropriately have been shining down on tar pits or boiling mud. As Annie leaned out to look back (the line was longer still) and then forward (no shorter ahead), the red sun struck the gold dome of the pavilion and sent her ducking back into her place. Now a vertiginous edge of purple outlined everything she saw. She saw heads turned away from the sun. Shoulders moving slowly forward. The man’s speckled hand that had missed a belt loop this morning reaching up to wipe perspiration from his sunburned neck. His wife was turned around again to say to her mother they had one son in the army and one in the Marines and another one married and back near home. And Mary Keane replied four, two boys and two girls.

Something prehistoric, too, in the scaly flesh of the woman’s throat as she turned to speak to them, chin and neck indistinguishable. Her voice was worn.

She said she should have gone for four and had a girl, too.

Daughters will wait with you to see something like this. Not boys. “Although my boys are good to me,” she said. “They’re good boys.”

The woman turned to Annie, taking her in with small eyes, perhaps assessing what she’d missed. Suddenly, she asked, “Did you see the Carousel of Progress, honey?”

And her mother answered, “Yes we did.”

“The Magic Skyway? Futurama? The Moon Dome? Did you talk on the picturephones?”

“Oh, yeah,” Annie said, knowing her mother wanted her to say yes, not yeah.

“What I want to know,” the woman said, raising her voice, nearly shouting, “is what if you just got out of the shower, and your picturephone is ringing? Do you answer it?” She laughed, her open mouth full of silver and gold. She shook her head and wiped a tear from her eyes. “That’s your future, honey,” she said to Annie. “Not mine or your mom’s.” She leaned back, her wide arm touching Mary Keane’s damp shoulder. “We’ll be well out of it, don’t you think?”

The man in the plaid shirt, as husbands will do, was staring straight ahead, ignoring the conversation, as if both women were strangers to him. Even in this heat, Mary Keane was aware of a certain pleasure in being relieved of the burden of a husband.

“We sure will,” she said, agreeably.

But then the woman suddenly raised her arm, the pale skin swinging, and gestured toward the fantastic rooflines and white towers, the sky lifts and the monorails.

“The only thing I hate to think about,” she said, “is how all this will be knocked down when the fair is over.”

Other than the slow shuffling forward and the fanning of maps and brochures, there was the rise and fall of cigarettes to mouths, the tossing of them onto the asphalt. A couple up ahead occasionally left the line to chase a toddler. The man behind them was saying “Michael-angelo,” and the woman on his arm was saying, “Meekel, Meekel-angelo.”

They shuffled forward. In the boredom and the heat there were only the tender backs of necks to consider, arches of ears, puckered elbows, freckles, birthmarks. The variety of head shapes and hair colors. What wash-day mishap or expense spared or birthday gift or Simplicity pattern had led to those clothes on that body on this day. A missed belt loop. A plastic purse. A bleached beehive. A baggy pair of Bermuda shorts. A lip held over a protruding tooth. You had to pity anyone in long pants or black socks. Women in white gloves. Soldiers in uniform. You had to pity the man behind them for the hair on his arms, the woman’s weight against him.