serendipity:
the making of pleasant discoveries by accident, the knack of doing this.
Aunt Margarite never did move in with us. Instead, she wandered the country, finally settling in Florida, where she opened up a shop that did import-export. She and Joey traveled to Mexico, Central America, Africa, India, and China; they brought back Guatemalan blankets, wooden elephants, prayer shawls, and exotic art. Every now and then she’d call my mom and tell her she’d met the one. The first was a Cuban man who ran a cigar shop in Miami Beach. The second was a reggae singer from Jamaica. The third was a traffic cop. Then my mom wouldn’t hear from her again until disaster struck. “This one stole a hundred dollars from her and went back to his wife and kids in Texas,” Mom would report. “That guy from New York said she had to institutionalize Joey if she wanted him to stay.”
My mom fretted and worried about her sister constantly. “It’s always been that way for Margarite. Everything came easily to me. But she’s dyslexic. She flunked a grade and got in trouble constantly. She has an uncanny knack for choosing losers. And Joey. I wish there was something I could do to make it better.”
They were half sisters. Margarite’s dad was a railway worker who stayed on a train one day and never came back. Mom’s dad was an English teacher.
“You do all you can,” Dad said. “It’s out of your control.”
But my mom always wanted to take care of her, although Margarite was four years older. Mom couldn’t stand for anyone to suffer. If there was a stray dog, she’d take it in and put a photo up in the shop until someone adopted it. If there was a sick neighbor, or a death in someone’s family, she’d be there with one of her barely edible vegetarian concoctions. There were people who came into the bookstore just to talk, to tell her about their knee surgery or latest romance, and she listened. She listened to them all.
I woke up knowing three things: that I was in a bed, that I was clean, and that I was naked. The rest of my mind was blank.
I looked around the room. It was a motel room, with just a bed, a dresser, a hot plate, and a TV nailed to a stand, but the walls were decorated as if someone had been there for a while: photographs of celebrities cut out from magazines, a calendar with a cocker spaniel on it, a couple of drawings of fairies. Next to me, thumbtacked to the wall, were two tarot cards, a cartoon, and some fortunes. The cartoon was of a waitress taking an order; she pulls a tampon from behind her ear. “What’s this tampon doing behind my ear—and where’s my pencil?” the caption said. The fortunes were more promising: YOUR LUCK IS ABOUT TO CHANGE; YOUR TALENTS WILL SOON BE RECOGNIZED; YOU ARE A FRIEND TO ANIMALS. It was only later that I’d see the humor in that one, how it related to myself, a wild man found in the woods.
My clothes weren’t anywhere in sight.
“You’re awake.” Pretty Angel appeared. She was wearing a uniform, a gray polyester dress with a soiled white apron. Her hair was in a hairnet. “I didn’t know if you’d still be here when I got back. I even worried that you’d steal all my stuff and hit the road—not that there’s much to steal. I washed your clothes, but I don’t have a dryer. They’re hanging in the bathroom. What’s your name? Hmmm? Me, Stacey. You?” She took the apron off and flung it on the floor. “I’ll just have to call you William, then.” Stacey walked into the bathroom. A second later, I heard water running. “Boy, you really passed out. What happened to you?” She came back out and took her hair down in front of the mirror. “I used to like eggs. You know? There was a year when I was even on the egg diet. I ate every kind of omelet you could dream of: jam omelets, tomato omelets, green-chili omelets, marshmallow omelets. I lost, like, eight pounds in a month. Of course, you could only use the whites, but that was okay. The yolks remind me of chicks anyway, you know the little chicks that would’ve been—all, like, fluffy and yellow and cute.”
I nodded. My brain feels like an egg, I thought: a cracked one, little fragments missing, pieces of shell.
“You know PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals? Before I joined the Wiccans I belonged to that. It was an okay organization, but the people were boring. You know, like ‘my dog this,’ or ‘my parrot that.’ They were the types who couldn’t deal with people, mostly, so they obsessed about animals.”
I nodded. My parents had belonged to it for a while.
“There’s this other PETA, too. You heard of them? People Eating Tasty Animals. Those are just assholes who took over the name. Anyway, I hate eggs now. All breakfast foods. Even the smell of coffee makes me want to puke. Maybe I could go on disability or something, since diner food makes me so sick. What do you think?”
I shrugged. The word “woods” came to my mind. I wondered if I’d had a stroke.
She went into the bathroom and turned off the water. I could hear the sound of clothes being removed: a zipper, a snap. “I was starving this morning, after chanting all night. Wiccans are cool and everything, but they don’t know that a good time should include food and beverage.” I heard the sound of splashing water. “Ahh.”
I closed my eyes and drifted. If I could just stay in this bed and sleep for the rest of my life, I thought, everything would be fine.
“Prince William? Are you asleep again?”
I opened my eyes. She was naked under her towel, her skin pink and steaming. Despite everything, my body responded.
“Do you realize how long it’s been since I slept?” she said. “About thirty hours. This group is so amazing. I mean, I can feel my energy transforming. It’s just they do everything in the middle of the damn night. I started hallucinating at work, I swear, after I’d served my fiftieth plate of eggs. I saw men climbing into the yolks. Little lumberjacks. You know the spotted owls? The loggers are destroying their habitat. And to really piss off the environmentalists, they kill the owls and nail them up around town. I hate Idaho. The most famous resident of the state is Mark Fuhrman, that racist cop in the O. J. Simpson trial. He writes books. He lied under oath and got to become a celebrity. Idaho sucks. Land of the potato. Whoop-de-doo.”
I wanted to ask her questions, like where she was from, and how old she was, but my voice couldn’t make the trip from my throat to my mouth. I nodded to encourage her to keep talking.
“I’m beat. I burned my hand on the grill and kept spilling coffee onto the saucers.” She pulled the covers back and looked at me. “I just want to sleep. Okay? No funny business.”
I nodded.
She dropped the towel and climbed in next to me. I pulled the covers up over her. She put her head on my chest and I wrapped my arm around her. “Prince William,” she sighed, and in a minute, she was snoring.