UNCLE BILLY WAS GOING to the desert—again! We were all going to the desert, all except Arthur. And Arlette, too, was staying behind. Arlette was minding the lake house, the one Aunt Frances loved best. Aunt Frances did not like the desert. “I’m a snow bird,” she said; nevertheless, Aunt Frances packed. She ordered sleeveless shirts for me with my initials on the collars. Sleeveless shirts in March—imagine! “We were shucking off our winter coats; we were traveling light: “Good-bye, Arthur, (good-riddance, Arlette), good-bye.”
The desert was a vacation Uncle Billy paid for—no bargains, no deals—but here Uncle Billy hoped to make money, more money, unusually, of course, in the desert.
In the desert Uncle Billy carried a gun. The desert birds were a spring green or dirt color, I remember this, and Uncle Billy’s gun and the mountains and the trek we took after the Dutchman’s lost mine. I was ten—ten was my age when Mother left for good, and this sleep-over life began. I was sleeping at my Uncle Billy’s desert house that time we took the Dutchman’s trek, and I drank my water early, and Uncle Billy would not share his. He said, “Let that be a lesson to you, sweetie.”
I swam and swam in Uncle Billy’s pool.
I wrote to Arthur. I asked about the snow. I told him maybe I wouldn’t come back Spring after spring, I wrote this same message: I love it here. Maybe I won’t come back.
But Arthur was waiting in the car for me.
Arthur was waiting, was paid to be waiting to drive me from house to house, to Uncle Billy’s winter house and then to Arlette’s shack, to Nonna’s, Uncle Billy’s again, Nonna’s, Uncle Billy’s—Arthur was stoutly, conspicuously waiting for me, and I was embarrassed to be seen with him. Standing outside of the car, simply taking up my luggage, Arthur looked uglier than when even Mother left. His teeth, his nose. “Hello,” I said with a brushed-past hug. “Arthur,” I said, insisting on his name. I was ashamed of my cool behavior, yet I didn’t want anyone to see Arthur and to think he was my father. My father was handsome!
Arthur was waiting in the car for me; in front of school or after lessons, Arthur was waiting in Uncle Billy’s formal car, a blue-black, deep green, the same color as the stone Aunt Frances wore on her wedding-ring finger, a color stippled in the light, expensive.
Arthur called the car the Emerald Gem, and he washed the car weekly and dried it with a chamois. I helped.
I ran the chamois through the wringer and picked out gravel in the bristles of the brush.
Not much talking between us unless I asked, and I didn’t ask but came to conclusions from the way things looked. The way things looked made me think Arthur was sad, and I was sad for him. No immediate family, no friends, poor Arthur in overalls, smelling of oil and earth. His lace-up shoes had a bulbous toe, and the empty crown of his baseball cap stuck up stupidly. He swooped off the cap, saying, “Yes, Mister, Yes, Miss, Yes, Miss Frances” to the orders from the boss, to Uncle Billy or his wife. Arthur’s hair was sweated flat, his forehead grooved. Poor Arthur, left to do what I couldn’t do, he looked tired.
“Can’t I help?” I asked.
“No, stay where you are. You’re help just watching.”
“Can I come along then?”
“Okay,” Arthur said, and Uncle Billy said, too, but more often, “No, Alice, you stay here. …” And if I didn’t ride quietly, didn’t obey, what happened then? Banished to the backseat, obliged to sit and watch as they loaded Mother’s house on the U-Haul: her bed, a chest of drawers, six dining chairs, stacked. Arthur and his helpers were doing the work; Uncle Billy only bossed.
Shame, I felt, confusion, wonder, ease, the impression of a fire, a reddening light pulsed the shelter of leaves that branched across the road to Uncle Billy’s house. Arthur drove. Arthur was almost always driving or waiting and waiting, often for Uncle Billy, and with only a knife to pare his nails.
“Aren’t you bored?” I asked, yet another day, waiting in the Emerald Gem with Arthur and shivering despite the heat it hoarded. “Aren’t you bored? Because I am.” Hips passed and hems and scarf fringe and gloves, and I couldn’t see past the doors to the building, the one my Uncle Billy was in, the building with the doors revolving: not him, not him.
A Monday afternoon, a Thursday afternoon—any afternoon—it might be. Uncle Billy liked surprises and he liked to surprise, and he could! “An adventure!” he said, off to find gold or sausage or slot machines (really!) whatever he could find. Every day was his own, and Uncle Billy could be late.
“You must be patient,” Arthur said, which was fine, I thought, for a man dressed to wait in another man’s car, but I didn’t want to sit here without music. I didn’t want to wait with Arthur, and I was rude. I said, “Wait for me, too,” and I took off down the block on my own somewhere. Five minutes, ten, I wasn’t very long away—but still. …
“Has Alice been good?” Uncle Billy asked, returned and turned around to look at me while Arthur drove the three of us to someplace special where Uncle Billy flashed a card at a carpeted booth that let us in for free—for free the festooned aisles of giveaways and samples, tubs, birdbaths, rug shampoos, a new and faster way to cut up food. Big girls packed in dirndls held out dips and toothpicked weenies. Raffles, contests, questionnaires, there were baskets of possibilities only waiting to be signed, and Uncle Billy was smiling broadly. “A year’s worth of anything was something,” he was saying, but what would he have to buy?
“The chance to go to Orlando,” was what the nearest clipboard said, and Uncle Billy bought it. He was rich!
He bought Mexico City, too, and raffles for instant-retirement cash, a bird, a goat, a car called Windlass. A trip with my mother’s rich brother was never entirely boring. Brochures, calling cards, glo-pink logos, Uncle Billy bought guesses and drawings, and carelessly fetched for me whatever was free—for a pet I didn’t have or an ailment; but the cure spilled in the trunk and there were rolling pellets. “No more adventures, I think,” Arthur was saying to me, sponging off the dashboard and the armrests. “No more or we’re going to get in trouble with Aunt Frances. …”
The wet wind of Arthur’s seriousness, that could make me shiver; and Aunt Frances … and Arlette, too. They spoke in unison to me: “We know what you’ve been doing.” Then they put up what treasures I had from my mother’s, put up too high for me to reach. “Just ask,” Aunt Frances said. “You won’t even remember what’s here, I bet.” But I remembered, and I recognized Mother’s plates and glasses, the felt bags of silver Mother wrote to me about, “Don’t sell the silver. We can afford it.”
Mother wrote me at the beginning. “This is where I am,” and x’d on a card she had drawn was a beachfront high-rise, palm trees dashed in front of it.
Flowers in the folds of letters, “Smell these!”
Locks of new blond hair, “Wish you could see!”
I scorned what seemed flimsy for the cold we knew, what scant clothes Mother sent me. “Love, love, love, love,” Uncle Billy read, and he held out the package with its friable contents, its hankies of printed cloth.
“I’m not wearing this,” I said. “Whatever made her think I would?”
I was a prude then; I was easily embarrassed by my body and by my mother’s body and how she had exposed it—remember? When the yard was under snow? Mother, sunbathing on a bed of foil Arthur had built for her, a sun-box, Arthur’s homemade Florida, and Mother on her knees, waving to me—waving to the neighborhood!—her legs glossy and oiled and white, the sun invisibled in murk. “Look where I am!” Florida, Florida, no matter that we lived in the land-of-lakes state where spring was slow to come.
Arthur said to me, “No one could be happy the way she was.” He said, “No one in the family was as generous … remember that,” but I forgot.