when William gets settled you can move everything into his room.”
Victor nodded and put one foot on top of the other. He could sense everyone looking at him.
Shelby walked over to her father and butted her head gently against his frail shoulder. “I can’t wait to come see you, Daddy,” she said. Uncle Buzz nodded and lifted his free arm, as if with enormous effort, to drape heavily across his daughter’s shoulders. She turned to Victor. “He gets his own private room, and they have hot tubs and a massage therapist. It’s not a rest home. It’s more like a damn health spa.”
“Nice,” said Victor, uncertainly.
“Well, I don’t know why we’re all standing around,” the grandmother said after a brief silence. “William, let Shelby show Victor your room before you go back in there. Shelby, go on and show Victor the rest of the house, and I’ll get some lunch ready. I’m just going to have a tomato sandwich, it’s too hot for anything else. Victor, what do you want? I’ve got peanut butter, I can grill some cheese…”
For some reason, Victor wanted one of the supplemental milkshakes that Uncle Buzz was drinking, the same sort of thing they made all the anorexic and bulimic girls in the treatment center drink. His stomach was so tense that he could think of nothing less appealing than a peanut butter sandwich. “Peanut butter’s O.K,” he said. He picked up his duffel bag and followed Shelby down the hall. The first door, on the right, was the bathroom, small and dark and clean smelling. The next door, to the left, was the door to Uncle Buzz’s room, the room that Victor would soon inhabit. He peeked in for a moment and saw an unmade twin bed, a window overlooking the front yard, and, opposite the bed, a tall dresser. The doorway down the hall a bit and to the left was shut tight. “That’s the master bedroom,” said Shelby. “The old lady doesn’t like anybody going in there, so we won’t go in. There’s not much to see, anyway. It’s the biggest room in the house, though. There are a couple of pictures of you when you were little on the wall. They look like school pictures. I guess your mom must have sent them.”
At the end of the hallway there was another door shut tight. There was a laminated magazine picture of James Dean tacked to it and a knotted string with tiny copper bells attached hanging from the doorknob. “You want to see my room?”
“Sure.”
She opened the door and immediately the intermingled scents of candle wax, incense, and menthol cigarette smoke wafted out. She stepped inside and Victor followed, and the musky air made him sneeze three times in a row. The walls and ceiling were painted a smoky shade of lavender, the bed in its antique metal frame was heaped with stuffed animals and pillows of all shapes, colors, and sizes, and thick hot pink velvet curtains were drawn across the two sets of windows. Pictures framed or simply torn from magazines were pinned or hung haphazardly on every wall, and there was a vanity with an enormous round mirror and a tiny television atop a French provincial dresser. A wooden framed rocking chair upholstered in an incongruous brown sat underneath one window, its arms and back draped with clothing. Shelby put her hands on her hips and looked questioningly at Victor.
Victor had never been in a room so feminine or so thoroughly fragranced, and yet he was overcome by an eerie feeling of familiarity. It was as if not so much the room itself, but some invisible presence within it, was welcoming him back to a place he couldn’t quite remember. He smiled at Shelby. “It’s cool,” he said.
She snorted. “Gum hates it. She says it looks like a whorehouse in here. As if she has any idea what a whorehouse looks like.”
Suddenly Shelby’s expression became stern. “I’m glad you like it. But please don’t ever come in here without my permission. If you do, I’ll be pissed, and I have my ways of knowing if my space has been invaded. I don’t want to be a bitch, but I want to make it clear that I can’t live in a house with someone who doesn’t respect my boundaries. Everyone has to have their own space, and this is mine, for now. I know we don’t really know each other, but we are cousins, and I’m glad you’re here, believe it or not, because I’ve always wondered what you’re like, but I don’t want you- or anyone- in my room without my permission. Okay?”
“Okay,” as Shelby spoke he felt an initial rush of fury, as if he’d been offered something that was suddenly, tauntingly snatched away, but almost as instantly he wanted to assure her that he could be trusted. “I need my own space, too.”
Shelby smiled. “You’ll like Daddy’s room. It’s good,” she said obscurely. “Do you smoke?”
Victor hoped she meant tobacco. “Yes.”
“Menthol?”
“If that’s what you have.”
She held out a pack. “Take the whole thing. Gum gets them wholesale for the bar at the restaurant. I never have to buy my own,” she walked over to her vanity table and picked up an ashtray. They settled themselves on the carpet, Shelby leaning against the side of her bed, and Victor leaning against the closet door. For the first time Victor asked a question. “So, are you my only cousin?”
Shelby rolled her eyes. “There’s no telling, with this family.” l
Uncle Buzz did not join them for lunch, having enjoyed his nutritional supplement earlier he retired to his room, presumably to sleep away the sunny afternoon. It struck Victor as odd, and rather comforting, that the women in the house behaved so casually about his own sudden arrival as well as the uncle’s illness and immanent departure. From what Victor’s mother had told him over the past few days about this side of his family, it appeared that Uncle Buzz was or at least always had been, until he got sick, a very heavy drinker, and his drinking was to blame for his disease. Victor’s mother had mentioned all this in the context of explaining that his uncle and cousin lived with his grandmother, and not the other way around. “Buzz has never been able to take care of himself,” she’d said. “He went into the military right out of high school, just like your father, but he got kicked out as soon as he met poor Shelby’s mother.” ‘Poor Shelby’s mother’ was the only way Victor’s mother ever referred to Shelby’s mother, and she would only say that she was ‘unfit,’ but not why. She must be a monster, Victor figured, given that his mother seemed to consider Shelby’s alcoholic and apparently unemployed father to be more fit than this absent, enigmatic female figure.
He looked across the round kitchen table at his cousin Shelby and tried to conjure up the image of the monster that gave birth to her. Shelby didn’t on the surface resemble her father, but if one really looked one could see that they shared the same square, pointed chin and they both had slim, delicate looking fingers. It was hard for Victor to imagine Shelby having any other mother besides their grandmother, who, having eaten half of her own tomato sandwich was now standing by the sink smoking a cigarette and peering at the label on one of Uncle Buzz’s cans of nutritional supplement.
Shelby seemed to detect Victor’s scrutiny of her, and looked up. He blushed and looked down at his plate, which, with its half-eaten sandwich lying in nervous pieces upon it, seemed horribly unappreciated. Shelby’s plate was clean. She pushed back her seat, stood, and the bracelets on her arms jingled as she smoothed back her wild mass of hair and twisted it into a loose, but steadfast knot at the nape of her neck. “I’m going to my room to write in my journal,” she said pointedly, and took her plate to the sink. “I’ll be out when it’s time to go to work,” she spoke to their grandmother, but it was clear to Victor that he was the one being told to keep his distance for a while.
Victor left the house with the vague notion of figuring out if it would be possible to find, and walk to, the beach, but as soon as he stepped out of the cool darkness of his grandmother’s house onto the white hot concrete stoop that served as the front porch, it was obvious to him that to walk far would be to risk not only getting lost, but getting sick. The sky above was clear and pale, and the sunlight bore down on the crown of his head like a heavy hand. He didn’t want to go back