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  Elaine had been a chemist, working at the university with Donald until the kid was born. Her work had been her life, or at least that was the impression I got when I received her letter saying that she was putting her life aside to take care of the kid, because the kid had been born deformed. She and Donald had been vague about the nature of the kid’s deformity; I’d only known that it had something to do with her feet. I was therefore surprised for a second time when Donald called out, “Meredith,” and Meredith came wheeling in from the other part of the house purely footless. Donald introduced her, and I looked, because, who wouldn’t? And when I looked back up at her face again, she was staring at me, insolently, like, How dare you go and look at my footless situation? I thought, You’re not going to scare me off with that look, honey. I’ll look at whatever part of you I like whenever I like, because I’ve seen it all, and I don’t scare that easily. Then Roscoe jumped out of his seat and went down on his knees between us like a court jester, taking her hand in his and raising it to his lips. When I looked up from his foolishness, I saw she hadn’t taken her eyes off of me, was still sending me her angry message over the top of Roscoe’s head.

  Otherwise, she was a beautiful kid though, I’ll say that much for her. Her straight brown hair was shiny and so long that she would have been sitting on it if it hadn’t been combed over the canvas back of her wheelchair. Her eyes were long and almond-shaped, slanting up at the corners. Her nose was a little-kid pug. And her lips were the red, pouty sort that the boys go crazy over nowadays. She was slim and dark-skinned, with little cookie-shaped breasts straining against her pink t-shirt.

  Carole said, “What do you think of the house?” I looked around. I could only see the porch through which we’d come, and the breezeway, and beyond the breezeway, an entrance into another section which I guessed was where the bedrooms were. I said, “It looks old, and I take the ceiling fan to mean there’s no air conditioning.” She laughed and heaped some scallop salad onto a hard roll and passed it to the kid. The kid took a bite of it and then put it back on her plate and just stared at it. Roscoe and Donald, meanwhile, were all hands and mouths, taking this, passing that, jaws pumping. I had a million questions I wanted to ask Donald, a million memories I wanted to throw out at him, just to hear his wonderful, hearty laugh again, but with her sitting there—Carole—presiding over the table like a high priestess, and the kid eyeballing her sandwich like it might have been poisoned, my questions and memories seemed out of place, inconsequential. The wife and the kid were reminders that the tight little reunion I’d hoped for would not take place after all. This was this and that was that. Carole said, “What do you do for a living, Belinda?”

  Donald put down his fork and answered for me, with his mouth full. “She’s a beautician,” he exclaimed. “The best. She wins trophies all the time for her concoctions.”

  “No more,” I said. “Not since I’ve been at the home.”

  Carole looked at me quizzically, with her head cocked to one side and her scallop-salad sandwich held out over her shoulder. “Old people,” I said. “I wash and style for the patients who can’t manage for themselves, which is most of them.”

  Roscoe emerged from his banquet dream. “You should see the hairdos she comes up with,” he said. “It’s outrageous.”

  I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Roscoe. Eat.”

  After the meal we unpacked the van and then we all went to the beach in it. Donald wheeled the kid through the parking area and then carried her over the sand dunes while Carole dragged the chair behind them. The kid clung to her father’s neck, with her head against his chest. I saw him whisper something into her ear. He was apparently trying to make her laugh, because he laughed, but she kept her face hidden.

  The beach was practically deserted. It was nothing like the beaches on Key West. There were no life guards’ chairs, no life guards. I said, “Hey, where are all the people? Is it because it’s late in the day?” “No,” Carole called out from behind me. “The island’s something of a well-kept secret.” When I turned to look at her, she winked. I didn’t know what the wink was about, but I was relieved all the same, because even though I’d made Roscoe leave his stuff behind, he would have for sure found something to juggle around if there had been a crowd. He would have strung up seaweed if he’d had to, and stood up on it on one foot like a crazy flamingo in his shocking pink silk shirt, juggling dead fish or crab shells, whatever was handy. And knowing Roscoe, it would have worked, too.

  The kid and I had another staring contest while the other three were testing the water. She was up in her wheel chair pedestal, sitting erect like a little princess, looking down her nose at me on the blanket. Finally, she broke off and said, “Mrs. Creedmoor, do you enjoy working in a nursing home with all those old people in wheelchairs?”

  I thought, You don’t learn easily, do you kid? I said, “A, Don’t call me Mrs. Creedmoor, because that’s not my name. My name is Cavinaugh, Belinda Cavinaugh, because although Roscoe and I have been living together since time began, we never saw fit to get married. So you may call me Belinda, or you may call me Miss Cavinaugh, or you may call me Ms. Cavinaugh. I leave that up to you. And B, not all the patients in the nursing home are in wheelchairs. Some of them lie in bed all day with tubes up their noses and their hands tied to the rails so they can’t pull the tubes out. They get a washing now and then, but no styling, because any style I could give them would only be crushed out by the pillows that are always hugging their heads. Now, to answer your question: No, I don’t really enjoy working on them very much.

  “Then, at the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got your walkers, people who get around just fine on foot on the good days, and only occasionally need a chair. These folks are wanderers, moving back and forth all day long, back and forth, back and forth, across the floor, looking in the ashtrays for the butts the nurses and aides leave behind, lifting up their gowns and exposing their tumors and their whatnots to anyone who happens along. They get a washing and a styling, but seldom a perm, because most of them are angry types and don’t like to be touched. Them I could do without altogether.

  “Then, in the middle are the feeders, most of whom have had serious strokes, and so, though they can be gotten out of bed and into a wheelchair, they can’t wheel themselves, and they must be spoon-fed by the aides when it comes mealtimes. They get a washing and a styling, and sometimes even a perm, because they are extraordinarily patient and can sit all day, mute and motionless, while I work them over. They are my favorites, needless to say.

  “Now, let me explain that none of these folks are what you would call lucid. Some arrive with less than a full deck, and other lose their jacks and aces along the way, purely from the day-in, day-out of the place. And so when I say to them, ‘Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So, what kind of a hairdo do you think you want today?’ they either look up at me with blank faces, or they give me an answer which has nothing in the world to do with hair, or they don’t acknowledge me at all but just go on staring at nothing. So I just go on ahead and give them whatever style I think best. And oh child, they are a sight to behold. Some never moving a muscle; some talking all day long, to no one in particular; some drooling and staring at their kneecaps; some praying to God; some cursing Him; some thinking they are kids again and I’m their mama come to get them ready for school; some snarling and snapping like the devil himself. But when the head nurse calls out, ‘Wheel in the feeders,’ and the aides start the procession into the dining room, each aide pushing one and dragging another, I can stand back and be proud, because despite the drooling and the babbling and the staring, they are all looking too cool for words, like they just stepped off the pages of ‘Rolling Stone,’ with hair styles like Tina Turner’s and David Bowie’s, and Cindy Lauper’s.”

  I got a chuckle out of her. She said, “You mean they let you get away with that?”

  I said, “Who? The staff? They don’t care. I do most of them, on the side, the same way.”

  She said, “What abo
ut the relatives who come to visit? It must be a little disconcerting for them to find Grandma looking like Tina Turner around the edges, but just like Grandma everywhere else.”

  I said, “Most don’t get any visitors. But I go easy on the ones who do.”

  She laughed. She said, “Did you ever think about going to work for a mortician?”

  I looked at her, at the sneer she was showing me. I said, “No, actually, I prefer the near dead to the dead dead. Hey, how about if you let me do your hair before the vacation’s over.”

  She gave me a long hard look. Then she brightened. “Touché, Mrs. Creedmoor,” she said.

  Well, I thought. So this is Donald’s kid. I watched her for a minute to see if she would say anything else, and then I followed her gaze down to the water’s edge where Roscoe and Carole were throwing around the Frisbee, with Donald running back and forth between them, trying to get it away, howling with laughter at his own clumsiness. Meredith said, “Father’s gotten foolish since he married her.” I said, “Yeah, I can see that.”

  After a while I lay back on the blanket and closed my eyes. The sea breeze felt good on my face. I said, “I knew your father, oh, about sixteen, seventeen years ago,” because I wanted her to say, Yeah, What was he like then? What was it like? But she said nothing. So I decided to tell myself the story, as I have every now and then over the years. I let its words play out in my head like music against a background arrangement made up of the sea sounds and Donald’s laughter, while its images came to life on the back of my eyelids, as vivid as yesterday. It was the kid’s loss too, because it was a good story, although I would have had to leave stuff out if I’d been telling it for her.

  Once upon a time.… I like to start it off that way because it feels like a fairy tale when I look back on it. Of course the ending isn’t happy the way fairy tale endings usually are, but hey! That’s not my doing! And anyway there are parts in the middle that are happy enough to make up for the end. And it seems like a fairy tale too because it doesn’t seem real anymore, doesn’t seem like it ever really happened. It’s so … so … Long Ago and Far Away. When the day comes that I can’t be bothered to recall it anymore, it won’t have happened.

  So … once upon a time there was this country. And the people who lived there were happy—because men were walking on the moon—but also sad—because their sons and brothers were being killed in another country far, far away. The young people of the country that was sending its men up to the sky and out to the war were the only ones with sense enough to catch on to the contradiction here, and it confused the hell out of them. So away they went, in groups for the most part. One particular group settled in a place called Maura’s Mountain. This is, in fact, the story of that settlement, how it started and how it ended.

  Maura didn’t own the mountain. Her mother did. But Maura’s mother was a rich chick and she had no use for the little bit of money that she might have made by selling the land she’d inherited from her grandfather. So she okayed Maura’s plan to go and live there along with a few of her friends. Now Maura had never been to the mountain. The only thing she knew for certain about it was that it was located in a part of the country that was very difficult to get to because of there being a shortage of roads. But the rumor going around was that there were people out that way who had never seen a movie or a TV set. These people, it was said, lived among bears and rattlesnakes. They were incredibly poor, but also happy, because the confusion of the times hadn’t reached them yet. They took their days one by one and didn’t give a hoot about the future. So one fine day in early spring, Maura and her friends Sally and Belinda drove south in Maura’s Pontiac to claim the mountain and the occasion to begin a new life.

  But when they arrived, they found the farmhouse they proposed to live in to be in very poor condition. It had been vacant for a long time and some rats had moved in. The well pump was broken. The front door was hanging off its hinges. And threads of sunlight shot in at different hours of the day from places other than the windows. Belinda, the prettiest of the three, I might mention—slim girl with green cat’s eyes and strawberry blonde hair—had saved up some money doing hair on the side while she was in Beauty School. Because she was as generous as she was pretty, she’d planned to use it for food and furnishings for herself and her friends, but she didn’t see how she could stretch it out to cover repairs too. And yet she and the others didn’t have the know-how to make the repairs themselves. So they put their heads together and came up with a plan. And the next day Maura drove into the nearby village in her Pontiac and called some fellows she knew.

  Bart and Eddie had just finished college and were hanging around, waiting for something to happen—because the world was on hold then and everybody knew it. Paul had just come home from the faraway war, in one piece physically but mentally scattered; he was looking to regroup. The three agreed to come at once, provided Maura had no objection to them building themselves a little cabin on the property when the work was done on the farmhouse.

  Belinda rejoiced when she heard the news. She and Paul had been lovers before he went away to fight. But since his return, he’d been different, indifferent. She believed the mountain might be just the thing for him; she believed he might come to love her again there.

  The young men came, and the six young people worked together in harmony under blue skies that spring, deratting the farmhouse, fixing the pump, and caulking up the cracks in the walls. They also began to build the cabin. When everyone was broke, Belinda found a job in the nearby village cutting the locks of the local folk who could afford it. Bart and Sally got a job putting up fenceposts for one of the farmers in the area. Paul and Eddie got scab work down in the mines. Maura didn’t work. She wanted to write a book about the mountain and all the wonderful things that were happening there. She was going to interview everyone, one at a time.

  By the end of spring, the farmhouse was in good order and the cabin was complete. The cabin had no water or electric, but was a pretty fine place anyway. It had been built in the shape of the letter A, one room with a sleeping loft above it. A second hand wood stove had been installed in the center, for heating and cooking. Drinking water was easy enough to fetch from the nearby creek. In the evenings the three young men walked up to the farmhouse to bathe. Maura charged each bather a quarter, to help pay the electric bill. A garden was started, midway between the cabin and the house. In it grew vegetables of all sorts and a very special plant which could be dried out and smoked when the real world threatened from afar. Everyone was happy—even Paul.

  The word got out. Sally’s cousin George came in with his girlfriend from a place to the west. With everyone pitching in, George’s cabin went up in no time at all. Bart sent a letter to some people he knew northwest of the mountain. The northwest group, three couples, came out, but they didn’t know if they wanted to stay the winter. So they put up teepees instead of cabins. The frames for the teepees were made from the spruce saplings that grew up behind the farmhouse and were covered with canvas. There were three in all, one for each couple. Each was twenty feet in diameter with a wood stove off-center pointing up at the smoke flap. Eddie met a woman when he was thumbing his way into town. She came to the mountain with her three kids. Others came too, putting up cabins and teepees and all manner of things in between. No need to mention them all.

  The people on the mountain got to know some of the locals. There were two kinds: The folks living right in the village—which was seven miles away—were more or less like village folk anywhere; they’d give you the time of day if you asked for it, but they’d throw in a look that said, My hunch is you young people ain’t up to much good up there. But the mountain folk, what you might call the backwoods people, who lived in the mountains that surrounded the village, had a kind of raccoon-like curiosity about Maura’s Mountain—which is to say that when they saw one of its inhabitants passing by they sort of started and followed along with their eyes—and gradually they began to find excuses to have a look at it.<
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  Once, a few backwoods boys came by with a side of deer. Another time a few came by with three possums and instructions on cooking them. They had a girl with them, a dark thing with a dirty face and frightened black eyes. She stayed in the pickup while her father and brother were offering the possums up at the farmhouse. Belinda, who never missed a thing, saw her from the window leaning forward in the truck, all hair and curiosity. Paul saw her too, and a few days later he came back to the mountain saying that her name was Jen, that she’d never seen a movie or a television set, that she thought Twiggy was an adjective and that Sirhan Sirhan was a kind of aluminum foil.

  Paul spent less and less time on the mountain after that, and at the end of the summer he left it to marry Jen. Everyone was sorry to see him go. Eddie still saw him regularly down in the mines, and he gave the others reports on how the couple was doing. He said Paul and Jen had bought a team of workhorses and were logging on the weekends. They were saving up money to buy a farm of their own. In the meantime, they were living on duck-egg sandwiches as thick as any of Maura’s cakes. The duck eggs were giving Paul a serious mucus problem. Everyone laughed at that because that Eddie was a kidder, but one day, sure enough, Belinda saw Paul passing the beauty salon on one of his horses, coming home from the mines, she guessed. His face was black and his nose was running good.

  It was early fall when the wizard came to the mountain. His name was Roscoe and he carried a flute. Who had invited him no one could say for certain, but everyone was sure that someone had. Because Roscoe had no money, some of the people on the mountain offered to lend him enough to get a cabin or a teepee started. But he refused their offers saying that if you looked hard enough, someone somewhere was throwing away exactly what you needed. (Wizards always say things like that.) So everyone waited to see where Roscoe would look. And one day, sure enough, he came back from the nearest town, about thirty miles east of the mountain, saying that he’d talked to some folks there and had learned that a block of buildings was about to be torn down to make way for a new post office. In the meantime, he would stay on with the girls in the farmhouse.