Pandora's Closet Part 4

After that, things get a bit blurry, because I met up with Neck-beard. He had a pipe. He swung and I tried to parry, except I had no idea what I was doing, and I ended up getting hit full-force on my right elbow.

So I hear a snap, and suddenly the umbrella's on the ground and my arm's hanging limp at the shoulder and it feels really weird, like anything it touches is moving around all over the place. And there's no pain yet, not really, because I'm in shock. I fall to my knees and throw up margaritas and Alamo Ma.s.sacre Wings all over the biker's boots. You wouldn't believe the colors.

Neck-beard stood over me, and he raised the pipe. I couldn't even get my arm up to protect myself. I just felt bits of bone grinding together where my humerus ought to be. I knew the next thing I was going to feel break was my skull.

Only the pipe never came down. Just then, Quig came out of nowhere, yelling... well, I guess it was a battle-cry. I didn't catch the words-they sounded Spanish-but it caught Neck-beard's attention. He took a swing at Quig, but Quig twisted out of the way, then snapped his umbrella around and hit Neck-beard in the face. There was another crack, and Neck-beard dropped his pipe and clutched his nose, which was starting to pour blood. Quig didn't miss a beat; he spun around, rammed the b.u.t.t of his umbrella into the back of Neck-beard's head, and the big ox fell on his face and stayed down.

I just knelt there, grunting and grinding my teeth, while Quig stood above Neck-beard silhouetted against the lights of the mini-golf course. "You all right, J.?" he asked.

"Not... really," I said, and managed a weak, crazy kind of laugh. I shook my arm, which flopped in a way I still don't like thinking about. "But I'll live."

Quig smiled at me. Then, with another battle-cry, he was gone. A moment later, the pain finally hit, and I don't remember anything more.

It was a wonder n.o.body on either side was killed. I was one of the worst hurt-it took the surgeons five hours, a steel plate, and seven screws to put my arm back together, and the elbow still doesn't straighten all the way-but there were a few other broken bones, a whole lot of concussions, and plenty of cuts, sc.r.a.pes, and bruises. By the time the cops showed up, it was over. One of the bikers ran away; they found him hiding behind the restaurant's dumpsters. The rest were unconscious. Gabby and Ravi were still standing; Rick was one of the concussed. And then there was Quig, still wearing that d.a.m.n bowl on his head, and not a scratch on him.

The media loved it. Quig's picture ended up on the front of the Providence and Boston papers and even made it into the New York Times: " Rhode Island 'Knight' Wins Parking Lot Brawl." He got calls to appear on talk shows, but he never did. There were various charges of a.s.sault and mischief, but we got off-there were plenty of witnesses who confirmed that anything we did was self-defense. The bikers weren't as lucky-as Stan figured, most of them had warrants.

Things at work weren't the same after that. Rick never came back; he cashed in his stock options and moved out west. I hear he's working in games now. Gabby and Ravi and I stayed a while longer, but we each left the company before too long. After that night in the parking lot, any attraction to baby product websites was pretty much gone. Me, I'm still programming. But I'm writing and taking acting cla.s.ses too, because hey, why not? Plus aikido. Next time I'm in a fight, I want to be ready.

And Quig...

Ah, Quig.

He fought for us. He went to the CEO Monday morning and told him we wouldn't be working late to make up for their mismanagement. Said if they didn't like it, they could fire him. So they fired him, of course. No, he wasn't wearing the helmet when it happened.

Two weeks later, he showed up in the street outside the office. He was riding a motorcycle-a big, beautiful hog that would have made Neck-beard insane with jealousy. Written on the side was its name: Rocinante. Sitting on the back, behind him, was Donna, and tucked into one of the saddle-bags was the Golden Helmet.

"Where you headed, Quig?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "Don't know yet. Just driving around the country a while. We'll probably end up out west. Maybe I can find work in Hollywood, teaching stage fighting."

He'd changed. He was happy. I never asked him if it was the helmet that did it. That seemed too obvious.

Donna slid her arms around his waist, gave him a squeeze. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll take care of him."

And like that, with a noise that rattled the windows, he was gone.

I watched the bike head down the street, then turn left and disappear.

I went home early that day.

Oh, and if you're looking for The All-American Alimentary Adventure, don't bother. After all the bad press, the company closed the location. The mini-golf people bought it, and they opened a restaurant of their own.

It's called Windmills.

TECHNICOLOR.

by Louise Marley.

The screen door slammed, making the breakfast dishes jump. Dorothy winced, and Lin rolled her eyes in a manner only possible for a twelve-year-old. "Mother," she complained. "Do you two have to fight every morning?"

Dorothy sighed and looked away from her daughter's pouting face. She watched Phil stamp across the sunburned gra.s.s of the backyard. His back was stiff, and he slapped at his leg with his ancient baseball cap as he stalked toward the barn. Today, it was because Dorothy had forgotten to buy tractor oil on her weekly trip to the mercantile. Yesterday, it had been something else.

Dorothy wanted to defend herself, but the words wouldn't come. In fact, it was hardly fair of Lin to accuse her of arguing, since Phil had done all the talking. Dorothy hadn't said a single word yet this morning. She couldn't remember if she had said anything yesterday morning, either. Silence was easier. And less provoking.

She looked across the jumble of cereal bowls and dirty gla.s.ses at her pigtailed daughter and forced words to her lips. All she could think of was, "Did you make your bed, Glinda?"

A mistake. "Mother! Don't call me that! I've told you!"

"Sorry."

"Breakfast was late because you two were fighting, and now I don't have time," Lin said triumphantly, pointing out past the porch to the plume of dust winding toward the farmhouse. "The bus is coming!"

Dorothy stood, crumpling her napkin. She carried the cereal bowls to the sink and stood gazing out over the pile of dirty dishes. The school bus, covered in dust, was all but indistinguishable from the dry wheat fields, the dirt lane, the browning leaves on the oaks and alders that drooped around the house. "Monochrome," she murmured to herself.

"What?" Lin asked.

Dorothy just shrugged.

Lin was shouldering her backpack. "Where's my lunch?"

"On the counter," Dorothy said absently.

Lin s.n.a.t.c.hed it up, and opened the bag. "Oh, Mother! Peanut b.u.t.ter?" Another roll of the eyes, with the bonus of an exasperated snort. Twelve-year-olds, Dorothy thought. Surely, I never snorted at Aunt Emily. Not even when I was twelve.

She crossed the kitchen to help stuff the lunch sack into Lin's backpack. "Wait," she said. "Your shoes are untied." She bent to reach for the laces of Lin's hightops, but Lin pulled her feet away, saying, "Never mind, Mother."

Dorothy tried to brush her lips across her daughter's forehead, but Lin spun away before she quite reached her. A moment later, she was on her way out the door. "Have a good-" Dorothy began, but the screen door slammed once more, and Lin was off, das.h.i.+ng across the yard to meet the bus. Her hightops, laces flying loose, disappeared up the steps, and the door folded closed behind her. Dorothy raised one hand in farewell, but her daughter never looked back.

Dorothy stood by the screen door to watch the bus rumble away in its cloud of beige dust. Did nothing, in all this landscape, have any color? Even the last of the hollyhocks had died. All of Kansas, it seemed to Dorothy, was painted in shades of brown.

She pulled the kitchen blinds against the rising heat and turned to face the piled dishes and the waiting laundry. It was as oppressive a sight as the dry fields stretching to the horizon. Dorothy knew a woman who started on a bottle of Dewar's at just this moment every day, right after the school bus left. Today Dorothy could understand. She sighed again and started up the stairs, her house slippers scuffing on the bare wood.

She pa.s.sed her old high school painting, still hanging on the landing despite Phil's scoffing. She had tried, in her amateur way, to capture the colors, to remember them. Now the sun had faded them to the same brown she saw everywhere around her.

Lin's bedroom door opened on chaos, the bed unmade, the floor littered with clothes, shoes, scattered schoolbooks. The years of her daughter's childhood seemed to Dorothy at once endless and unbearably brief. She couldn't remember the last time Lin had kissed her, or hugged her. When, she wondered, as she bent to pick up a pair of black jeans, had her daughter begun to disdain anything she said and everything she did? It had happened gradually, inching up on Dorothy until, all at once, her daughter had escaped her. She hadn't seen it coming. She didn't know what she could have done about it, or should have done about it. Maybe it was because Lin's childhood was so different from her own. Or maybe Lin was following Phil's example. He had not hugged or kissed Dorothy in a long time, either.

Dorothy crossed to the hamper with the jeans, and as she reached for the lid, she caught sight of herself in the mirror above the bureau. She stopped and stared at her reflection.

The jeans hanging from her hands were impossibly narrow. Had she ever, when she was twelve, been so slim-hipped? She straightened, holding them before her. She was twice the size of these jeans now, round-bodied, soft of breast and stomach. Even her hair had begun to gray in the front, the way Aunt Emily's had. In fact, she had begun to look like Aunt Emily. It was a look she had taken for granted when she was young, as if Emily had been born that way, looking as if the sun had baked her dry, the prairie winds weathered her like the boards of the barn. And now the sun and the wind-and her life-were doing the same to Dorothy.

Dorothy dropped the jeans in the hamper and bent across Lin's bed to untangle her sheets and blanket. She plumped the pillow, letting her hand linger a moment in the shallow depression where her daughter's head had lain. She picked up the quilt to fold it across the foot of the bed.

Aunt Emily had made the quilt, in a wedding-ring pattern, its blue and red circles faded now. Dorothy traced them with her finger, remembering her long-ago wedding shower. How different the world had seemed on that day. It had been full of promise. Full of color.

Dorothy's vision blurred with sudden tears. She dropped the quilt, turned her back on the mess, and hurried to her own bedroom. She ignored her own unmade bed-Phil had pulled the sheets loose again-and went to the closet. She slid the mirrored door aside and knelt to reach far into the back.

Her fingers scrabbled through boots and pumps and old sandals until she felt the stiff edges of the heavy, old-fas.h.i.+oned pasteboard box. She pulled it out and then stopped, listening to be certain she could hear the grumble of the tractor moving compost behind the barn. Phil must have found some oil after all, she thought resentfully. He could have told her, could have apologized, but he wouldn't do that. She couldn't remember him ever having apologized for anything. At least he was occupied, so he wouldn't interrupt her. This box was her secret.

She got stiffly to her feet and carried the box to the bed, setting it on the tumbled blanket. Slowly, slowly, she lifted the lid and gently folded back the layers of tissue.

She had not looked at them in a very long time. They lay innocently in their bed of tissue, gleaming with a color that no longer existed in Kansas. Red was not an adequate word for this color. It was crimson, cardinal-red. It was the color of rubies, glowing from within, deeply, vibrantly, the very color of imagination.

Of magic.

She touched the shoes with one finger and felt their power surge through her skin, tingle up her arm, s.h.i.+ver in her chest.

Dorothy pulled her hand back. She glanced up at the mirror that lined the closet door, seeing a plain woman with one pudgy hand at her throat. A dull woman, whose life had lost every shred of its magic. She looked back at the ruby shoes, yearning toward them.

No, no, she told herself. She couldn't. She shouldn't.

She left the open box on the bed and crossed to the window. She lifted the print curtains she had made on her old Singer machine and gazed out at the fields. The sky was a flat, lifeless bowl, as if the sun had faded it, too. The sun glared on the house and the barn, the pigsty, the milk cows huddling in the shade of the silo. None of it had seemed so bleak in her childhood. In those days, possibility shone from every leaf, every wheat stalk. When she was young, enchantment rose with the sun every new day, and she had run, with her little dog at her side, to meet it.

Dorothy rested her forehead against the gla.s.s and let the tears roll down her cheeks. How had she come to settle for this? How had she let this happen, that her husband spoke to her only to criticize, and that her only child treated her like a piece of furniture?

It was her own fault, of course. She had drifted into it, letting the independent girl she had been transform into someone else, someone she didn't recognize.

Dorothy turned back, letting the curtain fall closed behind her, and stared at the vivid shoes sparkling from their box. Lin would sneer at them, call them old-fas.h.i.+oned. Phil would have a fit if he even knew she had them. She had hidden them away the day he asked her to marry him.

The sudden wish that he hadn't married her, after all, made her press her hands to her eyes. That wasn't right. If she hadn't married Phil, if they hadn't taken over the farm after Emily pa.s.sed away-she would never have had Lin. She could hardly wish her daughter away, could she? She could hardly... no matter how bad things were...

Dorothy dried her cheeks and dropped her hands. The shoes glimmered their scarlet invitation.

She had resisted their temptation for such a long time. Not for her the scotch bottle, or romance novels, or soap operas. For her there were only these ruby shoes.

As if in a trance, one foot before the other, she moved back to the bed. She knelt on the rug and reached for the shoes.

She turned them this way and that, letting the sun glint on their sequins. Their rounded toes and stubby heels were out of date, but Dorothy didn't care about fas.h.i.+on. What she cared about, what she longed for, was magic.

She cradled the shoes against her chest. She knew why she had kept them in the back of her closet, why she had hidden them all these years. They signified something that threatened her life with Phil and with Lin. They seemed to sing in her hands, to call her away. They invited her to step out into enchantment. They were, like the Dewar's and the romance novels, an escape.

Her toes curled with the urge to put them on.

Dorothy set the shoes neatly on the floor, side by side. She kicked out of her house slippers. She fitted her feet, first the left, and then the right, into the shoes.

They felt wonderful on her feet! She had thought the heels might be uncomfortable after years of wearing flats, but they were perfect. They made her ankles looked trim, her calves seem longer. Even her cotton skirt looked crisper above the ruby glow of the shoes. Smiling, Dorothy lifted her eyes to the mirror.

Her eyes shone with a gleam of excitement. Her cheeks glowed, and the gray in her hair looked like threads of silver in the morning light. Even her waist looked smaller, perhaps because of the heels, or perhaps...

Perhaps the magic still existed.

Dorothy took a step closer to the mirror, pulling off her ap.r.o.n as she moved, dropping it to the floor. Behind her the jumble of bedclothes, the glare of sun on the wheatfields, faded to a blur. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She shouldn't do it, of course. It was silly, and childish, but...

She giggled. And then-and then she closed her eyes tightly, and she did it.

Click. Click. Click.

Three times she touched her heels together. The shoes made a slight, plasticky sound. Dorothy started to giggle again.

A sudden, sharp pain lanced through her chest, and her giggle turned to a gasp. She struggled to breathe, but her lungs cramped. She couldn't open her eyes, either, and beyond the closed lids was only darkness. Something was wrong.

She couldn't tell what was happening. She heard a loud rush that seemed familiar, like a great, whirling wind, and then, in the darkness, came a stupendous silence. Dorothy went spinning into the blackness, shooting into some place where up and down had no meaning, where gravity was gone. She flew backward, and then tumbled forward. She clenched her hands together, having nothing else to hold on to. Had she had breath, she might have screamed, but there was nothing in her lungs, and her throat wouldn't work.

And then, just when she felt as if her chest would burst...

Thud.

Her lungs released, all at once, and a great draught of sweet, moist air rushed to fill them. The pain in her chest vanished all at once, leaving a sense of lightness. There was light beyond her closed eyelids now, golden light. The silence was filled by the burble of running water, the whisper of a gentle breeze. Cautiously, she opened her eyes.

Her cluttered bedroom, with its unmade bed, her ap.r.o.n on the floor, was gone. The farmhouse was gone. Kansas was gone.

Around her, on every side, were green fields and blue houses and vivid flowers. A stream sparkled between gra.s.sy banks. The sun was gentle on her head, and Dorothy felt as if she had opened her eyes inside a kaleidoscope, her eyes dazzled by pink and rose and yellow and violet and other colors she had no name for, colors that existed nowhere else.

With a soft cry, she sank to her knees on the soft gra.s.s. Her palms crept to her cheeks, and she gazed about her in wonder. It was still here! The magic had waited for her all these years. She spread her arms wide, to embrace the bright world. "h.e.l.lo!" she called. "h.e.l.lo!"

For long moments she was alone in the world of color, and then, as if they too had been waiting, they began to come, creeping forward through the banks of flowers, popping up from hedges, peering around the blue houses. They were as perfect as she remembered, and as funny, small and smiling, bright-eyed. Dorothy laughed to see them and held out her hands.

The little people in their motley clothes crowded around her, twittering in their high voices. They patted her arms and then her cheeks with soft hands. They touched her hair, and the cotton of her dress. They hugged her.

They smelled of berries and cotton candy and sweet tea, scents that mixed with the perfume of flowers, the smell of new gra.s.s, the taste of rain not long past. For a long time they greeted her in this way, welcomed her back, and Dorothy remembered how good it felt to be touched, to be caressed.

After a time, they tugged at her arms, and she stood up.

She was twice as tall as they were.

Their twittering ceased, and their eyes went round with confusion. They stared up at her, dismay in their soft faces, their hands falling by their sides.

Dorothy said, "What-what's the matter?"

They stared at her shoes and then at her face. They backed away, now beginning to murmur urgently to each other. One or two turned and ran, like fat puppies tumbling over the gra.s.s.

Dorothy put one hand on her chest. "It's me," she said, a little diffidently. "Don't you remember me?"

Heads were shaken, brows furrowed.

"You have to remember me!" Dorothy cried. "I remember you so well! I remember all of you, and I remember this place, and the flowers, and the sky..."

"Oh, but, Dorothy," came a melodic voice behind her. "Of course you remember us! We haven't changed. But you-you have changed a great deal."

Dorothy whirled.

She was just stepping out of her iridescent bubble, her spangled skirt as white as pearl, her hair like spun gold.