The Palace of Illusions. Kim Addonizio
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Hershey’s syrup on top.”
“I don’t like chocolate anymore,” Annabelle says.
“Oh, sure you do,” Grandpa says. “You love it. My favorite little girl,” he says. “My little girl loves chocolate.”
“No, I don’t,” Annabelle says.
“You listen to your Grandpa,” he says. “Do what I tell you.”
“No.” She remembers her mother saying, Stubborn as a mule to the man in Sue’s Kitchen. “I hate chocolate,” she says. “And I hate dancing and I hate it when you wet your pants, so there.”
Grandpa looks at her a moment. Then he says, “You spoiled little brat.” He looks really upset. Annabelle has never seen him like this before. He has always been nice as pie, smiling at her, giving her treats and presents, asking her for dances. “Get over here right now.” He starts to rise from the couch, but sinks back down, wheezing and red in the face.
“I need my oxygen,” he says. His tank is in the bedroom. “Go bring it in here.”
“No,” Annabelle says.
“Now!” Grandpa says.
This is a Grandpa she has never seen, angry and needing his oxygen.
“I won’t,” Annabelle says.
“Oh, yes you will, Missy.”
He is breathing more slowly now, his face returning to its normal color. Again, he starts to get up from the couch. But before he is even off it, she has run out the door of the trailer and down the ramp.
“Get back here,” Grandpa calls.
But Grandpa is old, and slow. By the time he is at the door, she is running through the woods in the dark, branches stinging her face and arms.
When she can’t run anymore she stops, panting. She looks back toward the trailer, at a light pole on the road she knows is nearby. She can’t actually see the trailer, or Grandpa. Maybe he has gone back to get his tank from the bedroom, to sit on the couch and watch his show. Or maybe he is in the plastic chair in the dirt yard, smoking one of his cigars. The cigars will kill him one day. Her mother said so. Every day, Grandpa will get older and slower, and Annabelle will get bigger and stronger. If he chases her, Grandpa will wheeze and turn red in the face. The next time he asks for his oxygen, she will hide it, and he won’t be able to catch his breath. He will take in the air in little gasps, and then he will pass out for good, and be perfectly still. Then Annabelle will disappear, like the girl on the crime show. No one will be able to find out where she is. She will live in the woods in a fort, just her and Simba and the white cat Beautiful Lady of the Snow. Annabelle has never seen real snow, but she knows that somewhere, like at the North Pole, it falls all the time, covering the ground and trees and buildings, making everything it touches white, and pure again.
It’s Halloween, and I don’t have plans with anyone. No big thing. It’s only a Wednesday evening. From Sunday through Wednesday, if I happen to be alone in front of my old Sony TV with a succession of gin-and-tonics and a diminishing package of salt-and-vinegar potato chips, this is not a serious existential problem. After Wednesday, though, things get dicier. First there is Thursday, or “little Friday”: the bars and restaurants crowded, the clubs pulsing with music and bodies until the dawn hours. If little Friday arrives and I don’t have plans, a sharp but still-distant note of anxiety begins to sound—the harsh whistle of a train, coming from a long way off. On Friday it rumbles closer, and on Saturday night it appears from around the curve and bears down on me, huge and monstrous, threatening to cut me in two.
So, it’s only Wednesday. But Halloween complicates things: a day of bank tellers in bunny ears and fairy wings, the occasional drunken clown reeling from a bar at lunch hour with a smeared red smile, so that by evening the air is charged with the lonely ions of expectation. It is not a night to stay in, watching ill-trained teenaged actors get cut up with knives or crushed under electric garage doors or chased sobbing through the woods. I call three different friends, but everyone else has had the foresight to find a date, and no one invites me to tag along. Next I call Mona. Mona is way older, like sixty or so, and she hasn’t dated in years.
“Let’s go for drinks,” Mona says. “I was going to have dinner, but I’ll skip it. Nothing like a liquid diet.”
I can hear ice slithering around in a glass, and behind that her TV going. Predictably, someone is screaming. Nearly every channel has some kind of scare-a-thon happening.
“Drinks it is, then,” I say.
“I’ll just finish my drink,” Mona says, “and get ready.”
“Your pre-drink, you mean. Before we have drinks.”
“I get thirsty this time of day.”
“Always.”
All my friends are drinkers. Most Fridays we gather after work at some bar, then go to dinner and order carafe after carafe of house red. In my circle, the parties last long—until the revelers slip to the floor or stagger off to pass out on a neighbor’s lawn, maybe climbing into their cars, if they have them, to wend their erratic way home through the deserted streets. We start the weekend mornings with a Bloody Mary or Mimosa or Ramos Fizz, with Walprofen and Aleve and Excedrin, with groans and nausea that gradually slide into hilarity. We get through our McJobs with flasks, and have beer with lunch. We head out of Starbucks and Kinko’s and financial district offices for fifteen-minute cocktail binges on our scheduled breaks. Forget AA. AA is for losers who can’t handle their shit.
“Let’s go to the Redwood Room at the Clift,” Mona says. “I haven’t seen it since it’s been renovated.”
On her TV, a girl’s voice goes, Oh, God, no. Oh, God, please, no, no.
“Pick you up in an hour,” I say.
“I’ll treat, of course. But make it sooner. I don’t want any fucking little kids at my door.”
Mona always treats me. She has that appealing combination of wealth and carelessness with money. Hundred-dollar bills spill from her Italian leather wallet. She’s big on cashmere coats; she owns five. Gucci and Fendi bags, Ferragamo shoes, Dior scarves—Mona always looks like she stepped out of a photo shoot, materializing into the air on a breath of floral perfume from a fashion magazine. Her hair is white-blonde, sleek and smooth as metal, and falls straight to her shoulders. Her eyes are a color of blue that looks like it has metal in it, too. Mona exudes an aura of ease and luxury, of eternal impossible beautiful moments in exotic locations where even the inanimate objects, like chaise lounges and sea walls, admire your flawlessness.
In honor of Halloween I put on a long leopard-print skirt with slits on each side up to mid-thigh, and a black velvet bustier with leather laces. For good measure I wear my black hat with the square of lace hanging down the back and the fake roses on the brim, and slather on the makeup. I drink a quick toast before I leave, a cold shot of Estonian vodka raised to dodging the bullet of sitting at home in my bathrobe, in thrall to scenes of a couple being terrorized by a doll in overalls. I’ve been transformed into a sexy twenty-seven-year-old jungle cat out on the prowl, ready for whatever magic the night may bring. When I get in my car, a guy in a George Bush mask whistles, and his friend, encased in an alien creature with eyes the size of tennis balls, meows at me.
At the Redwood Room I get a Clift Cosmopolitan, and Mona a Manhattan. I don’t know anybody who drinks Manhattans except Mona. I feel like I should have ordered something more classic, like a martini. There’s a purple flower floating in my drink that the waitress identifies as a pansy; she tells us it’s edible.
Though I’m kind of hungry from not having any dinner, I don’t think a pansy or two will make a difference, so I just pluck it out and set it on my napkin.
The waitress looks about my age,