THE RITUALIST by Anne-Marie Kinney
I’ve been working at Du‑Par’s for four months, and already I can picture myself growing old here. Older. The other day I was filling two glasses at the fountain, one root beer, one Sprite. I misjudged the fizz on the latter, sending the soda burbling down over the back of my hand and dripping down the counter’s edge. I searched the shelf underneath for a rag, and while I was down there, I noticed that the dark floral carpet was worn down right where I was standing, a bleached-out, thinned down rectangle where countless other waitresses had been standing in their black, rubber-soled waitress shoes, filling glasses at that same fountain for eons. Okay, decades. And the fountain’s surely been replaced in the interim. Still. I settled for a clutch of paper napkins and mopped up the mess. Sonya – she’s been here fourteen years – passed by with a tray of creamers and gave me a sympathetic wince. I wondered how many times and by how many people that same wince had been exchanged back and forth: behind the counter, in the kitchen, in the cloakroom, in the parking lot between the back door and the dumpster, everybody feeling everybody else’s pain.
* * *
I have every Wednesday off, and every Wednesday I do exactly the same thing. I eat peanut butter toast and read the L.A. Times. I make a pot of coffee and go out on the porch, where I smoke one of the two cigarettes I allow myself per week. I take a bath – not a shower, a bath – and then I drive to Saint Croix Adult Rehabilitation Center. Harv was moved there after his previous residence had to shut down. A family sued because their dad was dead two days in his room before anybody noticed. I don’t blame them; it was pretty egregious. All those jobs, though.
He moved, so I moved. An hour and a half down the 101.
Before I fixed it up, Harv’s room was the barest of cubes: white walls, white vertical blinds, white dresser, white ceiling fan. I got permission to paint the walls a nice toasted almond color and I replaced the blinds with these curtains that look like ivy climbing up to the ceiling. Makes no difference to him, but I like it.
I knock on his door, just for appearances – for whom I don’t know, for me I guess – before I let myself in. Sometimes he’s in his armchair looking out the window. Other times the armchair is pointed toward the TV, and he’s watching whatever channel some staff member has left it on for him. He doesn’t actually watch it.
“Hi there, Harv,” I say. “How are we doing today?”
We, as if there’s any we. As if there’s been a we in over a decade. He looks up at me, startled, and says, “Oh!” He smacks his lips a couple times, then returns his gaze to the window or the TV, same difference.
I give him a package of cheese crackers, the kind where you scoop the neon orange cheese out on a little plastic stick and spread it on. I peel off the plastic and set the package down on his lap, his skinny legs swimming in his Dockers. The action triggers something in him, stokes his appetite. He eats every last cracker, and sucks the last smudges of cheese off the stick until I take it away. I don’t want him to swallow it.
They leave his mail on top of his dresser and I sort through it, use his checkbook to pay his bills. I curl up on the bed and flip through the catalogs before throwing them away. I sort the coupons and take the ones I might use for myself.
After an hour or so, I quietly slip out the door without saying goodbye and drive back to my place. I sit on the porch and smoke the second cigarette with a glass of Scotch.
* * *
I asked Sonya if she’s ever thought about leaving Du‑Par’s. It was dead on a Thursday afternoon. We were marrying the ketchups, though one of us could have easily done it herself. The only customer was an old man with one of those walkers with tennis balls stuck on the legs parked next to his booth. He’d been drinking tea for three hours.
She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. The management’s nice.”
“Goes a long way,” I said.
She laughed. “I used to be an actress. Talk about shitty management. I quit that game twenty-five years ago and never looked back.”
“Were you in any movies?”
She laughed again. “Oh honey, nothing you would’ve seen.”
I’m not sure how old Sonya is. She could be a rode hard forty-five or a well-preserved sixty-five, her hair dyed auburn, her eyebrows expertly drawn. I want her to help me draw mine, make them frame my face the way hers do, beautiful and severe.
* * *
My daughter Gina calls on Sunday nights. She’s so busy it’s the only time she has. She has her own company, a consulting firm she started all by herself, and now she has three employees and an office in Chicago, where she went away to college nine years ago and never came back. She tells me about clients, about the latest guy she’s seeing, about her plans for a girls’ vacation to South Beach with her two best friends. I nod along, sometimes interjecting a “huh” or a “wow.” It’s not that I’m not interested. I just don’t really know what to say. She’s a marvel. I’d be proud if I thought I’d had anything to do with it.
“Mom,” she says sometimes, “you know you could move out here. We’ve got seasons. Snow in the winter. It’s nice. You could get a condo.”
“Maybe, maybe,” I say, thinking, “Never. Never.”
* * *
I made it clear to the staff at St. Croix that I wouldn’t handle anything that seemed “medical.” I’m not going to make sure Harv takes his pills. I’m not going to clean him up if he doesn’t make it to the bathroom in time. I’m definitely not taking him to his doctor’s appointments. I don’t want to see him outside of that room, outside of that triangle from window to TV to armchair. I barely survived sharing a whole house with him.
“Why even bother?” Gina asks, when I let it slip that I’ve seen him.
She can’t see me shrugging.
“Does he even recognize you?”
“In a way I think he does.”
“And?”
“He’s different now. What can I say? He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
I can’t see her shaking her head but I know she is.
“Even if he would,” I say, “he couldn’t.”
“Is that how low the bar’s gotten? Jesus, Mom.”
“You really know how to let go of things,” I say to her. “It’s why you’re so successful.”
She got huffy at that and said a terse goodbye. But I really did mean it as a compliment. I think she heard me turning on the TV.
* * *
My favorite manager at Du‑Par’s is a cutely stocky young guy with jet-black hair and a smattering of acne scarring on his jaw. At the end of the night, while he’s pecking away at his calculator, he’ll sometimes tell us each to go ahead and take home the day-old pie of our choice. It’s not easy to choose. There’s lemon meringue, strawberry-rhubarb, blackberry, peach, Dutch apple, Key lime, chocolate silk, pecan and pumpkin no matter the season. They’re all lined up in their glass case, just beaming at you. Sonya always takes cherry if we’ve got it. Antonio, the dishwasher, always waits till everybody else has chosen and takes whatever’s left. I usually go with the one that looks the biggest and prettiest and bring it to the staff at St. Croix, unless we have coconut cream. That I’ll eat with a spoon for days, to the exclusion of all other food.
* * *
“Hello, hello,” Harv said, turning on the charm like he still can on rare occasions.
I was doing a crossword on the bed. He tilted himself toward me in his chair.
“Hi,” I said. He seemed to think I’d just arrived.
“It sure is nice to see a pretty face on a day like today.”
I nodded without looking up from the paper.
“Say, are you doing anything later?” he said. “Maybe you and me could go out someplace, get a bite to eat. I got a few things I’d like to show you.”
“That sounds so nice, but you know, I’m busy later. Maybe some other time,” I said.
He looked out the window for a minute, then looked back at me.
“It sure is nice to see a pretty face on a day like today.”
“What’s a day like today?” I said.
He looked at me quizzically.
“What day is it, Harv?”
He stared at the floor and considered, and I watched his face change as the question was slowly pushed out into the ether, his mouth settling again into a contented line.
The moves he tries on me, not knowing I’m me. In the last years of our marriage, he barely looked at me sober. He brushed my hands away when I tried to rub his shoulders, laughed at my attempts at lingerie because, he said, I was scrawny, like bird, like a boy. Didn’t stop him from heaving himself onto me, blind drunk and sweating at four in the morning when I was trying to sleep, raising welts where he pinned me down by my arms. Now he courts like an Eagle Scout. That’s what drinking a case of Keystone every night for thirty-five years will do to a person.
I packed up my crossword and slipped out while he was still staring at the floor like a drowsy puppy.
* * *
I was crossing the dining room at Du‑Par’s, and the bright lights were bouncing off the mirror-lined walls, surrounding me so completely that I felt as though a patch of sunshine had opened up in the middle of the restaurant, and would follow me everywhere I went. There are so many moments like that, where the artificial can stand in for the real so perfectly that there’s no distinction – like the fake plants hanging from the ceiling. They’re at just the right distance from eye level that you can’t see that the stems are plastic. You can’t see that the leaves are polyester, that the veins are stitched in. All you see is the delicate tumble, the vibrant green. You don’t even have to squint to let it make you happy.
I tried calling Gina on my break. I wanted to apologize for hurting her feelings. She’s so strong, sometimes I worry she’ll decide I’m another sandbag she needs to cut. I remember the way she looked when we left Harv. I was behind the wheel, my hands shaking, not knowing where we were going or how we’d survive, trying, for her sake, not to lose it completely. At a red light, I glanced over at her to see how she was coping. She was idly flipping through the radio dials, simultaneously digging through the backpack in her lap to make sure she had all her homework. There wasn’t even a suggestion of a tear, not a quiver, not even a question.
“Mom, it’s green,” she said.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said, my voice cracking.
Still, I am always apologizing to her.
She didn’t pick up, I didn’t leave a message. Sonya stepped out into the alley for a cigarette and offered me one, but I declined. Not till Wednesday.
* * *
I got to Saint Croix a little later than usual. There was a traffic jam on the freeway caused, it turned out, by an accident that had likely been gruesome, though only the cars remained. One was upside down against the guardrail, another spun out from it at a ninety-degree angle, both crumpled, bits of chrome and glass glittering all across the lanes. The cop cars on the scene seemed to be just sitting there. I wondered how it had happened. How did the cars collide so spectacularly in the midst of such a dull exercise as commuting? It seemed as likely as tumbling into a fistfight in an elevator, though I know car crashes happen everywhere, constantly. Fistfights too.
It was dusk by the time I got to Harv’s room, and I found him asleep, fully dressed on his still-made bed. I set my purse lightly on the floor. I didn’t sit down for fear I’d wake him. Instead, I stood over him and watched him breathe. The curtains were closed, so the room was practically dark. I’d watched him sleep so many times, tiptoeing around his ponderous form wherever it was he’d finally passed out, wondering what I’d done wrong.
He was clutching at the blanket like a baby, like Gina did when she was small. He’d been good then. We’d looked at her together with the same wonder. I’ll never know what changed. But I have to stick around. I have to wait till the end.
He was laid out horizontally in the middle of the bed, his pillow undisturbed. He looked so serene, so helpless in the darkened room, and I thought for a moment that the end could come right then, so easily, if I wanted it to.
It would take almost no effort. It would be quiet, and quick.
His lips smacked softly a couple of times and his eyelids fluttered. I didn’t stay.
I found a couple of staffers I know having a coffee break in the lounge, and they offered me a cup. I usually take it with a little steamed milk but all they had was non-dairy creamer. I sprinkled it into my cup and watched it dissolve in clumps.
“Thanks for the blueberry pie,” Jeffrey said, “it was most excellent.” Sheila stirred her coffee, nodded assent.
“Oh. Don’t mention it.”
The two of them got to talking about a TV show I haven’t seen. I sat back and listened to them rehash the latest plot development while I drank my coffee, knowing it would keep me up way past my bedtime. I usually avoid caffeine at night, but when Jeffrey called me over, I wanted to sit with them. I didn’t want to go home yet. My heart was still beating double-time. I was still picturing Harv, immobilized. Harv, eyes open, on his back. I drank slowly, until their break was over. They returned to work, and I sat until the sun was gone, until the coffee was cold.
* * *
I walked in on Sonya in the ladies’ room when we were opening on a Monday morning. She was parked in front of the mirror carefully painting her lips a deep raspberry.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, “didn’t mean to barge in.”
She waved off my apology and continued dabbing at the center of her bottom lip.
I washed my hands at the sink next to her and she caught my eye in the mirror.
“Honey, you look beat.”
I looked at my reflection. She was right. My eyes were flat pinholes, my skin sallow and dry. I’d fallen asleep sitting on the couch the night before and missed Gina’s call. By the time I woke up, disoriented with the TV news blaring, it was one o’clock my time, too late to call back. By morning I knew she’d be too busy. One misstep in the routine, and she could slip just a hair beyond my reach.
“C’mere,” Sonya said, capping her tube of lipstick.
She sat me down on a stool and rubbed lotion on my face, then swirled a light dusting of powder from my forehead to my chin. I instinctively resisted as she tried to tilt my face this way and that with her thumb and index finger.
“Relax. Keep your eyes closed.”
I took a deep breath and tried to let my muscles go slack as she touched me up with various sponges and pencils, fighting the urge to take a peek at what she was doing.
“You want to see?”
It wasn’t so dramatic that I didn’t recognize myself, but I looked more awake, and also more aloof somehow – something she’d done with my eyeshadow had given me a mysterious stare, a certain genteel toughness of which I’d never imagined myself capable. But it suited me.
“Hang on,” she said. “I need to do your lips.”
I realized I hadn’t even filled the sugars or started the coffee. I jumped up and re-tied my apron, checked its pockets.
“Don’t we have to get out there? What time is it?”
Sonya took me gently by my shoulders and led me back to the stool.
“Shush. You’re almost done.”
She rifled through her makeup pouch and selected an almost-sheer gloss, and without being instructed, I closed my eyes again as she dabbed the wand across my lips in soft little swipes. When she was finished, she fluffed up my hair, teasing it up at the crown with her fingertips.
I felt perfectly sealed then, behind an illusion locked in place.
Sonya said she’d start the coffee.
I nodded, standing before the mirror. I pressed my lips together and blinked my eyelashes.
As I followed Sonya out onto the floor, I imagined I was walking in her footsteps. Not just hers. Step by step wearing down the floral carpet. Maybe I’ll be here fourteen years. Maybe longer. And when Wednesday comes, there’s always a chance I’ll let it go by.
Anne-Marie Kinney is the author of the novel Radio Iris (Two Dollar Radio, 2012). Her short stories have appeared in Indiana Review, Black Clock, and Keyhole.