Free Virgin Territory by James Lecesne Page A

Marie says to me, “I charged him ten cents every time he sighed like that. I did. If I’d actually collected, believe me, I would’ve been a rich woman.”
    Doug looks up, exasperated. Marie sometimes forgets where she lives, but at other times she can recall random incidents from her past. It’s weird: there’s no telling which Marie you’re going to get and when. Doug digs deep into the pocket of his jeans, pulls out a dime, and then, as though he’s placing a bet on a bad hand, he places it on the countertop.
    “For the last time, Ma, think. How’d you get from
the place
to the golf course? Did someone drive you? One of the nurses?”
    “Teleportation?”
    “Funny,” says Doug without a stitch of humor.
    “I can’t remember?” she replies, adding a little lift at the end of the word to make it sound like a question.
    “Ma?”
    She swivels around and stares at me as though I might be able to help her, as though I have something handy up my sleeve that can divert Doug’s attention. But I know for a fact that when Doug gets like this, there’s no reasoning with him. It’s how hebehaved when he found out about my virtual babe in Tampa. He was furious.
    “It was a friend,” she says as though suddenly remembering. “Definitely a friend. That’s who drove me! A friend.”
    “And the name of that friend?”
    “Am I staying here tonight?” Marie asks, trying to change the subject, and then she looks around and adds, “Wait. Who did you say lives here?”
    “We do!”
Doug booms in a big voice from across the room.
    “May I be excused?” I ask, hopping down from the counter stool and eyeing the door.
    “No, you may not,” Doug replies rather sternly. And then, without adjusting his tone, he says to Marie, “Who is this friend?”
    Marie fusses with a roll of paper towels on the countertop and then raises her face to me. I recognize the look—she’s lost the thread, not just the thread of the conversation, but also the thread of her life. The weave is undone, the space between things has widened, and she’s falling through. Down, down. For her, there’s no bottom, and Doug and I are just two faces looking at her from up near the rim of the well.
    “This has got to stop,” Doug says as he bangs his fist down hard on the countertop. “You cannot be running around town. It’s not safe. We’ve been through this before.”
    Marie begins to whimper.
    If Kat were here, she’d know what to do, she’d say the right thing. She’d calm Doug down, make him believe that everythingwould be all right, tell him that he shouldn’t be such a bully, and that he ought to stop worrying so much. No one was hurt, she’d say, nothing bad had happened. She’d know how to handle Marie, too, how to guide her up the stairs and into bed.
    “C’mon, Gram,” I say, taking hold of Marie’s bony shoulders and leading her into the living room. “Let’s get you ready for bed.” And then to Doug I say, “Let it go. No one got hurt. Nothing bad happened.”
    “Is it true?” Marie asks me as we shuffle from the kitchen into the living room. “Do we live here?”
    “Yes. For now. But it could change at any minute. That’s the thing. Things change.”
    “And they
do!”
she says, surprising herself with this bit of information. “They really do.”
    She stops in the living room and looks around as though a light has been switched on and at last she can see what’s what. When she spots her china cabinet standing against the far wall, she heads straight toward it. She calls it a breakfront. This is where she displays her collection of plates from around the world—Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan. Each plate is like a ceramic story told in miniature. In the old days, Marie used to sit for hours serving up the whole world in those old plates, recounting every detail of where she’d been and how she’d spotted the plates in some market or store window or street stall. She’d slip in an exotic phrase or two as she