back at him. She was faintly amazed that the little girl who had
worn a Mary medallion every day from ten to sixteen had become
this woman in the Donna Karan dress - that the desperate couple in
that Revere apartment were these middle-aged rich folks rolling
down a lush aisle of palms - but she was and they were. Once in
those Revere days he had come home drunk and she had hit him
and drawn blood from below his eye. Once she had been in fear of
Hell, had lain half-drugged in steel stirrups, thinking, I'm damned,
I've come to damnation. A million years, and that's only the first
tick of the clock.
They stopped at the causeway tollbooth and Carol thought, The
toll-taker has a strawberry birthmark on the left side of his
forehead, all mixed in with his eyebrow.
There was no mark-the toll-taker was just an ordinary guy in his
late forties or early fifties, iron-gray hair in a buzz cut, horn-
rimmed specs, the kind of guy who says, 'Y'all have a nahce tahm,
okai?'-but the feeling began to come back, and Carol realized that
now the things she thought she knew were things she really did
know, at first not all of them, but then, by the time they neared the
little market on the right side of Route 41, it was almost
everything.
The market's called Corson's and there's a little gid outfront, Carol
thought. She's wearing a red pinafore. She's got a doll, a dirty old
yellow-haired thing, that she's left on the store steps so she can
look at a dog in the back of a station wagon.
The name of the market turned out to be Carson's, not Corson's,
but everything else was the same. As the white Crown Vic passed,
the little girl in the red dress turned her solemn face in Carol's
direction, a country girl's face, although what a girl from the
toolies could be doing here in rich folks' tourist country, her and
her dirty yellow-headed doll, Carol didn't know.
Here's where I ask Bill how much farther, only I won't do it.
Because I have to break out of this cycle, this groove. I have to.
'How much farther?' she asked him. He says there's only one road,
we can't get lost. He says he promises me we'll get to the Palm
House with no problem. And, by the way, who's Floyd?
Bill's eyebrow went up. The dimple beside his mouth appeared.
'Once you get over the causeway and onto Sanibel Island, there's
only one road,' he said. Carol barely heard him. He was still
talking about the road, her husband who had spent a dirty weekend
in bed with his secretary two years ago, risking all they had done
and all they had made, Bill doing that with his other face on, being
the Bill Carol's mother had warned would break her heart. And
later Bill trying to tell her he hadn't been able to help himself, her
wanting to scream, I once murdered a child for you, the potential
of a child, anyway. How high is that price? And is this what I get
in return? To reach my fifties and find out that my husband had to
get into some Clairol girl's pants?
Tell him! she shrieked. Make him pull over and stop, make him do
