Our bedroom is my favorite place in the house. It sits at the top of a wide central tower, and it’s round, with shuttered windows that look out over the treetops. The ceiling is high and cone-shaped, pointy as a witch’s hat. If we forget to shut the windows at night, fruit bats fly in and hang from the rafters like little leather change purses.
Laura’s almost finished with the garden room. She removed the heavy curtains. She cleaned the dome so that the glass sparkles in the sunlight. I told her I’d cut down some of the vines lashed across the windows if she wanted me to, as they obscured the view, but she said to just leave them.
“They make the room feel like a tree house,” she said. “I like it this way.”
She keeps a bunch of pillows scattered around, big satin pillows with tassels on the corners, and I often wake up on weekend mornings to find her already downstairs, lying beneath the bright dome, reading the newspaper in her nightgown and sunglasses.
I chase Laura up the creaking spiral staircase, laughing, both of us naked. I carry her to the windowsill, her arms around my neck, and I make love to her with the whole blue sky behind us.
Then, when we’re done, I’ll sit with her while she takes a bath in the giant cauldron of our marble tub, her knees poking up through the water like tiny islands of pink sand. Sometimes I’ll read her part of a book or a magazine. Other times, while Laura soaks, I’ll amuse her by spying on the women in the prison near our home, the federal work camp. I bought a telescope from an antique store in town and set it up by the window. When I look into the eyepiece, it’s like I’ve been transported right inside the camp among the residents.
Joyce was telling the truth, too. The camp’s grounds are beautiful, with shaded walking paths and picnic tables set up beneath the many trees. There’s a pond populated by giant goldfish, a vegetable garden that the women tend in the afternoons. The facility is entirely open, too. There aren’t any barbed wire fences or guard towers, just a bright green sprawl of grass and trees around which the ladies are allowed to wander freely for most of the day. The only thing bounding the property at all is a bright yellow line painted in the grass along the prison perimeter. The paint contains fluorescent chemicals, and at night the line glows an eerie, spaceship green.
“What are they doing now?” Laura said to me the other day. She was lying in the tub.
I used the telescope to scan the grounds for any of Laura’s favorites. The women she most liked to hear about were the high-profile inmates, the society wives and politicians and celebrities who’d lived all sorts of glamorous lives before ending up at the camp. One resident was the owner of a baseball team, another was a restaurateur. There was a famous jazz drummer, the CEO of a baby food company, even a world-renowned eye surgeon. I don’t know about Laura, but sometimes I actually felt a strange surge of pride knowing that such a cluster of accomplished women was gathered so close to our home.
I tried to find something interesting to report, but most of the women had headed inside the canteen for supper. A couple of them were jogging along the gravel exercise path. One, the baseball team owner, was reading the newspaper beneath a tree. It was nearly sunset and the line painted around the prison had just started to glow.
“The chef, the really fat lady? She and your favorite girl, Shirley the golf pro—they’re fighting it out in the yard.”
“Sounds exciting,” said Laura. She knew I was lying. Nothing like that ever happened at the camp.
“It’s ugly,” I said, turning back to Laura. “Shirley just pulled out a shank. Things are looking bad for the chef.”
“Her ass is grass,” Laura said, smiling.
She yawned and let her head fall to the side and I studied her face for a moment—studied the soft shells of her eyelids; her lips; a tendril of wet, brown hair curled against her cheek. I felt a pull in my chest so hard it frightened me.
“I’m going to marry you in this house,” I said. “We can have the wedding in the yard after I clear it out.”
Laura wrung the water from her hair. “Is that a proposal?”
“I guess I can do better than that,” I said.
She laughed. “I should hope so.” Then she closed her eyes and let her body slide down into the water.
“Did you know,” she said, “that in exactly one hundred days from tomorrow, you and I will have been together for five years? I was doing the math in the car the other day. Isn’t that crazy? Five years.”
I leaned over and kissed her on her forehead. “I’ll tell you what. If in a hundred days from tomorrow I haven’t proposed to you, you can leave me forever.”
“Jacob, that’s not what I was getting at.”
“No, I mean it,” I said. “One hundred days.”
“This is silly.”
“It’s not silly,” I said, suddenly feeling agitated. “It’s not silly at all.”
“Are you okay?” she said, sitting up, her skin raw and tender from the hot water.
“I’m fine,” I said, but I was angry now. “You deserve someone who’ll stick around and commit. Someone who’ll love and take care of you. I mean for life.”
“Jake…you’re talking about yourself, right? You’re scaring me.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Of course I’m talking about myself. Who the hell do you think I’m talking about? I mean myself. Jake. Me.”
My grandfather was a traveling salesman. He met my grandmother in the winter of 1920, while passing through her hometown of Barclay, Virginia. He was twenty-two at the time. She was seventeen.
The way my grandmother remembers it, she was upstairs in her room, doing her homework, when she overheard yelling down on the street. As she came to the window, she spied a young man outside, standing on top of a parked car. He was shouting and gesturing at people, making some kind of sales pitch. A crowd had already gathered around him. In one of his hands he held a little star, which was emitting a cold and piercing light.
My grandmother opened the window to get a better look at the star. She’d never seen light so concentrated before. The little star was shining brighter than all the town’s electrical streetlamps put together.
The star, she soon learned, contained something called neon gas. My grandfather was working for a company called Star Neon, the country’s first manufacturer of neon lighting tubes. The owners of Star paid my grandfather to drive around the South in a new Ford and do promotional demonstrations about the wonders of neon lighting. Neon tubes were still brand-new in 1920. They were delicate and expensive to construct. Only a few businesses in the whole world had neon signs hanging in their windows, and all of them were located in Western Europe. Hardly anyone in the United States had seen a neon light before.
My grandmother watched, fascinated, as my grandfather continued with his demonstration, making his case as to why neon was
It was at about this point in his speech, according to my grandmother, that he noticed her up in the window and winked at her, making her blush.
Later that night, she snuck out to meet the neon salesman. Less than a week after that, she ran off with him, hopping into his car in the middle of the night and driving off.
The two of them ended up traveling all across the South together. My grandmother learned to help with the demonstrations: she passed out pamphlets about the science of neon, she gathered names and addresses. They were a team: two kids in love, living in a shiny black Ford, the whole country spread out before them. They kept blankets and tins of food on the backseat, along with a loaded revolver. At night they slept in the car, huddled together. Sometimes, when they ended up parked out in the middle of nowhere, my grandfather would hang the neon star from the rearview mirror and leave it turned on, glowing through the night.
They traveled together for three months before my grandmother became pregnant. They were in Bristol, Tennessee, when she told my grandfather, who seemed thrilled at the news. He took her out to dinner to celebrate, bought them both fried steaks and wine, and then took her dancing afterward. He even rented a hotel room.
The next morning my grandmother woke to find the car gone. No trace of my grandfather anywhere. She
