Chapter 19 Lily #2
“Definitely not. I’m working on a project.”
“What kind of project?”
“My mom’s neighbor has this stash of portraits in her house, just sitting there. Of Atlantic City throughout history.”
“Sounds depressing.”
“No, they’re amazing. A bunch of them are soldiers and staff from this old hospital—apparently the biggest World War II hospital in the country was here?”
“Here here?”
“Right on the boardwalk. It was one of the old hotels, and then a hospital, and now the original building is part of Resorts. I can’t make out the signature, but I want to see if I can find out who did them.
Let me show you photos of it,” I said, clicking on the browser window.
Emily hadn’t closed her last tab, and it was open to her homepage on her Sallie Mae account.
Account Balance: $57,433, it announced, in a strangely cheerful yellow typeface.
“Oh, uh. Sorry.” I pulled my hand away from the mouse, and she reached over to close the tab.
“No, I’m an idiot for leaving that up.” She flushed.
I made $11 an hour at the spa, and maybe she earned a little bit more, but probably not much.
I would have been one of those people, too, buried under student loans, if we hadn’t received a settlement from the accident.
It made me queasy to think about it. As though what had happened to my father had a price.
I knew he was thrilled that I had ended up at Vassar, that he and my mom had planned to help as much as they could.
And then, my senior year, when that check finally came in, and that balance shrunk to zero, I could only feel the kind of guilt that made it impossible to eat anything for the rest of the week.
I was eager to change the subject. “Here, look at this.” I googled the Thomas England Hospital, scrolled through some of the images, enlarged the ones of the soldiers, the men who returned home missing limbs, doing stretches on a sundeck.
“That’s the hospital?” She stepped closer to the monitor.
I nodded. “There are people who say that Resorts is haunted by the souls of soldiers who died there. Noises, voices.” I had read reports online of guests waking to see the hems of hospital gowns trailing around corners, to hear moans in the middle of the night.
I didn’t believe it, but there was something affecting about the idea that this hospital had loomed over our beaches, all those souls that circulated through its halls.
Other photos showed platoons of soldiers in dark uniforms and heavy boots thrusting their bodies through drills on the beach. Camp Boardwalk, it was called.
“Well, that would explain a lot. Maybe they’re the ones setting fires around here. There was another one last night,” Emily said.
“Another one? Wait, how many is this now?”
“Three, I think. Things are getting biblical-level bad around here.” She made her voice deep and somber.
“By water also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.”
“Uh. Yikes.”
“You wouldn’t believe how much of that shit is still rattling around in my brain.”
“I guess so.”
There had been a series of blazes in the city—empty houses, mostly.
A boathouse that had been abandoned on one of the creeks after Hurricane Sandy.
A stretch of dry brush near the entrance to the Revel.
The police and the fire department suspected it was arson, but they didn’t have any leads yet.
I’d driven past one of the sites on my way home from work: a two-story house near the bus depot, its facade charred black, its roof collapsed.
I thought of the wildfires in California, the way that sometimes they would burn to reset the soil, to restore nutrients to the forest. I knew it wasn’t the same, but I wondered if these fires might have been like that—the city’s way of restoring itself, of regenerating through destruction.
It was a nice alternative to the reality—that someone was setting fires just because they liked having something to ruin.
The plant guy came in, rustling his garbage bags, ready to take away the month’s orchids and swap them out for new ones.
I watched him lift the flower from the pot on the desk and drop it into the mouth of the bag, the delicate white petals swallowed in darkness, though when he saw Luis he straightened, gestured to the bag.
Luis smiled at him and crouched at the man’s feet, removed the orchid, and placed it into an empty Windex bottle that he had cut in half.
“Luis does that sometimes,” Emily said. “If he’s on shift when it’s plant day. He likes to rescue them. Otherwise they just get thrown away.”
Luis retreated, cradling his orchid in the crook of his arm, and the man bent to his little wagon for another plant, dropped a new orchid, identical to the last, in the other one’s place.
He left a small crumble of soil on the counter, and the earthy, damp smell of it briefly filled the air. Wild and dirty but real.
After he left, Emily and I restocked lipsticks and pans of blush from the late summer color collection, Indian Summer Dreams. As I emptied my second box, I looked up at the photo of the spa’s founder, Geraldine Austin, that was mounted above the vanity mirrors in the boutique.
That severe sheen on her leather riding boots, the gloss on the horse’s coat.
The grim set of her mouth, as though she knew that, in sixty years, two young women would sit on the floor of an establishment bearing her name and we would let her down in a way too beneath her to even articulate.
“Do you think that we are doing any good here?” I asked Emily.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Are we good at our jobs?
Customer service jobs are practically designed for failure.
We have to depend on other people being patient, reasonable, sane, in order to serve them well.
Or do you mean good good. Like morally? Because for starters, I’m pretty sure these lipsticks aren’t cruelty-free. ”
“I don’t know. Do we ever have the opportunity to help people? Do people really come here thinking that we can make them the better versions of themselves? Do we give them that in any way? Or are we just trading on their insecurities?”
Emily lifted a stack of eye shadow palettes out of the box.
“I don’t know. People confuse better and better looking all the time.
I read that humans ascribe morality to people who are attractive, and they are suspicious of people who aren’t.
Even from the time you’re a baby. We are preprogrammed to. Pretty equals good. Ugly equals bad.”
“Great. So basically we’re helping perpetuate that bias?
” If all beautiful people were good, Matthew would have been a saint.
The high forehead and the hair that was always falling into his eyes.
The arcs of his shoulder blades. The dainty divot in the middle of his bottom lip that I stared at while he slept.
In a strange way, to think that my trust in him had been hardwired comforted me.
But what a mistake. So much cruelty was committed in the name of beauty. And in the name of art.
“Maybe. But I guess there are opportunities to do good. Last week, this woman called to schedule services for her sister to celebrate the fact that the sister’s cancer had been in remission for three years.
It’s kind of cool to be a part of that. Even though most of the people who come in here are raging lunatics.
Or perverts. Or petty thieves.” Emily leaned back into a box of packing peanuts, rubbed her hands over her eyes.
I still didn’t know much about her. I knew she rented a room from a family in Brigantine.
That she took college classes at night. But I didn’t know what she did for fun, or even what she wore when she wasn’t at work, when she was finally able to shed the impersonal black blazer and pencil skirt.
Once I asked her whether she had brothers and sisters, but the look on her face made me wish I hadn’t.
When she was nervous, or anxious, she fiddled with the cross on the chain around her neck.
“Why do you ask, anyway? I thought this was just your ‘get back on your feet’ gig.”
I didn’t really know the answer. I had never asked myself at the gallery if it was good, or fair. I was getting what I wanted. “Just something I’ve been thinking about, I guess.”
“One good thing about this company is that it’s almost entirely run by women. It could be a good place to start a career, in that sense. Even if they are as crazy as the guests most of the time.”
“How are your classes going?” I felt self-conscious asking—as though I were creeping back toward the discussion we didn’t have about me seeing her loan balance, but I was curious, and besides talking shit on everyone else at the spa, school was the only other thing she’d open up about.
She sat up, and I picked a Styrofoam packing peanut from her hair. “Okay—I’m taking exams next week, and then I start a new session. At this rate, I’ll be done in, oh, two, two and a half years.”
“That’s great.”
“It seems like such a long time to me. Sometimes I wonder if it’s even going to be worth it. Who will respect me for having a degree from a small local college? Working as a receptionist when other people are out interning with banks or learning about real estate or management psychology.”
“What, you’re not learning about management here? You practically run this place.”