“We’ve got twin beds in our unit,” my mother says. “This wouldn’t have fit anyway. We’ve just got regular bedspreads now. Like in the other rooms. Hotel supply. They’re OK.”
“Come and see the living room,” my father tells me, and I follow him through the door. After some fumbling, he finds a light that works. The furniture in here is all new and doesn’t remind me of anything. A painting of driftwood on the beach hangs on the wall. “How do you like that painting? We got fifty of them from this warehouse. Five bucks a pop. And they’re all different. Some have starfish, some seashells. All in a maritime motif. They’re signed oil paintings.” He walks to the wall and, taking off his glasses, makes out the signature: “Cesar Amarollo! Boy, that’s better than Picasso.” He turns his back to me, smiling, happy about this place.
*
I’m down here to stay a couple of weeks, maybe even a month. I won’t go into why. My father gave me unit 207, right on the ocean. He calls the rooms “units” to differentiate them from the motel rooms they used to be. Mine has a little kitchen. And a balcony. From it, I can see cars driving along the beach, a pretty steady stream. This is the only place in Florida, my father tells me, where you can drive on the beach.
The motel gleams in the sun. Somebody is pounding somewhere. A couple of days ago, my father started offering complimentary suntan lotion to anyone who stays the night. He’s advertising this on the marquee out front but, so far, no one has stopped. Only a few families are here right now, mostly old couples. There’s one woman in a motorized wheelchair. In the morning, she rides out to the pool and sits, and then her husband appears, a washed-out guy in a bathing suit and flannel shirt. “We don’t tan anymore,” she tells me. “After a certain age, you just don’t tan. Look at Kurt. We’ve been out here all week and that’s all the tan he is.” Sometimes, too, Judy, who works in the office, comes out to sunbathe during her lunch hour. My father gives her a free room to stay in, up on the third floor, as part of her salary. She’s from Ohio and wears her hair in a long braided ponytail, like a girl in fifth grade.
At night, in her hotel-supply bed, my mother has been having prophetic dreams. She dreamed that the roof sprung a leak two days before it did so. She dreamed that the skinny maid would quit and, next day, the skinny maid did. She dreamed that someone broke his neck diving into the empty swimming pool (instead, the filter broke, and the pool had to be emptied to fix it, which she says counts). She tells me all this by the swimming pool. I’m in it; she’s dangling her feet in the water. My mother doesn’t know how to swim. The last time I saw her in a bathing suit I was five years old. She’s the burning, freckled type, braving the sun in her straw hat only to talk to me, to confess this strange phenomenon. I feel as though she’s picking me up after swimming lessons. My throat tastes of chlorine. But then I look down and see the hair on my chest, grotesquely black against my white skin, and I remember that I’m old, too.
Whatever improvements are being made today are being made on the far side of the building. Coming down to the pool, I saw Buddy going into a room, carrying a wrench. Out here, we’re alone, and my mother tells me that it’s all due to rootlessness. “I wouldn’t be dreaming these things if I had a decent house of my own. I’m not some kind of gypsy. It’s just all this traipsing around. First we lived in that motel in Hilton Head. Then that condo in Vero. Then that recording studio your father bought, without any windows, which just about killed me. And now this. All my things are in storage. I dream about them, too. My couches, my good dishes, all our old family photos. I dream of them packed away almost every night.”
“What happens to them?”
“Nothing. Just that nobody ever comes to get them.”
*
There are a number of medical procedures that my parents are planning to have done when things get better. For some time now, my mother has wanted a face-lift. When my parents were flush, she actually went to a plastic surgeon who took photographs of her face and diagrammed her bone structure. It’s not a matter of simply pulling the loose skin up, apparently. Certain facial bones need shoring up as well. My mother’s upper palate has slowly receded over the years. Her bite has become misaligned. Dental surgery is needed to resurrect the skull over which the skin will be tightened. She had the first of these procedures scheduled about the time my father caught his partner embezzling. In the trouble afterward, she had to put the idea on hold.
My father, too, has put off two operations. The first is disk surgery to help the pain in his lower back. The second is prostate surgery to lessen the blockage to his urethra and increase the flow of his urine. His delay in the latter case is not motivated purely by financial considerations. “They go up there with that Roto-Rooter and it hurts like hell,” he told me. “Plus, you can end up incontinent.” Instead, he has elected to go to the bathroom fifteen to twenty times a day, no trip being completely satisfying. During the breaks in my mother’s prophetic dreams, she hears my father getting up again and again. “Your father’s stream isn’t exactly magnificent anymore,” she told me. “You live with someone, you know.”
As for me, I need a new pair of shoes. A sensible pair. A pair suited to the tropics. Stupidly, I wore a pair of old black wingtips down here, the right shoe of which has a hole in the bottom. I need a pair of flip-flops. Every night, when I go out to the bars in my father’s Cadillac (the boat is gone, the plane is gone, but we still have the yellow “Florida Special” with the white vinyl top), I pass souvenir shops, their windows crammed with T-shirts, seashells, sunhats, coconuts with painted faces. Every time, I think about stopping to get flip-flops, but I haven’t yet.
*
One morning, I come down to find the office in chaos. Judy, the secretary, is sitting at her desk, chewing the end of her ponytail. “Your father had to fire Buddy,” she says. But before she can tell me anything more, one of the guests comes in, complaining about a leak. “It’s right over the bed,” the man says. “How do you expect me to pay for a room with a leak over the bed? We had to sleep on the floor! I came down to the office last night to get another room but there was no one here.”
Just then my father comes in with the tree surgeon. “I thought you told me this type of palm tree was hardy.”
“It is.”
“Then what’s the matter with it?”
“It’s not in the right kind of soil.”
“You never told me to change the soil,” my father says, his voice rising.
“It’s not only the soil,” the tree surgeon says. “Trees are like people. They get sick. I can’t tell you why. It might have needed more water.”