The line shuffled forward three more steps. Constricted by the space between them, Mary Keane reached back carefully and pulled her blouse away from her spine. She felt a bead of perspiration roll down her back. And then another. Cascading, she thought. “I’m melting,” she said. Behind them, the man with the woman on his arm was reading from a guidebook. Annie felt the edge of the paper against the back of her head.
“They shouldn’t have moved something so old,” he said. “Something could have happened to it.” And the woman on his arm made a sympathetic noise and then seemed to readjust herself, as if she were turning in bed.
“God, it’s hot,” she said and Mary Keane turned to nod at her, “Isn’t it, though?” Farther behind them there was a family, parents and two teenagers, limp shouldered and unhappy. Then what might have been a church group of pastel men and women, all with name tags and crosses on their breasts, fanning themselves with identical paper fans printed loudly with the name of an Atlanta funeral home.
Above the rooftops of the Belgian Village, the sun had gone from orange to red-so fiery now it might have been lifted from some creation tableau itself. Might more appropriately have been shining down on tar pits or boiling mud. As Annie leaned out to look back (the line was longer still) and then forward (no shorter ahead), the red sun struck the gold dome of the pavilion and sent her ducking back into her place. Now a vertiginous edge of purple outlined everything she saw. She saw heads turned away from the sun. Shoulders moving slowly forward. The man’s speckled hand that had missed a belt loop this morning reaching up to wipe perspiration from his sunburned neck. His wife was turned around again to say to her mother they had one son in the army and one in the Marines and another one married and back near home. And Mary Keane replied four, two boys and two girls.
Something prehistoric, too, in the scaly flesh of the woman’s throat as she turned to speak to them, chin and neck indistinguishable. Her voice was worn.
She said she should have gone for four and had a girl, too.
Daughters will wait with you to see something like this. Not boys. “Although my boys are good to me,” she said. “They’re good boys.”
The woman turned to Annie, taking her in with small eyes, perhaps assessing what she’d missed. Suddenly, she asked, “Did you see the Carousel of Progress, honey?”
And her mother answered, “Yes we did.”
“The Magic Skyway? Futurama? The Moon Dome? Did you talk on the picturephones?”
“Oh, yeah,” Annie said, knowing her mother wanted her to say yes, not yeah.
“What I want to know,” the woman said, raising her voice, nearly shouting, “is what if you just got out of the shower, and your picturephone is ringing? Do you answer it?” She laughed, her open mouth full of silver and gold. She shook her head and wiped a tear from her eyes. “That’s your future, honey,” she said to Annie. “Not mine or your mom’s.” She leaned back, her wide arm touching Mary Keane’s damp shoulder. “We’ll be well out of it, don’t you think?”
The man in the plaid shirt, as husbands will do, was staring straight ahead, ignoring the conversation, as if both women were strangers to him. Even in this heat, Mary Keane was aware of a certain pleasure in being relieved of the burden of a husband.
“We sure will,” she said, agreeably.
But then the woman suddenly raised her arm, the pale skin swinging, and gestured toward the fantastic rooflines and white towers, the sky lifts and the monorails.
“The only thing I hate to think about,” she said, “is how all this will be knocked down when the fair is over.”
Other than the slow shuffling forward and the fanning of maps and brochures, there was the rise and fall of cigarettes to mouths, the tossing of them onto the asphalt. A couple up ahead occasionally left the line to chase a toddler. The man behind them was saying “Michael-angelo,” and the woman on his arm was saying, “Meekel, Meekel-angelo.”
They shuffled forward. In the boredom and the heat there were only the tender backs of necks to consider, arches of ears, puckered elbows, freckles, birthmarks. The variety of head shapes and hair colors. What wash-day mishap or expense spared or birthday gift or Simplicity pattern had led to those clothes on that body on this day. A missed belt loop. A plastic purse. A bleached beehive. A baggy pair of Bermuda shorts. A lip held over a protruding tooth. You had to pity anyone in long pants or black socks. Women in white gloves. Soldiers in uniform. You had to pity the man behind them for the hair on his arms, the woman’s weight against him.
The fat woman, mopping her thick neck with a small tissue, turned again to say that the long wait would be worth it. “It’ll be like a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.”
With her purse in the crook of her arm, Mary Keane reached out to run her fingers through her daughter’s thin hair, gathering it bit by bit to the top of her head. She twisted the hair into a topknot and pulled three bobby pins from the purse to hold it. Annie reached back tentatively to feel her bare neck. “Better?” Mary Keane said and Annie said, “Yes,” although one of the bobby pins bit like a tooth.
The line moved again. Mary Keane leaned down and blew a soft stream of air onto her daughter’s neck, miraculously cool. Annie closed her eyes briefly. “How much longer?” she said at the same time the woman behind them said, “Not much longer.” They turned, mother and daughter, to meet her eye, but it was the man she was addressing, leaning against him, holding on to his arm. There was a diamond engagement ring on her hand. You had to pity the length and thickness of her brown hair, the weight of her chin on his shoulder.
They shuffled forward again. Now they could hear faint music coming from the building, and with the next step forward they could smell, if certainly not yet feel, the air-conditioning inside.
Someone up ahead, an official, cried, “No pushing, please,” in what might have been an Italian accent. They felt the line grow slack at the reprimand. And then it moved forward again.
The fat woman was now talking to the woman ahead of her. “What if you’d just stepped out of the shower?” she shouted.
“Pee-aye-tuh,” the man behind them said and the woman, laughing deep in her throat said, “Pee-aye-ta.”
Here now was the official who belonged to the voice, perspiring in a red jacket and gray pants. He waved his arms like a traffic cop although, at the moment, they were standing still in front of him.
“Almost there,” he was saying, smiling at them all. His accent not Italian but Long Island. “That’s it”-as they moved forward-”won’t be long now.”
As if responding obediently to a command, the line pressed itself together, tighter still, heads, hands, shuffling feet. (Annie briefly placed the heels of her palms to the damp yellow shirt of the man in front of her and then drew them away.) Chests to backs and the woman behind them leaning, it seemed, over Mary Keane’s shoulder. “No pushing, please,” the man said again.
The sun had nearly dropped out of sight although the sky glowed so vividly with its afterimage that it hardly mattered. The heat still gave the thick air a slow pulse. The crowd pressed together and her mother took her hand, moving. For a moment Annie forgot just what it was they had been waiting to see. And then they were inside.
Cold air and a low Gregorian chant, eyes struggling to adjust to the change. There was the smell of incense and of new paint. Glass cases along the walls and the impression of red and gold. Golden arcs of light. Red carpet at their feet. The line held, still shuffling, past cases of jewels, now, or books, or vestments, or small ivory models of churches, paintings of saints and priests. The volume of the choir’s voices seemed to rise slightly as they moved forward, wavering the way the heat outside had wavered. But the heat was already forgotten. “Keep moving, please,” someone said.