Cutting Loose in Paradise

by Mary Jane Ryals

  “What’s the matter?” I said. A small, fat, toddler years ago, his eyes now looked down to meet mine.

  “You can’t even buy a decent video game at the arcade or video store now,” he said, putting groceries away, talking about his afternoon. “The tourists last year bought up all the good stuff. I’d saved allowance to get good flicks, and inventory’s down. New movies won’t come in until—guess when—next tourist season, if we ever have another one after BP’s bloody bollocks up.” I was about to tell my son to please stop being so profane, even if it was British, but didn’t. “And since the economy is so tied to—”

  “Mama, I’m so hungry!” called Daisy, running down the hall to embrace me. Her eyes held the evening’s amber light, and her hair was black as mine, only more orderly, shinier. She had her father’s family’s elegant noble-nosed looks. And at eight, she still loved her mother.

  She hugged me, nearly knocking me down. “I got some Oreos.” She jumped up and down, clapping her hands. The age difference in my kids alone kept me exhausted, not to mention their varying emotional needs. She had interrupted her brother’s rant. He wasn’t really talking about video games, but something deeper, closer, more personal. I took out the mac and cheese package, because I am Betty Crocker only on free days, which aren’t many, and set water on the stove to boil pasta. I would drag out Dad’s broccoli and throw that into the mix.

  “Hey,” I said to Taylor. “Come see.” I pointed out the window. We lived at the corner of Riverside and Port St. Leon, looking out towards the old Spanish Fort at the confluence of two rivers and the Gulf. From our front balcony on the second story, you could see the few blinking lights from boats and buoys in the now-black winterish night. “This. This is still ours.” I hoped he wouldn’t lecture me on the sugar in Oreos.

  “Cool,” he said, hands on the railing, his body leaning out towards the view. Still, his black eyes looked doleful.

  “How’s school?”

  “Terrible, as usual,” he said. “Stupid, slow, boring. Have you been to high school lately? It sucks. Well-known fact.”

  I sighed. He couldn’t make sense of the Trina ordeal, just as his father’s death hadn’t made sense to a young boy. He’d admired Trina’s work with the environment. He knew the planet was in peril, and some teachers at school had warned me that he was way ahead of everyone—including teachers and administration, if you asked him. Still, I thought he needed to learn how to fit in. He’d dyed his hair cobalt blue at thirteen. After that, he’d grown his blond hair out to the middle of his back. People stared at him. A little conformity, I had learned, went a long way. He had sneered at my out-loud thoughts about all this.

  “Oh,” he said now, brightening. “I forgot. Madonna called.” He pushed his hip out like Betty Boop and flicked his eyelashes. Even my son recognized that Madonna was a striking combo of Georgia farm girl and exotic African-Hispanic woman. She looked like a pin-up with a Southern accent that would melt tea china. And Madonna had that rare ability to really listen to everyone. It’s why men would confess anything to her.

  “Oh, stop it,” I said, but was glad when he grinned and nudged me. We turned from the window, and walked back to the kitchen.

  “She wanted you to call her right back. Hey, can I go out tonight? After dinner? After I clear the table?” I nodded and went for the phone. I had quit asking him if he’d done his homework. That always meant a big debate over busy work versus reality.

  “Help your sister with Oreos and milk, will you?” I said. He nodded.

  “Hook Wreck,” Madonna said, somehow pulling four syllables out of the bar name. I could hear bar murmur in the background, the clink of glasses.

  “So you made it to work. That St. Annes waiter didn’t take you off into the sunset?” I said.

  “He’s too city for me. College boy. Still a baby, too,” she said, pausing, taking a drag off a cigarette. She indulged while working. Said it alleviated stress. “Glad I only had two beers with oysters, though. Anyway, did you hear about our cop Cooter’s wife, Mary?”

  “No, what?” I admired Madonna’s radar for juicy gossip. I poured the pasta into the boiling water as the kids set the table with clinks and whispered sibling disagreements.

  “Well, the thought of Cooter leaving her on their date night to go over to Piney Point to do that police report on Trina Lutz just about did her in. She got drunk as a rabid yard dog at that bar up in Cureall Tuesday night, swearing Cooter was having an affair with Laura,” Madonna said. One of the fishermen had told her this.

  “Laura?! Our Laura? Knight?” I said. The drunk and early-balding half-cop with my eccentric and brilliant friend, Laura? Impossible. Mary, concocting paranoid stories.

  “Our Laura,” Madonna chuckled, and went on. I was fishing around in the refrigerator looking for butter. She went on about how one minute Mary was dancing drunk on one of the tables, threatening to strip. The next, one of the Greek spongers who was off the boat for some days from down Tarpon Springs way was trying to pull her down off the rickety table. Mary started swinging at him. He thought it was funny till she picked up a beer pitcher and nearly took out his left eye.

  “Then she broke a glass and came at him. That’s when the bartender called Mac. He was over at the Cureall Cafe by chance. Mac called the county cops and had her hauled off to the county jail, waiting for Cooter to get off work,” Madonna said. Mac was the go-to guy when Cooter was out of pocket, or if it involved Mary. His money and influence gave him cop-clout.

  “Mary creates her own bad reality TV, not poetry, like she claims.” My kids sat down in front of the TV watching “The Simpsons.”

  “A bartender’s job could go on prime-time reality TV sometimes,” she said. “If it ain’t a shrimper coming in after two weeks on the Gulf without a bath, it’s the oystermen already drunk on some rot gut and just come in to pick a fight.”

  I pointed out that Laura lived out near St. Annes Key, not at Piney Point.

  “Close enough for Mary,” Madonna said. “I think she sees Laura reporting news while Cooter is doing police reports and puts two plus two together to equal thirteen.”

  “Damn, you ain’t saying.” I was falling into my Cracker accent and slang with Madonna. I’d flip from college English teacher talk to my home girl twang quick as the wind picks up on a sailboat without even realizing it. “The county jail?”

  “Cooter could have stopped it, you know,” Madonna said.

  “Well, it’s not like Mac had to call and have her drug off.” Neither of them was the Mother Teresa, even if Mary was three-quarters crazy, I surmised. “Another day, another St. Annes drama.” I was relieved to be talking about stupidity with my girlfriend. I threw the broccoli into the boiling pasta pot.

  “How about giving me a haircut before the funeral?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “But I just saw you, and unless somebody threw a bucket of paint in your hair, you don’t need one.”

  “Please. I need a change. Then I can tell you the rest,” she said. “Can’t tell you on the phone.”

  “Hmm,“ I said.” Okay, then.”

  I dumped the pasta water and mixed in the gooey cheese and got off the phone.

  We decided to eat in front of the TV. The kids had settled. After our modest dinner, we began dipping Oreos into glasses of milk, even Tay.

  Daisy came over to the sofa and cuddled up. “I love you, Mommy.” She squeezed me, warm and soft against my side. We settled into watching old videos of “Dexter’s Laboratory,” our favorite cartoon. Taylor, revved up to go out, sat down across from us and began talking about how he’d learned, from his grandfather, tricks for seeing in the dark. I usually tuned out his explanations for camouflage clothing and stealth tactics. He lectured us on how you have to sit in complete darkness for one hour before your eyes adjust completely.

  “Then you can rescue people,” he said. I didn’t like this rescue obsession, which had begun just after the divorce—guarding this, rescuing that, saving the
other. He went through a “Dungeons and Dragons” phase that swallowed up his middle school days. Maybe it was a guy thing, as Madonna would say.

  “Well, you be careful at the park,” I said.

  He let out an impatient breath. “I will,” he said.

  “Be home by ten. No later, hear? It’s a school night,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, standing up, hands in his pockets. He looked skinny and fragile to me. I held my arms out, and he gave me a quick hug.

  “You doing okay?” I said. He nodded, not looking at me. He went out, shutting the door quietly. I could hear him skipping two steps at a time as he bounded down the steps. I went to the window to see him walk down the street into the vast night.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE NEXT MORNING, I was savoring one of few indulgences, Ethiopian coffee, when someone knocked on the door. “C’m in,” I said. My cagey neighbor, Tiffany Parrish. A youngster, about twenty-one, who had come to town to do a community college internship. “Hey, what’s up?” I put down the local Chronicler, hoping she’d say Nothing.

  “Nothing,” she said, sitting down, raising her eyebrows up quickly the way she did when nervous. Which meant Something. She had stringy hair with no personality. Taylor said hair can’t have personality, but I said Who’s the hair authority in this house? I could do something with that hair, I thought. “That funeral . . .” Tiffany said, then drifted off, flinging herself onto the sofa across from me, pulling up her legs.

  “Yeah?” I said, putting my long clumsy feet under my long torso. “The funeral?”

  “Do I have to go?” Up went the eyebrows.

  “No,” I said. I observed her youthful body, tight and expectant. Tiffany centered the talk in town these days. The men’s topics, anyway. A new woman, young, good-looking. Why was someone like her here? and who would get her?—the underlying question. “Why do you think you have to go?” I said.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Everybody’s going. I—Fletch wanted me to go, but I just feel—too weird, you know?” I was constantly amazed at her inability to articulate what she meant. I had the same problem at twenty-one. The reason for my inner hostility at her, a shrink might say.

  I felt tired, which annoyed me. Just before this, the coffee had started to coax me into a good speedy mood. “Don’t go then.” I took in a deep breath through the nose and let it out, grabbed the remote and turned on TV news. CNN’s image of the oil drilling platform going up in a big blast hovered on the screen again, like it had a thousand times on various channels over the past months. I turned the TV off. “Want some oatmeal?” She nodded, so I got up to make some.

  She spent a lot of time out of her house in the evenings. When she first arrived in August, she’d come over to borrow a fan. She wasn’t used to not having AC in a two-story building two blocks from the Gulf. The sun blasted into everything during the summer months. She’d shown gratitude for the extra old AC unit I’d loaned her to shove into a window to finish out the long summer. We all joked that we had two seasons—fall, and hot as hell. Not any more. Weather was changing. This week, we might have snow, or the drought that had plagued us recently could return.

  Tiffany had offered very little about herself, except that she’d attended a two-year business college in Tampa and wanted to get her real estate license. Maybe her contractor’s license, so she could build. Not a great time for either career choice. But she also wanted to save the environment, she’d told me. She was doing an internship for her lobbyist friend Mr. Mac Duncan. Nothing about parents or family.

  “An internship for a construction and real estate lobbyist for someone interested in the environment? Is there such a thing?” Madonna had asked in September on a quiet Hook Wreck night where we’d met to watch “Ironman.” Robert Downey Jr. was on The List.

  “She got papers in the mail from the community college about it,” I shrugged. “Seems like a decent goal.” I played devil’s advocate. “Apparently, the school is giving her a fellowship to work on a project towards Magnolia Springs. The huge development that started in the sixties. Magnolia Gardens. I think it covers her rent.”

  “I wish someone would give me a stipend to cover the house payments,” Laura had said. “Magnolia Gardens. The homeowners are in a snit about their roads not being paved. And I know for certain there are serious problems with their septic. Safety issues.”

  “Maybe that’s what she’s working on. She’s a self-starter,” I said. “Says she’s interested in protecting the fragile environment.”

  “Well, somebody better start,” Madonna said. “Did you see that the Block’s land is up for sale? All two hundred acres of it, mostly in the swamps surrounding the St. Annes River, Magnolia Springs and Magnolia River. Who’s gonna want that but a builder with back-up investors?”

  I wondered how they’d get a permit, since most of the land was wetlands.

  “That property is too near Dad’s place for me,” I said.

  “What I’m saying is, businesses get around this stuff somehow if a lot of people aren’t raising hell against it like they did the bottling company in Jefferson County on the Wacissa River,” Madonna had said, then clicked on “Iron Man” so we could put environmental concerns on hold for ninety minutes that September night.

  Shortly after, Tiffany had begun avoiding my eyes. By then she had wandered around town finding out who was important. Fletch and Mac were important—big business. So was Randy, the lawyer, but he was a recluse. She asked about him, though. And Mrs. Fielding, who’d taken the senate seat for her deceased husband. I’d seen Tiffany having morning tea on Mrs. Fielding’s Victorian porch more than once down on Main Street in St. Annes.

  Tiffany brought me back, licking her spoon of the oatmeal. “That was yummy.”

  “Cinnamon and honey,” I said as Taylor’s alarm went off down the hallway. He stomped out to the kitchen blinking. Since he made a habit of dressing for school the night before and sleeping in those clothes, they were wrinkled. He wore a black T-shirt with big orange lettering in front that said, “Help the World, Ban Country Music.” On the back, a mask in orange glared a grin. Flames surrounded the mask.

  “You could get yourself into a juicy fight wearing that,” I said. After all, we lived in a county where more than half the population loved their handguns, the Dixie flag, and relished rolling on the floor in a pool game fight.

  “Mom, get over it,” Taylor said in a dismissive mutter.

  “There’s extra oatmeal in there if you—”

  “You know I can’t eat anything until noon,” he snapped.

  In spite of myself, I went on. “You need some sustenance if you’re going to—”

  “Mom, I can’t! I’ll be late!” He grabbed his backpack and flew out the door. Tiffany looked bemused.

  “Teenagers,” I said. “Tay!” I hollered. “You going to the funeral?”

  He hesitated on the stairs. “I don’t know yet—maybe.” I figured he could walk the half mile from school to the cemetery.

  “You’ll need a note from me, won’t you?” I said. More hesitation.

  “Just call the school!”

  “How do you ask?” I demanded, wanting him to say please. To remind him I was his mother, not some fool he could beat up on verbally.

  “Please,” he said, with only a slight mocking tone. Then he started up the ’89 Dodge van I’d given him when I got the Saturn. Daisy came running down the hallway.

  “I’m starved!” she announced. “Oh, hi, Tiffany.” Tiffany waved.

  I pointed to the oatmeal. “Just in time,” I said.

  “Guess I’d better get home,” Tiffany said. “Maybe I will go to the funeral. What are you going to wear?”

  “Oh, simple. I don’t think black is necessary anymore. I just wouldn’t go, you know, decked out,” I said. Up went her eyebrows. “I’ll probably wear this old dark purple dress, a wool one I’ve never had any use for until this year, with a black jacket, scarf, boots.” Madonna had it right. Most o
f life isn’t what you learn in school. It’s how you improvise. “By the way, did you hear about Trina Lutz?” She raised her eyebrows again and swung her leg high. Then she cleared her throat and stood up.

  “Yeah. Didn’t know her,” she said, and headed for the door. That had to be a lie. Tiffany worked in Mac’s office. Trina and Fletch used Mac’s copier for big runs.

  Just before the door shut behind her, I said, “It’s going to be cold.” Then she was gone.

  DAISY REAPPEARED “DRESSED” and ready for school. She wore red and white striped bell-bottoms with a green and gold plaid top. Don’t say anything. Let her wear what she wants.

  Taylor didn’t like taking Daisy to school, because she moved slow as sludge most mornings. So I drove her to school over by Seventh Street where kids from K-12 landed every day unless they’d dropped out. Which they did. Often. The senior class ended up having about ten students every year. Boys dropped out to fish, oyster, clam, crab. The girls tended to get pregnant and learn that single momming wasn’t easy. “Mama, what did Trina die of?” Daisy asked.

  “Die of?” I said. “I’m not sure.” Honest, if vague, I thought as we passed the Methodist Church on Third Street. We should have walked, but Daisy wasn’t a walker.

  “Do you think she hurt?” We were stopped at the corner where the oldest Indian mound stood facing the Gulf. I wondered how those mothers had talked to their children about murder.

  “No, honey, I don’t,” I lied. I imagined someone reaching from behind, the knife at Trina’s throat. We passed the Holy Roller church and headed up the hill, one massive Indian mound. The Gulf was choppy, and the sun didn’t hold much promise for coming out. Still foggy.

  “I don’t want to die yet,” she said. She’d half-discovered death at five when her cat died.

  “Don’t worry.” I reached over and patted her leg. “You don’t need to worry about that.” We headed down the hill toward school. The leaves on the palms, cedars, and oaks still had a deep muted green of dragonfly wings in winter. I felt grateful to live around trees that thrived in winter. All the green life around us oozed in summer when we were languishing. I only hoped the oil spill wouldn’t do the green any deep damage. The hard part was not knowing. There’d never been such a huge oil disaster in human history. All across the world, people saw visuals of the combusted rig, the oil spreading across miles of Gulf. They didn’t see our town’s small businesses quietly starting to close down months later.