Me and My Baby View the Eclipse

by Lee Smith

  “All right, buddy. The show’s over.” The security guard had me by the elbow, he was hustling me out of there. I looked back at Kim while he did this.

  “Call me,” she said.

  Well, I did, of course. I was a regular Sherlock Holmes figuring out who she was and how to do it. I had to sleuth around. But she was my dream girl. I told her so, right off the bat.

  “Don’t even get in this truck unless you are going to take me seriously,” I said the first time I picked her up. I had planned to say this. I had practiced saying it. My truck was the only truck parked along that half-moon driveway in front of the school, where you go to pick up your date. People were looking at it.

  She climbed right in. “Where are we going?” she said.

  I drove her up to Kerr Lake. We got some beer and some crackers and Vienna sausage and Velveeta cheese at a 7-Eleven on the way up there. We had a picnic. It was the best food I ever ate. On the way back, I played her my new Don Williams tape. It’s real romantic. I was in love. By then it was dark out and we rode with the windows down. Kim scooted over and sat real close to me in the truck. She has this way of filling her skin so full of herself that she almost busts out, if you follow me. It’s hard to explain. It is a very attractive feature though. Maybe you call it charisma. I went home and wrote a song about her.

  We kept it up. I was over there at the college as much as I could be, whenever I wasn’t working. Anytime I could get over there, Kim would go out with me. She could have had her pick and I knew it, boys from State, fraternity guys from Chapel Hill. But Kim wanted me. She wanted me even after her mother started taking a fit which she did soon enough. Her mother really got up on her high horse about it. She told Kim that she couldn’t see me anymore, and said I was a day laborer. I couldn’t argue with her. I reckon I am one. I did not even try to tell Kim’s mother about being in the Art Club or the Honor Council or what Mr. Burton said. Kim’s suitemates thought it was all real romantic, they used to cover for her when she would stay out all night. Of course I couldn’t take her over to my house because of my little sister, Janice, that I felt kind of responsible for. So we stayed at Days Inns, and like that. One time we went down to Morehead City and ate at Captain Tony’s, right on the dock. Kim was not doing so hot in school by then as you can imagine. Exams were coming up. I reckon she would of flunked out if she hadn’t of gotten pregnant, which she did.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked her this when the EPT showed positive. What I wanted to do was marry her, but I didn’t want to force her into anything.

  She looked at me. Her brown eyes got big and sparkly. Again I felt that quality I was telling you about, like she might pop right out of her skin. “I want to have the baby,” she said. Kim’s dorm room was all full of stuffed animals and Care Bears and rainbow posters, and like that, so I was not surprised.

  “Mama will just die,” she said. Now I knew that was true too. Kim’s mom always told her, Marry a surgeon. Kim hates her mom. Kim’s dad left because he just couldn’t take it anymore, according to Kim. Her older brother went with him, out to California. Kim’s mom had already tried to get her father to write to Kim and tell her to stop dating me, but he would not. Instead he sent her a postcard from Hawaii that said, “Follow your bliss. Love, Dad.”

  So I was not surprised at the way Kim’s mom acted. The only thing that did surprise me was my own family’s reaction. My mother is a sweet woman, she was sweet even when she was drinking. Now she’s got high sugar and can’t. Anyway my mother just smiled and kissed me when I told her, but that night I heard her crying in bed like her heart would break, that real loud kind of crying which is embarrassing to hear. The only time I ever heard her do it before was when Gran-Gran died, and the first time Daddy went into Dix. Janice kicked me in the leg when I told her, this surprised the hell out of me. I mean, I practically raised Janice. I guess she is jealous of Kim or something. Still, they came around. And they have been sweet as can be ever since Kim tried to slit her wrists.

  That was four months ago, when Stacy was two months old. I was working two jobs, one at Creative Landscaping and one at Copy Quick, and we had a room in a boardinghouse down on Hillsborough Street. But things were not going so good. For one thing, Kim’s mom had cut her off, I mean entirely. She didn’t call on the telephone, she didn’t come over to see the baby.

  “I might as well be dead,” Kim said. She stuck out her full bottom lip and her pretty brown eyes filled with tears.

  “You’ve got me,” I said. Between us on the bed in the room on Hillsborough Street, Stacy cooed and cooed. She held on to my finger. Sirens were screaming out in the street.

  Kim looked at me. “I can’t live like this,” she said all of a sudden. “I just can’t.” She started crying.

  Later that week was when she tried to slit her wrists, with a Trac II razor thank God, so it didn’t work too good. The social worker at the hospital said she might not of really meant it. He said we needed some additional support. He called Kim’s mother but even then she wouldn’t talk on the phone to her daughter, heart of steel. Then Janice moved in the bedroom with Moma and we moved in with them, so Moma and Janice can watch the baby and Kim can get out some. Now Kim has got a part-time job at Tanfastic. But she still cries a lot, and she won’t say why. The doctor says it is hormones, Moma says it’s the blues. Anyway this is common, after a baby. It’s been on TV. You can’t blame Kim either. Her life is different from what it was. At her mother’s house in Rocky Mount, for instance, they have five bedrooms and wall-to-wall carpet. I know this.

  But Kim hasn’t got it too bad since we moved over here. She put Stacy on a bottle so she’s got her figure back, and she’s real tan. She looks great. And she doesn’t have to do a thing except play with Stacy and watch TV. It’s a funny thing, before we got married, I did not have any idea that Kim watched so much TV. I used to read books all the time myself. I can read the hell out of a book. But Kim doesn’t like for me to read too much, she says it makes her feel left out. I am mostly too tired now, anyway. Now what we do is, she watches TV and I watch her. Janice is dating somebody now, she’s gone a lot. Moma is in her room. I lay on the couch watching Kim watch TV and little Stacy lays on my chest. Stacy loves this. She’s a little doll. She has this funny snuffly breath and a sweet milk smell. Stacy is one of those real solid babies with a round head and big round eyes. Her cheeks stick out. Now she sits up by herself, it won’t be long until she is all over the place, Moma says.

  On Sundays when I’m off work, me and Kim will go for a long ride in the truck, we put Stacy in her carrier between us on the seat. We might drive over to Chapel Hill or Rocky Mount, eat some tacos. We might take all day and drive up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I can’t ever figure out how they got all those rocks up there, to build those walls along the Parkway. It is amazing. It looks good too. I love riding along like this, looking out at some scenery, looking over at Kim, looking down at Stacy just sleeping away. It makes Stacy sleep, to go riding.

  It makes her sleep to lay on my chest too as I was saying, we do that most nights. Stacy will snuffle and hold on tight to my finger even when she’s asleep. I look at Kim and her face is beautiful in the pale blue light of the TV. She watches TV real hard, like she’s taking a class or something. Stacy snuffles. This is my family. I am the man of the house.

  Only, this morning something happened that worries me some, it’s hard to say why. Me and Kim were on our way to work and we drove in the Biscuit Kitchen like always. Mornings are a drag because you’ve got so much to do then, Kim has got to spend plenty of time dressing because she’s got to look real good for her job at Tanfastic. It’s like, part of the job. So I get Stacy up and change her and give her a bottle. She’s got these little yellow pajamas with rabbits on them. I fix Moma her Diet Pepsi and take it in there and put it on the nightstand for her when I wake her up, which is the last thing I do before we go out and get in the truck and head for
the Biscuit Kitchen. It’s early, foggy and misty all over Raleigh. The arc lights are still on in Cameron Village when we drive by there, they make a misty pink glow in the fog, like fairyland. We drive past NC State, we drive past St. Marys.

  We get to Biscuit Kitchen and pull up to the speaker and Kim orders a Coke and a sausage biscuit. I order two biscuits with steak and onions and one ham biscuit and a big Sprite. I won’t get a lunch break at Copy Quick until 1:30, don’t ask me why, so I have to eat a lot. Also, I am still growing. Anyway, we’ve ordered these biscuits and we’re just sitting there in the truck waiting for our turn to drive to the little window and get them. We are listening to this REM tape but all of a sudden Kim reaches out and ejects it. Kim is not what you call a morning person. I have got the hang of this now, I try not to say too much, just let her slide into the day.

  “I had a dream about you last night,” Kim says.

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “Just what was I doing in this dream?” I ask. I reach over and feel of her.

  Kim pushes my hand away but I can tell she likes it, she is smiling at me. “Something like that,” she says. Kim is smiling very sexy at me, she looks great this morning.

  I say “Hey!” all of a sudden because now I remember my dream, which I would not of remembered if Kim hadn’t said that. Gran-Gran always said if you don’t tell your dreams you will lose them, and I reckon I was about to do that, lose the dream I mean. But now I get upset, because it was an awful dream. I remember it all now. I’m looking at Kim. The dream comes clear as day. “I dreamed we were in a motel someplace, you and me,” I tell her, “and this guy came in.”

  “What guy?” Kim asks. She looks very interested in my dream.

  “That’s the weird part,” I tell her. “I don’t know the guy. I mean, I can’t place him. I think I’ve seen him around, though. He looked kind of familiar.”

  “What does he look like?” Kim asks.

  “Well, he’s kind of a big guy,” I tell her, “with long hair and a moustache. . . .”

  “What color hair?” she interrupts me.

  “Black,” I say. “Definitely black. He looks like he might be part Indian or something, you know?”

  Kim nods. She is looking at me the way she looks at TV. “Then what happened?” she asks.

  “Hey.” I start laughing. “Hey! This is my dream,” I remind her. But the next part of the dream is hard to tell. “Well, what happens next is, this guy comes in the motel room, like I told you. We aren’t doing anything in particular. We’re just sitting there in this motel room.”

  “What’s he wearing? The guy, I mean.”

  “A suit,” I say. It all comes back to me like it was happening now. “Anyway he’s got on this suit and he’s a little bit older than we are, and for some reason, like I said, I kind of know him, it’s like maybe I did a landscaping job for him or something, and so I say, ‘Let me introduce you to my wife.’”

  This is the bad part.

  “But he says, ‘We’ve already met.’ Then he comes over and throws you down on the bed and starts kissing you like crazy.”

  “What?” Now Kim is staring at me in that skin-busting way I was telling you about before. Slowly, a big grin comes over her face and her cheeks turn red underneath her tan, like she’s actually been caught in bed with this guy, like she is embarrassed.

  Behind us in the line of cars, all these people start blowing their horns. So I throw the truck in gear and cruise up to the window and we get our biscuits and our drinks. All of this costs $7.41. Sun is breaking through the fog by the time I pull back out on Wade Avenue. While I’m driving up Wade Avenue I look over at Kim, her hair is all clean and shiny in the sunlight. Actually, she has got a lot of blond hairs and red hairs mixed in with the brown. She’s eating her biscuit in tiny little bites. And she is still blushing, which makes me mad.

  “Listen, Kim,” I say. “You didn’t do anything. It wasn’t even your dream. It was my dream, remember?” Kim can tell I am getting upset now, so she slides over and gives me a big sexy kiss on the neck and puts her hand on my leg. “You silly,” she says. We ride up Wade Avenue like that. I pull over in front of Tanfastic, and Kim gives me another kiss before she gets out of the truck. But I don’t know. I still think she thinks it’s her dream, and I still feel weird about it.

  The Interpretation of Dreams

  For Ann Moss

  Melanie stands dreaming against the open door, the entrance to Linens N’ Things in the outlet mall in Burlington, North Carolina. It’s raining. Melanie loves how the rain sounds drumming down on the big skylight at the center of the mall right over The Potted Plant and Orange Julius, it sounds like a million horses running fast, like a stampede in a western movie. She loves movies, she loves Clint Eastwood, now what if he came in the outlet mall right now and walked over to her and said, Excuse me, ma’am, I need a king-size bedspread in a western decor? She’d say, Why yes, come this way, sir, I’ve got exactly what you need. Only the trouble is that he won’t come in probably, or any other real man either, men don’t come to outlets unless of course they happen to work there, especially not to Linens N’ Things, which is where Melanie works.

  She’s between men. Stan left Tuesday for a new job at WRDU in Raleigh, which has a soft country format. Stan the Man, they called him on the radio, what a joke. Melanie and him didn’t really get along that good anyway, it was mostly a mistake caused by too many piña coladas. Stan turned out to be real self-centered like most media personalities, at least in Melanie’s experience and she has known several. Like sometimes you’ll have a boyfriend for a while and then you’ll go out with his buddies after that, which was true of her and the guys at WHIT. All of their voices were so loud, plus they were kind of neurotic which is often true of artistic types. Melanie would like to steer clear of artistic types now and find a person who is basically down-to-earth, which she is.

  Or maybe a healthy sports-minded man like Bobby of Bobby’s Sport which is just opening up now in the corner space vacated by Pottery World. Mr. Slemp didn’t have any heart for business after his wife died, they all watched her waste away before their very eyes, Mrs. Slemp, but she kept coming into Pottery World every day until the very last, when she had to go in the hospital. Mrs. Slemp was only forty-six years old. It was tragic, what a nice long marriage the Slemps had, they’d been at the outlet mall ever since it opened.

  This is what Melanie wants, a sweet regular man she can watch TV with, and not have to put on her makeup or kick up her heels. A solid sports-minded man to be a role model for her son Sean, Lord knows he could use one even though he is almost grown up now and probably it’s too late anyway.

  Melanie sighs, nibbling a piece of her long red hair. Her sister says she’s too old (thirty-seven) to wear it long, that a woman should cut her hair by age thirty at least. But men like it long. Melanie knows this. Long hair is sexy, short hair is not. Mr. Rolette, her boss, keeps calling to her but she doesn’t answer him back, she’s going to act like she doesn’t hear, it’s still early, and speaking of husbands, she’s had three.

  Some people might not count the first one since it was annulled, so it was like it never happened at all, like an abortion. She’s had some of those too. But he was so sweet, her first husband. After she lost him she tried to be philosophical and think, Well, I was lucky to have him at all, but this was wrong. The fact is, he almost ruined her for anybody else. She’d been married and annulled by twenty, it was all downhill after that, or so it seems on some days like today when it’s raining and she’s feeling blue. He was the one she really loved. He was so intelligent. In fact he was in Army Intelligence that summer she met him, she was waiting tables at Wrightsville Beach, she’d just graduated from high school and he was a year out of college but real young, since he was so intelligent.

  His name was Andrew, called Drew, he had gone to school up North. He was an only child whose parents lived in Greenwich, Connec
ticut, where the clocks are. Melanie never met his mother and she met his father only once, when he came down to Fayetteville to get them annulled. Drew’s father looked like the guy on Masterpiece Theatre. He gave her a thousand dollars and kissed her on the cheek and said, “No harm done.” This was not exactly true. Because never again did Melanie come across a boy who was so intelligent or could make her laugh so hard. He was going to be a professor, probably he’s one now at some university up North, only Melanie doesn’t know this for sure because his parents’ phone is no longer listed in Greenwich. Sometimes over the years when she’s been drinking, she’s tried to call. Her second husband was nothing but a flash in the pan but at least she got Sean out of that one. Sean is the best thing that has ever happened in Melanie’s life so far. And her third husband, Gary Rasnake, was cute but he was trouble from the word go, he wouldn’t work and all he wanted to do was play, he loved equipment and gadgets for their own sake such as Weed-Eaters and remote-control toy airplanes and guns and cars and VCRs. They had the first VCR in Burlington, when nobody else had ever heard of them. A man ahead of his time.

  “I’m coming,” Melanie yells to Mr. Rolette. It’s true she ought to go back in there now, Mr. Rolette’s been nervous lately and the mall is filling up, it’s getting real busy, everybody comes to the mall when it rains. The worst thing Gary Rasnake did was charge all those things on Melanie’s Visa card and then leave town. She stopped payment of course, but still. Later, she found out that he’d done this before at least twice, once in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and once in Spartanburg, South Carolina. But it wasn’t all bad she guessed, they had some fun too even if she can’t remember what they did exactly, it seems like such a long time ago.

  And now she’s getting old, too old to have long hair. It’s time for another husband. The boyfriends she’s had since Gary have not seemed like husband material, or else they just took off. Melanie is basically domestic, which is why she enjoys working at Linens N’ Things. “Coming,” she calls.