by Lee Smith
So she was right there the first time Raymond Stewart—wearing a top hat, white gloves, white boots, and an electric-blue sequined suit which, it was rumored, he had designed himself—came strutting and dancing across the field, leading the band like a professional. Nobody ever saw anything like it! He’d strut, spin, toss his baton so high it seemed lost in the stars, then leap up to catch it and land in a split. Sharon remembered remarking to Leonard once, at a game, that she could hardly connect this Raymond Stewart, the drum major—wheeling like a dervish across the field below them—with that funny little guy who had been, she thought, in her English class. That little guy who wore such high pants. “Well,” Leonard had said then, after some deliberation—and Leonard was no dummy—“well, maybe it just took him a while to find the right clothes.”
Raymond had a special routine he did while the band played “Blue Suede Shoes” and formed itself into a giant shoe on the field. Everybody in the band had showed more spunk and rhythm then, Sharon thought, than any of them had ever shown before—or since, for that matter. Under Raymond’s leadership, the band won two AAA number-one championships, an all-time record for Roxboro High. They even went to play at the Apple Blossom Festival the year the governor’s daughter was crowned queen, all because of Raymond Stewart.
And just what had Raymond done since? After his father’s suicide, which must have happened around the end of his senior year, he had turned “nervous” for a while. He had gone to work at Stewart’s Pharmacy and had continued to live with his mother in their big old nubby green concrete house on Sunset Street. Everybody said something should be done about the house, the shameful way Raymond Stewart had let it run down. Since the leaves had not been raked for years and years, all the grass had died—that carefully tended long sloping lawn which used to be Paul Stewart’s pride and joy back in the days when he walked to work every morning in his gleaming white pharmacist’s jacket with a flower in his buttonhole, speaking to everybody. Paint was peeling from the dark green shutters now, and some of them hung at crazy angles. The hedge had grown halfway up the windows. The side porch was completely engulfed in wisteria, with vines as thick as your arm. It was just a shame. Of course Raymond Stewart wouldn’t notice anything like that, or think about raking leaves . . . and his mother!
Miss Suetta was as crazy as a coot. Raymond hired somebody to stay with her all the time. The Stewarts had plenty of money, of course, but Miss Suetta thought she was dirt poor. She’d sneak off from her companion, and hitchhike to town and go into stores and pick out things, and then cry and say she didn’t have any money. So the salespeople would charge whatever it was to Raymond, and then they’d call him to come and get her and drive her home. Sharon had been hearing stories about Miss Suetta Stewart for years and years.
But about Raymond—what else? Every Sunday, he played the organ at the First Methodist Church, in a stirring and dramatic way. The whole choir, including Sharon’s Aunt Marge, was completely devoted to him. They all called him Ramón. And he had had his picture in the paper last year for helping to organize the Shady Mountain Players, an amateur theatrical group which so far had put on only one show, about a big rabbit. Sharon saw that, but she couldn’t remember if Raymond had had a part in it or not. Mainly you thought of Raymond in connection with weddings—everybody consulted Raymond about wedding plans—or interior decoration. Several of Sharon’s friends had hired him, in fact. What he did was help you pick your colors through your astral sign. He didn’t order anything for you, he just advised. In fact, come to think of it, Sharon herself had ordered some new business cards from Raymond Stewart several years ago, for Leonard when he got his promotion. Gray stock with maroon lettering, which Leonard hadn’t liked. Leonard said they looked gay. When he found out where she got them, he said it figured, because Raymond Stewart was probably gay too. Sharon smiled at this memory now, driving home. How funny to find that she knew so much about him, after all! How funny that he’d been right here all along—that you could live in the same town with somebody all these years and just simply never notice them, never think of them once as a person. This idea made Sharon feel so weird she wished she’d never thought it up in the first place.
Then she pulled into her driveway and there was Margaret playing with the hose, pointing it down to drill holes in the soft black dirt of the flower bed. “Stop it! You stop it right now!” Sharon jerked her daughter’s little shoulder much harder than she meant to, grabbing the hose.
Later, after Margaret had run in the house yelling and Sharon had turned off the water, she stood out in the heat with the dripping hose and stared, just stared, at the row of little pines that Leonard had planted all along the back of their property, noticing for the first time how much they had grown since he set them out there six years before, when they’d built the house. The pines were big now, as symmetrical as Christmas trees, their green needles glistening in the sun. Sharon thought she might try to draw them. Then she burst into tears, and when Raymond Stewart came by her house in early September to deliver the PTA’s five hundred recipe booklets, she went to bed with him.
* * *
Raymond was an ardent, imaginative lover. Sometimes he brought her some candy from the pharmacy. Sometimes he brought flowers. Once he brought her a butterfly, still alive, and kissed her on the mouth when she let it go. Sometimes he dressed up for her: He’d wear one of his father’s pin-striped suits, or a Panama hat and army-green Bermuda shorts with eight pockets, or a dashiki and sandals, or mechanic’s coveralls with “Mike” stitched on the pocket, or jeans and a Jack Daniel’s cap. “Honestly!” Sharon would say. Because Raymond thought she was beautiful, she came to like her large soft body. She loved the way he made everything seem so special, she loved the way he talked—his high-pitched zany laugh—and how he stroked her tumbling hair. He was endlessly fascinated by how she spent her day, by all the dumb details of her life.
Oh, but there was no time, it seemed, at first, and no place to go—two hours once a week at Sharon’s, once Margaret had been deposited at Mother’s Morning Out—or late afternoon in the creepy old Stewart house, after the boys came home from school to watch Margaret, while Miss Suetta went to group therapy at the Senior Citizens’ Center, with her companion. Miss Suetta hated both group therapy and her companion. Sharon lay giggling in Raymond’s four-poster bed on these occasions, aware that if she’d ever acted so silly in her own house, Leonard would have sent her packing years ago. But Raymond gave her scuppernong wine in little green-stemmed crystal glasses. The strong autumn sun came slanting across his bed. The wine was sweet. Raymond was blind as a bat without his glasses. Oh, she could have stayed there forever, covering his whole little face, his whole body with kisses.
Raymond had a way of framing things with words that made them special. He gave events a title. For their affair, he had adopted a kind of wise-guy voice and a way of talking out of the side of his mouth, like somebody in The Godfather. “Me and my baby sip scuppernong wine,” he’d say—to nobody—rolling his eyes. Or, “Me and my baby take in a show,” when once they actually did this, the following summer when Sharon’s kids spent the night with her mother and Leonard went to the National Guard. Raymond picked an arty movie for them to see, named The Night of the Shooting Stars, and they drove over to Greenville together to see it after meeting in a 7-Eleven at the city limits, where Sharon left her car. The Night of the Shooting Stars turned out to be very weird in Sharon’s opinion and not anything you would really want to make a movie about. But Raymond thought it was great. Later, on the way back, he drove down a dirt road off the highway and parked in the warm rustling woods.
“Me and my baby make out!” Raymond crowed, pulling her into his arms. Oh, it was crazy!
And it got worse. They grew greedier and greedier. Several times, Raymond had just left by the back door when Leonard came in at the front. Several times, going or coming, Sharon encountered Raymond’s mother, who never seemed to notice until th
e day Sharon picked her up hitchhiking downtown and drove her back to the house on Sunset Street. Just before Miss Suetta went in the front door, she stopped dead in her tracks and turned to point a long skinny finger back at Sharon. “Just who is this woman?” she asked loudly. And then her companion came and thanked Sharon and guided Miss Suetta inside.
By this time, of course, Sharon called him Ramón.
* * *
After two years, he finally talked her into going to a motel, the new Ramada Inn in Greenville. Built on a grander scale than anything else in the county, this Ramada Inn was really more like a hotel, he told her, promising saunas and a sunken bar and an indoor pool and Nautilus equipment. “You know I wouldn’t do any of that,” said Sharon. Leonard had to go out of town on a selling trip anyway—Leonard can sell or trade anything, which is what he does for the coal company he works for. For instance, he will trade a piece of land for a warehouse, or a rear-end loader for a computer. Sharon doesn’t know exactly what Leonard does. But he was out of town, so she let Alister and Leonard Lee spend the night with their friends and asked her mother to keep Margaret. “Why?” her mother had asked. “Well, I’ve been spotting between my periods,” Sharon said smoothly, “and Dr. King wants me to go over to Greenville for some tests.” She could lie like a rug! But before Sharon saw Raymond with new eyes, she had never lied in her whole life. Sharon felt wonderful and terrible, checking into the Ramada Inn with Raymond as Mr. and Mrs. John Deere. The clerk didn’t bat an eye.
This Ramada was as fancy, as imposing as advertised. Their room was actually a suite, with a color TV and the promised sunken tub, and a king-size bed under a tufted velvet spread and a big brass lamp as large as Margaret. Sharon stifled a sob. She was feeling edgy and kind of blue. It was one thing to find an hour here and an hour there, but another thing to do this. “All I want for Christmas is to sleep with you all night long,” Raymond had said. Sharon wanted this too. But she hadn’t thought it would be so hard. She looked around the room. “How much did this cost?” she asked. “Oh, not much. Anyway, I’ve got plenty of money,” Raymond said airily, and Sharon stared at him. This was true, but she always forgot it.
Raymond went out for ice and came back and made two big blue drinks out of rum and a bottled mix. The drinks looked like Windex. “Me and my baby go Hawaiian,” Raymond said gravely, clicking his glass against hers. Then they got drunk and had a wonderful time. The next morning Sharon was terrified of seeing somebody she knew, but it turned out that nobody at all was around. Nobody. Raymond joked about this as they walked down the long pale corridor. He made his voice into a Rod Serling Twilight Zone voice. “They think they’re checking out of . . . the ghost motel,” he said.
Then Sharon imagined that they had really died in a wreck on the way to the motel, only they didn’t know it. When they turned a corner and saw themselves reflected in a mirror in the lobby, she screamed.
“She screams, but no one can hear her in . . . the ghost motel,” said Raymond. He carried his clothes in a laundry bag.
“No, hush, I mean it,” Sharon said.
She looked in the mirror while Raymond paid the bill, and it seemed to her then that she was wavy and insubstantial, and that Raymond, when he came up behind her, was nothing but air. They held hands tightly and didn’t talk, all the way back to the 7-Eleven where Sharon had parked her car.
* * *
And now, Raymond is all excited about the eclipse. He’s been talking about it for weeks. He’s just like a kid. Sharon’s real kids, Leonard Lee and Alister and Margaret, have been studying eclipses at school, but they couldn’t care less.
“I want to be with you, baby, to view the eclipse.” Raymond has said this to Sharon again and again. He has made them both little contraptions out of cardboard, with peepholes, so they won’t burn their retinas. Luckily, the eclipse is set for one-thirty on a Tuesday afternoon, so the children are at school. Leonard is at work.
Raymond arrives promptly at one, dressed in his father’s white pharmacist’s jacket. “I thought I ought to look scientific,” he says, twirling around in Sharon’s kitchen to give her the full effect. His high giggle ricochets off the kitchen cabinets. He has brought a bottle of pink champagne. He pops the cork with a flourish and offers her a glass. Which Sharon accepts gladly because in truth she’s not feeling so good—it’s funny how that lie she told her mother a couple of months ago seems to be coming true. Probably her uterus is just falling apart. The truth is, she’s getting old—sometimes she feels just ancient, a hundred years older than Raymond.
Sharon sips the champagne slowly while Raymond opens all of her kitchen cabinets and pokes around inside them.
“What are you looking for?” she finally asks.
“Why—nothing!” When Raymond smiles, his face breaks into crinkles all over. He clasps her forcefully. “I like to see where you keep things,” he says. “You’re an endless mystery to me, baby.” He kisses her, then pulls out a pocket watch she’s never seen before. Perhaps he bought it just for the eclipse. “One-twelve,” he says. “Come on, you heavenly body you. It’s time to go outside.”
In spite of herself, Sharon has gotten excited too. They take plastic lawn chairs and sit down right in the middle of the backyard, near the basketball goal but well away from the pines, where they can get the most open view. It’s a cloudless day in early March. Sharon’s daffodils are blooming. She has thought this all through ahead of time: The only neighbor with a view of her backyard, Mrs. Hodges, is gone all day. Raymond refills his glass with champagne. Sharon’s lettuce is coming up, she notices, in crinkly green waves at the end of the garden. But Raymond is telling her what will happen next, lecturing her in a deep scientific voice which makes him sound exactly like the guy on Wild Kingdom: “When the moon passes directly between the earth and the sun so that its shadow falls upon the earth, there’s a solar eclipse, visible from the part of the earth’s surface on which the shadow lies. So it’s the shadow of the moon which will pass across us.”
I don’t care! Sharon nearly screams it. All I want, she thinks, honey, all I ever want is you. Raymond sits stiffly upright in her plastic lawn chair, his head leaning to the side in a practiced, casual manner, lecturing about the umbra and penumbra. He has smoothed his spiky blond hair down for this occasion and it gleams in the early spring sun.
“A total solar eclipse occurs only once in every four hundred years in any one place. Actually this won’t be a total eclipse, not where we are. If we’d driven over to Greensboro, we would have been right in the center of it.” For a minute, his face falls. “Maybe we should have done that.”
“Oh, no,” Sharon assures him. “I think this is just fine.” She sips her champagne while Raymond shows her how to look through the little box in order to see the eclipse. Raymond consults his watch—one-fifteen. Mrs. Hodges’s golden retriever, Ralph, starts barking.
“Dogs will bark,” Raymond intones. “Animals will go to bed. Pregnant women will have their babies. Birds will cease to twitter.”
“Twitter?” Sharon says. “Well, they sure are twittering now.” Sharon has a lot of birds because of the bird feeder Alister made in Shop II.
“Trust me. It’s coming,” says Raymond.
While Sharon and Raymond sit in her backyard with their boxes on their knees, waiting, Sharon has a sudden awful view of them from somewhere else, a view of how they must look, doing this, drinking champagne. It’s so wild! Ralph barks and the birds twitter, and then, just as Raymond promised, they cease. Ralph ceases too. Raymond squeezes Sharon’s hand. A hush falls, a shadow falls, the very air seems to thicken suddenly, to darken around them, but still it’s not dark. It’s the weirdest thing Sharon has ever seen. It’s like it’s getting colder too, all of a sudden. She bets the temperature has dropped at least ten degrees. “Oh, baby! Oh, honey!” Raymond says. Through the peephole in her cardboard box, Sharon sees the moon, a dark object moving across the sun’
s face and shutting more and more of its bright surface from view, and then it’s really twilight.
“Me and my baby view the eclipse,” says Raymond.
Sharon starts crying.
The sun is nothing now but a crazy shining crescent, a ghost sun. Funny shadows run all over everything—all over Sharon’s garden, her house, her pine trees, the basketball goal, all over Raymond. His white jacket seems alive, dimly rippling. Sharon feels exactly like somebody big is walking on her grave. Then the shadows are gone, and it’s nearly dark. Sharon can see stars. Raymond kisses her, and then the eclipse is over.
“It was just like they said it would be!” he says. “Just exactly!” He’s very excited. Then they go to bed, and when Margaret comes home from school he’s still there, in the hall bathroom.
“Hi, honey,” says Sharon, who ran quickly into the kitchen when she first heard Margaret, so as to appear busy. Sharon moves things around in the refrigerator.
“Who’s that?” Margaret drops her knapsack and points straight at Raymond, who has chosen just this moment to come out of the bathroom waving Sharon’s new Dustbuster. Margaret is a skinny, freckled little girl who’s mostly serious. Now she’s in first grade.
“What’s this?” Raymond waves the Dustbuster. He’s delighted by gadgets, but whenever he buys one, it breaks.
“I’ll show you,” Margaret says. She demonstrates the Dustbuster while Raymond buttons his daddy’s white pharmacy jacket.
“See?” Margaret says gravely.
“That’s amazing,” Raymond says.
Sharon, watching them, thinks she will die. But Raymond leaves before the boys get home, and Margaret doesn’t mention him until the next afternoon. “He was nice,” Margaret says them.
“Who, honey?” Sharon is frying chicken.
“That man who was here. Who was he?” Margaret asks again.