And then there's Sherry, and Darlene, and Gene Junior, of course, dead in the war.
"We're just looking," said the husband when they came in the first time. It was a Friday; Friday's the day the big truck comes and I recall the floor being crowded with hampers of new merchandise. I had met them at the glass doors up front. When a couple comes in, you hustle to get there ahead of the other salesmen.
"Look all you want," I said and fell into pace behind them. "My name's Gene. Gene Harris. Give a yell if I can be of help."
She gave me a nod, but he didn't. They sauntered up the center aisle past the appliances washers and stoves gleaming white and copper and harvest gold they paused for a moment, glancing at each other, and then she pulled him into Furniture.
"We've got a big sale on," I said.
"That so," said the man coldly, but the woman smiled for me, showing off a big gold tooth sparkling right up front.
"Care for some coffee?" I asked. If you can get them holding onto something then nine times out of ten they're yours for good.
"No, thanks," he said, trying to pretend I wasn't there. The woman smiled again though. She was young, very early twenties at best, with the kind of skin that brings to mind rich dairy products such as buttermilk. I don't mean to be cruel, but this woman was large, more than overweight. Shoulders like huge Christmas hams, forearms like Popeye the Sailor's and a pair of breasts so large she could have fed the whole state of Texas.
"How's about you, ma'am. A cup?"
"Well . . . " she began but quickly hushed herself and the husband gave me a glare the likes of which I hadn't seen in a while. So I excused myself and slinked off to the sales counter, sort of a corral at the center of the store, where I waited, watching those people. They'd linger here and there, inspect a chair or a coffee table, move together, discuss it. It was apparent they were country types. He was lean, wiry like a fighting cock, and at least ten years older than his wife I'd say by the way he held himself and the fact that his face had obviously begun the downward slide of real maturity. He was so short it seemed his wife spoke into a hole in his blue work cap.
Darlene's chair scraped against the floor and I felt her next to me across the counter. Darlene was the head office girl back then, a pretty, puffed-up, made-up redhead with more pearly teeth than a mattress has springs. She took payments, kept the books, actually ran the store in all practical matters.
"Looks like you got one there," she said, eyeing the people as they meandered through the French provincial and into the Early American. We had a bright new Early American suite from Bassett on the floor and I was hoping they'd stop and take a seat, bounce on the cushions, get a feel. We both watched.
"They're nibbling, sure enough," Darlene said
"I don't know," I said. "I think they're lookers."
"Naw, she's wanting. I can tell."
"How's that?"
"When you're that young, you're always wanting."
Darlene was smiling at me in her appealing way. We were having a time together just then, and once or twice a week I'd follow her home at the end of the day, and we went out on a regular basis for lunch or a cup down at the drug store.
"What's it like being that young, I mean. You remember?"
She gave me a look teasing with insult and slapped my arm.
"You know I didn't mean anything," I said.
"Take it easy." Her voice was husky too many Chesterfields.
"Well, then tell me," I said. "What's it like?"
"Good, mostly. But not always. You're always wanting. Look at her. She wants it so bad it's dripping from her eyes."
I looked but I couldn't see it.
"Just what is it she wants?"
"Besides furniture, you mean?"
"Yeah, that's what I mean, Miss Psychology Professor."
"Now that I don't know," she said, twisting up her eyebrows. "Love, or a child maybe . . . who knows what anybody really wants."
We were quiet for a while, both of us thinking, then I said, sort of whimsical, "Would you want to be that young again?"
"Sure, I'd want to be young again."
"Even with all the longing and the wanting?"
"Even with that, sure. Wouldn't you?"
"Even with the acne and everything stirred up all the time?"
"Sure," she said. "What's got into you?"
I didn't answer. I said, "And what would you do different?"
She grinned, showing lots of teeth, showing off her heart.
"I'd marry you," she said. Then she slapped my arm again and laughed. She could be a hard woman, had to be hard to get by in a life that had left behind two husbands and a boyfriend that knuckled the fire out of her one night and later went to jail for it. But all of that was long ago and there were times when I really felt for Darlene. There were times when I loved Darlene.
"How's about coffee later?" I said and her red-painted lips crested into a smile.
Given what happened, I couldn't get my new "customers" off my mind. So at supper that night I told Sherry, my wife, all about those people, the McCarthy's. I told her how I had sashayed back over toward them, calling out above the lamp shades, "That couch fits you just like a new hat," and how they both stood up then, acting flustered like they'd been caught shoplifting, acting like for some reason they weren't good enough to sit on our furniture.
"Ready to take it home?" I said.
The man snapped, "No no," but his wife, running her eyes over the pretty fabric, cooed to herself and to me, "Sure is nice, comfortable too," and he gave her a hard look, a cold look. I told Sherry how the woman cowered then, if you can say that a woman of that size could ever really cower, and how the husband more or less strutted back and forth with his hands in his pockets like he was thinking too much about something, and how he suddenly stopped, giving me the same hard cold look he'd given his wife a moment before. I mentioned how he'd done an about-face then as sharply as a soldier in formation and how he marched toward the front, weaving through the furniture and the appliances until he placed his hand on the door. That's when he glanced back, expectant, as if his wife were a dog who came on that kind of simple, stern command.
"He likes to take his time about such things," the wife said. And I'd swear her lashes were batting back tears.
"Yes, ma'am," I said.
"And we've had a death in the family, you see."
"Yes, ma'am," I said, trying to be gentle.
"Well," said the wife, "I better go," and she started off after her husband. "We may be back," she called to me. Smiling, she showed me that gold tooth for just an instant.
I told Sherry what the woman had said and how the husband had given the wife a heap of nasty grief when she got to him at the door, and how he grabbed her arm as if she were a naughty child and spoke right into her chin while he pulled her by the elbow down to his level. I explained how he yanked her out the door and how she stumbled and how her hand came up to her mouth, the backs of her knuckles just barely touching those heavy soft lips of hers as if she were gasping, as if she'd just witnessed some horrible accident in the street.
Darlene and I and everyone else watched then as the husband dragged his wife by the arm out to a pickup waiting in the lot. And we watched even as the truck pulled away, coughing out black smoke so thick that anybody could see the man needed a ring job.
I said, "Are you sure you'd want to be that young again?"
Darlene just grinned and lit up a Chesterfield.
I didn't tell Sherry about my conversation with Darlene I never mentioned one to the other but I did tell her about the strange feeling I'd had the rest of the day after those people left the store and how I hoped they wouldn't come back.
"They're probably an unhealthy credit risk anyway," she said, mopping up the last of her gravy with her home-made bread.
I got whimsical again. "Imagine being that young."
She swallowed and said, "No way."
"How's that?"
"Not for me," she
said, leaning back and reaching for a Winston. "I'm quite comfortable with the ripe old age of forty-five. All's I want now is for Gene Junior to get himself home from the war, find himself a pretty wife and fill up the house with grandkids. It's a powerful longing in me. I can't wait to help 'em do up their house."
I said, "You wouldn't want to be a sweet twenty-one again?"
She looked at me. "You can have it."
"Even with all the energy you had?"
"Even with all the energy."
"Even with all the good times?"
"What good times?"
This caught me short, but we smiled at each other.
I said, "We had some good times, didn't we?"
"If we did," she said, "I sure can't remember any of them."
"And just what do you remember, Ms. Hardass Housewife?"
Her sage look came on then, mouth lifting slightly at the edges, eyes going to wrinkled slits. She exhaled and a lungful of bluish smoke drifted over the table in my direction. She said, "I remember wondering for three hellish years if you'd ever come back from your war. And then when you did all's I remember is a lot of screaming and slapping and the slamming of doors. And I remember going home to Mother and you coming in drunk and mean late at night and acting like you wanted to beat hell out of me and Mama having to put herself between us to keep you from doing it." Her eyebrows rose, dropped. "That's what I remember."
"But it changed, of course," I said. "Didn't it change?"
She shrugged. Then she got up and started clearing the table, adjusting the Winston with her teeth so that it poked out of her unpainted lips at an angle. She moved around our old Dixieland dinette with ease, a kind of grace that had developed in her only within the past few years. I watched her move, heard the faint rustle of material across her hips, a mother's hips.
I said, "It wasn't all bad, was it, Sherry?"
She grinned through the smoke, glanced at me, took a long drag on the Winston. "We had our moments, I guess," she said.
Sherry went into the kitchen, her arms heavy with dishes, and then her voice low, lazy, an Atlanta girl's voice came back through the swinging door: "You want coffee with your pie?"
It was about mid-morning that Saturday when Darlene called my name over the loudspeaker. A customer was waiting for me at the corral. I saw the big woman as soon as I turned the corner into the center aisle. She was standing at the counter, solemn as marble, gazing at the TVs flashing against the far wall. Then I saw her husband, strutting among the ranges and washers up front.
"When d'you want it delivered?" I said, coming up behind her. She showed me that tooth in a startled smile, but then her eyes found something on the floor that held them there and wouldn't let them rise. Embarrassment is what it was, and I thought about how brave she had to be to come back into a place where just the day before a dozen people had seen her humiliated.
"Mr. Harris," she began but I interrupted: "Call me Gene."
"Gene, then," she said. "My husband wants to talk to you."
Together we walked toward the front of the store and as the heels of my wing tips smacked the linoleum I could feel something deep within me banking up against my guts. I didn't appreciate the way he'd sent his nice wife like a servant to fetch me and I didn't like the thrown-back angle of his shoulders which revealed an attitude of the sort that told the world it owed him something he shouldn't have to pay for like the rest of us. I'm no Puritan and I know that each of us has to make his way in life as best he can, but the thought of deadbeats and bullies really boils my blood, so that by the time we reached her husband I was angry, and that's no way for a salesman to be.
"Lookie here," he said, scratching at the floor with a boot. His jaw was gray with stubble. "We need furniture. She wants some."
"Yessir," I said. "I figured as much."
"And we got to have it on credit." He made a sound through his nose like a horse, like he was disgusted.
So she threw in, "We got fifty we can give you right away, Mr. Harris, and the truck's parked just out front."
"Hush, Julie Ann," he said. "Let me handle this." She cowered again and I could feel the heat of anger moving across my belly and up my chest. He continued, "Like she said, we got fifty to give you today and we'll pay out the rest ten dollars a month. I just need some help loading it on the truck."
I laughed then, and felt good for it. I told him that wasn't how it worked, that he'd have to fill out a credit application and that the application would have to be checked for accuracy and that we'd need to know some of their history and that the manager would decide how much down payment we'd require and what the payments would be. I mentioned interest rates and the credit bureau and how we had to protect ourselves against risk as best we could, but that I was sure we could make a deal satisfactory to both parties. By the time I was finished he was so red in the face I thought he was going to start bleeding at the nose. He gave his wife that hard cold look again and then he turned on me.
He said, "Just what in hell is this, mister?"
"Mr. McCarthy, that's the way it's done."
He looked at his wife again, a mean glare, and I hated the look. "Had to push it, didn't you, Julie Ann. You really want them to know all about me? Do you?"
She tried to speak, but he raised his hand as if to smack her so that I had to say, "Here, now!" and step between them.
"He don't hit me, Mr. Harris, he just gets frazzled sometimes since the boy passed on."
"Yes, ma'am, I can see that."
"Shut up," he said to her. "L. Junior'd still be alive today if you had a lick of sense in your head." And that's when she started crying, a low rumbling noise rolling up out of her deepest gut, whimpering through her nose. He cursed then and squeezed between us, literally shoved her out of the way, and at the center aisle he looked back. "Come on, gal," he said, but he didn't wait. He was outside before she could get her body moving. The wife followed him out with her eyes, and here's the strange thing: there was a look of love in her face, of love and regret and harsh wisdom, a look that I didn't understand then.
"Ain't there no way, Mr. Harris?" the wife whimpered.
"Not without proper credit, ma'am."
She nodded her head and dug in the pocket of her house dress for a hanky or a tissue but came up empty ran a sleeve across her nose. Like a lake after a squall, she calmed quickly then.
"He's not always like this, Mr. Harris," she said. "Only since L. Junior died and he started blaming me for it. And I'm just sure as I can be that if we could fix up our place, make it into a real home, you know, everything would get back to normal."
"Yes, ma'am, I know what you mean."
"That was a fine time, Mr. Harris, a fine time. Until he. He weren't even two year old when he fell in the tank. I was hanging up wash, you see, and not paying attention." She wanted to say this to someone, someone like me, I think, who helped people settle in. "I'm sorry you had to see this," she went on. "He's a good man mostly who's had trouble in his life, that's all."
"Yes, ma'am," I said, thinking I was ready for a coffee break with Darlene. I felt like I had failed in a duty. I needed a cup, and I knew Darlene would want to hear everything these people had said. I thought about the forgiving smells of coffee and toast that would fill our noses when we walked into Randolph's Drugstore and took our seats at the end of the counter.
"You're a real nice man, Mr. Harris," she said, showing me that gold tooth. "And a good salesman too."
"Not good enough, I guess."
"Maybe we'll be back," she said and pushed open the door.
I remember that Saturday every year about now, as it just happened to be the day that Sherry received a telegram informing us that Gene Junior was Missing In Action in Vietnam. It was odd, I know, an eerie and unlikely coincidence, but the memory grabs whatever advantage comes along, lest we forget. And there was this too: for several days I'd been having this feeling that kept me awake at night and distracted during the day; it had kept my bowels distu
rbed and my head kind of light; and I thought it had something to do with Darlene, that I was wanting to start over somehow with her and her appealing ways. Perhaps I just wanted to be young again, not that it's possible, but we all have imaginations and memories and isn't the idea of youth just as real as youth itself? Well now I know: this was only part of it, the weariness, the distraction.
I left work early that day, soon after Sherry called to tell me the news and I had settled up a morning's worth of sales and had informed the store manager, Mr. Gentry, and Darlene of course that sorrow and the hurt of living had just struck me in a way I had never thought possible. All together it took maybe two hours, including the drive on the freeway, and when I got home the first thing I noticed after giving Sherry a hug and telling her "it'll be all right" was that she had rearranged the furniture in the living room. You can do a lot in two hours. The love seat had traded places with the club chairs. The television was in a new corner and all the tables had been moved. Our old gray sofa bed angled away from its wall, the worn spot on its arm shining up like an ugly lesion I had never really seen before.
Sherry said, "I'll need help with the couch." She looked at me then as if it were all my fault, as if she understood something that she felt free to let me know about now, and there's been a kind of distance, a quiet between us ever since.
They found Gene's body within a week and his name is now listed on government documents under Killed In Action.
As it turned out I stayed with Sherry and Darlene eventually quit her job. She married Mr. Gentry after his first wife passed away and his children moved out of the house. They seem happy and we chat whenever she stops by the store. Mrs. McCarthy never did come back, but once about a month later I saw their rusty pickup sputter by me on the freeway. In the bed of the truck was an old tattered rocking chair rolling back and forth as if a ghost were putting it to use. I chased them down, honked and waved, and she smiled, but her husband speeded up to get away from me.
In An Arid Land Page 15