“I’ll call my father. He’ll give you a ride home.” Tacker cracked his knuckles.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’ve got to go. Don’t worry. I’ll leave by the back door this time.”
“No. I’ll walk you home. The store can wait. No one comes in this early anyway.” Tacker felt himself at that intoxicating edge of his known world, as he had with Samuel riding motorcycles in the bush.
“I’ll run along.”
“I’m going to get you another bottle of milk.” Tacker flipped through the swinging doors of the lounge and headed to the cooler. The milk was becoming important to him, the white liquid encased in glass, the cardboard cap: BILTMORE DAIRY FARMS. In the lounge Gaines was bent over, still hugging his abdomen.
“Forgot to lock the door,” Tacker said. “I’ll be right with you. Wait here.” He set the milk bottle down on the table. He hadn’t felt this alive since Nigeria, before Fray picked him up that morning, busting everything up, charging him with the massive impropriety of going native. “Let’s go.” He flapped open the doors into the back room. But Gaines was gone. He’d taken the milk and left the hat. Tacker ran out the delivery entrance and around the corner but didn’t see the man anywhere. He almost ran into the street, but a car horn blasted and he swung around like a top. A cool wind pierced the weave of his shirt.
Only when he was back in the store did Tacker see blood on his sleeve. From Gaines’s face? Before the lavatory mirror, he discovered a shard of glass in his hair. Removing it he found another. The splinter sliced his finger. He turned on the water and let the finger bleed into the stream of it until he remembered how stupidly American he was being, wasting water. In the mirror his face looked a little warped. Probably the mirror, but he turned from side to side, examining himself. Was he losing hair at his temples? He walked out of the lavatory into the lounge. “Have I got a clean shirt?” he said out loud. Only he didn’t quite say it. He mouthed it, as if carving himself out of air.
Suddenly he was back at the Hay-Adams Hotel in D.C., the summer before going abroad, he and a dozen other men, recent college grads, being lectured in the purpose of their assignment. Tacker had roomed with a guy from Tennessee named Seth Hudson. Tacker was out of clean shirts. “Here, take one of mine.” Seth had wadded the shirt and thrown it across the room. At dinner the Clintok rep had preached, “Essentially you’re going as nonreligious missionaries. Russia has an army of doctors and engineers and teachers spreading communism.” Later that evening, Tacker and Seth read from the Manual for Behavior that they’d just been handed like a New Testament. Seth couldn’t contain himself. “Says here, Wear Western clothing. Do they think we’re going to show up in a loincloth?” They’d laughed. “Avoid the local food,” he went on. “Always boil your water.” “Do we have to make our own fire?” Tacker had shot back. “No swimming except in chlorinated pools. Hey, get this. No romantic liaisons or physical involvement with the native population.”
Even though he was going to be on the other side of the Sahara, Tacker had imagined an Egyptian woman in a white gown, carrying a lantern and a teapot, walking across the desert, looking back to see if he was following.
“Wow,” Seth interrupted Tacker’s reverie. “This takes the cake. Do not participate in traditional religious practice. No voodoo for you, my friend,” he’d finished, dusting his thumb against his fingers in a sign of magic.
Six weeks after the Clintok training in D.C., Tacker was in Ibadan. He had a week to settle in before the project began, a week “to acclimate.” Samuel, who had picked Tacker up at the airport, introduced him to an open-air market. Raw slabs of meat, covered in flies, hung from the bamboo rafters of stalls. The vegetable stalls were a little better but still the flies were everywhere, landing on the nostrils and lips of sleeping children on mats. But then he spied a yellow pineapple. He bought it on the spot. The seller chopped it up for him, juice spilling out. The taste was sweetly sharp, bearing no resemblance whatever to the pale slices of canned fruit that passed for pineapple in America. His acclimation to Nigeria began with that pineapple. Nigeria, where new banks went up and the old mud structures stayed alongside them, women in bright clothes with babies tied to their backs cooked on open fires right next to a modern department store. Boys hawked bread in the streets while Muslim men opened mats and sent their prayers toward Mecca. Before long it was nothing to see a beautifully dressed girl leave a shoe store and sit on an upturned concrete block enjoying a warm Coca-Cola purchased from a toothless vendor. High-life music floating out of storefronts rendered the world fluid, giving inanimate objects their own life. A mossy water pot set under a tree seemed as alive as the hawk in the air.
After his week of acclimation to Nigeria, the rest of Tacker’s team had shown up, Nigerian men who had been selected for their prowess in what they called “maths.” Including Samuel, there were ten of them. They spent their days on the University College Ibadan, or UCI, campus, reviewing fundamentals of architecture, practicing conceptual drawing, building models, writing up specifications. Tacker was something like a graduate teaching assistant to the Nigerian engineer who had been hired to lead the project. The windows to the classroom where the team did their draftings stayed open all the time.
Tacker had known since knowing that he was smart. He knew through some internalized moral guide—his mother?—that brains did not constitute goodness. Yet he was not wholly free of the notion that, as a receiver who could catch a ball outside the bounds of the playing field and plant his feet inbounds for the touchdown and regularly show up on the honor roll, he was a little more special than your average Joe. In his first two weeks at UCI, his pride met a corrective. One of their group, a squat man with a broad face, named Abraham, could add six-figure numbers in his head before Tacker could put the first number to paper, and when they made a dash for the dining hall one afternoon, he was lucky to be in the middle of the pack. These Nigerian men were like the Greeks, equally trained in mental and physical exertion. Their capacity sharpened Tacker’s desire as nothing ever had. Something mythic seemed afoot in this fermenting African world, something deep beneath the surface of things.
During a break between classes, they strolled down the long lanes of the campus, beneath palm trees and flowering hardwoods, past the Catholic chapel with its decorative cinder-block tower, going as far as the entry to the university where they purchased oranges from young girls practicing to become market women. Their faces spoke a determination Tacker had never seen on a girl, while their thin dresses held the breeze as if the fabric were lined with butterflies. He wondered how the movement of their cloth could be replicated in architecture.
In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the back of his father’s grocery, Tacker Hart put his sliced finger to the mirror and left his print in blood.
Chapter Three
ON A MID-OCTOBER morning in Winston-Salem, Kate Monroe sat cross-legged on the braided rug in her father’s study, her family correspondence spread out around her. Not her parents’ correspondence. That she hadn’t found, though it must be here somewhere, what with her father’s research trips, her mother’s visits home to South Carolina, and before that, their courtship. A variety of other dispatches were abundant: for example, a long, spidery letter from an aunt with pictures of Kate’s cousins who had grown up in India, their father in the foreign service. The photos were by an amateur. Her cousins frowned into bright sun, their heads cut off at the top. In one, her oldest cousin was entirely decapitated. There were other letters: from Kate herself when she was in camp that summer in South Carolina and learned to canoe. The sensations of it came back to her, the sluicing sound of paddles in water, a rhythmic side-to-side, a silver plane of lake ahead. Kate believed her parents’ letters would have a similar but more necessary effect. They would ground her, resolve something.
Kate’s father had been dead nearly a decade, drowned at the North Carolina coast, her mother for a year and a half, after terrible
suffering with pancreatic cancer. Her mother’s death was still too vivid to be bearable if Kate thought about it for long: screaming, an arm slung out. She dwelled on the sweeter parts that had allowed a depth of tenderness she and her mother had not known before the illness.
Kate’s mother had been a runner-up for Miss South Carolina in 1937, the first year of the pageant, the year before she married. Even in her mid-thirties, she looked better in a swimming suit than college girls at the beach. Her hair fell in blond tendrils across cheekbones the color of tea rose. Though petite, she was immensely able, doing all the things Kate wasn’t interested in: sewing, housekeeping, planning complex meals. She would not have a maid in the house though they could easily afford one. At ten, dark-haired, chubby Kate wondered if she was really her mother’s daughter. She took sides with her father, more like her in temperament and appearance. Brian, her younger brother, was blond like their mother, thin and athletic, and Kate thought their mother favored him. At least there was balance: Brian and their mother; she and their father. Then, when her father died, the balance was gone. Her mother started taking painting lessons at the garden club and became very good at it, moving from lilacs and hydrangeas to portraits, even Kate’s. The period of that composition was a sweet interlude. Yet when the portrait was hung, Kate and her mother still held out against each other. Only in her mother’s dying, when Kate was twenty years old and took off a year from Agnes Scott College, did she feel her mother’s dearness, and then she wondered if all along the problem had been hers.
A nurse had come to the family home on Glade Street. But in the hours that they were alone, Kate was her mother’s minister. “You’re all I need,” her mother whispered as Kate combed her thinning hair. Later, in the hospital, eased by morphine, her mother still smiled in recognition. “Thank you,” she said every time Kate offered her apple juice. For the first time in her life, Kate saw her mother naked, her skin still beautiful. Kate was so strengthened by the hospital visits that she began to believe her mother would not die. Balance had returned. All she needed to do was show up and all her mother needed to do was stay. One afternoon in her hospital bed, her mother turned to Kate and said, “Letters . . . no,” and she shook her head. Once she looked fiercely at Kate, declaring “not sorry enough” before slumping back on her pillow. When Kate held her hand, she whispered, “Burn.” Kate thought she was hot and pulled back the sheet, but her skin was cool to the touch. Kate climbed into the bed, lying curved around her mother’s small body, feeling herself a blade. I am a knife, she’d thought. I am steel.
The next day, her mother was sitting up in bed, looking like a girl grown suddenly old. “Are we all here?” she said. The next day she woke and peered with a confused countenance at Kate, and five minutes later she stopped breathing. Walking out of the hospital into the bright parking lot, her aunt Mildred steering her by the elbow, Kate felt she might blow away. “You’ll come stay with us now, you and Brian,” Aunt Mildred had said. Aunt Mildred was Kate’s father’s sister.
The thought of her aunt brought Kate back to the present and the family correspondence and the October morning outside the window. Her foot had fallen asleep. She stretched her leg and flexed her toes, examining the envelope in her hand, one she had sent from South Carolina six years ago. She laid it aside and picked up another, a letter from Kate’s mother’s great-aunt Jane, who had left her mother an inheritance. Included in the letter was a recipe for tomato aspic. “Oh my Lord,” Kate said aloud as she tossed the recipe into the trash.
* * *
• • •
THE SPRING AFTER their mother’s death, Brian and Kate had lived with their childless aunt and uncle. Brian stopped carrying his books to school. Kate came into the living room to find him watching Howdy Doody though he was sixteen years old. Finally someone directed him to a shop class and after that he started working with wood in their aunt’s garage.
“You’re acting just like Mom,” he said to Kate one day.
“How’s that?”
“Like you don’t feel anything when you really do.”
“What do you mean?”
But Brian turned his attention back to a piece of wood whose secret he appeared close to unlocking.
I do feel, she had wanted to say, but a cool lozenge had settled into the right lower chamber of her heart.
There had been talk of Kate’s transferring to Wake Forest College to finish her degree before a letter arrived from Dr. Lovingood, urging Kate to return to Agnes Scott and Atlanta. A flowing figure with reddened hair over gray roots, Dr. Lovingood had written her dissertation on Dorothy Wordsworth. Kate had changed her major from music to English because of her, a woman in charge of herself who talked about literature as if it lived and breathed. In her letter to Kate, she asked for something. The Agnes Scott student paper, the Profile, needed a photographer. Did Kate think she might do it? Dr. Lovingood would be grateful if she could. Kate saw through the request. It was like Brian’s woodworking. They were both being led by the nose. She didn’t care. She might find a career in photography. She left Brian with Aunt Mildred and went back for her senior year. The plumpness of her girlhood had fallen away the year before. Now her figure emerged and her hair thickened. For the first time in her life, boys flocked to her. Kate thought it had something to do with the camera, the Argus C3 Dr. Lovingood gave her to use. Oddly enough, the metallic camera warmed her.
“It’s called a Brick,” said a boy caller when she showed it to him.
He must have seen confusion in her face.
“For its shape,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”
“No,” she said, “but I like it.”
She found security in the heavy rectangular camera with its smooth leather case and shoulder strap. It offered a connection with her painter-mother and seemed an extension of life into the future. After a while, she settled on one suitor, a resident at Emory University Hospital. His name was James. He was dark-haired like her father, not as tall—but he had sensitive hands and a powerful mustache that hinted at a deep level of sexual energy in spite of his conservative clothes. He was a heat she needed. Kate let herself melt into his kisses and fantasized the rest. To finish her degree, she had to attend summer school, and when August came, James wanted her to stay in Atlanta.
“I’ve got to go back to Winston,” she said. “At least for a while.”
They stood on the back stairs of her dormitory.
“Back to your parents’ house?”
“It’s my house now. Brian got the beach house. I’ve told you that.”
“But I’m in love with you.” It was the first time he had said it. He pressed her against the wall and kissed her and put his hand to her breast. She felt enormously excited and afraid. She wasn’t ready to give him everything. He would hurt her if she did. The next morning, she woke feeling the flint of her backbone. She said good-bye to Dr. Lovingood and the next day left for Winston-Salem on the train, the Brick cradled in her lap. Her professor had made a present of it.
From the window of her father’s study, Kate heard the crunch of car wheels in the back alley. James had owned a Corvette. It made Kate feel in vogue, but James was a little too proud of it. Since her abrupt departure from Atlanta, he called regularly, sounding remorseful and wounded. She had been tempted to get right back on the train and go to him. But to where exactly, and to live how? Renting a room and working as a secretary while he finished his residency? For now, they’d agreed he would call every Saturday night. She missed the kissing but she also felt shame, for her thoughts were purely carnal. James spoke vaguely of a visit.
Kate nibbled on a piece of toast. Part of the mystery of the letters was their haphazard state. Her father always bundled important correspondence with rubber bands, labeling each bundle with his long, beautiful script. As a girl she had sat with him in his study, watching him write, trying to create a script just like his. Why was she spending all this
time searching for letters anyway? Who knew what her mother had meant in her ramblings at the end? Letters . . . no. Maybe it was know. Letters . . . know. Or No letters. Who had she expected would write?
The hall clock chimed eight o’clock. Kate looked out the window. Sun was breaking through. Where had she put her camera? The phone rang.
“Kate?” It was Aunt Mildred.
“Good morning,” Kate said, fingertips poised on her father’s desk. She was a little sorry she’d picked up so quickly.
“How are you doing over there?”
“I slept like a baby.”
“Are you eating?”
“Yes, thank you. I have everything I need.” Except a car, she thought. It still burned her up how Aunt Mildred had convinced her mother to sell the green Ford when she was in the hospital. With a car Kate could be out shooting pictures. Two of her photographs in the Profile had won college-level awards. In one of them a woman holds a young boy back from the street where his sister has just been hit. It turned out the girl was not seriously harmed. Nonetheless it had alarmed Kate how quickly she could pull out the camera and shoot rather than try to help.
“Now, Kate, you know anytime you want to you can come stay with us. It’s an awful lot for a young lady to have two parents . . .”
Dead, Kate thought. Dead is what you call the deceased. Tacker Hart had stumbled over the same problem in the grocery. Your family used to . . .
“You don’t want to be living in the past. You’re young and beautiful. You have your own life. Don’t bury yourself over there.”
Bury herself? It was amazing what perverse things people said when they were nervous, and two dead parents did that to people, made them nervous. Kate sat down in her father’s chair. “Don’t worry. Remember I’ve got that meeting with the library board coming up. They want me to take Mom’s place.” Maybe Kate did want to live in the past. Her mother had spent her time cultivating their home, leaving for the garden club and the library board and coming back with old-fashioned roses and books. Her father had been a historian. He taught at Salem College. Kate loved Old Salem, the brick streets and simple, elegant buildings. Painters and writers and historians lived in the past. By the time a photograph was developed, it was the past.
Swimming Between Worlds Page 4