Swimming Between Worlds

by Elaine Neil Orr

  * * *

  • • •

  TACKER’S FATHER CAME in to Hart’s early the next week, walking up and down the rows jiggling change in his pocket before heading over to the customer service counter. “Heard there was a little trouble out front the other day.”

  “It was a misunderstanding, Dad. The guy didn’t mean anything.” Tacker straightened a sheaf of invoices.

  “The colored boy, you mean?”

  “If that’s what you’ve got to call him. He came to get milk for his baby sister. The dang sun was so bright, no one could have seen anything. If it looked like he was smiling at that woman, he was squinting. I don’t understand anyway why cordiality is an affront to people.”

  “You have a store to run and customers to keep. Things might need some changing, but not too fast. Too fast and we all lose.” His father patted the counter flat-handedly like some fathers might a well-loved car or even a horse.

  “Look, Dad. You’re the one who taught me to treat everyone with respect. Was there a footnote I missed, a list of exceptions?”

  “I’ve always been cordial with Negroes.”

  “Sometimes cordial isn’t enough. If a man’s being accosted because he smiled at someone, a fine howdy-do won’t help him much.”

  “You have any idea what he was doing in this part of town?”

  Tacker dipped and lifted his head, trying to loosen the suddenly too-close fit of his collar at his neck. “What difference does it make?” he said. Just what he had said to Lionel Fray in response to the Nigerian girlfriend question.

  “Don’t get too self-righteous, son. I’m just saying your first responsibility is the store.”

  “I understand that. I don’t see a conflict.” Tacker sensed that thin edge where the known world ended and another began, like the crest of a wave.

  His father turned to take in the aisles of the store, the produce section, the meat counter.

  “Sales this month are up over last year this time,” Tacker said.

  “That’s good.” His father patted the counter again. “Bass are biting at Kernersville Lake. Let me know if you want to get out there Sunday morning.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, Tacker looked up to see Frances, his family’s maid, coming into the store. He hadn’t seen her much since moving into the foursquare. She would have come from his parents’ house on the bus. She could shop at Hart’s precisely because she was a maid. It irked him to be reminded of this unwritten rule. After her shopping, she would take the bus to the Watkins Avenue neighborhood, where she owned a tidy shotgun house.

  Frances was stately, six feet tall at least, long, stilt-like legs from her ankles to her skirts. She nodded at him, walking slowly with her neat pocketbook. “Pocketbooks are my weakness,” she once said. The handbag she carried today was as blue as a Crisco can. Frances liked to read from the merchandise and she did so aloud. She was in the canned-fruit section and Tacker could see her examining the cranberry sauce. He had never known her age. Once she seemed much older than his mother, but then she seemed to plateau.

  “Your daddy set these prices or you?” she said, coming through the checkout.

  “Same prices as last week, Frances. But you get your discount as always.”

  “I know my discount. Why you think I shop here?”

  “I’ll drive you home.”

  “Looks like you working. I can’t wait. Got a week’s ironing waiting for me.”

  “Connie can take care of the store. One of the part-time boys will be here any minute. I’ve got Dad’s car today.” Frances seemed weighted down, more than usual. Tacker was sorry for it because he was beginning to feel in possession of himself, even joyful on the days he saw Kate Monroe, and he didn’t want this band of hope scattered.

  Frances got into the backseat. Tacker said nothing about it. Maybe she liked it this way. Maybe she would be uncomfortable in the front seat with him. He’d been driving her home since he was sixteen, but now the arrangement felt all wrong. She was chewing gingerroot. In Nigeria, he and the guys had piled into lorries or mammy wagons when they went out to a village for the yam festival or to help thatch a roof. These were trucks converted to rough-riding buses. They toted just about everyone: farmers with hoes, women going to market, tradesmen traveling to Lagos, and on top of the vehicle, chickens in baskets, bags of cocoa, firewood, and mangos. The fruity smell wafted through open windows, mixing with sweat and hair pomade and starched fabric. These vehicles boasted fabulous signs—YOUR TIME IS NOT YET and SAFE JOURNEY—though the lorry was swinging wildly from side to side. There was always room for one more in a mammy wagon, or if the distance was short, a man might simply hop onto the back runner and hold on for dear life.

  Watkins Avenue was a pocket neighborhood, one of those developed to house Negroes who served white families and establishments. Frances had never had children, and her husband, who had died with complications from diabetes, was only a vague memory in Tacker’s mind. At the first stoplight, he glanced back at her through the rearview mirror. Her eyes were on him.

  “What?” he said.

  “Why don’t you hire you a colored boy to help in that store?” she said. “Plenty of them need a job this time of year.” Before the light turned green, she broke her gaze.

  “Not a bad idea,” he said. “You got someone in mind?”

  “Might have. I don’t know what you go to Africa for and come back here same as always.”

  Did she think he should have fought to stay? Besides his parents, Frances was the only person in Winston-Salem who knew he’d been forced out. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. How long had she waited to speak to him? Had she planned her shopping knowing he had the car? “My mother thinks I’m not the same as before,” he said. “She thinks I’ve lost my ambition.” It had crossed his mind that maybe his mother had inquired, had someone send the full report of his dismissal. He’d only skimmed it and it almost took the top of his head off. Liaison with married woman, interference with federal government business, native ritual, violent inclinations, homosexual tendencies. The last was followed by a question mark.

  “I know she’s worried,” Frances said, moving the gingerroot around in her mouth. “But change can be good.”

  “I guess you mean that all the way around, for her and for me.” Tacker thought his mother might relax a little, have more faith in him.

  There was hardly any traffic but Tacker drove so he would hit every light, giving Frances time to rest. Stopped at the corner next to a Baptist church, he spotted a group of white women at the side door, apparently coming out from a meeting. Every one of them wore a little hat. They gazed at the car, taking him in and then Frances in the backseat, and then they were happy enough to go on talking. He caught a glimpse of Frances in the rearview mirror. She was looking out the window, deep creases at the edges of her mouth.

  “Are you too warm?” He rolled his window down.

  “That fresh air smells good,” she said.

  He parked in front of her house and jumped out to open her door. But she already had her feet on the ground, those long legs ending in heeled lace-up shoes that reminded him of his grandmother. He offered her his hand. She took it. At the steps of the inclined yard, she placed her hand on his arm and leaned into him. Brown-tipped chrysanthemums filled the brick planters on either side of the galvanized-pipe railing. Frances took one step at a time. He wished he’d picked up some extra things for her.

  “You go on in,” he said at the door. “I’ll get the groceries.”

  Some oranges. He could have grabbed some citrus.

  “Back here,” she said when he stepped into the house.

  The living room was shaded but light came down the narrow hall. There was her father, Old Daddy, in the chair asleep. And a little girl next to him on the floor, coloring by the window. She glanced at
Tacker and then focused again on her work. Tacker hadn’t been here for more than two years. “Here you are,” he said when he reached the kitchen.

  Frances was at the sink, washing her hands.

  “Set that box on the table there. You want some coffee?”

  A thrum of vibration filled the air. Must be the heater in the basement.

  “Sure,” he said, visualizing Connie back at the store, a line of customers likely forming. He looked at his watch.

  “Anything I can do for you before I leave?” he said.

  “You just have a seat.”

  Tacker had never sat at Frances’s table and he wondered if he had blundered in some way. He pulled out a spindle chair and sat down. She was rinsing the coffeepot. It would take a little while to percolate. From where he sat, he could see into the next room. A shelf ran high across the wall and along its length were bottles of all sorts—blue glass, deep green, red, and brown. When he glanced back in her direction, Frances had turned around and was leaning against the sink with her eyes closed, her fingers linked and resting on her tidy stomach. The light from the window lit the outline of her form and she seemed to shimmer. The coffee began to percolate and with the thrumming of the house created the illusion of a thin brown veil levitating over them. The ginger smell was back. Tacker recalled an afternoon in Ibadan, the brown curtains in the dormitory lifting in a breeze, and then the memory hitched on to Kate in that old brown coat, a slight down above her lip.

  Frances said something.

  “What?” Tacker said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you.”

  “My nephew over here from Nashville,” she said, her eyes still closed. “His mama, my baby sister, Gwendolyn, had her chest carved out from the cancer, can’t work for some while. She got a baby girl. My nephew back to aid his mama. Take care of that child. He and I sharing the task. He could use a job in your store. He’s smart. Starting his last year at Fisk before this come up.”

  Tacker fidgeted with the zipper pull on his jacket. Something besides coffee was percolating.

  “How you take your coffee? Maybe you changed that too,” Frances said.

  “Black,” he said. “I did change that. Used to take sugar and cream.” He jittered his brain sideways. Where was the father of the baby? To Frances, who was pouring his coffee, he said, “Okay. Your nephew. He needs a job. What’s his name? Where is he?”

  “In the next room,” she said.

  A pause like Tacker knew on the field, just before the snap.

  “Gaines,” she said.

  A cool ripple ran up Tacker’s spine. The same Gaines? Did she know what had happened? Tacker had to be careful not to hurt the next minutes, not to foul it up. Frances still had her back to the sink. She shifted a hip.

  Everything was timing. Even architecture. The time the eye takes to comprehend the foundation, the rising wall, the shape of the portico, the heartbeat of windows, the rise of the roofline, the surging back-and-forth of the brain’s receptors comprehending, achieving finally the vault of sky.

  “I think I know him,” he said.

  “You know what?” Frances said.

  “Gaines.” Tacker sat forward in his chair.

  “Gaines!” she called.

  The air buckled.

  There was Gaines in the doorframe of the room with the colored glass, the scrape on his face beginning to heal. Tacker had that slow-motion sense again. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Working at the grocery.” Surely Gaines was going to say something about how Tacker had saved him before he was hurt worse.

  “Could be helpful.”

  “You’re not worried? You know. About those guys? Coming back to the store?”

  “Of course I am. But what are you going to do? Be afraid forever?”

  Tacker got why Frances had come to him; his dad would not do well with a Negro this frank and self-possessed. He glanced at her. She looked tired and he regretted his earlier impatience. Maybe a new way of speaking was emerging. He and Gaines were trying out for parts in a play no one had written yet. He got excited. “Wrong place at the wrong time?” Tacker said. “I know a little about that myself.”

  Gaines knuckled one hand and pressed it against the flat of his other palm. “The job would help my mother out, and my baby sister,” he said, his tone softening.

  “How old is she?”

  “Five.”

  Tacker had imagined a baby. This was the girl with the coloring book. And then she slipped into the kitchen. She must have been listening from the hall. A thin girl, determined-looking, brown velvet cheekbones, her hair plaited on top of her head.

  “Valentine, meet Mr. Tacker,” Frances said.

  “Hello, Valentine,” Tacker said, offering his hand for her to shake.

  * * *

  • • •

  TACKER GOT BACK to the store to find Connie smoking out front.

  “Been out here only a second, boss,” she said, ribbing him. “A little hectic. One of the freezers is on the blink. Started leaking.” She stubbed out the cigarette. “A kid was back there stomping in the water. Got it cordoned off now.”

  “Have you called an electrician?”

  “Not yet. Turned off the water main and got everything moved to a freezer in the back.”

  A rivulet of water had moved past the fresh meat counter and into the aisle where hams were displayed on a long table. “Sorry, folks,” he said to shoppers who stopped like voyeurs at a car wreck to see if anything more disturbing was going to happen. “We’ll have this cleaned up right away.” The crowd dispersed and he started mopping. Before long, he sensed someone watching. Billy from high school—once a second-stringer on the football team—stood beside the hams, one hand resting on a particularly large ham, as if he were taking possession of the goods. Tacker had not considered Billy Cyrus’s existence in half a dozen years, until he ran into him at Krispy Kreme recently and Billy had boasted of being promoted to assistant branch manager at Wachovia.

  “We’ve had an accident back here.” Billy’s appearance was so sudden that it was impossible for Tacker to mask the disdain he felt.

  “So you’re the janitor, too,” Billy said.

  Billy had not changed much since high school except that he was now sausaged into a suit. Five feet ten, so fair-skinned his eyelashes were blond and his face perpetually pink. When he had gotten into a football game, which was rare, he was always jumping the snap and getting called for offsides.

  “Is there something I can help you find?” Tacker said, determined to keep his cool.

  “I told Connie I’d give you a hand.” Billy started clapping, walking forward, closing the gap between them. “By the way,” he said conspiratorially, “you ever think about squeezing her?”

  “Have you got no decency?” The guy was an ass.

  “Hey, I’m just passing the time with an old friend. Remember? From football days when you told Coach not to put me into the championship game.”

  Tacker stopped mopping. “Are you still living in high school?”

  Billy ignored the question. “You meet Tarzan in Africa?”

  “What’s your beef?”

  “You kept me out of that game.”

  “I never did any such thing. Coach would have had me sidelined if I’d told him how to do his job.”

  “So you say, but I heard about it. You were a regular heller, weren’t you? How the mighty have fallen.”

  When Tacker had gone to Nigeria, he’d imagined teaching benighted young men the basics of architecture. Turned out no one at UCI was benighted.

  Billy’s bubblegum pink face blurred like a bad television screen. Tacker spun back to that day in Ibadan, running from Fray, collapsing in the brown compound, drinking the Fanta.
Finally getting himself up. “UCI,” he’d said to the taxi driver.

  Samuel wasn’t yet back from Osogbo. Tacker fell onto his friend’s dormitory bed. He must have slept. The next thing he knew Fray was in the room. He’d brought enforcement, two Americans. Tacker scrambled to get up. His mouth was dry and when he tried to speak his voice came out in a whisper. Fray had something white tucked under his arm.

  “What?” Tacker said.

  “You’re being sent home,” Fray said. “This afternoon.”

  Tacker’s brain raced. Out the window, a student strode by on his way to class, almost floating in his casual, confident walk. For the first time, Tacker wished he was a Nigerian. “I am home,” he said.

  “You’re losing it,” Fray said, unfolding the white fabric. The long arms fell out. A straitjacket. Tacker bolted for the window but a tackle sent him to the floor, the cool tile smacking the left side of his face. Two weeks later the bruise would still be blooming. One of the men sat on top of him.

  “Leave me alone,” Tacker said. “I’ll cooperate.”

  “You’ve missed that particular opportunity,” Fray said.

  Tacker managed to flip himself over, the drumbeat of his own ears all he could hear as he thrashed against the two men. They were stronger than they looked. What was the question that demanded an answer? He couldn’t remember. They lifted him and threw him facedown onto the bed.

  Anna’s blond hair in the sun. Swimming in the Osun. The boy with the Fanta. The man burning the family gods, moaning on the ground. Talking with the Shell Oil rep at the Ibadan swimming pool. Samuel. He ceased to fight. The men slipped one arm and then the other into the long sleeves of the jacket, then turned him and stood him up on his bare feet like a toy soldier. There was a terrible wrenching in his shoulders when Fray tightened the sashes. They took him out by the door at the end of the hall, where the Jeep waited, already running, a driver at the wheel.