“No,” she said. But she didn’t move around him. She waited. In a moment, he looked back toward her.
“You sure I can’t help you find something?”
“I know you,” she said.
“I don’t remember that we’ve met,” he said.
“Not exactly.” She considered how to say it. “Maybe a month ago. I was in my backyard. You were walking in the alley, carrying a bottle of milk.”
He put down the can he was holding, lifted his white apron, and wiped his forehead.
“I hope I didn’t cause you any alarm.”
“Not at all,” she lied. “I didn’t know you were working here. I’m Kate Monroe, a friend of Tacker’s, Mr. Hart’s.”
“Gaines,” he said, looking at her frankly. It startled her.
“You turned and lifted your milk bottle,” she said.
He shifted his gaze to the back of the store.
“I’m glad to see you,” she said, and she was, because now she was safe. He was in just such a place as she could imagine him, not visiting her in dreams or causing her to look behind her back when she was out in the yard.
“Likewise,” he said.
Gaines seemed to steady himself and Kate found herself embarrassed to have expressed such feeling. She had to compose herself in front of the spices before heading to the checkout with the items she needed for her pie.
“That Negro boy,” she said to Tacker at the checkout.
“Gaines? You know him?”
“Sort of. I’ll tell you later.”
“Sounds intriguing,” he said.
“I just picked up some pictures I had developed. I thought you might like to see them.” Maybe he would say no. She had not intended to invite him over, but seeing Gaines in the store made her feel her world might have a pattern, and besides, she craved an audience. She’d always had her teachers to tell her how talented she was and before that her parents.
“Do you accept criticism or only praise?” he said.
What did that mean? Could he read her mind? She blushed.
“I’m kidding. Yeah. I’ll come over.”
* * *
• • •
KATE SPREAD HER best pictures on the dining table. Tacker knocked on her door at seven fifteen, freshly showered and smelling like English Leather and exhaust fumes.
“Follow me,” she said.
In the dining room, she flourished a hand. “The up-and-coming city of Winston-Salem, destination of hundreds flocking from tobacco fields and turkey farms.”
Tacker grinned. “What are you practicing for? A travel agent?”
“No. An avant-garde photographer.”
“That’s impressive.” Tacker leaned over the table. He examined the pictures one at a time. “I didn’t know you were interested in architecture.”
“We’re trying to lure people here,” she said, “get ourselves noticed.”
“I like that idea better than you leaving for somewhere else. Let’s take these to the library.” He scooped up the photographs and moved in front of her down the hall, taking her father’s chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. He was an impressive man to look at. Kate sat on the edge of the sofa. Tacker stopped at the picture of Modern Chevrolet and Kate thought of the Negro woman she had seen in front of Wachovia Bank.
“Oh,” she said. “About the colored fellow at the store.”
“Gaines?”
“I saw him in my yard one morning, maybe the week before Thanksgiving. It kind of frightened me.”
“In your yard?”
“In the alley behind the yard. He was carrying a bottle of milk.”
“Huh,” Tacker said, and he sat back in the chair, rubbing his jaw, the photograph of Modern Chevrolet still in his hand. “What time was it?”
“About nine. What do you think he was doing?”
“Going home.”
“Through this neighborhood?”
Tacker glanced at his watch and set her picture down. “Something happened that morning. He came in early to get milk for his kid sister and when he left a couple of losers beat him up.”
A needle of guilt rested in Kate’s throat. She had misjudged. But how could she have known?
“What for?” she said.
“For nothing.”
“He must have provoked someone,” she said.
“Not necessarily,” Tacker said, frowning.
“Did you see it happen?”
“I ran outside when I heard car tires screeching.”
“What did you do?”
“I broke it up.”
“Why haven’t I seen him at your store before?” She expected Tacker to be concerned for her. The least he could do was admit that Gaines’s presence was puzzling.
“He’s in the back room a lot of the time pricing new inventory. And he works in the mornings. I don’t know why you haven’t run into him. He’s a great worker.”
Tacker sat with his hands at his sides. In the dim light of the room, his eyes seemed deeper set and he looked older. Kate remembered the cut on his finger that morning when she had gone into the grocery.
“You know a lot about him.”
“His aunt is our family maid. I’ve known her all my life.”
So much could shift on small sentences, just a word, just the verb tense. Is our family maid. There is a family. The slightest of breezes came down Kate’s stairway and touched her photographs. It carried a scent reminiscent of her mother and Kate wondered when it would be—when in human history the time would come—that a woman could say plainly what she wanted.
Gaines frightened me. I’m confused by you. I know you’re a man accustomed to attention but I’d like to talk with you about my boyfriend and see what you think. Do you really like the photographs? Tell me again and remember that I am a serious person. My backbone is a blade. Is it possible for a woman to live alone for some years until the ground firms up and she knows what she wants?
At the door, leaving, Tacker patted her on the shoulder. So she was his little sister, amusing. Kate called Janet. She was probably sitting in her bedroom in her house robe, her blond hair up in a towel, reading Time magazine and painting her toenails. But Janet didn’t answer. In the library, Kate picked up Dorothy Wordsworth. The quietness and still seclusion of the valley affected me even to producing the deepest melancholy. I forced myself from it. She ran her hand across the sofa cushion. Her father had bungled his last year. Her mother had not confided it to Kate. Both parents were cast in doubt. She thought of László Moholy-Nagy, whose mysterious words, copied down by Dr. Lovingood, she had read aloud to Janet: the photographic camera . . . a beginning of objective vision . . . we wish to produce systematically. Yet Kate had concluded that systematic production meant truth would change. The truth about her father had changed—based on paper evidence. Kate didn’t trust her feelings for James. Tacker was a little too self-interested.
She would wrestle to the ground this paradox of systematic production and objective truth. On a Saturday morning—the busiest day downtown, she selected a spot outside Thalhimers, this time across the street. For ten minutes, she would photograph everyone who walked in. Twice she had to stop to reload. In the end, she had shot forty-eight pictures. Three people had walked in and come right back out. She caught them coming and going. It was lunchtime and she was hungry but she was too excited about her work to wait, so she went immediately to a nearby camera shop and offered to pay extra to have the film developed as soon as possible. Monday morning she had her pictures. In her mother’s studio on the large table that had once been used for wintering over begonias, Kate spread out her photographs. She took out the three that were duplicates. That left forty-five pictures, arranged in order taken. Almost without thinking, Kate picked out the photographs of men (nine), leaving thirty-six of women. Of those, f
ive women had children in tow. Kate selected them out. Now she had thirty-one women on the table, all headed into Thalhimers alone to make a purchase on Saturday morning. Of the thirty-one women, thirty wore skirts. One woman was dressed in slacks.
One variation among thirty-one. What did it mean? Kate couldn’t say. Her method wasn’t very scientific.
In the kitchen she fixed a cup of black tea. Back in her mother’s studio, she picked up the photograph of the woman in slacks and suddenly she wasn’t sure it was a woman. How could she know absolutely? The picture was taken from behind. The character wore a kind of French-looking cap and carried no visible pocketbook. Her shoes were flat and her coat came to her knees. Kate had assumed it was a woman. Why? The implied movement of her figure?
The picture could not prove the assumption. It was neither one thing nor the other absolutely. If her image was the objective vision Moholy-Nagy alluded to, then objective vision was not absolute. Or objective vision could not determine the truth. Or the truth was not objective.
* * *
• • •
SUNDAY AFTER CHURCH, Kate turned down dinner with Aunt Mildred—she would be there later in the week for Christmas—and came home to cottage cheese and canned peaches. The phone rang. It was Tacker.
“Want to come over for hot chocolate tonight? You haven’t seen my place.”
She should say no. But she had finished Brian’s shirt and didn’t want to read. She said yes.
“I’ll pick you up at five thirty,” he said.
Tacker’s place was sparsely decorated but attractive. A couch in front of the fireplace, a triangular side table with a turquoise lamp and a sketch pad, and over the fireplace two African carvings, silhouettes of a woman and a man, from Nigeria she assumed, along with some beautifully woven shallow baskets. The music room included a built-in and it was full of books about architecture as well as Tacker’s record collection and a turntable. A dinette set was pushed against a large picture window in the dining room and at the center of the table Tacker had placed a vase of nandina berries. A new radio sat solidly on the kitchen counter. Yet the sum of these few artifacts was greater than they suggested individually, as if he had captured the essence of himself in small appointments and was content not to have more.
Tacker had the milk warmed and he stirred in the cocoa mix. “Let’s sit in front of the fire,” he said.
“Oh, I like the table with the nandina,” she said.
“My only Christmas decoration. In Nigeria we had poinsettias that grew up twelve feet next to houses. But they weren’t thought of as Christmas decorations.”
“What do people there decorate with?” Kate said.
“The same things we do,” he said, “artificial trees and Christmas balls and Nativity sets.”
It didn’t sound very exotic and Tacker seemed to have little more to say on the subject. This evening his eyes were green and bright. Kate pulled out a chair and sat down. Tacker did the same, a sweet, inscrutable smile on his face.
“If I lived here,” she said, needing to fill the silence, “I’d sit and watch people walk by and take their pictures. I think I’m becoming a voyeur.” A normal couple would not be meeting for hot chocolate on a Sunday night. They would be at a Christmas pageant, which sounded horrible, but it would be normal. She and Tacker weren’t a couple. He hadn’t tried to kiss her. He felt just as she did, that they were friends, old acquaintances from high school. This probability was a bit of a letdown.
“Kids walk by on the way to school,” Tacker said.
Kate had to think back to what she had last said. A large cat strode in like a panther. “Who’s this?”
“Da Vinci.”
The cat leapt into her lap. He stood and arched before settling. She petted his back with one hand and sipped her hot chocolate with the other. Tacker turned his head sideways and looked out the window.
“Kate,” he said.
“Yes?” Don’t let him say what she had been meaning to say all along. I don’t want to lead you on.
“About Gaines.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Of course I do. I just wonder. You said he frightened you. He got beaten up by two fellows who thought he was being fresh with a white lady. I just wonder what you think.”
“About what?”
“How should he act when he’s walking down the street?”
“I don’t know. I was just surprised to see him so close by. Actually, since you’re asking, I thought he might have stolen the milk he was carrying. But then he kind of signaled to me and I felt like everything was fine. Did you invite me over for a lecture?”
“Sorry,” Tacker said, taking her hand and pressing it. “There’s a lot to figure out. I just want to get it . . .”
Kate felt a silence roll between them.
“Get it what?”
“Get it right. I just want to get it right.”
Tacker leaned back in the smallish aluminum chair so his legs were stretched out in front of him and he latched his fingers behind his head.
“I suppose I mean I want to get the big things right.”
For example? Marry the right person? Choose the right career? Raise your children well? Make the world better? He sure was smug. “You sound like a preacher.”
“Oh God,” he said and laughed. “I don’t want to save anyone. I couldn’t. Look at me. I’m lost myself.”
In a heartbeat, he had gone from apparent smugness to being the most charming man she had ever met. “You don’t appear lost.” She stopped petting da Vinci.
“Well, I am. Or I was.”
The cat complained with a meow and she got back to scratching his head. “Then I guess we’re lost together,” she said. “Except you said you were lost.”
“Well, you’re here,” he said.
Tacker drove her home. On the second set of yard steps, he found her hand and took it in his and she let him, and on the porch, he opened her hand and touched the four points of her palm and then closed it, and she remembered seeing him at Summit Street Pharmacy months ago, how she wondered whether they would ever speak, and now she knew his smell but not his mouth. In silence, she found her key and let herself in.
Chapter Twelve
TWO DAYS BEFORE Christmas the grocery was a madhouse. It was just as well. Tacker was falling in love with Kate, perhaps because of the darkness in her. Or maybe it was his darkness and she mirrored it. He suspected she was comfortable with a Negroes in their place mentality and that angered him. But he wanted her. So he argued with himself: She should know better. She could be brought to know better. His yearning won out and he called her on Christmas Eve.
“Hello,” he said. “It’s been crazy at the store.”
“I figured,” she said, a little guarded maybe.
He forged on. “In Nigeria we celebrated Boxing Day. It’s a British holiday; I don’t even know what it’s about. Over there it meant lots of music and drinking. If it’s not too cold, I thought we could ride up to Pilot Mountain. What do you think?”
“You just delivered me from taking down Aunt Mildred’s Christmas tree,” she said.
“Dress warm,” he said.
* * *
• • •
TACKER PULLED OUT his letter jacket for the first time since he’d come home.
“I have on my leotards,” Kate said, exposing the ankle of one blue-jeaned leg when he picked her up. They hopped on the bike and headed toward Mount Airy, taking Highway 52, rolls of hay in pastures, horses looking up with their curious, coffee brown eyes. The sky was Carolina blue, the air like fingers of ice against their faces. Halfway up Pilot Mountain, past the wintered pool and dance pavilion, Tacker parked the Indian and they started out on a trail. Kate found herself a walking stick. Out of nowhere she began talking about her last year of college. She’d considered going on to get
a master’s degree in English.
“I thought I might teach in a college.” She trimmed a small branch from her stick. “Like my dad,” she added.
“You could still do the master’s,” he said.
“Oh, sure,” she said, but she seemed to be thinking of something else.
“There was this guy,” she said, trimming another branch.
Not at all what Tacker wished to hear.
Kate described a resident at Emory. He sounded like stiff competition, though Kate seemed detached as she talked about him, as if it were in the past. “He loved to play golf but he didn’t like the woods. He worried about ticks.”
Tacker ran a hand through his hair.
“What’s wrong?” Kate said.
“Nothing.” Everything.
“Your hair.” She lifted a hand to smooth it, her fingertips warm on his forehead.
Tacker would have been content to linger there. But she slipped away.
“Let’s explore,” she said.
They walked single file, for the path would not allow otherwise.
“You ever go camping?” she said over her shoulder.
“Sure. My dad and I camped in the Smokies when I was in junior high. My favorite part was reading in the tent at night. Well, that and jumping naked into whatever water was close by.”
Kate slowed down. She covered her face in her hands, then threw her head back. “God,” she said.
“A bad topic?”
She laughed and half sobbed.
She was awfully skittish this morning. Did she think he was going to jump on her?
“My brother was always swimming naked in the lake,” she said at last. “He didn’t show up yesterday for Christmas at Aunt Mildred’s even though he promised after missing Thanksgiving. He called at the last minute to say he was having dinner with some family at the coast.” She paused. “It’s like he’s turning into my dad or something, disappearing.”
“Have you told him about the letters?”
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