Swimming Between Worlds
Page 32
In the morning, they were gone before Tacker woke up.
Chapter Thirty-five
KATE WAS WORKING out some connection between what had happened to Janet and what happened to Negroes turned away from any town’s central library. It seemed an unlikely connection, yet she knew it was there if she studied the problem long enough. Since her near fainting at Summit Street Pharmacy, she felt nervous going to Hart’s, not sure exactly how to act if she saw Gaines. Should she shake his hand? Say hello and smile?
She parked her car in the parking lot and rolled down the windows to let the breeze through, then checked her image in the rearview mirror and got out. Connie greeted her when she walked in. There was Gaines in living color, loading cantaloupes into a large wooden bin. Kate pretended to study her list, composed herself, and lifted her face. “Good morning,” she said.
He looked at her. “Good morning,” he said, without a smile but maybe with a hint of recognition, as if they had once, ever so briefly, shared a common interest. “These are some sweet cantaloupe.”
“You tried one?”
“I can smell them,” he said, putting his nose to the end of one. “Here. Take this one.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He got back to work and she pushed her cart past him. Moments later, Tacker came out of the back room and saw her and came to where she stood.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
“Hey to you, too,” she said. “Although my mom always said hay was for horses.”
“Good day, Miss Monroe.”
“Good day, Mr. Hart.” She smiled largely and finished her shopping.
“Want to come help me in my backyard on Saturday?” he said, ringing up her items.
“What are you going to do?”
“Clean it up. I invited Gaines and Valentine over next weekend. I thought Valentine would be able to play if I tidied up back there.”
“Sounds like fun.” She kissed his cheek. Oddly she no longer felt threatened by this business about lunch counters, and she wondered how much of it was the boy asking for the book, or Gaines helping her out, or Tacker’s move into architecture, or Janet’s abysmal marriage. When she got home, she picked up her camera and focused it on her image in the mirror at the end of the hall. Her backbone felt solid and strong—not a blade but the living buttress of herself—and the cool lozenge in the right chamber of her heart had vanished.
Saturday she was at Tacker’s house at eight o’clock. Fortunately the backyard was shady and it was a cool morning for late July. They started raking leaves down the slope of the yard. “Later I’ll move them to the other side of the garage for a mulch pile,” Tacker said.
“You know about mulch piles?” Kate teased.
He lowered his chin and gazed at her as through spectacles. “Yes,” he said.
A dove sang its hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo and a filament of light illuminated a climbing rose. “I never doubted,” she said.
“Let’s just rake past those trees for now,” he said, gesturing.
They raked in the deep shade of the porch for a while and Kate remembered months ago raking out her father’s monkey grass, she in her father’s old coat, and how she had gone into Hart’s after seeing Gaines pass by in the alley with that bottle of milk. They ran out of shade and worked in the sun. At ten o’clock, just as Kate was about to stop and demand a cold drink, she uncovered the edge of a mossy patch.
“Oh, look!” she said.
“What?”
“Moss,” she said.
“Is that exciting?”
“I love moss.” On her knees, she raked with her hands, revealing a large patch of velvet upon which she then proceeded to sit cross-legged. “I’ll have a lemonade,” she said.
Together they sat, admiring the emerging structure of the yard. There was the climbing rose that once had a trellis. Tacker had uncovered a slate patio in front of the old stone grill. A hedge of boxwoods defined what must have been a lawn—before the trees grew so large and the yard was left untended. High in the yard, near the house, they’d uncovered two flower beds, bordered by stone, where spring bulbs had spent themselves. “There may be enough sun for caladiums,” she said.
By midafternoon they had pulled up half-buried stones and defined another garden and they were smeared with dirt.
“I can’t get in my car like this,” Kate said.
“You can shower in my bathroom,” Tacker said. “Take off your clothes on the screened porch. You know where the bathroom is.”
“Really?”
“What else are you going to do?”
She watched Tacker sitting in the circle of moss, his back to her as she unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it off. She rocked off her tennis shoes, then pulled off her pedal pushers, then peeled off her underclothes. A breeze came through the porch and her skin prickled. Tacker kept his back turned but she still felt exposed as she tiptoed through the kitchen and into the dining room. Da Vinci lay in the hallway. He opened his eyes to look at her and closed them again. “Not impressed, huh?” she said. She tiptoed down the hall toward Tacker’s bedroom and bath. The door squeaked as she opened it and it would not fully close. “I’ve never,” she whispered to herself.
She used the shower, washed and scrubbed, borrowed Tacker’s Prell, and lathered her hair twice. She washed between her legs with Prell, then leaned over to scrub between her toes, the steady stream of water cascading over her. Kate hadn’t thought about a clean towel. Feet on the bathmat, she reached for Tacker’s. She dried her hair and wrapped the towel around her. Neither of them had thought about clean clothes. She peeked out of the bathroom. For starters, she’d have to wear her damp underwear, maybe borrow a shirt. Tacker was still sitting on the moss, faced away from her. Good man, she thought, as she slipped back into her damp underclothes. In Tacker’s room, she rummaged for something to put on, finding at last a man’s housecoat pressed back in a dresser drawer, an item, no doubt, his mother had given him one Christmas but that he never used.
Through the porch screen she saw clouds had gathered and a breeze poured over her. “I’m through, I guess,” she called.
Tacker turned and looked toward her, though she didn’t think he could see through the screen. He ascended the steps, his gaze down until he pulled open the screen door and entered, the door slamming behind him, the little latch twinkling like a bell. It seemed he would walk past her and Kate wondered if he was blinded, coming in from the bright afternoon.
“Tacker,” she said.
He hesitated and then he came to her and lifted her off her feet, cupping her behind, she locking her legs around him. He moved like a tremendous machine, pressing into her, angling her upward, one hand pulling her hair back, his mouth on her neck.
She wiggled.
“Cut it out,” he said, releasing her to standing, opening the housecoat, putting both hands to her breasts.
She unbuttoned his shirt.
“You’re filthy,” she said.
“You’re not,” he said, kissing her neck again.
Kate smelled the rain before it came. The first drops hit the roof of the porch like hail.
Tacker took her hand and they were in his room and he was kissing her onto the bed.
“Wait,” she said, thinking of Janet and her fast wedding.
Tacker moved to his dresser and took something out, a small square envelope. She had never seen one but knew what it was and she closed her eyes and he was back, moving over her, and this time when she went down into the deepest water, she was not drowning. She was flying.
Chapter Thirty-six
“GUESS YOU KNOW the pool is opening?” Gaines said one night when he dropped by with Valentine.
“Yeah, I heard,” Tacker said.
“They having a ceremony?”
“Probably.”
“So you aren’t going to be
there?” Gaines said.
“Not if I can find a good excuse,” Tacker said.
“Maybe you ought to go.”
“I thought you were against my having anything to do with all that. Make up your mind.”
“I’m just saying maybe you ought to go.”
* * *
• • •
A CONCESSION STAND went up where Tacker’s design called for oversize double doors into the circular main room. Gravel was trucked in for a temporary walkway.
* * *
• • •
SAMUEL WROTE THAT he was engaged to marry a woman who was a student at UCI and when she finished her BA they planned to go to London for further study. His brother now had three market stalls and had made enough money to build himself a house. The high school in Osogbo had dedicated the chapel building.
* * *
• • •
ON TACKER’S RADIO, Senator Kennedy: The world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.
* * *
• • •
ON A THURSDAY in late July, Tacker left Hart’s, took the Indian to the foursquare, fed da Vinci, showered, ironed a shirt, took his grandmother’s ring in its box from his bureau drawer, put it in his pocket, and walked to Kate’s. Coming around a corner, he remembered the first time he called at her house and was about to leave when she came tearing down the hall and jerked open the door and pulled him in, her hair all awry. The sky was clear. A gust of wind filled the trees and a few yellow leaves scudded down and wove along the sidewalk. He didn’t have a plan exactly. Buildings you planned. Proposing seemed like something you could overplan and it would fall flat. He kept his hands in his pockets. Maybe he should plan a little. He came around the next corner and there was Kate in her front yard, watering the lawn. She wore white shorts and had her hair tied up in a ponytail. He started to run, as if she might shut off the water and disappear in a plume of vapor. He was on the second set of her yard steps when she turned and sprayed him full in the chest. Kate dropped the hose, and it flapped like a fish on a boat. Her hands went to her mouth. Tacker looked at his shirt and the front of his trousers. Soaked to the knees.
“Oh no,” she said. “I didn’t see you.”
“I’m wash-and-wear,” he said, smiling, taking five big steps toward her and pulling her to him.
“Now I’m wet,” she said, looking at her damp blouse.
The afternoon throbbed with green life. Tacker turned off the water.
“Oh. What’s that?” Kate tapped his pocket, the wet fabric of his shirt molded around the little box.
“Let’s sit down,” he said.
On the front porch of the house on Glade Street he pulled out the nondescript box. It might hold his baby teeth or a Boy Scout achievement badge or the leather bracelet from Nigeria that he kept in a cigar box with his passport and visa and some pound notes he had never exchanged.
“I want to marry you, Kate. Will you marry me?”
Her eyes were lavender again, like that first morning when he was still reeling from all that had happened in Nigeria and she had confided in him and her confidence had been a light.
“Yes. Yes.”
He opened the box. “It was my grandmother’s. I hope you like it.”
She lifted the ring, slipped it onto her finger, and closed her hand.
He wondered if every lover is redeemed by love as he felt he was in that moment. And in love he forgave Lionel Fray and understood that Samuel had forgiven him.
August comes like an orange cat
Rain pours down in an afternoon
Your hand is a cup in the shape of a magnolia petal
And as sweet.
Chapter Thirty-seven
WHEN TACKER TOLD Kate that Philip and Steven would be back in town the night of the cookout—the two men who occasionally stayed with him when they were in town for a protest—she steadied herself and took the news in stride. But that evening at home and with more time to think, she found that this change of plans disturbed the calmer waters she had sensed herself in with the man she loved. That many people in a backyard in West End would not go unnoticed, especially when the group was this mixed and included two adult Negro men. In a compartment of her mind, she understood that she still felt vulnerable in regard to public opinion. But then she viewed the ring on her finger and Tacker’s confidence in who he was and she experienced a great relief to have finally decided what side she was on. She didn’t have to hover over uncertainty forever, like a bird over the ocean. And perhaps it was because of this new awareness that she had come to the certain conclusion that her father had not meant to drown himself. About one thing Aunt Mildred was absolutely right: strong men drown. But they don’t kill themselves. And, no doubt because she had come to this conclusion, she also chose to believe that her parents would have made amends. There never would have been a divorce. Her father had not left, nor had he intended to. She saw him again walking in D.C. that summer past the gardens, his hair lifted by the wind. He was as certain and straight as the levels at the hardware store she had visited with Brian, who had foreseen that she would choose Tacker Hart.
She doubled her potato salad recipe for the cookout and arrived early to hang paper lanterns. Tacker was in his backyard setting up two folding tables, and the sight of him brought a rush of affection, not only for him but for the two of them together. In her high school years and even in college, even after her mother died, it had never occurred to her that she might marry and also have a career, that she might find a man, or be found by one, who would expect her to fulfill her ambitions. “How did you get to be this way?” she had asked him the day he proposed. “I’m not sure,” he had said. “No, really.” “Maybe Nigeria. Women there make their own money. If they’re good at something, they keep doing it. My mom once told me she wanted to be a pharmacist when she was girl.”
She and Tacker pushed the tables together. Tacker took her hand and kissed it and Kate apprehended the warmth of his happiness. She covered the tables with a checkered tablecloth, then plucked flowers from the rose of Sharon blooming by the street and laid them in bowls of water and set one in the center of each table. She turned her ring.
When two men drove up and parked on Jarvis, Kate knew they must be Philip and Steven. Moments later, Tacker introduced them. Philip was very dark-skinned, large, with a round face and a few premature gray hairs along his temples, a gentle giant. Steven was fair-skinned, no taller than Kate, ears sticking out from his head. They were an odd pair and she almost laughed in relief. Their actual presence seemed entirely natural, whereas the thought of them had seemed threatening. This awareness seemed important to consider later and she made a note of it.
“You’ve cleaned up back here,” Steven said.
“Kate helped me,” Tacker said, close by now, leaning over to kiss her shoulder.
“You thought about buying this house?” Philip said.
“I hadn’t yet.”
No one spoke for a moment.
“Kate and I just got engaged,” Tacker said.
Philip’s head tilted back and he laughed as large as he was, a laugh like a conclave of silverware thrown in a basket. Kate took a step back.
“You have my congratulations,” he said. “You two. But we didn’t know it was an engagement party. We don’t have a gift.”
“Oh,” Kate said, recovering. “We wouldn’t expect you to.”
“You can’t deny it,” Philip said. “You two are engaged and we’re here for a party. Let’s celebrate.”
Steven seemed embarrassed and his ears stuck out even further. Kate wanted to reassure him, but just then Gaines and Valentine came walking up the street. The girl’s face was almost plump now and her hair had grown so that her braids made a full crown on her head.
Tacker cooked the burgers. At the table, Kate passed the potato salad.
&n
bsp; “A toast,” Philip said, lifting his glass of lemonade. “To Kate and Tacker. May you never thirst again.”
At the end of the evening, Tacker walked her home. The sun was setting. For a moment, a perfect arch of yellow spread out beyond the trees, pink above, and higher still, purple clouds. At her door, Tacker put his arms around her neck. He kissed her, drew back and looked at her, and kissed her again, and she knew without a doubt that he was a book she would never want to put down. It would take a lifetime to know him and to know herself with him. And she had the time.
Chapter Thirty-eight
SATURDAY. THE MORNING dawned heavy and overcast. Clouds the color of tin. Tacker took his coffee onto the front porch. No birdsong. A truck rumbled and backfired on the highway a few blocks away. In a tree across the road, a bare limb hung at an angle. The cedars shone pale blue. As he finished his coffee, a lone monarch butterfly wafted over late asters. Tacker didn’t know whether to pray for the pool opening to go forward with thundershowers and a thinned crowd or whether to pray for such a downpour that it would have to be postponed.
Kate was going to take pictures for the paper. He had no right to talk her out of it. For some reason—maybe to teach him a lesson—Gaines wanted Tacker to be there, so Connie was managing the store for the day. Gaines asked if Valentine could stay at the foursquare if an older cousin came along to look after her while Tacker was out.
“I don’t see why not,” he said, “though I doubt I’ll be gone more than thirty minutes.”
Valentine and her cousin knocked at the back door at ten thirty. They had taken the bus. Tacker put out cookies and showed Valentine the milk in the fridge. The cousin, Juliette, looked familiar and Tacker wondered if she had been one of the girls from Winston-Salem State who protested that day at Woolworth’s and got arrested. He was alarmed that he wasn’t sure and didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. She didn’t seem eager to help him out.