Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

by Lee Smith

  Cheryl went to bed with him in her own bed, and after it was over, she got up and went in the bathroom and took a shower and then came back and saw M. Herron still there in her bed, against the yellow sheets. She thought he’d be dressed, but he wasn’t. All he wore was a gold neck chain. He held out his arms to Cheryl and said he wanted to give her a big kiss. Then he said he hated to brag, but he was a pretty good cook, and would she like to come over for dinner on Saturday? He said he lived at the Swiss Cha-lets. “Well, thanks,” Cheryl said without batting an eye — she was proud of herself, later on — “but actually I have a long-term relationship with a dentist in Raleigh and I can’t do this anymore. I guess you swept me right off my feet,” she said.

  BY LATE OCTOBER, Lisa and Netta were reconciled. Purcell, who had a lot of influence in community affairs, had helped Netta get a job at the new Council on Aging, which had just opened its office downtown in the courthouse. This job suited Netta to a tee. It was as good as the liquor store had been for seeing people, but nothing about it made her nervous, the way watching the hair pile up around the chairs and not sweeping it up did. Netta had a list of practical nurses, maids, and companions for the elderly, and she matched them up with names of older people who needed help. Also, she organized craft classes, gourmet cooking classes, genealogy classes, and so forth. Netta loved her job. She said it made her feel young again.

  David told the kids that Margaret was pregnant and that he and Margaret were “delighted” by this news. But they did not plan to marry, he said. He said marriage was an outmoded concept in his and Margaret’s opinion.

  “I bet she doesn’t want to marry him,” Marie said. “She just wants to have a baby with a smart father. A lot of women get like that, they hear the biological clock just ticking away.”

  Cheryl was astonished. This idea — that Margaret might not want to marry David — had not occurred to her. She thought that David didn’t want to marry Margaret, or he would. Or he would do it when the divorce became final, next spring.

  “You better watch out now, honey,” Purcell said. “He’s liable to come traipsing back here with his tail between his legs, any day now. You’d better get yourself a game plan,” Purcell said.

  But Cheryl didn’t have one.

  All she did was go to work and come home again, glad to have a permanent job now since Johnnie Sue had had her baby and it was colicky so she had decided not to return to Fabric World after all. Cheryl made $160 a week, plus whatever extra she got for slipcovers, which would be unlimited if she had the time and the energy. She had more orders than she could ever fill; it looked like the sky was the limit in the slipcover business. Lisa had suggested that Cheryl ought to hire some other women to sew them, say three or four women, and then Cheryl could just take the measurements and order the cloth and pay the women by the hour and make a big profit. “You can start your own business,” Lisa said. “You can quit working at Fabric World and make a mint.” This was a great idea and Cheryl knew it. But for some reason she was dragging her feet, losing orders. Maybe she didn’t want to have her own business. Maybe she didn’t want to be like Lisa. Maybe . . . oh, who knows?

  Anyway, Cheryl had her hands full, what with the children, and Netta, and the slipcovers she’d promised, and Bob. She was stitching a mauve sofa cover for Mr. and Mrs. Holden Bench on Saturday night in early November, just after Halloween, when Bob got out again. She couldn’t believe it. But she should have known. First, he’d howled and howled, and then he had fallen suddenly, mysteriously silent, and now here he was barking and jumping against the front door. Cheryl stopped stitching and turned off the light on her machine. She stood up. “Louis, Sandy — “ she yelled, and then stopped. Her voice echoed through the empty rooms of this house that she had lived in all her life. Too late she remembered that she was here all by herself tonight. Everybody was gone — everybody in the whole world, it suddenly seemed. Angela was off on a date, Netta was out playing rook with the New Generation card group, Sandy had gone on a Cub Scout camping trip, Louis was at the movies seeing Rambo for the fourth time, and Mary Duke was spending the night with her friend Catherine. Cheryl was home alone. She remembered M. Herron and what he had said about nightlife, and burglars.

  Cheryl opened the kitchen door and Bob bounded in, wagging his tail so hard that it crashed him into the refrigerator, then into the kitchen table, where her sewing machine was set up. “Now you just come right along here,” she said firmly, grasping his collar, dragging him through the kitchen away from the mauve sailcloth all over the kitchen floor, toward the TV room. Bob reared back on his haunches and allowed himself to be scooted along. Cheryl gritted her teeth, dragging Bob. She would fix that pen right now, right this minute, by herself. And he’d stay in it. She shut Bob in the TV room and turned on The Love Boat to keep him quiet.

  Cheryl put on a dark flannel shirt and a woolen cap. She felt like a burglar herself. She took off her loafers and put on some of Angela’s boots. She got the flashlight out of the laundry room and went out the back door. Lord, it was cold! A chilly, gusty wind came whipping along, kicking up all the leaves. You could smell wood smoke in the air, and something else. Cheryl couldn’t quite place what it was. Something cold, something sharp, it reminded her of winter. Winter was on the way. The almost bare limbs of the hickory tree showed against the full yellow moon and then disappeared when the moon popped in and out of the puffy dark clouds that ran across it. Cheryl’s own backyard seemed unfamiliar, a scary but enchanted place — full of moving light and darkness, wind — and she remembered M. Herron saying a lady can’t be too careful. But that was ridiculous. She could do it. Of course if she had let Jerry Jarvis send a man over here, this pen would have been foolproof months ago. But Cheryl could do it herself, and she would.

  With the flashlight, she walked the fence until she found the spot where Bob had tunneled under. Then she walked back to the garage and got the last cinder block and carried it balanced against her stomach and placed it carefully in the hole. There now. And that ought to do it too, she thought, flashing the light around the bottom of the fence. There, now.

  Cheryl went into the house and got Bob and dragged him across the kitchen and pulled him across the yard to his pen and pushed him inside, latching the ornamental gate securely. She felt flushed, and strong, and ready for anything, the cold night air so pleasant on her cheeks that she couldn’t bear the idea of going back in and working on the Benches’ slipcover. Instead, Cheryl went to the kitchen and got three California Coolers out of the refrigerator and opened one of them and turned off the kitchen light and went back out and sat down in a lawn chair.

  The wind and the shadows moved all around her, she felt like she glowed in the dark. The dry leaves rustled at her feet, red and brown and gold, but she couldn’t see their colors, only feel them in the dark. It was true she was artistic, she did have a sense of color, maybe she’d open up a business after all. Bob barked, then rattled the leaves, then made a snuffling, scuffling noise. Cheryl opened another California Cooler, she knew he was digging out. She imagined David and Margaret Fine-Manning entertaining M. Herron right now at a gourmet dinner in their apartment at the Swiss Chalets, she saw the candlelight gleaming in David’s eyes, and the gleam of M. Herron’s gold neck chain. The moon went in and out, in and out of the tumbling clouds. Cheryl imagined Jerry Jarvis unhappily at home with his fat wife, Darlene. She imagined Marie and Lenny embracing in a motel in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where they went this weekend to look at the leaves. Cheryl leaned back in her chair and opened the third California Cooler and laughed out loud finally as Bob scraped out and shook himself off and lurched over to stand for a minute there by her chair before he took off running free across the darkened yards, beneath the yellow moon.

  Toastmaster

  Jeffrey immediately likes the restaurant, Salute, which is nothing but an old porch built right out on the beach, open to the ocean and the huge pink sky which goes on and on and on, Jeffrey has never seen so much sky. �
�Very Key West!” his mother announces, as a personage in a kind of robe (Jeffrey can’t tell if it is a boy or a girl) shows them to their table by the rail. Personage is a word from Jeffrey’s vocabulary book. He follows his mother and her friend, slipping between the tables, the Invisible Boy. Each table has a different kind of cloth on it, and different chairs. Some people are barefoot and some are dressed up. A girl at the table behind them wears a string halter. A man at the table next to theirs has a big bird just sitting on his shoulder. The bird swivels its head almost all the way around to watch them take their seats, Jeffrey and his mother, Dar, and her friend from the conference, Lindsay.

  “Two mojitos,” his mother tells the personage, though Lindsay demurs, another word from the vocabulary book. “Not a chance,” his mother says. “Ignore her,” she tells the personage. “You’ll love it, it’s very tropical,” she tells Lindsay. Dar always gets her way. Lindsay is a nice serious lady in a big navy blue pantsuit. But Dar looks like Rapunzel with her scary red hair puffed out all around her head and halfway down her back. She wears long glittery earrings and a long dress with big flowers on it, she looks like she has lived in Key West all her life. Dar is a professor at the School of Social Work at American University, a specialist in empowerment. She has deep brown eyes and round white muscular arms and legs, from years of yoga. She “goes to yoga” almost every day, like she is going to a foreign country. Dar is amother by choice, as she tells everyone. This means that it was entirely her decision to have Jeffrey, his dad never even knew about him. Jeffrey often imagines his dad walking around some cold northern city with his coat collar turned up, not knowing about him.

  Dar and Lindsay sip their drinks and discuss their conference, which is all about community action, how to involve the poor and the marginal and the non-English-speaking in the process. Meanwhile the sun hangs like a Day-Glo red yo-yo on a string above the horizon, dropping fast. Jeffrey watches it intently. It seems to be gathering speed now, plummeting toward the ocean. How can this be? Can gravity speed up? The women consult their menus and order Italian seafood dishes. Jeffrey orders a steak, well done, and a baked potato.

  “No potatoes,” the personage says. It wears makeup all the way around its eyes, like a raccoon. “How about some pasta?”

  “Plain?” Jeffrey asks. “Can it be plain?” He hates it when people put stuff all over his food without asking.

  “Sure,” the personage says.

  “Honey, this is an Italian restaurant!” his mother breaks off her conversation to point out. “In Key West, for Christ’s sake! Lighten up!” Then she leans over to give him a kiss. “Okay. Sorry. Two more mojitos,” she tells the personage. “And a Coke for the kid.” This is a special treat.

  Jeffrey stares at the sun which seems to be flattening out now that the bottom part of it has touched the horizon. It looks like a flaming beehive, going, going, going, gone! Applause ripples through the restaurant, making him blush. He didn’t realize that he was a part of something, that other people were watching the sunset too. Jeffrey goes back to being invisible. Pink jet streams crisscross the sky. A chicken walks by on the sandy floor. A cruise ship heads out to sea, it looks like a floating building. Three tables away, a man and a lady with long blonde hair start kissing each other amorously (word). They have moved their chairs to the same side of the table. But the boy and the girl at the table behind them are arguing. Jeffrey almost but can’t quite hear their irate (word) voices. He knows it would not be cool to turn around and look at them. Another chicken walks past.

  Darkness falls suddenly, like a blanket dropped over the beach. Little twinkle lights appear everywhere, looped around the poles that support the tin roof and all along the awning above them and the rail beside their table. This is enchanting, Jeffrey thinks. Like fairyland. Or like that cookbook Dar uses,The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. He likes that title even though he would rather die than eat broccoli. Dar is always trying to get him to eat healthy things because he is small for his age, eleven, though he has been mistaken for eight. He has been taken to doctors about it. He weighed only four pounds two ounces at birth. He knows this for sure because he found his birth certificate and read it, then put it back carefully just where it was, in Dar’s file marked “Jeffrey — Imp.” So maybe he had a twin brother who died. Jeffrey has asked Dar about this again and again, but she always denies it. “You were just premature,” she swears. In many ways, Jeffrey feels, he is still premature. And he still sort of believes he had a twin brother who died, sometimes in fact he feels very close to this brother, whose name is Rick. He feels that Rick is somewhere out there right now, in the enormous sky, where stars are beginning to appear one by one, like those enchanting little twinkle lights.

  Their food comes, including a salad that Jeffrey didn’t even order. At least it’s plain. Jeffrey eats it, then his pasta. He eats only one thing at a time. Now the personage and two other waiters are pushing several tables together to make one big table on their side of the room. The girl behind them sounds like she is crying. “I didn’t think it would be like this,” she says. Jeffrey can’t stand it, he turns around to look, and sheis crying. Her breasts are slightly blue.

  “Eat your steak,” his mother says. She notices everything, pouncing like a cat. His mother does everything too much. She is a mother like a battery cable, a mother like a laser (similes). Jeffrey knows that she loves him, but this is almost, he feels, the problem. There must besome problem, because he is excused from school one hour early every Thursday to spend the afternoon with Dennis Levering, a cool spiky-haired young man who is actually some kind of counselor. He asks Jeffrey too many questions and tries to take him out to do things like shoot baskets (no), ride bikes (no), kick a soccer ball around (no), take a walk (no), go to a museum (yes!). Next week they are going to walk around the Tidal Basin with a metal detector, Jeffrey is really looking forward to that.

  He used to go to the afterschool program at his school, but there were these two bullies in that program, Sean Robertson and Max Gruenwald, who did something really bad to him and even though they had to come to his house with their parents to apologize, Jeffrey hates them now with implacable (word) force and will never speak to them again or be in any cluster group with them or even discuss it with his teacher, the very sweet and voluptuous (word) Miss Hanratty.

  So now he goes to Club Creative at the library. He is the top-scoring member of the Club Creative Team, which meets with Mrs. Rogers, he is a Shining Star because he read fifteen books in two weeks. He loves to read books, especially fantasy books and books about disasters such as the Titanic and the Chicago Fire. He feels that if he reads enough of these books, he will not be in a disaster. He also loves the Rice Krispies snacks they have at Club Creative. Every day, on his way home, he stops to hang by his knees from the monkey bars in the empty playground next to the library, to make himself stretch out and grow taller. Sometimes he hangs by his hands from the steel rod at the top of the garage door at home too, before Dar gets back.

  This is a part of Jeffrey’s Invisible Life, which also includes his visits to this old couple who live on the corner, the Hampdens (Jeffrey calls them the Hamsters in his mind). The Hamsters are very old and very diminutive (word) and also very bent over, so that they are not much bigger than Jeffrey himself. He met them one time when he was walking past their house and Mrs. Hamster had fallen down beside their mailbox, and he helped her get up and walk back inside. “Come back!” they said. “Drop in!” Every time he drops in, the Hamsters are always doing the very same thing. Mr. Hamster is sitting in his big blue chair watching baseball on TV, and Mrs. Hamster is sitting in her big blue chair reading magazines that Dar will not allow in the house, such as theNational Enquirer and Midnight Star. Jeffrey likes to sit in Mrs. Hamster’s chair with her (there’s plenty of room) and read these magazines and eat nonpareils, a flat kind of chocolate candy with hard little white balls all over it. The Hamsters keep the nonpareils right there in a glass dish just for him.

&
nbsp; Now Jeffrey eats every bite of his steak while Dar and Lindsay talk about their relationships. Dar has had a lot of relationships because she is so enchanting and intense, but the men tend to blur somewhat in Jeffrey’s mind, all kind, earnest doctors and professors, most of them wiry with dark hair and pointy little beards. Many of them have been hikers (no, thank you) and bikers (no, thank you). Jeffrey watches with interest as two girls in very tiny bathing suits run onto the beach and start twirling luminescent (word) hoops out on the dark sand, throwing them high up into the air, then catching them with professional expertise (word). Maybe they are practicing to be on television. Dar orders key lime pie for herself and Lindsay, tiramisu for Jeffrey. “It’s kind of like a chocolate sundae, you’ll love it,” she tells him. She orders Rusty Nails for herself and Lindsay, over Lindsay’s expostulations (word).

  A big group of big men barge into the restaurant all at once, seeming to fill it up entirely. There’s a lot of hugging and shaking hands and clapping each other on the back. They seat themselves at the pushed-together tables and start ordering in loud voices. Dripping pitchers of beer and huge bowls of “u-peel-’em” shrimp arrive.

  Dar and Lindsay roll their eyes and lean closer so that they can hear each other. The man with the bird leaves. The kissing couple leaves. Jeffrey watches the girls with the luminescent hoops out on the beach. These girls are very curvaceous (word). He knows that the women are talking about him.

  “Why don’t you send him to the Friends School, then?” Lindsay asks.

  “What?” Dar says.

  These are the largest, noisiest men Jeffrey has ever seen.

  “TheFriends School, ” Lindsay says. “Don’t they have a really good Friends School in Washington?”