Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

by Lee Smith

  “Alrightee,” Rodney Broadbent nearly sings, unhooking his machine. Harold turns to look at him. Rodney Broadbent certainly looks more like a middle linebacker than a respiratory therapist. But Harold likes him.

  “Well, Rodney?” Harold says.

  Rodney starts shadow-boxing in the middle of the room. “Tough times,” he says finally. “These is tough times, Mr. Stipe.” Harold stares at him. Rodney is light on his feet as can be.

  Harold sits down in the chair by the respirator. “What do you mean?” he asks.

  “I mean she is drowning, Mr. Stipe,” Rodney says. He throws a punch which lands real close to Harold’s left ear. “What I’m doing here, see, is suctioning. I’m pulling all the fluid up out of her lungs. But now looka here, Mr. Stipe, they is just too damn much of it. See this little doohickey here I’m measuring it with? This here is the danger zone, man. Now Mrs. Stipe, she has been in the danger zone for some time. They is just too much damn fluid in there. What she got, anyway? Cancer and pneumonia both, am I right? What can I tell you, man? She is drowning.” Rodney gives Harold a short affectionate punch in the ribs, then wheels his cart away. From the door, apparently struck by some misgivings, he says, “Well, man, if it was me, I’d want to know what the story is, you follow me, man? If it was me, what I’m saying.” Harold can’t see Rodney anymore, only hear his voice from the open door.

  “Thank you, Rodney,” Harold says. He sits in the chair. In a way he has known this already, for quite some time. In a way, Rodney’s news is no news, to Harold. He just hopes he will be man enough to bear it, to do what will have to be done. Harold has always been scared that he is not man enough for Cherry Oxendine anyway. This is his worst secret fear. He looks around the little Intensive Care room, searching for a sign, some sign, anything, that he will be man enough. Nothing happens. Cherry lies strapped to the bed, flanked by so many machines that it looks like she’s in the cockpit of a jet. Her eyes are closed, eyelids fluttering, red spots on her freckled cheeks. Her chest rises and falls as the respirator pushes air in and out through the tube in her neck. He doesn’t see how she can sleep in the bright light of Intensive Care, where it is always noon. And does she dream? Cherry used to tell him her dreams, which were wild, long Technicolor dreams, like movies. Cherry played different parts in them. If you dream in color, it means you’re intelligent, Cherry said. She used to tease him all the time. She thought Harold’s own dreams were a stitch, dreams more boring than his life, dreams in which he’d drive to Jackson, say, or be washing his car.

  “Harold?” It’s Ray Muncey, manager of the Food Lion at the mall.

  “Why, what are you doing over here, Ray?” Harold asks, and then in a flash he knows, Lois Hickey must have called him, to make Harold go on home.

  “I was just driving by and I thought, Hey, maybe Harold and me might run by the Holiday Inn, get a bite to eat.” Ray shifts from foot to foot in the doorway. He doesn’t come inside, he’s not supposed to, nobody but immediate family is allowed in Intensive Care, and Harold’s glad — Cherry would just die if people she barely knows, like Ray Muncey, got to see her looking so bad.

  “No, Ray, you go on and eat,” Harold says. “I already ate. I’m leaving right now anyway.”

  “Well, how’s the missus doing?” Ray is a big man, afflicted with big, heavy manners.

  “She’s drowning,” Harold says abruptly. Suddenly he remembers Cherry in a water ballet at the town pool, it must have been the summer of junior year, Fourth of July, Cherry and the other girls floating in a circle on their backs to form a giant flower — legs high, toes pointed. Harold doesn’t know it when Ray Muncey leaves. Out the window, the parking lot light glows like a big full moon. Lois Hickey comes in. “You’ve got to go home now, Harold,” she says. “I’ll call if there’s any change.” He remembers Cherry at Glass Lake, on the senior class picnic. Cherry’s getting real agitated now, she tosses her head back and forth, moves her arms. She’d pull out the tubes if she could. She kicks off the sheet. Her legs are still good, great legs in fact, the legs of a beautiful young woman.

  HAROLD AT SEVENTEEN was tall and skinny, brown hair in a soft flat crew cut, glasses with heavy black frames. His jeans were too short. He carried a pen-and-pencil set in a clear plastic case in his breast pocket. Harold and his best friend, Ben Hill, looked so much alike that people had trouble telling them apart. They did everything together. They built model rockets, they read every science fiction book they could get their hands on, they collected Lionel train parts and Marvel comics. They loved superheroes with special powers, enormous beings who leaped across rivers and oceans. Harold’s friendship with Ben Hill kept the awful loneliness of the only child at bay, and it also kept him from having to talk to girls. You couldn’t talk to those two, not seriously. They were giggling and bumping into each other all the time. They were immature.

  So it was in Ben’s company that Harold experienced the most private, the most personal memory he has of Cherry Oxendine in high school. Oh, he also has those other memories you’d expect, the big public memories of Cherry being crowned Miss Green-wood High (for her talent; she surprised everybody by reciting “Abou Ben Adhem” in such a stirring way that there wasn’t a dry eye in the whole auditorium when she got through), or running out onto the field ahead of the team with the other cheerleaders, red curls flying, green and white skirt whirling out around her hips like a beach umbrella when she turned a cartwheel. Harold noticed her then, of course. He noticed her when she moved through the crowded halls of the high school with her walk that was almost a prance, she put a little something extra into it, all right. Harold noticed Cherry Oxendine then in a way that he noticed Sandra Dee on the cover of a magazine, or Annette Funicello on American Bandstand.

  But such girls were not for the likes of Harold, and Harold knew it. Girls like Cherry always had boyfriends like Lamar Peebles, who was hers — a doctor’s son with a baby blue convertible and plenty of money. They used to drive around town in his car, smoking cigarettes. Harold saw them, as he carried out grocery bags. He did not envy Lamar Peebles, or wish he had a girl like Cherry Oxendine. Only something about them made him stand where he was in the Food Lion lot, watching, until they had passed from sight.

  So Harold’s close-up encounter with Cherry was unexpected. It took place at the senior class picnic, where Harold and Ben had been drinking beer all afternoon. No alcohol was allowed at the senior class picnic, but some of the more enterprising boys had brought out kegs the night before and hidden them in the woods. Anybody could go back there and pay some money and get some beer. The chaperones didn’t know, or appeared not to know. In any case, the chaperones all left at six o’clock, when the picnic was officially over. Some of the class members left then too. Then some of them came back with more beer, more blankets. It was a free lake. Nobody could make you go home. Normally, Harold and Ben would have been among the first to leave, but because they had had four beers apiece, and because this was the first time they had ever had any beer ever, at all, they were still down by the water, skipping rocks and waiting to sober up so that they would not wreck Harold’s mother’s green Valiant on the way home. All the cool kids were on the other side of the lake, listening to transistor radios. The sun went down. Bullfrogs started up. A mist came out all around the sides of the lake. It was a cloudy, humid day anyway, not a great day for a picnic.

  “If God is really God, how come He let Himself get crucified, is what I want to know,” Ben said. Ben’s daddy was a Holiness preacher, out in the county.

  But Harold heard something. “Hush, Ben,” he said.

  “If I was God, I would go around and really kick some ass,” Ben said.

  Harold heard it again. It was almost too dark to see.

  “Damn.” It was a girl’s voice, followed by a splash.

  All of a sudden, Harold felt sober. “Who’s there?” he asked. He stepped forward, right up to the water’s edge. Somebody was in the water. Harold was wearing his swim trunks under his
jeans, but he had not gone in the water himself. He couldn’t stand to show himself in front of people. He thought he was too skinny.

  “Well, do something.” It was the voice of Cherry Oxendine, almost wailing. She stumbled up the bank. Harold reached out and grabbed her arm. Close up, she was a mess, wet and muddy, with her hair all over her head. But the thing that got Harold, of course, was that she didn’t have any top on. She didn’t even try to cover them up either, she stomped her little foot on the bank and said, “I am going to kill Lamar Peebles when I get ahold of him.” Harold had never even imagined so much skin.

  “What’s going on?” asked Ben, from up the bank.

  Harold took off his own shirt as fast as he could and handed it over to Cherry Oxendine. “Cover yourself,” he said.

  “Why, thank you.” Cherry didn’t bat an eye. She took his shirt and put it on, tying it stylishly at the waist. Harold couldn’t believe it. Close up, Cherry was a lot smaller than she looked on the stage or the football field. She looked up at Harold through her dripping hair and gave him her crooked grin.

  “Thanks, hey?” she said.

  And then she was gone, vanished into the mist and trees before Harold could say another word. He opened his mouth and closed it. Mist obscured his view. From the other side of the lake he could hear “Ramblin’ Rose” playing on somebody’s radio. He heard a girl’s high-pitched giggle, a boy’s whooping laugh.

  “What’s going on?” asked Ben.

  “Nothing,” Harold said. It was the first time he had ever lied to Ben. Harold never told anybody what had happened that night, not ever. He felt that it was up to him to protect Cherry Oxendine’s honor. Later, much later, when he and Cherry were lovers, he was astonished to learn that she couldn’t remember any of this, not who she was with or what had happened or what she was doing in the lake like that with her top off, or Harold giving her his shirt. “I think that was sweet, though,” Cherry told him.

  When Harold and Ben finally got home that night at nine or ten o’clock, Harold’s mother was frantic. “You’ve been drinking,” she shrilled at him under the hanging porch light. “And where’s your shirt?” It was a new madras shirt that Harold had gotten for graduation. Now Harold’s mother is out at the Hillandale Rest Home. Ben died in Vietnam, and Cherry is drowning. This time, and Harold knows it now, he can’t help her.

  OH, CHERRY! WOULD SHE have been so wild if she hadn’t been so cute? And what if her parents had been younger when she was born — normal-age parents — couldn’t they have controlled her better? As it was, the Oxendines were sober, solid people living in a farmhouse out near the county line, and Cherry lit up their lives like a rocket. Her dad, Martin “Buddy” Oxendine, went to sleep in his chair every night right after supper, woke back up for the eleven o’clock news, and then went to bed for good. Buddy was an elder in the Baptist church. Cherry’s mom, Gladys Oxendine, made drapes for people. She assumed she would never have children at all because of her spastic colitis. Gladys and Buddy had started raising cockapoos when they gave up on children. Imagine Gladys’s surprise, then, to find herself pregnant at thirty-eight, when she was already old! They say she didn’t even know it when she went to the doctor. She thought she had a tumor.

  But then she got so excited, that old farm woman, when Dr. Grimwood told her what was what, and she wouldn’t even consider an abortion when he mentioned the chances of a mongoloid. People didn’t use to have babies so old then as they do now, so Gladys Oxendine’s pregnancy was the talk of the county. Neighbors crocheted little jackets and made receiving blankets. Buddy built a baby room onto the house and made a cradle by hand. During the last two months of pregnancy, when Gladys had to stay in bed because of toxemia, people brought over casseroles and boiled custard, everything good. Gladys’s pregnancy was the only time in her whole life that she was ever pretty, and she loved it, and she loved the attention, neighbors in and out of the house. When the baby was finally born on November 1, 1944, no parents were ever more ready than Gladys and Buddy Oxendine. And the baby was everything they hoped for too, which is not usually the case — the prettiest baby in the world, a baby like a little flower.

  They named her Doris Christine which is who she was until eighth grade, when she made junior varsity cheerleader and announced that she was changing her name to Cherry. Cherry! Even her parents had to admit it suited her better than Doris Christine. As a little girl, Doris Christine was redheaded, bouncy, and busy — she was always into something, usually something you’d never thought to tell her not to do. She started talking early and never shut up. Her old dad, old Buddy Oxendine, was so crazy about Doris Christine that he took her everywhere with him in his old red pickup truck. You got used to seeing the two of them, Buddy and his curly-headed little daughter, riding the country roads together, going to the seed-and-feed together, sharing a shake at the Dairy Queen. Gladys made all of Doris Christine’s clothes, the most beautiful little dresses in the world, with hand smocking and French seams. They gave Doris Christine everything they could think of — what she asked for, what she didn’t. “That child is going to get spoiled,” people started to say. And of course she did get spoiled, she couldn’t have helped that, but she was never spoiled rotten as so many are. She stayed sweet in spite of it all.

  Then along about tenth grade, soon after she changed her name to Cherry and got interested in boys, things changed between Cherry and the old Oxendines. Stuff happened. Instead of being the light of their lives, Cherry became the bane of their existence, the curse of their old age. She wanted to wear makeup, she wanted to have car dates. You can’t blame her — she was old enough, sixteen. Everybody else did it. But you can’t blame Gladys and Buddy either — they were old people by then, all worn out. They were not up to such a daughter. Cherry sneaked out. She wrecked a car. She ran away to Pensacola with a soldier. Finally, Gladys and Buddy gave up. When Cherry eloped with the disc jockey, Don Westall, right after graduation, they threw up their hands. They did not do a thing about it. They had done the best they could, and everybody knew it. They went back to raising cockapoos.

  Cherry, living up in Nashville, Tennessee, had a baby, Stan, the one who’s in his twenties now. Cherry sent baby pictures back to Gladys and Buddy, and wrote that she was going to be a singer. Six years later, she came home. She said nothing against Don Westall, who was still a disc jockey on WKIX, Nashville. You could hear him on the radio every night after 10 p.m. Cherry said the breakup was all her fault. She said she had made some mistakes, but she didn’t say what they were. She was thin and noble. Her kid was cute. She did not go back out to the farm then. She rented an apartment over the hardware store, down by the river, and got a job downtown working in Ginger’s Boutique. After a year or so, she started acting more like herself again, although not quite like herself — she had grown up somehow in Nashville, and quit being spoiled. She put Stan, her kid, first. And if she did run around a little bit, or if she was the life of the party sometimes out at the country club, so what? Stan didn’t want for a thing. By then the Oxendines were failing and she had to take care of them too, she had to drive her daddy up to Grenada for dialysis twice a week. It was not an easy life for Cherry, but if it ever got her down, you couldn’t tell it. She was still cute. When her daddy finally died and left her a little money, everybody was real glad. Oh now, they said, Cherry Oxendine can quit working so hard and put her mama in a home or something and have a decent life. She can go on a cruise. But then along came Ed Palladino, and the rest is history.

  Cherry Oxendine was left with no husband, no money, a little girl, and a mean old mama to take care of. At least by this time Stan was in the navy. Cherry never complained, though. She moved back out to the farm. When Ginger retired from business and closed her boutique, Cherry got another job, as a receptionist at Wallace, Wallace and Peebles. This was her undoing. Because Lamar Peebles had just moved back to town with his family, to join his father’s firm. Lamar had two little girls. He had been married to a tobacco heires
s since college. All this time he had run around on her. He was not on the up-and-up. And when he encountered redheaded Cherry Oxendine again after the passage of so many years, all those old fireworks went off again. They got to be a scandal, then a disgrace. Lamar said he was going to marry her, and Cherry believed him. After six months of it, Mrs. Lamar Peebles checked herself into a mental hospital in Silver Hill, Connecticut. First, she called her laywers.

  And then it was all over, not even a year after it began. Mr. and Mrs. Lamar Peebles were reconciled and moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, her hometown. Cherry Oxendine lost her job at Wallace, Wallace and Peebles, and was reduced to working at the deli at Food Lion. Why did she do it? Why did she lose all the goodwill she’d built up in this community over so many years? It is because she doesn’t know how to look out for Number One. Her own daughter, Tammy Lynn Palladino, is aware of this.

  “You have got a fatal flaw, Mama,” Tammy said after learning about fatal flaws in English class. “You believe everything everybody tells you.”

  Still, Tammy loves her mother. Sometimes she writes her mother’s whole name, Cherry Oxendine Westall Palladino Stikes, over and over in her Blue Horse notebook. Tammy Lynn will never be half the woman her mother is, and she’s so smart she knows it. She gets a kick out of her mother’s wild ideas.

  “When you get too old to be cute, honey, you get to be eccentric,” Cherry told Tammy one time. It’s the truest thing she ever said.

  It seems to Tammy that the main thing about her mother is, Cherry always has to have something going on. If it isn’t a man it’s something else, such as having her palm read by that woman over in French Camp, or astrology, or the grapefruit diet. Cherry believes in the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, Atlantis, and ghosts. It kills her that she’s not psychic. The UFO Club was just the latest in a long string of interests although it has lasted the longest, starting back before Cherry’s marriage to Harold Stikes. And then Cherry got cancer, and she kind of forgot about it. But Tammy still remembers the night her mama first got so turned on by UFOs.